Yves here. For a change, I have nothing to add to this fine if sobering article on nuclear war and numbing to the horrors of genocide and conflicts. Please do read it in full.
By Tom Valovic, a writer, editor, futurist, and the author of Digital Mythologies (Rutgers University Press), a series of essays that explored emerging social and cultural issues raised by the advent of the Internet. He has served as a consultant to the former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and was editor-in- chief of Telecommunications magazine for many years. Tom has written about the effects of technology on society for a variety of publications including Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Technoskeptic, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Examiner, Columbia University’s Media Studies Journal, and others. He can be reached at jazzbird@outlook.com. Originally published at Common Dreams
As a political journalist, I typically monitor about six or seven print publications and a somewhat absurd number of online ones. But I recently noticed a disturbing trend—a slew of articles with titles like “Apocalyptic map shows worst U.S. states to live in during nuclear war” or “Nuclear Fallout: Is Your State Safe?” Then there’s my personal favorite “10 U.S. States with the Best Odds of Surviving Nuclear Fallout and the Science Behind Their Safety.”
The second article informs us in a blithe and matter-of-fact tone that “recent geopolitical tensions have reignited concerns over nuclear safety across the United States. According to a detailed risk assessment featured on MSN, states along the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington) and East Coast (Florida, Maine, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio) have lower immediate fallout risks compared to central states.” And then, in a tone that could well be used to describe the best air conditioners to buy this summer, we’re cautioned that: “Even states considered safer are not guaranteed refuge from longer-term global impacts such as nuclear winter and widespread humanitarian crises.” Well good to know. Now we can all plan our summer travel accordingly. (As a brief aside, it should be noted that the MSN risk assessment article referred to is no longer available and has been yanked from the website. Curious.)
My first reaction upon seeing these articles was a kind of visceral astonishment. The tone was jarring and, frankly, appalling. Were these perhaps AI-generated pieces coming from a digital source that has no real idea of the emotional resonance required to discuss nuclear war? Quite possibly. Does this point to a design flaw in AI that will never really be eradicated? Also, quite possible. My second more measured reaction was that such articles might inadvertently expose flaws in the veneer of the rational calculus that underlies the basis for what we sometimes generously called modern “civilization.”
So, what’s behind this disturbing attempt on the part of various media outlets to normalize the prospect of nuclear war? For starters, articles like these speak to a deep cognitive dissonance around this topic that’s been evident in sociopolitical environment ever since the horror of Hiroshima. The meme-contour of these articles seems to invite a casual shoulder shrug with respect to the dark road that we’re now heading down and to minimize the powder keg of conflict looming in the Middle East. The matter-of-fact tonality about the possibility of nuclear Armageddon is deeply troubling. Articles such as these nudge us toward the psychologically unhealthy space of accepting a situation that should never be accepted.
Unpacking the Psychological Roots of Militarism
The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing described our socially conditioned and sometimes blithe acceptance of war and militarism as a form of mass psychosis, noting that “insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” In a brilliant essay on this topic, clinical psychologist Frank MacHovec noted that “Wartime behavior deviates markedly from cross-cultural social norms and values. The irrationality and emotionality of war is a radical departure from accepted normal behavior… Wartime behavior of and by itself meets current diagnostic criteria for a severe mental disorder.”
MacHovec goes on to discuss war as a function of Freudian death instinct:
We award medals to and hail as heroes or martyrs those who kill more of the enemy. One nation’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, even though it may be the same behavior… Victims are dehumanized into objects, and robot-like violence depersonalizes the aggressor in the process… Defense mechanisms of denial, externalization, projection, rationalization, and splitting block reality testing have the effect of reducing anxiety and protecting against stress. Violence then becomes part of the array of defense mechanisms. Emotion overrides reason and logic in public education and controlled news media that reinforce aggression.
Do Governments Persuade Us to Accept War as “Normal”?
As if our own unruly and erratic human impulses weren’t enough cause for concern, when it comes to the application of violence-as-solution, Western and other governments (often in a position of power as the result of war settlements and therefore having “something to defend”) spend a considerable amount of time and effort normalizing war in both popular culture and the political sphere. Here in the U.S., the CIA funds ceremonies and rituals in venues such as NFL games designed to promote acceptance of the so-called glories of war. Hollywood does its part with movies like Top Gun that position the violent extermination of enemies as noble or brave. In fairness to a broader perspective, we can and should posit that, as individuals, those who fight in wars are often in fact noble or brave in specific situations. Certainly, they have been persuaded to and are willing to risk their lives for a cause and this takes both courage and selflessness.
That said, these qualities of selflessness are often exploited to persuade us that that war itself is somehow an acceptable solution to periodic disagreements that arise between the governments of nations. Adding nuclear acceptance to the mix is when the notion of more severe psychological aberration comes in. Far from being “diplomacy by other means,” our best historians have shown us that wars often benefit economic elites in power. Even worse, modern warfare has shown a disturbing tendency to focus on harming civilian populations. History reveals that, here in the U.S., elites have at times funded both sides of a conflict or stood to gain from both supplying armaments and rebuilding in the aftermath. We see this in extremis in President Donald Trump’s bizarre plans to turn Gaza into a resort area.
The cold hard fact is that many wars are fought for all the wrong reasons: territorial domination of economically important resources (such as oil in the case of Iran and Iraq); economic benefits associated with supply chains; or the mere continuation of empire. But when the possibility of nuclear war becomes either conveniently ignored, gamed, or normalized by any given administration including those of Presidents Trump or Joe Biden and with willing complicity from the mainstream media, then I suggest it crosses the line into the territory that Laing alludes to. It also suggests a potent reason why trust in government is at an all-time low.
Another angle on the psychology of this dynamic is offered by Dr. Kathie Malley-Morrison, a former professor of psychology at Boston University and a member of Massachusetts for Peace Action. In “No, I Can’t Help! Psychic Numbing and How to Confront It, ” she provides a valuable perspective on odd and even bizarre psychological responses to the nuclear war threat that involve either magical thinking around notions of “surviving” or garden-variety denial:
Warnings about the dangers inherent in the availability of nuclear weapons in Russia, the United States, its allies, and other nations can be heard right, left, and center across the political spectrum… Why, then, do we not hear of massive actions against the continued development and sales of nuclear weapons, and the threats by nuclear power countries to use them? One of the answers is psychic numbing—a psychological phenomenon that can affect both individuals and entire cultures in ways that allow atrocities—and existential threats—to grow and spread.
Malley-Morrison points out that psychic numbing is also called “compassion fade.” The article goes on to clarify further:
At the individual level, psychic numbing is a psychological process of desensitization to the pain and suffering of others, particularly as the number of people experiencing pain and suffering increases… Exposure to information about genocides or nuclear holocausts or other catastrophes involving more than a very few people may lead to an emotional shutdown; the very idea of such horrors can seem too painful to tolerate.
