Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

What it’s like to hear but not see the Toronto Air Show

A tweet of mine, written in a moment of irritability aggravated by the sound of jets roaring overhead, has gotten some attention by virtue of being incorporated into some news articles about social media commentary on the Toronto Air Show.

In addition to my standard gripes about the wastefulness of jet engine use, the undesirability of unwanted background noise, and the militarism embodied in combat aircraft development, I suggested that there are people in Toronto who find the experience of being a bystander during the noise as troubling or a reminder of trauma, having heard military jets operating at close quarters during any number of recent conflicts, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Yemen, or during interception flights carried out by domestic air forces.

A disturbing amount of the response on Twitter expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly an assertion that (a) people who have experienced conflict and now live in Toronto now live in preferable life circumstances and therefore (b) they owe certain moral obligations to people who previously lived in the place they now inhabit, to wit just lumping it and not complaining while these acrobatic displays are put on. To some extent my interpretation of the comments was inevitably coloured by Twitter’s reputation as an especially hostile and personal platform, but I think even when viewed with as much objectivity as can be mustered they brought unnecessary hostility to a discussion ultimately about public policy, specifically whether such spectacles should continue.

It’s entirely fair to criticize me for assuming what somebody else’s life experience would mean, in terms of their experience of these noises. That being said, the basic parameters of something like post-traumatic stress disorder are publicly known and it seems plausible to me that anyone who has traumatic memories of being close to combat in which jets operated (whether as a soldier or a civilian) would have some chance of being triggered by the sound of an air show. Given the population of Toronto, it’s plausible that hundreds of people with PTSD are within earshot of each loud noise made by flying aircraft. It’s much more speculative, but I have also wondered about the number of people who can have panic attracts triggered by a stimulus like a jet engine sound find it triggering due to associations they have made through fiction, specifically quasi-realistic military computer games and films which realistically depict violence like Saving Private Ryan. Statistically very few people, even during times of mass conscription, faced intense combat of the kind depicted in the film, but probably a majority of the adult population has now seen multiple detailed immersive representations, whether through films like Spielberg’s or depictions like HBO’s Generation Kill or Band of Brothers.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing at all, but I have my own negative associations with hearing but not seeing military jets at low altitude nearby, as I lived in North Oxford within earshot of at least some of the approaches to RAF Brize Norton and we used to listen to Vickers refuelling aircraft and B-52s flying in at all times of day and night (familiar eventually in their shrieks and rumbles) and speculate about whether they were coming back from Iraq or from Afghanistan, maybe carrying coffins.

I don’t think social media griping is going to lead to the abolition of the airshow, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a public dialog about what people in the city are going through in terms of their mental health and the choices we make together affecting it.

Those with any opinions on the matter are invited to comment, anonymously if you like.

Attractions of monopropellants

A monopropellant is a liquid which contains in itself both the fuel and the oxidizer, either as a single molecule such as methyl nitrate, CH3NO3, in which the oxygens can burn the carbon and the hydrogens, or as a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer, such as a solution of benzene in N2O4. On paper, the idea looks attractive. You have only one fluid to inject into the chamber, which simplifies your plumbing, your mixture ratio is built in and stays where you want it, you don’t have to worry about building an injector which will mix the fuel and oxidizer properly, and things are simpler all around. But! Any intimate mixture of a fuel and an oxidizer is a potential explosive, and a molecule with one reducing (fuel) end and one oxidizing end, separated by a pair of firmly crossed fingers, is an invitation to disaster.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 7 (italics in original)

What if someone breaks the nuclear weapon taboo?

Many problems in nuclear strategy are unpleasant or even horrifying to contemplate. As the number of nuclear-armed nations grows, the chances that one will be put in a desperate situation and choose to use one more more nuclear weapons likely rises.

An article by Vince Manzo and John Warden considers potential American responses to the use of a nuclear weapon by a hostile power, including four scenarios involving North Korea and Russia.

Among all the international norms under threat, the norm of non-use of nuclear weapons is among the most valuable. If at all possible, it should be reinforced even if one state does use nuclear weapons. As the article illustrates, however, that will be one among many strategic considerations, and no option offers the kind of certainty that would be desirable.

Open thread: ballistic missile defence

An episode involving missile defence* from the West Wing holds up very well today. The craggy old American chief of staff is in favour, out of fear of what rogue regimes might do to America. The British ambassador is opposed because it’s impractical, violates international law, and risks worsening the global nuclear weapons situation.

I can see why people like the idea of being able to stop a few missiles launched by North Korea or Iran, or by a rogue commander somewhere. At the same time, I think the dangers of a nuclear arms race make the development and deployment of such a system unwise, even if the major technological hurdles could be overcome. It’s the classic security dilemma: you build something meant to make you safer, potential opponents interpret it as making them less safe (by reducing the credibility of their deterrent) so they build expensive countermeasures. In the end, everyone has wasted money on the race and everyone ends up less safe. It could also tempt decision-makers into recklessness, based on false confidence that the system will nullify any response to their aggression.

We should be working to de-alert and dismantle the nuclear arsenals of the authorized nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Against that backdrop, resisting proliferation to new nuclear states would be more plausible.

* I don’t mean defending things like aircraft carriers from ballistic missiles. I mean systems to protect domestically-located military facilities and population centres from ballistic missile attack, probably with nuclear weapons.

Ellsberg’s broad conclusion

Yet what seems to be beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put the trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being – anyone, not just this one man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons – is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury; New York. 2017. p. 332 (italics in original)

Fire excluded from U.S. nuclear death estimates

The fact is that the estimate of fatalities, in terms of what was calculated at that time—even before the discovery of nuclear winter—was a fantastic underestimate. More than forty years later, Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, revealed in Whole World on Fire the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs—throughout the nuclear era to the present day—have deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire.

…

Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of the firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury; New York. 2017. p. 140–1 (italics in original)

Ellsberg’s on America’s nuclear posture

The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities. The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of “first use”—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.

Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Bloomsbury; New York. 2017. p. 12 (italics in original)