Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Rhodes on the nature of nuclear war

So much confusion, so much paranoia, so many good intentions, so much hard work, technical genius, cynicism, manipulation, buckpassing, buckpocketing, argument, grandstanding, risk-taking, calculation, theorizing, goodwill and bad, rhetoric and hypocrisy, so much desperation, all point to something intractable behind the problem of how to deploy sufficient and appropriate nuclear arms to protect one’s nation from a nuclear-armed opponent. There was such a beast. It was quite simply the fundamental physical fact of nuclear energy: that such power is relatively cheap to generate and essentially illimitable. Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter-bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank. Each one can destroy a city and kill hundreds of thousands of people. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower concluded. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” It followed, and follows, that there is no military solution to safety in the nuclear age: There are only political solutions. As the Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr summarized the dilemma succinctly for a friend in 1948, “We are in an entirely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.” The impossibility of resolving militarily the new situation that knowledge of how to release nuclear energy imposes on the world is the reason the efforts on both sides look so desperate and irrational: They are built on what philosophers call a category mistake, an assumption that nuclear explosives are military weapons in any meaningful sense of the term, and that a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure. They are not, and they cannot.

Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. p. 101 (hardcover, italics in original)

Step by step toward a proposal

My PhD committee members probably feel like I have fallen off the face of the Earth.

Seemingly decades ago, my hope was to have my thesis proposal submitted for approval by December 2015. Now, I am getting close to the point where I think the draft will be worth circulating to committee members and potential supervisors.

While there are literally hundreds of tasks which I have listed for myself in completing the proposal, including reading many books and articles, there are three that I think I should push through before sending a preliminary version to my committee members, if only to show them that I am alive and working. I need to incorporate ideas from a qualitative methods course I completed, specifically concerning ethical approval. Then, I need to incorporate two sets of comments from my friends Nathan and Nada.

This project will involve a lot of challenges. Two that loom over me are getting it through ethical approval, given the way the communities opposing these pipelines are often vulnerable and specifically targeted by state security services, and actually finding people who were involved in fighting these pipelines who are willing to be interviewed.

One step at a time, I suppose.

Israel’s nuclear weapons

I have read quite a few books that pertain to Israel’s development of nuclear weapons at Dimona. It’s of historical interest for many reasons, ranging from the support states notionally opposed to nuclear proliferation actually providing assistance to foreign weapon programs, to whistleblower history, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the details of capabilities required for weapon development.

Now, according to The Economist, the Dimona facility where Israel is thought to have made its fissionable material and assembled weapons may be reaching the end of its usable life:

The country’s atomic secrets have always been closely guarded, so little is known about the plant at Dimona. However, officials at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) admitted at a scientific conference last month that the reactor is showing its age. An ultrasound inspection of the aluminium core found 1,537 small defects and cracks, they said. The lifetime of such a reactor is usually around 40 years. At 53, Dimona is one of the world’s oldest operating nuclear plants.

The article also discusses the development of Israeli delivery systems:

The third leg of the triad is thought to have been added in 1999, when Israel received the first of six planned submarines. These were built and largely paid for by Germany. If, as reported, they can launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, this would give Israel a “second-strike” capability, allowing it to retaliate even if an enemy were to destroy its air bases and missile silos in a nuclear “first strike”. In January Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “Our submarine fleet will act as a deterrent to our enemies who want to destroy us.”

Among books on the development of nuclear weapons in many different states, I especially recommend those of Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (2010).

Federal Court of Appeal overturns Northern Gateway Pipeline approval

The Federal Court of Appeal just ruled that the Canadian government had failed to adequately consult indigenous peoples and so quashed the 2014 federal approval for the project.

As one of the subjects of my PhD thesis, all developments on NGP are of great interest. It’s certainly a fast-moving as well as an important topic.

Traumatized by violence

I think it has been plausibly demonstrated that people who witness the violent and traumatic death of other people may experience adverse psychological consequences as a result.

It’s hard to interpret the significance of that in the present era, or more so in the case of my own life. Ignoring early childhood, I don’t think I witnessed any violence which produced a deep psychological effect until 2001-09-11. People have subsequently told me that they don’t believe me, but this was my first day of university classes at the University of British Columbia. I don’t remember what woke me up, but I walked down to the end of the hall and saw World Trade Center CNN footage, went to the dining hall for breakfast and saw more of the same, and then went to my first ever university class where we discussed what happened, who might be responsible, and what American response might be justified.

In terms of personal experiences, there have been other cases where mass violence reported through mass media could have involved friends of mine.

I also once saw a man crushed to death in front of me by collapsing scaffolding, no more than 50 metres from where I stood.

Still, I think the phenomenon of the violence-induced trauma affecting many people alive today is a broader issue. I was born in 1983, and have never lived in a time when nuclear war wasn’t a plausible possibility. I have seen personal and media responses to dozens of acts of political violence, from professors discussing thwarted bomb plots in Toronto to dear friends mourning from mass shootings near their homes. One close friend of mine, whose wedding I attended, decided to propose because of how close their partner came to dying in the London bus/tube bombings of 2005/07/07.

Aside from that, I have been traumatized by potential violence. I have read dozens of books about the history of nuclear weapons, great power war, the risks of accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch, etc. I certainly cannot comment about whether the terror and helpless feelings associated with these possibilities have anything to do with the experiences of people who have seen violence first-hand and directly. I do think there is a better-than-even chance that nuclear weapons will be used in war again during my life, and some of these possibilities and their ramifications impress themselves on me every day.