She then cites the work of Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist, while observing that “whole societies or cultures can also be subject to psychic numbing. Within militarized societies, numbing, desensitization, and a general sense of pseudo-inefficacy— the feeling that some problems are so beyond one’s control that one is helpless to solve them—may even be encouraged.”
War and unchecked militarism are unquestionably one of the greatest causes of human suffering. Is humanity now at an existential crossroads where we must simply reject it as an option and wake up to the folly of our own collective self-programming? Given the realities of large-scale polycrisis, a third world war with nuclear, AI, and autonomous weapons in the mix is the last thing humanity needs. Further, it seems abundantly clear that, as governments around the world falter in their efforts to effectively deal with the multi-headed hydra of polycrisis, many are once again falling back on a familiar pattern of state-sanctioned violence against other nations as a “solution” and a means to bolster the power of incumbency.
Sadly, even when large segments of the populace oppose militarism (as is clearly the case here in the U.S.) it has become abundantly clear that our own government will do whatever it pleases without regard to democratic input or sentiment. This might lead us to wonder whether a 2014 Princeton University study stating that true democracy in the U.S. is a thing of the past might not have been painfully accurate. Clearly, the corporate profit-driven machinery of the political establishment and military-industrial-complex can now steamroller over public opinion with cavalier impunity, aided and abetted by both political parties. And while a certain situational adaptability is likely one of the best qualities of the human species, paradoxically, it might also be one of the worse.
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There is a four part series on BBC R4 that asks the question “Are we wired for war”.
On the individual level I don’t feel the majority are ‘wired for war’, but on the state level the desire for war seems to go ballistic.
jd: but on the state level the desire for war seems to go ballistic.
How else are the psychopath class going to create and maintain hierarchies of inequality? War is the health of the state.
Homo sapiens did not live like this for most of our species’s history. Consider the situation of a human predator preying on other humans. In a Paleolithic group of twenty to forty hunter-gatherers, that predator’s scope for predation was inherently limited. Perhaps they could threaten the group’s members and even kill one or two to compel the others to comply with their demands. Yet those others might still combine against them or simply flee while they were sleeping.
Around 10,000 years ago, one intelligent predator therefore developed a more effective strategy, which was to point to some neighboring tribe as a threat, attack any dissenting members of their own group as cowardly and disloyal, and excite the rest with stories about seizing whatever the other tribe had—food, women, access to a body of land or water—that they themselves desired.
cf Herman Goering: “Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.”
To return to the sequence of events outlined above, from the predator’s viewpoint. While before your group were more or less egalitarian foragers, you have just had them successfully raid another group, thus creating a heirarchy—a system of inequality with yourself on top, your warriors below you as junior predators, the rest of your group below them, and however many of the other tribe you enslaved at the bottom. Most crucially, you now control any surpluses of food—and everything else, consequently—that your group acquires.
And so on. All the rest of so-called ‘civilization’ proceeds from this, for bad and good.
Do animals have wars? Why yes they do from ants to social mammals like our closest relatives the primates. If one accepts evolution then it’s hard not to see competition between species and social groups within species as one of the drivers. Thought has nothing to do with it.
Of course the cold algorithmic nature of Darwin’s theory outraged many in the 19th but in the 21st we can hardly both accept and reject it as convenient. The question is how to we act on our self knowledge. What’s really unnatural is to deny our connection to the thing that made us and to which we perhaps owe some deference.
Is animal behaviour war in a modern sense, though, rather than evolved aggressive competition for resources?
I don’t think so, and I have no idea when the last conflict strictly of that sort was undertaken by groups in the evolutionary lineage of H. sapiens.
I see modern war as a phenomenon driven primarily by sociopaths and psychopaths in positions of power, for personal reasons.
Some species, such as crows and chimpanzees have thrown up individuals who display deceptive/asocial behaviour in order to benefit reproductively or nutritionally, though: I muse sometime if this is going to lead to cultural and psychological changes to a population as a whole. We do know that cultural traits evolve in species as diverse as otters and oystercatchers…
The thing is that “war” is much more than mere violence. It is socialized, acculturated violence. Or, in other words, it takes the proverbial village to go to war, to mobilize the “people” to get onboard with the war.
It does make me wonder: can we, in today’s atomized society, do a real “war”? I honestly doubt we, at leasr, in the West, can. We can do “technical” violence, sure, sometimes even on a pretty large scale. But can we mobilize large segments of the population to buy into collective violence wilfully for an extended period?
Carolinian: Do animals have wars? Why yes they do from ants to social mammals like our closest relatives the primates.
Over seventy million military personnel became mobilized during World War One and more than forty million died, while in World War Two more than one hundred and twenty-seven million were mobilized, and fifty to eighty-five million died.
Nothing remotely analogous or on this scale exists in inter-animal conflicts. And didn’t exist in human behavior till 10,000-5,000 years ago.
Carolinian: Thought has nothing to do with it.
Thought and human cooperative behavior has everything to do with it, because that’s what enables this singular human behavior of war on this scale. That, and one thing more.
Psychopathy among 2 percent of the human population.
Umm, Neandrathals… Far before 10,000 BC and almost erased Homo Sapiens. We habe tempered some of the conquest genes by social behavior but we are not there yet.
Reformatting what I have read to “hierarchy” framework, typically named “social complexity”, limited warfare or hostility was ecologically beneficial, assuring proper spacing between hunting+gathering bands or egalitarian villages. Head hunting or other low-intensity warfare took some toll, but the rest had enough resources to maintain their life styles.
Still, less adaptive “archaic humans” lost this pushing away game and they remain only as a small fraction of contemporary genetics.
Summarizing, early non-hierarchical society were not devoid of armed conflicts, and the most clear “recent” example is when “modern Innuit” took over North American Arctic from Dorset people (and Norse?).
Is there something about history that suggests that aggression and fighting are not part of our human makeup? Perhaps all those psychiatrists should read more history before declaring war to be abnormal and a syndrome.
The difference with nuclear weapons is that the death dealing is so effective that their use threatens the user’s own survival and so clash with an even more powerful instinct. This is why some of the Los Alamos scientists felt the atomic secrets should be shared with the Soviets. And indeed until the Russians got the bomb there were those in the Pentagon planning the complete destruction of Russia once they had built enough bombs to do the job.
And as we’ve seen since that time the advent of nukes haven’t stopped war. The quest for dominance goes on.
So here’s suggesting the psychiatrists are part of the problem including their refusal to accept what’s really going on. The only true weapon against war is rationality and self awareness. If Darwin were still around he would say job one for any species is to promote its continuation. And nukes threaten this. Psychiatry has little to do with it.
