Palace Posy

Fourteen months later I finally follow-up on my short review of Threads with the promised discussion on the Cold War. This seems as good a time as any; it recently being the 70th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Japan, and, therefore concurrently, the 10th anniversary of this blog. A good way to mark a decade of blogging might be to write something on the blog for the first time in months.

Cuevas de las Manos, Wikipedia, 2005

Threads depicts the almost total obliteration of a functioning state - it really was the end. The Day After (the American analogue, produced in the same era) on the other hand seems very tame, and deliberately so. It even includes a Presidential address, coming across on the radio without any hint of interference, which clearly indicates that for all the immense damage incurred the federal government appears to be intact - the future possibility of the cessation of existence of the USA like every other power in history being inconceivable to the majority of the citizenry (in my experience) and so probably too much for the casual public to swallow alongside their TV movie of the week popcorn. The softer depiction is of course the result of network pressure (can't keep the proles down if you make them start to think, after all), but it raises a serious problem in the logic of nuclear strategy: it almost implies nuclear war is winnable. The title is supposed to make you think about what happens after both sides' missiles have flown. By depicting what looks like a survivable exchange, it then begs the question what will the day after the day after be like.

In the narrative the Soviets strike first and the US retaliates in self-defence. As an aside; I know US television is never going to depict otherwise, but I must point out it was NATO that operated a First Strike strategy because the Soviets had non-nuclear superiority in Europe - therefore the nuclear escalation after Soviet aggression would always be by Western hands in order to contain a Soviet push to the Rhine. Back on topic; after such devastation are both sides going to call it a draw? Is the President of the United States really going to let this go? Obviously the point in all those nukes is that they're never supposed to be used, for if they are then deterrence has failed. If deterrence has failed, then what is the point in even launching a second strike? The deterrence in second strike is to make the cost of launching a first strike unbearable - both will be damned if it comes to that. If both sides can walk away then clearly the costs weren't high enough. And that leaves the door wide open for a continuation of the conflict. Thus, not only has it failed to deter nuclear conflict it has in fact enabled conventional conflict.

The scientists on the Manhattan Project feared before the first live test that the detonation would set off a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere.They were wrong - it ignited the bush instead. The forty-five years after the end of the Second World War are littered with proxy wars. The two largest conflicts of the Cold War (Korea and Vietnam) went ahead almost completely unimpeded by US or Soviet arsenals. Sure, Douglas McArthur is characterised as overly keen to drop them on North Korea and Richard Nixon tried to look like a howling-at-the-moon anti-communist barely on Kissinger's leash who just might be crazy enough to drop the bomb if the North Vietnamese didn't come to negotiating table. No-one with the responsibility was ever stupid enough to do it. Case in point, Fidel Castro is on record well into the 80s agitating for the Soviets to nuke America already until Soviet advisers pointed out it wasn't like lobbing a few artillery shells. The heart of the paradox of Mutually Assured Destruction is that no-one wants to push the button but everyone has to look like they might do it. Rationally the US and Soviets both had lines which they would not allow to be crossed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was apparently one such example, though not all it seems. Soviet nukes ninety miles off Florida was entirely as normal as American ones in Turkey. They didn't actually escalate the situation much compared to the what the oceans hid. Both sides still operate ballistic missile submarines. If it could ever imaginably come to it, the Kremlin could give the command to a boat sitting off the Eastern seaboard for a decapitation strike on Washington DC. Warning time would be so minimal as to be useless and retaliation likely minimised by command structure disruption. Precisely to avoid this, launch authority for nukes was delegated way down the command chain. Forces in West Germany wielding Davy Crockett tactical launchers had authority down at the battalion level in case the Warsaw Pact came rolling through the Fulda Gap.

The fact of the matter is, the line of nuclear provocation for the superpowers was frequently kicked down the road to avoid catastrophe. If you're going to go down in what few scraps will remain of human history as the person in office that ordered the missiles to take flight, you're probably going to decide some arid shithole called Afghanistan or a mosquito-ridden jungle in South East Asia isn't really worth the infamy. West Germany, France or Italy? Yes, probably. These are major allies with substantial populations (mainly white, I hear you say), economies, and industrial and military capacity. The line in this case was very clearly demarcated after Victory in Europe - hence the Soviets stayed out of Greece during their civil war. Thus there was nothing to gain for either side in trying to gain an extra square meter of Europe at the risk of global annihilation. Especially for the Soviets (and subsequently Russia) who did come close to annihilation through Nazi Germany (and that episode crucially coloured their perception from then on, as I will discuss in a following post). Central and South America were exclusively within the American sphere of influence since the start of the century under the Monroe Doctrine, which left Africa and Asia up for grabs much as they were in the neo-colonial period. Aside from strategic prizes like Japan and Australia (and China had it not already been lost in 1949) there was little to start a worldwide conflagration over.

With the alleged stabilising influence of nuclear weaponry under MAD, we forget that the technology was originally pursued with the intent to win a war (against Germany, then Japan by the time it was deployable). The only way to win a nuclear war, of course, is if only one side has them. That was demonstrated very clearly against Japan which was already incapable of responding in kind to conventional attacks. This was the only time in history when any state was building an offensive nuke as all since then have been defensive weapons, if we are to believe MAD theory. The Soviet achievement in 1949 was defensive because it was a response to American hegemony. Even allies instigated their nuclear programmes in response to America - France and the UK both established independent deterrents specifically because they suspected the US would let them fall rather than endanger their own cities in a retaliatory strike. The value of a target is what determines the response; and in the case of the Falkland Islands, for example, no matter how incompetent the government of Argentina it knew physically seizing this British territory would never elicit a nuclear response. So much for deterrence. Even more recently, in Scotland we are told we must continue to have an SSBN base twenty miles from Glasgow (which I can almost see from the living room window) because Putin is belligerent. He took Crimea last year and if he wanted to there's a decent chance he could take a slice of Lithuania or Latvia. He's well aware Obama isn't going to reach into the football over a fifth of Latvia. Get real.

Today, and for the last decade or so, we've been told that Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions are destabilising - the implication being that it is to win a war, specifically against Israel whose destruction we are told they seek. The reality is that everyone knows Israel already has their own arsenal and has had it for several decades. Again invoking MAD, which supposedly ushered in peace for the second half of the twentieth century, we must understand an Iranian counterforce as in fact a stabilising influence in the Middle East. To disclaim Iranian possession as defensive is to admit MAD was a sham all along. The prolonged and deliberate ignorance about Israel introducing them into the area

The underlying logic of the nuclear age is in actuality an infinite matrioška of paradoxes. Spending billions on weapons you have no intention of using to prevent a war you have no intention of starting. A military technology that exists to prevent the destruction from occurring that became possible with the destruction that became possible with their invention. As such there are two simultaneous frameworks: they are or are not the solution to the problem they caused.

Seems fitting to have 'Enola Gay' turn up on shuffle as I finished this.
Drafted June 10th 2014
[1522]