Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war war launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174

Far and slow

I took my Dutch bike in for servicing today (to get my brake pads replaced) and calculated some usage statistics.

Indeed, on the ride from home to the bike store, I crossed 7,000 km of total distance on the bike.

One interesting element of that is how it has nearly all been done at a modest pace. 90% of all my travel is at less than 19.3 km/h and 50% was under 12.2 km/h.

It’s a hauler, not a racer, and I am often occupied with tasks more complex than just getting from Point A to Point B.

Libraries are the best

A couple of weeks ago I decided to read John Green’s book, Everything is Tuberculosis, in part as research for the novel I am writing about a tuberculosis outbreak. Initially I considered buying it, but remembered the weak state of my finances and checked the Toronto Public Library system. A library 150 metres away had it available immediately.

Yesterday was the due day, so I swung by to drop off the unfinished book. The librarian asked if I was done with it, and I explained that my effort to renew it was rejected for a short-loan book. She offered to check it out again for me immediately and — when I showed her a place the book was tearing — she offered to fix it immediately and then check it out for me.

While waiting I spotted Harriet Rix’s The Genius of Trees and leafed forward to the chapter on symbiosis with fungi. This is the passage that prompted me to take the second book home too:

Later, more mycelium networks can be seen in Devonian trees, in the first ectomycorrhizal interactions in pine from 156 million years ago, and today most trees form some sort of associative network with a fungus or two or even three or more. Like most of our own relationships with other species, these are not relationships of simple benevolence or mutual support. Although some fungi will kill trees and some not harm them at all, most sit at an awkward interface, a balancing point between support and harm, where the forest network can turn on a coin and the fungal support network quickly change into the digestion matrix. Trees use fungi for their own advantage, but they sometimes lose. (p. 118)

If anybody needs me, I will be in the digestion matrix.

Ellsberg on the Cuban Missile Crisis

If Khrushchev had not, surprisingly, initiated an abrupt, humiliating withdrawal of his missiles Sunday morning—without even waiting for an official American response to his proposal of Saturday morning, which Kennedy had argued to his advisors was “very reasonable”—there was every likelihood of the fuse to all-out war being lit by that afternoon.

How close did that come? As close as the unpredictable decision of one man to overrule two others on a Soviet submarine [preventing the use of a nuclear torpedo of which the Americans knew nothing], or the inaccuracy of Cuban antiaircraft gunners (improving every hour) on their first day of firing at live targets. Far greater than one in a hundred, greater that day than Nitze’s one in ten. And that was for reasons which I didn’t know, and no other Americans knew, for thirty and in some cases forty years. The world has yet to absorb the lessons of this history—the story of how the existence of humanity was placed in great, unjustifiable danger by men who had no intention of doing that, men who recoiled from ending human history, or from taking what they saw as a high or even significant risk of doing so.

A primary lesson I draw from this episode is that the existential danger to humanity of nuclear weapons does not rest solely or even mainly on the possibility of further proliferation of such weapons to “rogue” or “unstable” nations, who would handle and threaten them less “responsibly” than the permanent members of the Security Council, nor does it rest merely on the vagaries of the smaller and more recent nuclear weapon states of Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea (though these do enhance the dangers).

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury, 2017. p. 220–1

Late spring flowers

Flowers are coming up gloriously across Toronto. I have been enjoying the rich red and alien shape of Canada Columbine and, in the last few days, seeing the pink of Common Milkweed flowering, with flowers emerging in clusters. Black Cohosh cultivated on campus is already producing flower wands, just still green instead of white, and it is spreading in rhizomal clusters around where flower wands appeared last year.

I am checking iNaturalist daily for when the Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) bloom begins, at which point I will be leading a city-wide search to improve the data on where this plant is present.