I remember very well how during the Cold War people were really afraid of nuclear war, and that is probably why it didn’t happen. Nowadays it looks like people have lost fear of nukes.
One of the possible reasons is that during the Cold War, it was assumed it would involve mass attacks on cities and that it would result in mass destruction and an unlivable planet (MAD), whereas nowadays most discussions involve small tactical nukes aimed at military targets, and the idea that any use of nukes would be limited and remain contained. (Big mistake imo).
Another factor might be that the elites believe that they will somehow be shielded from any consequences, as has been the experience throughout their lives. Perhaps they even expect to profit from it.
During the Cold War, common people had nice life that they did not want to lose. Nowdays, nuclear war could be seen as a debt jubilee. :)
Uh, that only seems to make sense from the point of view of the southern hemisphere. Dead men don’t have debts to be jubilee’d. And I don’t think that anyone can argue that the southern hemisphere is behind this desire for nuclear war. So I rather think that it’s a nihilism of the overdebted and any suggestion of jubilee is just hopium to avoid admitting the true driver: pure nihilism.
It’s a (dark humor) joke, hence the :).
If there was a nuclear war that you happen to survive you can guarantee a representative of whatever bank your mortgage was with or the government will turn up. “Excuse me you haven’t paid your mortgage for the last year. Under the new law blah blah blah, you are now an indentured swrvant until it is paid off”.
We don’t have many mortgages in Uruguay, I don’t know about other countries in the southern hemisphere. I was more thinking of the national debts and who was going to enforce those in the desolate domain of the northern hemisphere Banks and international organizations…
How many divisions would the IMF have post world war III? And the World Bank?
I agree it would be an issue. That was part of a conversation I had with a friend about these people who fantasise about an end of civlisation scenario – because they’d get to live out their libertarian suvivalist fantasy.
However, don’t be sure there wouldn’t be an attempt to enforce a old debts with the global south. All they would need is a few left over nukes to blackmail any remaining governments. After all they’d have shown they are willing to use them.
Recall Krushchev’s statement after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that after a nuclear war, the living will envy the dead. To imagine otherwise is sociopathic dreaming that increasingly characterizes western elites’ thinking.
Another factor might be that the elites believe that they will somehow be shielded from any consequences, as has been the experience throughout their lives. Perhaps they even expect to profit from it.
This is very much one of the psychological aspects at play.
It’s tom and daisy all the way down, they just smash things.
Throughout history various elites have had grandiose ideas about how everything could be done better if only people would follow their ideas. Good or bad ideas, it does not matter, the masses have had a very annoying habit of preventing them being fulfilled one way or another. I think there is an element of the elite that actively want about 90% or more of humanity gone. They think they will be fine in their bunkers. With AI and automation they’ll survive and thrive. And in a few years theyll come out and order the world how they like.
Reality is that they’d be at each others throat in five minutes.
Regarding war in general, it always amazes me how indifferent the media / politicians/ general public are to military deaths, as if soldiers lives don’t count, don’t have parents, spouses, children, friends…
For example, we don’t know exactly how many soldiers are killed in the Ukraine war every day, but it must be in the hundreds per day. I read somewhere that civilian deaths in Ukraine was just about 1.2 per day in the past months (still 1.2 too much of course), but that is news when it happens. Nobody talks about hundreds of military personnel killed on a daily basis, or maimed for life in a lost war.
That is not exclusive to this war. Human psychology around war is very strange…
Those foreigners dying is the sacrifice that media / politicians / general public are willing to make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKuxfcSrEU
P.S. When one Russian and one Ukrainian soldier die, USA counts the score as 2:0.
@YuShan, In addition to the death and maiming that you speak of, there is the mental and spiritual harm. My Ukrainian housemate here in Bogota is a real mess. Drunk and stoned a lot, and always talking about how violence is the only force in human relations. Also, his diet consists of canned tuna fish on saltine crackers with the six pack of beer a day. And an incredible variety of exotic remedies for various things: he truly has a veridible cornucopia of the stuff. He thinks it’s how he maintains his physique and health at 50ish years. He occasionally eats other foods, and the empanadas he had the other day made him quite sick gastronomically.
A couple days ago he teared up as he repeated to me what Zelensky had told the Ukrainian people: that “Ukraine lived on in it’s people’s hearts” , with the implication that it was otherwise lost.
I hung out with him a lot in the last week and we get along really well, but 2 things keep me from pressing too often for information . First, he’s doing a LOT of self-medicating. Second, he’s a violent guy and claims he understands and even approves of the necessity of a violent world. He served in three theaters in the US Marines, but I haven’t inquired into those details yet.
I already described his association with Ukrainian armed forces. And someone here, AG I believe, asked why he’s in Columbia. He explained to me that it’s because he likes the energy here. He he likes the action, the edge, the violence, but he also likes the dominance and order created by the police here in the gated and guarded housing project where we are staying. What’s important to him is getting respect from violent forces, whether they be police or pisanos, all while doing cocaine, and getting drunk and high on marijuana. Although he originally told me that he enjoyed getting in fights with the paisanos, in the week he’s been here I have seen no evidence of fighting.
By the way, he confirms that civilians are constricted forcefully on the Ukrainian streets. He says at first it was Russian propaganda, but it became a real world truth that he witnessed, first hand and/or second hand, at several points. He is a very sad and lost soul now, yet somehow still clinging to the idea of violence, while also considering himself a proper Catholic!
It seems to me that Bogota has been good for him, when he first arrived some months ago there were many festivals and he stayed in an insecure area and didn’t sleep much. For the last week he has been in this very secure place and he is gradually improving, or at least seems to be getting better sleep. Yesterday he even spoke about looking for a boxing center to get some exercise and tension relief. hopefully he will pursue that idea. My theory is that if he would have found the secure location immediately on arrival he would not have been able to accept it properly. The festivals and partying and violence with the pisanos was a transitional period for him, that is now allowing him to progress with some healing.
And as you say Yushan, few in the US care one wit about the victims of these tragedies
Well, I’m going to be here with him for another week and I want to ask him about the involvement of UK intelligence in driving forward the Ukraine aggression: see if he has seen anything like that, above and beyond the US total management that he has already attested to.
The word you are looking for is pathetic.
Interesting post! Thanks Expat2uruguay
This man sounds like he is dealing with heavy trauma in a not-so-healthy way. He’s clearly experienced a lot of violence and is trying to cope with that by being in protected environments, projecting the violence he’s experienced as the basis for life, and sounds like potentially onto others. Poor guy
Perhaps mention to your new friend that eating too much canned fish (combined with beer) will end up with him getting gout, and once it’s set in, the attacks are chronic and painful. He needs to get some fat, fruit and vegetables into the mix. If he develops a full blown case of gout, he’ll never be able to drink beer without having symptoms.
