Retiring the Global Strongman in the Age of Nukes
Consolidated power, nuclear weapons, and Russo-NATO/US tensions.
Have you too been having that feeling lately — you know the one? The primal fight or flight response when watching the back-and-forth between the West’s attempts to discourage the Kremlin in its invasion of Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s threatening responses? The not-too-subtly hinted notion that the Russian leadership just might be willing to deploy nuclear weapons if events don’t go their way in Ukraine? It reduces us to little cavemen, figuring our best pose to confront the charging mammoth. We should not be having that feeling. It should not be possible for an established nuclear power to threaten such eventualities over peripheral armed conflict. Yet it is.
Sticks and stones and salted earth
We evolved as a species accepting “scorched earth” and even wartime atrocities as an inevitable part of state warfare. As horrible as genocide is, to put rival groups through that crucible of action might serve as a visceral test of fighting power and combat muster. To wipe out the rival village by burning and salting its fields, poisoning its livestock, and running every inhabitant out or killing them helped drive us through mortal, group-allegiant fear to out-compete or be destroyed. Even now, hand-to-hand combat, tank-to-tank, etc., serves to test the soldiers’ bravery, strength, and cunning.
But in a modern nuclear exchange these old instincts fail miserably. Any evolutionary advantage inverts to an extreme disadvantage in a nuclear war: there is no chance for competitiveness, no real combat to be had. Nuclear war vaporizes the skilled and the unskilled, the strong and the weak alike. Evolutionary mechanisms have no chance to act: “To make a desert and call it peace,” as Tacitus writes, only the desert is a hellscape countries-large.
What about MAD?
The principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is oft-cited as “insurance” that warring countries won’t incinerate the planet in a broad exchange of nuclear weaponry. There’s merit (and madness) to this line of thinking. On the other hand, a hegemonic state actor only holding back a nuclear fusillade because they don’t want to be incinerated in the process is a spectacularly sorry comment on the state of humanity. And when a country’s nuclear doctrine starts to get permissive, especially at the hand of a strongman, to flex its nuclear arsenal not as a last-resort against threats to the motherland but as a means to instill that fundamental fear to cover its own aggressions, MAD grows further suspect.
The aggravating effects of the strongman’s consolidation of power are an important concern. One of the reasons authoritarian regimes run against the grain for so many in the West is their negative effects on checks and balances. Ceding decision making to a central and absolute authority decreases or cancels any law-of-averages reduction in variance from polling and political concurrence.
MAD is predicated on rational actors, those at least presumably without suicidal impulses. Consolidation of power only increases the variance in decision outcomes and lowers the chance of rationality and good judgement in nuclear decision making. Leaving the decisions in the hands of a few leads to more opportunities for personal grudges, revanchism, power grabs, hurt feelings, and other passions to supplant the better judgement so essential to MAD principles. In short, the combination of the strongman, or narrow power oversight, with the awful technological leverage of nuclear weapons is a volatile and foolish mixture.
Enter the current Russian leadership
Up till early 2022, the Kremlin and its leader, Putin, have largely kept their harsher and more brutish actions off the Western stage. Till now. Whatever legitimacy one might afford the grievances underlying the Kremlin’s open onslaught of Ukraine — of Western intervention too near Russia’s borders, of Russian security concerns with NATO, or of a Russia forced to watch its former Soviet satellites fall one by one to Western influence — what do we have as a result? A high level of consolidation of motivated and emotional state power (bad), combined with an enormous amount of technological leverage in the form of the world’s largest cache of nuclear weapons, both launch-ready and in storage, at its fingertips (very bad).