Mass shootings have been traumatizing: Columbine when I was 16; the attack on a Norwegian summer camp when I was 28; the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting when I was 29; Orlando just weeks ago.

I don’t believe that humans were divinely created. We’re just long-term consequences of physics and chemistry. Not long ago in evolutionary time no single human was capable of killing a lot of other primates, even if the aggressor was strong and intent on murder. Perhaps more importantly from a psychological perspective, none of us had any idea about what was going on 1,000 km away, much less across the world.

My intention here is not to comment on political violence or to suggest how we ought to deal with it. If anything, my intent is to suggest that our biological makeup and history do not prepare us for a world with accurate rifles and nuclear weapons, and to raise the question of whether people educated about the world wars and other modern conflicts, and who have also been exposed across their lives to graphic and traumatizing coverage of acts of political violence, can reasonably expect to not be traumatized in a way that would be unfamiliar to most of our human ancestors across tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

And if we’re all traumatized, what do we do now?

My shot

It’s strange that a stage show running in one city is affecting the whole continent, but New York isn’t a normal place and Lin-Manuel Miranda clearly isn’t a normal man.

The killing in Orlando originally prompted my personal doctrine in response to political violence: refuse to be terrorized. One or a few people armed and keen to kill do not affect my thinking about politics.

I cried quite unexpectedly when I saw Miranda’s sonnet.

Reading more about the musical, and revelling in my BitTorrent audio, I am increasingly impressed by the virtuoso genius of the thing. Violence has sometimes been a decisive factor historically, but there is scope to hope that ideas and arguments can be our battleground as humanity learns to live all together on this small planet.

GONAVY: The Language of Trident launches on television

From a number of perspectives, I find YouTube videos which include demonstrations of Trident D5 missile launches from American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines highly interesting:

I find the first of the three clips (USS Nebraska) especially intriguing because of the highly stylized, almost theatrical language of the exchange between the bridge officers authenticating the emergency action message. In the second and third clips (USS Kentucky and USS Pennsylvania), the process is either simplified or not shown. The deliberateness of orders being given and then repeated back, with each action then being completed by a two-man team, seems demonstrative of a training culture and a concept of operations based around the two man rule. The way in which certain messages are broadcast on loudspeaker to the entire crew is also interesting from a security and system design perspective.

There is clearly a substantial recruiting angle to such ‘documentaries’, which helps explain why the navy would tolerate the bother and potential security risks associated. A related dimension is helping to justify the huge costs associated with a fleet of 18 multi-billion dollar submarines, each with 24 $37 million dollar missiles, each capable of carrying 12 nuclear warheads.

It also seems plausible that publicly demonstrating the functioning of such systems adds to their credibility in the eyes of potential adversaries.

The launch procedures above are interesting to contrast with those depicted for a British Vanguard-class boat (HMS Victorious) carrying the same missiles. The protocol of using a yellow stick to guard the launch code safe is an especially amusing British security strategy. This depiction, straight from the Royal Navy (HMS Vigilant), is more serious in tone, though it still lacks the drama of the American variations.

Is the Leap Manifesto at risk of easy reversal?

Today, Toronto350.org hosted a teach-in in preparation for the climate change consultations which the Trudeau government has asked MPs to hold.

Avi Lewis — co-creator of the Leap Manifesto — was on the panel. The question which I submitted through the commendable system of written cards (to avoid tedious speeches from the self-important audience members) wasn’t posed to the panel, but I did ask Mr. Lewis about it after.

Specifically, I raised the issue of progressive climate change policies being adopted by one government and removed or reversed by the next. How can we enact policies that can avoid the worst impacts of climate change and avoid being reversed when new governments take power, especially right-wing ones?

Mr. Lewis said that the climate movement doesn’t have an answer to this question.

He began by describing how the right wing in North America has been effective at creating mechanisms to lock in its own policies. Specifically, he cited the network of right-wing think tanks and multilateral trade agreements that constrain the policy options of future left-leaning governments. To this could be added some of Sylvia Bashevkin’s analysis of how centre-left governments like those of Clinton and Chretien adopted much of the thought of their right-wing predecessors.

I went on to contrast two potential approaches to success, the hope that a coalition of leftist forces can work together to achieve all of their objectives (which seemed the underlying logic of today’s event, and much other climate change organizing) and the approach embodied by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), in which they are strictly non-partisan and seek to become a trusted source of climate information for members of all political parties and adherents to all mainstream ideologies.

Mr. Lewis said that he saw little point in the CCL approach, in part because parties like the Republicans in the U.S. are so unreceptive. He also thought this approach has been tried unsuccessfully by the climate movement already, whereas major pressure from a left-wing coalition was novel and might be able to drive change in a government like Trudeau’s.

I remain skeptical about the idea that a coalition of the centre-to-far-left can achieve durable success on climate change. These are critical years in terms of blocking big new infrastructure projects, but solving climate change will ultimately require decades of belt-tightening and sacrifice. Conservatives need to be on board if we’re going to succeed, and tying climate change mitigation too tightly to other elements of the left-wing agenda could impede that. Hence my anxiety about non-strategic linkages with laudable but not critically connected causes, from LGBTQ rights to minimum wage policy to the conduct of police forces.

The big exception in my view is solidarity with indigenous peoples. Around the world, they are absolutely central to the process of shutting down fossil fuel development. In Canada, where the Trudeau government remains either clueless or in denial, they may also be the only ones with the legal power to stop the construction of fossil fuel production and transportation infrastructure that we will all regret.