Yes, we are being groomed for war. Here in Finnish taxpayer funded news the top headers are Russia/Evilly-evil-Pootin and sports. Even two braincells is enough to tell why. It would be interesting to see how many would want to go fight in a war. In Sweden, not that many, according to recent link here in nc.
I wonder if it is deemed OK for lunatics like Lindsey Graham to be wildly pro-war while a female presidential candidate is quietly rejected for bragging about a “Most Lethal” military. Probably both pass the test of lethality for most numbed and dumbed citizens. Meanwhile the Congressional majority automatically increase nuclear readiness and development of “tactical” nukes. I hope we can widely forward this survival aid!
When Corbyn was running for PM he was attacked for refusing to say if he would launch nuclear weapons. There was a huge media campaign about how this made him unsuitable to be PM.
The thing that amazed me is how many day to day people bought into this. He was weak. He was soft. He was unpatriotic. I’d be talking to people and they’d come out with this and I’d think to myself, you think only someone who would be willing to take part in a war that would kill the person, their family, everything they nee and loved, is the person they’d want to vote for.
It will probably take a limited nuclear exchange to decondition the population from acceptance of nuclear war risk. This may be avoided if steady advances in conventional weaponry make nuclear weapons obsolete, just as the advent of nuclear weapons made chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction obsolete. AI drone swarms, precision guided missiles, and cyber attacks may similarly render nukes unnecessary. Iran already has demonstrated the potential deterrent capability of its missile arsenal. Expanding it would be a better idea than building a useless nuclear bomb.
The fact the US and the West in general have fallen behind in non-nuclear weapons technology is why the West–specifically the US and Israel–are more likely to resort to nuclear weapons when confronted by losing a conventional war. The cynic in me even thinks the public might demand a nuclear exchange. But of course, they won’t be asked. The only alternative to this road to armageddon is a mass mobilization effort at educating the public against war and nuclear weapons–akin to what Scott Ritter has been trying to do. The revulsion against the Gaza genocide seems to be reawakening anti-war feelings, but I’m not seeing it extend to our war against Russia in Ukraine. One can only hope.
This too is my fear. The West will resort to the weapons it has when all else is failing.
There were 528 atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1996, that’s an average of 10 nuclear bombs going off every year for half a century.
How many nukes would have to go off to create nuclear winter?
They have to be detonated at ground level or near ground level in a place where a firestorm will result to create nuclear winter. The big ones. Many of them.
Nuclear winter is basically the same phenomenon that killed off the dinosaurs, although the energy released by that asteroid hitting the earth makes even the biggest nukes look like firecrackers.
The biggest one by far didn’t create nuclear anything…
Russia releases secret footage of 1961 Tsar Bomba hydrogen blast | REUTERS (I was in vitro for the event)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtCTzbh4mNQ
It’s a matter of degree.
Try several thousand going off within 30 minutes of one another.
Quite.
But even if there was no nuclear winter. A massive nuclearr would wipe out a billion more or less straight away. Then there are the massive loses due to radiation poisoning. And lastly the supply chains of the entire world would collapse, leading to untold suffering and starvation.
The last atmospheric test was in 1962, all of the multi-megaton ones were done in the 50’s. After that smaller bombs were detonated underground to avoid atmospheric fallout which were mostly successful.
It is estimated that a small nuclear exchange such as in an India-Pakistan war would have 20 to 50 warheads in the 75kt to 300 kt range. So 35 warheads x 200kt would be 7-12 megatons. They would be airbursts over cities or ground bursts on buried targets, both would put a “shitload” (technical term) of radioactive debris into the atmosphere, enough to lower the global temp 3-7 Cº, that would cause failed crops and famine. The war and expected climate effects would cause global panic, emptying cities in Asia-Europe, destroying supply chains for oil, food and medical supplies.
The political effects would be unpredictable, China might decide that launching on India would solve a problem, the same with Israel and Iran/Lebanon or any other anticipated threat. That a “small limited” nuclear exchange can be limited is doubtful IMHO. There would be thousands of internet “influencers” egging their populations on giving license to the hardliners pushing for their own small limited wars. The governments in countries that are targeted will disappear, overwhelmed simply from the inability to dispose of the 100,000s corpses. In a major war, the notion that the East coast would be a place to avoid fallout is pure fabulism. The jet stream would pump all the western fallout over it.
Movies to watch, Threads, a 1984 BBC docudrama of the immediate and extended effects of nuclear war (the most frightening movie I have seen) and Testament 1983 a film about the effects of fallout on a town otherwise not affected.
Joshua got it right, nuclear war is “a strange game” in which “the only winning move is not to play.”
It seems bizarre they are saying the East coast could be ok for fallout. Surely DC, New York and norfolk naval base would be first strike targets at the least.
The “East Coast” states named are at least ones other than the New England states that form the present metropolitan and naval hubs, but the author/chatGPT can’t have done much research.
Ohio for example is an overland transportation nexus linking the E.C. to the Midwest, and to the South via the Ohio River. OSU is a global research leader. Wright-Patterson is one of the major air bases, and Peter Thiel is planning to install a big ol’ murder-drone factory in Ohio. All of this is public knowledge. Anyone out to cripple the U.S. via ICBM is going to want to set all of that on fire. It’s only Americans who think nothing goes on there…
Saw this many years ago…
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 – by Isao Hashimoto
Hi Wukchumni,
Those were (by and large) atmospheric tests. If they had tested 528 nuclear weapons against cities then I guess there would have been a nuclear winter.
It is not the nuclear explosions themselves that cause the winter but the soot and detritus that results from the burning of cities and everything inside as it rises into the upper atmosphere & gets stuck there for years.
You would have to be pretty deluded to believe that if a State like Utah gets nuked, then all you have to do is move to somewhere like Iowa to be safe. Nuclear war does not work that way which was brought home to me in a 1984 book called “The Cold and the Dark” by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts. A nuclear war means a nuclear winter with a cold, frozen dark wasteland, no possibility of growing food and all ground water frozen solid. At the same time a TV film came out called “The Day After” showing different Americans living through a nuclear attack-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
This was made before we became aware of a nuclear winter but one scene stuck out. The remnants of the radiation-poisoned community of farmers were having a meeting and disheveled government reps were telling the farmers that the ground would be contaminate with radiation so best to bulldoze it aside to which the farmers said that that was the topsoil that they were talking about. Something to remember.
Thanks Rev, 50 years is a long time to remember; 60 if i go back to “duck and cover”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9scNl9h4Q
Best Regards to all, John
Personally I prefer this version of Duck and Cover-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5lv-56_KHk (1:11 mins)
“Duck and cover” is some of the advice given in this 1968 Soviet civil defense slide show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uITVWXE1EN8
The slide captions are in Russian, but a translation is given in the video description.
