You Don’t Suppose…
I had a nasty thought the other day.
Seemingly inexplicable things usually happen for a reason, even (often enough) a purpose. Confluences of inexplicable things can point to the purpose; it’s like solving simultaneous equations in math. Here’s one inexplicable thing: humanity is clearly hurtling over a cliff of climate breakdown. The macro-level science is indisputable, and moreover it’s corroborated by our daily observations — spring temperatures in winter, dogs getting ticks in mid-February, Saharan heat and drought every summer now in the formerly temperate north. Feedback mechanisms like methane melting and forests dying are demonstrably under way. So why doesn’t a large part of the world’s elite, and the dominant neocon faction of the US government, take suitable action or even messaging? I can’t believe that they really all think that building private fortified refuges with stocks of water, food, medicine and DVDs will allow them to continue their lives of pleasure and meaning unabated.
Then, another inexplicable thing: the US government (and perhaps those of Russia, China and others — I don’t know for sure in those cases) is aggressively modernizing and expanding its nuclear-weapons capacity: it is developing and deploying small-yield weapons that are more ‘usable,’ and upgrading its strategic (i.e. destroy-whole-enemy-cities) weapons. It’s as if they really think they’re going to use them. But I thought the science from the 1980s was pretty clear: any exchange of more than a few nuclear weapons would throw up enough sun-blocking dust and vapor to cause a ‘nuclear winter’ that would extinguish agriculture worldwide for some years. So even if you thought you could win a nuclear exchange in some sense, the blowback of nuclear winter would make the end result worse for everyone including you. Your 1970s and 1980s ICBMs still work and deter. Why buy new ones?
Moreover the US is reviving ‘Star Wars,’ the Reagan-era missile-defense initiative, even though the US and USSR came to the same conclusion in the early 1970s that such systems would be destabilizing because they might let one side think it could get away with a first strike (in which the attacker catches all the opponent’s nukes on the ground and precludes retaliation by destroying them). The US and USSR enshrined this belief in the ABM Treaty; the US pulled out of it in 2002. But the same nuclear-winter blowback would happen after a one-sided first strike, thus negating a successful strike’s putative advantages.
You could add a few more inexplicable things, like the blatant scramble for Middle Eastern (and now Venezuelan) oil, when it is clear we can’t afford to burn it even if we manage to control it. Also that no one is talking seriously about shrinking the global human population, before Gaia shrinks it for us.
They say you should never underestimate the determinant effects of stupidity, short-sightedness and wickedness on human affairs, and sure, that’s often the only explanation. But such an explanation should be a last resort; plus, clever plotters are well capable of seeming stupid etc. to disguise their real motives.
A fervid imagination could see a link between these two sets of inexplicable things, and the link is nuclear winter. What if there is in fact a plan to deal with climate breakdown and simultaneously show those pesky rivals who’s in charge: nuclear detonations in their faces (if not on their territory or forces), in amounts calibrated to throw enough debris in the air to weaken the sunshine for a few years, just enough to cool down the climate back to the status quo ante. While we’re at it, such an action might shrink the human population a bit; and the aggressor would definitely want to end up controlling the oil, since with nuclear cooling we could afford to burn it again, plus with worldwide industrial disruption following nuclear war there will be no capacity for rapid conversion to green energy, or indeed any alternative energy. And militaries would still have to run on petroleum distillates. Oil would once again reign supreme.
This would make a great thriller script. I have no evidence at all that it’s true, except the circumstantial evidence of being a neat explanation for multiple inexplicable phenomena. Experience shows, though, that if a scriptwriter has thought of it, so has someone in the real world.
Just a wild thought. But it would explain a few things.