Total destructive power
Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, at around 1500 launch-ready nukes, with another 3000 active but in storage [BBC]. A close second is the United States. For just a back-of-the-envelope estimate, suppose the average yield of a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is around 500 kilotons. That’s a city-leveler. Between the blast itself, the outlying burn casualties the fireball would create (it is estimated that just one such event would overwhelm all of America’s hospitals’ burn units), along with the close-in radiation blast and the death spread by the radioactive fallout (however many cubic miles of radioactive dirt and rock the blast vaporizes and sends high aloft, to fall somewhere downwind), let’s assume that amounts to a long-run casualty total of one million individuals. Further suppose around a third of the launch-ready nukes are smaller-warhead, non-strategic nukes, which we’ll omit from the lethality total. Just the 1000 ICBM’s have a total killing power of a billion people. You read that correctly. One billion humans dead.
This is insane.
Basic risk analysis speaks of expected outcomes. Given the probability of an event, p, and the cost of the event, c, we can compute the expected, or average cost simply by multiplying the event’s probability by its cost: pc. The costs to an open nuclear war if even just a single major nuclear power launched most of its arsenal would be unimaginable. Nevermind the likelihood of retaliatory strikes. The only acceptable probability level for such an event is infinitesimal. As close to zero as possible.
By association, we should never be having conversations to the effect: is that strongman leader of the world’s largest nuclear power in his right mind? Never.
Of nearly equal foolishness is the habit of normalizing nuclear threats, especially from a nuclear superpower. Strongmen who pride themselves on their unpredictability don’t like having their bluffs called. The next time they may deliberately not be bluffing, just to keep things interesting. The tolerance for such posturing needs likewise to be zero.
It’s also a sorry statement on the status quo that every generation we seem to require a game of global nuclear chicken. For this we can probably thank the little cavewoman/caveman brain inside us all, an ancestral need for some awe-inducing drama once in a while just to keep life interesting. That was fine when the scale of the drama was limited to the surrounding villages, or even, say, a subcontinent. But here and now the drama is global, the consequences planet-wide. Our caveman brains are poorly equipped to contextualize destruction of such scale and scope. “Drama” at such a level no longer serves any evolutionary advantage. At all. Again keeping in mind the only tolerable probability for such an event is infinitesimal, we risk massive self-sabotage as a species in the long run courting nuclear disaster at any frequency just to “keep life interesting.”
What can be done
Well, what about ballistic missile defense systems? They are imperfect, and not designed for a large-scale nuclear weapons exchange. Some hypothesize they could even lead to a bigger arms race.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START, 2009, but due to expire in 2026) was a good start (for a history of US-Russo treaties, see here). But we can do better. A zero global nuclear weapons policy is probably unrealistic. Nuclear weapons will be around as long as there are countries technologically advanced enough to develop and maintain them. What we can avoid is having a strongman and his country capitol run amok, backed up by nationalistic animus and festering grievances, with the eight-hundred pound gorilla of global thermonuclear war lurking over their shoulders.
New treaties are needed to put a lethality cap on any one country’s nuclear arsenal. In round numbers, say 100 million souls under the initial hours of the attack, and another 100 million more dying from later burn effects and the fallout. That’s plenty to strike abundant fear in the heart of any state aggressor, without turning the globe into a giant ball of scorched and radioactive earth.
In accord with better limitation treaties, the global culture needs to change. Nuclear arms need to go from being spoken of casually (“nuke it and pave it”), to being considered with the awful gravity they deserve. This (again) includes zero tolerance for casual mention by world leaders on the usage of nukes (as Putin has done time and time again).
In accord, the global stage is categorically the wrong place for a barfight or caveman mentality. If participants want to indulge their inner cavepersons on a local level, so be it. They may secure their corner of the bar, or their own little fiefdom with whatever atrocities they care to imagine. The temperament and attitude toward conflicts at such a vast global scale, with all the modern technological leverage at a state actor’s disposal, needs to shift dramatically. We need to evolve.
It can start with individual citizens and local or state-level politicians exercising more imagination in light of such global risks, encouraging leadership at levels accessible to the massive killing power of such weapons to pursue a more rational policy toward them before it’s too late.