It’s not bad advice, as such. It’s based on study of the effects of the nuclear attacks on Japan. Obviously, getting under a desk, or jumping into a ditch, won’t help much if you’re too close to the detonation (that goes for any kind of explosion). However, there will be many people at greater distances who could avoid serious injury from, say, flying or falling debris, by using whatever expedient cover might be available.
At distance, there is a long enough gap between the flash and the blast wave to allow one a few seconds to take cover (you can see this in some of the videos of the recent Beirut port explosion.)
The question of survival in a war involving nuclear weapons goes far beyond the first few seconds or minutes. But whatever the situation, your prospects will be better if you don’t start with a face full of glass shards.
I was mistaken about the captions being translated in the linked video’s description. The translation used to be in one of comments, I think, but it now seems that the comments were removed. Still, the illustrations are plain enough.
Getiing on the ground away from the “nuke” was a part of military training in Eastern Europe back in the day, mostly used by NCOs to mess with the soldiers.
Aologies I am a broken record, but Alan Weisman’s “World Without Us” is a fascinating read. Somehow brought me a Buddhist zen-like calm. Brought some some clarity about Illusion of “pressing problems”, materialism, everything. Why we should be dropping ego.
anyhoo, worth a read. His book on Population, “Countdown”, is also great- some jaw dropping information in there, timely too re: Mid-east, Iran, and IndiPakiChinastan.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248787.The_World_Without_Us
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17332183-countdown?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=tXhdC2NwWc&rank=1
I’ve seen several people attempt to draw out maps showing the safe areas during a first strike. And they are pointless because firstly, no one knows for definite where will be targeted. Perhaps the Russians would have different targeting proorities than Nato.
Secondly it assumes all warheads would hit exactly where they are meant to, that none would miss and land fifty miles away, that no one would have put in incorrect coordinates. For example there is a small village near me called moscow. I would not be surprised if some American warhead has it as assigned target due to some idiot inserting the wrong coordinates when asked to put in moscow, russia.
Soon grok AI’s military software will look at that little town and think, “wow! Easy and close target of bad guy!”. Woops!
More than likely. Because of course no one will check as the computers can’t ever be wrong.
This article is valuable for two themes: The uselessness of the endless media of the digital age, all requiring enormous amounts of fodder (opinions). Twenty-four hours a day, these unreliable fonts of lies, bullshit, and propaganda are publishing, publishing, publishing. What?
Second, the article likely throws into high relief how little influence psychologists and psychiatrists have these days. That’s a story unto itself.
Here in Italy, Donatella di Cesare, a philosopher and Germanist, has been pointing out necropolitics repeatedly. A commenter here at Naked Capitalism pointed out to me that the concept is not new to di Cesare. The diagnosis of the politics of death has been around for some time.
Necropolitics leads directly to another problem with the current arms races and war profiteering, the firearms in plays by Chekhov. If a gun arrives on stage in act I, it has to go off at some point in the play. I sometimes think that Chekhov lets the revolver go off all to easily, but this article points out how those with weapons see no reason to act responsibly. Then, as people in the U.S. of A. say endlessly, “It was a tragedy.”
I think that the author slips, somewhat seriously, by writing: “The cold hard fact is that many wars are fought for all the wrong reasons.”
I prefer Smedley Butler’s cleaner-and-simpler formulation: War Is a Racket.
We see this racket with people who think that having a war on their résumé will advance their political careers: Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Kamala Harris, Kaja Kallas, the execrable Tammy Duckworth, wounded in war and thoroughly enamored of war. We see this racket in the boys using the military and war as, what?, résumé inflation and beards: Pete Buttigieg, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham.
Watching Ukraine and the proxy genocide (as the author notes, deaths covered up), Palestine and the genocide (deaths covered up), Iran, Sudan, DR Congo, Myanmar (do we even mention Myanmar anymore?), I see no purpose to look for “right reasons.” I am not much of a Buddhist, but I believe that casting about for “right reasons” for war using Buddhist ethics would be a much-desired impossibility.
With regards to your first paragraph, well yes, media uselessness is true if you consider media as a source of information for the populaces but then, and following the line of thinking of this excellent article it can be argued that media can be quite useful, in this case to de-sensitize the populations against nuclear war.
I don’t think these publications cited by Valovic were casual except in tone as he so well describes. This raises the question of whether the nuclear option is being more or less seriously pondered in some high spheres. This was the first idea that assaulted me reading the first two paragraphs. Do some elements in the US have such a plan on their tables as an option? My best guess is that if they do it is probably about the possible use of nukes in Iran by the garrison the US has in the Middle East called Israel. Regime change failed and such a plan might have raised a notch in its pondering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(Vidal_novel)
The novel is written as the memoir of Eugene Luther (Vidal’s birth name), one of the first followers of Cavism, founded by John Cave, an American undertaker. Cave teaches, among other things, not to fear death and to actually desire it under certain circumstances. Later followers come to glorify death, and even enforce it on other members. The founder John Cave is himself killed by his followers when he proves inconvenient for the new religion’s development.
I shuddered in 2016 when I learned of Obama’s parting gift to the MIC as he was leaving office of a ten year, ten trillion dollar nuclear upgrade that would include the development of “battlefield nukes”. Upgrading for safety, or even better for paring down? Perhaps. Battlefield nukes, however, seemed psychotically stupid.
I lived through and remember the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. Watching my father gather canned foods, water, batteries and flashlights into cardboard boxes with shaking hands and carrying them into the cellar as the crisis peaked was perhaps the most terrifying moment of my life. I was 10. I agree fully with Yushan above. We were terrified of nukes and rightfully so, not to mention years of duck and cover drills each week in grade school. We have learned subsequently that we came within mere millimeters of nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis and in at least two instances it was Soviet officers who chose humanity over protocol that averted it. Thus we are alive today, only to have to deal with this issue again. The last months of the Biden admin were similar, especially at the end, with neocons edging toward a nuclear confrontation in Ukraine. Twice in one lifetime? That is truly over the top.
I believe that neoconism based on the ideology of zero/sum attracts and nurtures psychopaths. When I was young, I was crazy for fireworks. At a young age, I even searched out, library not internet, the formula for gunpowder and started making my own. Despite my best efforts, thank goodness, no one was injured. It is my firm belief that deep in their hearts neocons are desperate to use a nuke. In their twisted minds, this will bring the world to its knees in awe of the awesomeness of the American empire. Nonsense. In reality, they just want to do it. For them, it would be the ultimate orgasm and whatever plans and schemes they come up with, the ultimate goal is always to create the circumstances where they can “justify” pulling the nuclear trigger.
In my opinion, neoconism, Zionism and fascism all share a similar mindset based on the ideology of zero/sum. And this mindset is like a malignancy in the body of humanity. In the Collective West, this has been metastasizing before our eyes. In this age, war must be averted at all costs because the irrationality or “death wish” behind it will grab the chance and push it to the limit. The movie “Fail-safe” with Henry Fonda as the US president in the 1960s expressed the hope of innate goodness and rationality surmounting the irrational evil of annihilation. However, looking at the caliber of the Western political elite today, that is a forlorn hope. IMO, any substantive chance to avert global catastrophe will have to come from the bottom up. Same as well in regards to cascading global warming effects where any hope for a dignified, sustainable existence for living beings on this planet lies not in zero/sum human conflict but in win/win cooperation.
The millenials and younger don’t need nukes to be terrified, they simply need to attend school. whereas boomers had to duck and cover for practice, and seriously consider its implementation during the cuban missile crisis, today’s youth (myself at 40 included) are perpetually training to avoid the homegrown random shooters in their midst. thus begins the psychological numbing.
a decade of numbing from shooter drills, and actual events, and by the time one is mature enough to be engaged in world politics and fight in wars one is indeed comfortably numb to the macro risks of nuclear war.
I think any uprising from below that threatened their position and system would likely end up with a nuclear response as well. They’d rather burn the world than give up their place.
In 1980 I was in SAC.
We would exercise operating the base from shelters and monitoring everyones’ radiation exposure, as if the base were to remain….
Prior to that assignment I was usually involved in NORAD exercises. On the site I was second rank and drew overnight duty on battle staff….
We often had time to read files one had reports of nuclear weapon test damages. It was classified,but did nothing to sell limited nyclear war to me…..
In SAC we assumed we were first salvo targets. Our observation: “the living would envy the dead”. Very unofficial!
We survived a few close calls….
When I saw an X post by Neil Degrasse Tyson attempting to explain to/convince us that modern nuclear weapons are not like the older ones and we needn’t worry, I realized (1) here was a willing tool of the neocons. And (b) We’re fk’d…
Will say; he was roundly vilified in the comments.
WT family blog. I didn’t see the tweet, but do not doubt the claim.
Even our “rebooted” Carl Sagan doesn’t live up to the original (just like every other form of contemporary cultural reboot). Sagan was a devoted anti-militarist and devoted a long segment in his “Cosmos” series to the perils of civilizational self-destruction.
That is awful. How exactly are they not like older ones? Do they not give off huge amounts of radiation? Do they not annihilate everyone at ground zero?
Today’s strategic nuclear warheads are much lower in yield than formerly.
In the 1960’s, multi-megaton warheads were common. As accuracy improved, yield dropped.
A war involving the use of nuclear weapons would still be a catastrophe.
They did drop. Also in part because of MIRVs it moved away from a missle with one large warhead to a missile with multiple warheads. Turns out 10 100 kiloton warheads spread out slightly causes far more damage than one 1 megaton warhead. However, although the individual yields are lower, the overall yields are just as same and the radiation sources are spread out more. So seems dubious that we’d have less fallout to deal with.
I believe that the older ones were much bigger because of inaccuracy especially the Soviet missiles. Old joke was that an American missile would aim for the corners of 1st and Main Street while the Soviet missile would aim for the county if not the state. Then there was the proliferation of bombs as well as the belief that bigger was always better, which means that modern bombs would be considered small.
Capitals like Moscow had dozens if not more of missiles and bombs aimed at them. In a full exchange, Moscow would have been very flat and very radioactive especially as the goal for any major target was multiple air and ground bursts for each target. For instance, Manhattan itself would likely get several air bursts at different heights and several ground bursts in different locations to maximize the destruction.
The more I recall the insanity of the First Cold War, the more I realize just how damn insane it all was.
Beyond outright denialism, it is difficult to get our heads around the intertwined polycrisis the West faces – over reliance on digital technologies, with their potential for crime and failures of security and personal privacy; the out of control climate crisis already stressing the planet’s organic populations; the economic crisis of the West caused by de-industrialisation and the exponential growth of financialisation; the social crisis arising from migration and the toxic imbalance of wealth and power in formerly industrialised countries leading to a collapse in social cohesion; and the real shift in world power from the West to the Rest – it is simpler and more convenient to contemplate the use of nuclear weapons against adversaries as an easy fix with limited unwanted side effect or blowback, Netanyahu being the great exemplar, and where the crazed Bibi goes the West follows, for instance, Starmer’s proposal to acquire at least 12 new fighter jets that can carry nuclear bombs. If not for the intention of delivering nuclear weapons, why else would the tenth rate government of a third rate country 40% of whose population are living precarious lives in terms of economic and social wellbeing even think about this escalatory acquisition?
For Reagan and Gorbachev, nuclear war was unthinkable, for the likes of Lindsey Graham, Macron, Starmer, Kallas and other political, moral and intellectual pygmies who can only comprehend the simplest solution to complex problems (including, sooner or later, Trump), using nuclear weapons to hold on to the West’s place in the world is totally a rational and wholly acceptable option.
Nuclear Winter is a non-survivable event. Anyone who denies this is unstable.
A US tactical nuke release (no doubt, that the US would be the first to the post-1945 bottom) will create a smaller death toll than Gaza. Welp, looks like that the unthinkable has been normalized implicitly.
What if those to first use nuclear weapons, (after Hiroshima and Nagasaki of course,) are not the major “players” but the minor leagues? Say Pakistan uses some of their nukes against Indian dams in the Himalayas? Or if Israel uses some of their nukes against Iranian population centres? The subsequent actions by the other atomic weapons possessing nations will be key.
Back in the 70s or maybe the 80s (I have trouble these days decding what happened in April as opposed to May) there was a special made-for-tv movie starring Jason Robards about the horrible consequences of nuclear war. Some psychologists or psychiatristsl or whatevers stated that young children should not be allowed to watch this movie because it would “damage” them. And all throughout the 50s and 60s there were books, movies and tv shows (I especially remember there were some Twilight Zone episodes) that did a much better job than did warnings from “science” (social and physical) about how bad a nuclear war could be. I don’t follow what movies are current these days and don’t watch much TV but my guess is that the public is no longer being fed this kind of fare. That’s too bad because those movies and tv shows probably were quite effective in alerting people to the horrors that might be in store for them.
That Jason Robards TV movie that you are thinking of is “The Day After.” Supposedly Ronald Reagan watched it and it really rattled him which may help explain his change in attitudes to nuclear war. As you said, there were lots of movies and TV shows that showed the consequences of nuclear war but these days? Not so many.
I recommend “Threads” from 1984.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
The film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFu7Z5cc88&ab_channel=Retrospective-ClassicMovies
Knowledge without wisdom is the worst possible combination.
Testament scared the crap out of me.
Glad you brought that up. The Day After might have spooked Reagan, it also spooked Reaganites who reacted to it very much as Nazis reacted to All Quiet on the Western Front for encouraging defeatism. Recall their idea that With Enough Shovels we could dig our way through the aftermath of a war. I’m not seeing anything like that now, though I’d prefer mad bravura to the unstated resignation that seems to be prevalent now.
I’d go with an updated version of “On the Beach”, updated to account for the effects of nuclear winter. Put Tom Cruise and Sylvester Stallone in it, in the same roles Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire played. They can begin to atone for all their work making war propaganda films. Spoiler alert: they all die at the end.
The Outer Limits was low budget SF but full-on nuclear age nightmare material.
I remember being traumatized by The Outer Limits as a little kid.
No mamby pamby E.T. ‘Lets be friends’ bullshit, those extra terrestrials occasionally on display in the show wanted to rip your face off and use it as a place mat.
I have observed the “normalization” talk about the use of nuclear weapons. However measured and apparently wise the chin stroking purveyors seem, it is stark staring lunacy. The only sane nuclear weapons policy is their dismantling. There was a time when “everyone” agreed that nuclear war was unwinnable and as another commenter said, “the living would envy the dead.” Now there seems to be the childish notion that somehow “it” will happen to “them” but not to “us.” Unlike Wile E. Coyote we cannot runoff a cliff, stop suspended in mid air, fall to the floor of the canyon, and arise battered and dizzy but unscathed ready for the next cartoon adventure. The use of even one nuclear weapon is a no cartoon adventure. How many die in a “limited exchange?” Who are they? Where are they? What are the “limits’ on radioactive fallout? How much is too much? Oh, you have a shelter? Isn’t that special. What about your cousins who live down wind? That shelter … Stocked for how many days, weeks, years? And so on and so forth. Check out Tom Lehrer’s “So Long Mom, I’M off to drop the Bomb” on YouTube.
I’ve mentioned this before, but for once being in closer than i’d like to admit proximity with Fresno could be a good thing-my ace in the hole, as who would waste a perfectly good nuclear weapon on Fresno?
Like you, I have some distance from the city that was the home to Carol Burnett’s Raisin TV series. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL5bYdAlmUw)
We should not be too complacent however. I am unaware of the extent of defensive missiles in the Central Valley, unlike the San Francisco Bay Area with missile sites in Marin County and the Berkeley Hills. However, in Madera County on Road 28½ across the road from Western Way is a missile site location. What was that supposed to protect? Friant Dam? Maybe a political pacifier to the farmers getting irrigated wate throughout the southern Central Valley?
Naval Air Station Lemoore where F-35’s are based out of would also be a logical target, but similar to Fresno-why waste ordnance nuking the Edsel of the Air?
To quote our greatest moral philosopher, Joni Ernst: We’re all going to die.
During the Cold War, it became apparent that who lose the conventional war are the ones who use nuclear weapons first.
Had there been a war n Europe, the famous Fulda Gap Scenario, it was no secret that NATO knew that the Warsaw Pact would prevail. That that point, the solution would have been to fall back to the Rhine River in West Germany and from there, NATO would have been the first to use nuclear weapons.
The mainstream media, serving the Western rich as their PR arm, need to prepare Western audiences, because they know that the Western armies are not capable of defeating Russia, let alone China, in a straight fight. At the same time, they’ve been peddling the lie that Russia was losing, the sanctions have been crippling to Russia, that Russia was running out of ammunition, and exaggerating Russian losses.
Now that the West has lost, the elites are thinking about using nuclear weapons. This is to prepare the Western audiences to vilify Russia and China, because if the West does a first strike, they will retaliate and the Western cities will be devastated.
Very few people remember from the Cold War just how devastating nuclear weapons can be. That memory is gone. If there was a memory, the public of the West would be outraged and would no doubt protest the madness of their own elite.
The reality is that the Western elite may have decided that if they can’t be the world’s hegemon, and control the world, that they would rather destroy it.
Too much money to be made and no skin in the game, that’s the problem! We would have less chance of war if the warmongers including politicians, banksters, arms manufacturers and their first born were the ones first sent to the front – no exceptions, shin splints or not.
I grew up haunted by recurrent nightmares of nuclear apocalypse, although I wasn’t born in the duck-and-cover/back-yard bomb shelter era. I recall being deeply moved by reading John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” in school and later the made-for-TV film The Day After. I can’t imagine such a film being created these days. I’ve heard about the 1984 BBC film Threads, which is supposed to be even more harrowing. I don’t have the stomach for it.
“If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.”
-Moz
The film to see is Peter Watkins’ The War Game, about the effects of several hydrogen bombs dropped on Britain as part of a general nuclear war.
It is terrifying. As a result the BBC banned it. Threads and The Day After don’t close in terms of horrific impact.
I am taking orders for today’s Paul Harvey bumper snicker:
“No Lives Matter”
Yikes! Stripes! When you have lost the Reptilian Overlords…..
I don’t think this is psychic numbing or even normalization.
Witness Wounded Knee, Valley of Tears, the California genocide, the destruction of the buffalo, blatant broken treaties, blatant land theft, blatant medical experimentation on native and Black populations, witness the American plantation and slave industries, witness how Nazi ideology was lifted wholesale and directly from American government immigration policy and American scientific racism, witness the many wars initiated by the US over its entire lifetime, and finally witness the completely unecessary bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan had pretty much already lost the war (and the fact Americans are mostly undisturbed by these).
I’m not saying its exclusive to the US, obviously other nations have been pretty bad and quite racist (the Brits easily come to mind) but sometimes it does seem Americans are particularly hardwired toward violence and racism. So I don’t see this as new trend, more like a continuation of an existing tendency and predisposition. Even the reaction of the elites in regards to the Gaza genocide is a continuation. They see Arabs as vermin, just as they’ve seen every other group.
Maybe it’s because its a population raised on the Psalms? Without education around how to interpret these you’ll soon build delusions of paranoia and persecution. Everyone becomes an other, an enemy to be vanquished and exterminated.
A nice analysis here on the topic:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/nikhil-pal-singh-pervasive-power-settler-mindset/
A selection of other 1980s films about consequences of nuclear war are: Testament 1983 (US), Threads 1984 UK), When the Wind Blows 1986 (UK, animated). Testament is even bleaker than The Day After, but the bleak crown goes to Threads. None really available for viewing currently sadly.
>>>None really available for viewing currently sadly.
I am not surprised. It reminds me of how certain books that are embarrassing to the Powers That Be are not banned in the United States, but often have extremely limited publishing runs and before the internet would just disappear entirely.
(A response to James Above.)
“Threads” is available on YouTube for free.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFu7Z5cc88&t=80s&ab_channel=Retrospective-ClassicMovies
So is “Testament.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9cKi6f9nEE&ab_channel=YouTubeMovies
So is “When the Wind Blows.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TxrnYBrZME&ab_channel=YouTubeMovies
That should be enough “doom scrolling” for one day.
Stay safe. Don’t forget the potassium iodide tablets.
I was born in the white heat of the cold war, but never really felt at any time until most recently that nuclear war was ever as likely as presently.
The ‘normalization’ of nuclear war sadly comes with the territory, we’re running out of conventional weapons and/or can’t make them quick enough and lack the resources to ramp up production, leaving us a bunch of dusty nukes (one with a Howdy Doody stencil on the side) to put up our dukes.
We have a President who has shown zero empathy for anybody save a few family members, he’s already used to killing people vis a vis our military, what’s a billion more?
I could see him taunting (some radiated country) after the fact saying something to the effect of:
‘You should have taken our tariff deal when you had the chance.’
For a realistic scary version of the consequences of nuclear war view the year 2000 3 hr. TV mini series based on Neville Shute’s novel “On the Beach”. Available on DVD.
The movie hits pretty hard too. Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Perkins turn in good performances. Directed by Stanley Kramer, it removes the hope that any place on earth is safe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
I’d made mention of my entire nuclear war prep being somehow getting a ride up to the International Space Station before festivities start, but i’m rethinking it… what if I can’t get back to earth and there’s a smaller version of the Donner Party going on up over?
‘Dmitry, pass me Yuri’s arm and the Tabasco bottle’
Wargasm from the eternally awesome L7:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0fZ3LARsw
And here’s a link to “Flash of Darkness” from season 1 of medic about a nuclear bomb exploding in the US from 1955:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_RHhLn_vbzM
I believe it only aired once.
The Vatican seemed to normalize or even encourage a massive nuclear event with enormous hideous sculpture “The Resurrection” that sits in Paul VI Audience Hall behind the Pope.
https://publicdelivery.org/fazzini-resurrection/
2 recent books. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen who claims to have interviewed many who have had direct contact with the US nuclear forces and policy. Her scenario was NK launching a ICBM at the Pentagon. She split the book into parts – 3 of the parts covered just 24 minutes each. She explained how POTUS would have basically 6 minutes (after confirming that a ICBM was heading to the US, and what it’s target is) to decide how to respond, with a lot of pressure on “use them or lose them”. Since the US satellites saw the ICBM launch from NK, POTUS knew who to attack back, and sent a whole bunch of nukes – however many had to fly over Russia and of course the Russians had no way to know the target before they too had to decide to “use them or lose them”. Another interesting part of the scenario was a NK sub sneaking up the Californian coast and launching a nuke at a nuclear power plant – which had the nasty effect of turning all the nuclear waste that is often sitting cooling in large water baths, into the China Syndrome. Anyway by the time 72 minutes from initial detection of the NK ICBM was up, the whole world had used their nukes and heading into a nuclear winter and death by many different means of nearly all the World’s large animals, including humans of course.
The other book which I haven’t read yet is Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid it, by Mark Lynas. Using the preview option on Amazon, this author also highlights that POTUS or Putin would have about 6 minutes to decide how to respond when faced with nukes heading their way.
Both authors suggest that there is no real way to have a limited exchange, without escalating to a full on MAD.
Gaza helps in numbing down the population at large.
Scott Ritter is very timely in promoting a documentary on the false alarm of a balistic missile heading towards Hawaii some years ago, called 38 minutes (the length of the alarm):
https://scottritter.substack.com/p/38-minutes-the-trailer
The visceral panic is palpable. There is no amount of Clockwork Orange treatment to numb us down to the desired levels.
All the while NYC for instance was trying to put a Temple Grandin (the one devising methods of calming the cattle brought to slaughter) on its population with their nuclear preparedness video clip material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYU-_Vputh8
While Annie Jacobson’s book, mentioned above is frightening I think it is more frightening to hear her in interviews. She has an excellent and becalming voice, but the stories and information she provides will send double the chills down the spine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXgGR8KxFao
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday
Warday is a very detailed and technically inclined book about a short but deadly nuclear war between US and Russia.
People like Col McGregor or L-col Wilkerson have spoken about the reduction in fear towards nuclear conflict in Pentagon. Heck, they think they can win a nuclear war. As in Russia will not retaliate, forcefully. I think there is a profound lack of sense of reality doubled by total lack of imagination in the Western and the exceptional US elites.
However, the question raised lately on the internets, I have seen indi.ca, Andrey Martianov asking it on the same day (the Zeitgeist, eh), on who in fact are the puppet masters, who controls the hand that made the “most powerful man on the planet” cave and turn 180 degrees is very pertinent to this topic of nuclear war. We can see onto whom and how, but we don’t see really who and why.
Aside from nuclear winter, a nuclear detonation can be used to generate a large EMP burst. The book “One Second After” by William R. Forstchen describes the kind of disaster that might follow: “after the EMP wipes out all electricity and plunges the country into darkness.”
Of course there is really no reason to fear a nuclear war: “At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win! \s
In that case, better hope at least one is male and at least one is female. /s
Both of them will be free to decide whether they identify as male or female, or something else.
There are different types of wars, or maybe ways of selling wars, e.g., wars for ego, wars for revenge, wars for plunder, wars for “noble” reasons (independence, self-defense, humanitarian rescue, “ending all wars”, etc.). You can’t ask if we’re hard-wired for war and expect one answer with these different motivations. Most of the wars of the 20th century were, from the rulers’ standpoint, some combination of ego/revenge/plunder motivations, but were sold to the soldiers as having “noble” motives. As Barbara Ehrenreich said in Blood Rites, we started off as weak creatures subject to predation by larger and fiercer animals, and one of the few successful ways to survive that was to swarm attack the predator for the good of the tribe, even if some members died in the effort. That self-sacrificing mass action for the common defense is probably in our genes now, and that’s what leaders appeal to when they try to whip up support for a war. The urge for revenge is a different hard-wired instinct, and that you can use to sell a war to a smaller set of potential recruits. Wars for plunder are easier to sell as such when your potential recruits are in such desperately resource-poor environs that it seems half reasonable to risk dying to go take what you need from someone else who will fight back.
the lovely people of hiroshima have built an elegant museum a few hundred metres from ground zero that shows the results of the inhuman bombing they suffered. recommend that everyone tour that museum and attempt to ingest its message. especially the depressing sociopaths that somehow believe an atomic war is survivable.
afterwards, you can enjoy hiroshima-style okonomiyaki in one of the many stalls in the okonomi-mura building in naka, hiroshima.