Nuclear doomsday, continued

My last post detailed the deteriorating relations between the US and Russia and the threats made by Putin about 'weapons of mass destruction'. It remains foolhardy for the Russians to initiate a thermonuclear exchange with the US, because US nuclear capabilities are more impressive than ever, despite having fewer numbers of warheads in absolute terms. That's because the weapons have greater power, greater invulnerability (particularly our submarine-based missiles) and most especially, greater accuracy, with the advent of GPS and inertial guidance systems. Nukes were sloppy weapons that has as little as a 1% chance of success against their intended targets in the 1950s and 1960s - but that would now approach 100%, argues this "counterforce" expert, who claims that as a result, nuclear war with China has grown increasingly likely.

Why? Because this US "counterforce" dominance changes the usual logic of deterrence. If China ever put its missiles on alert (say, over a brouhaha over Taiwan declaring independence, a scenario that appears increasingly likely over the next decade), the US military commanders quite conceivably would place almost insurmountable pressure on the US President to launch a first strike - because we could effectively wipe out China's nukes at one blow, and assure next to nothing from China would hit the mainland US - but only by striking first. If we waited for the Chinese to strike first, China could still be largely obliterated by a US counterattack, but many (most?) American cities would be incinerated. The old logic of the Soviet-American mutual deterrence through mutually assured destruction (MAD) no longer applies - with our new weapons and China's relative paucity of ICBMs, if tensions rise, the logical thing for the self-interest of the US to do would be to launch a preemptive strike that takes out all Chinese capabilities to attack the US mainland. If the Chinese know that, their logical course of action would be to launch a first strike as well, with no warning. After all, if they allow the US to strike first, they would certainly be obliterated.

If that isn't scary enough - consider: would Russia sit idly by as the US turned its southern neighbor into a smoking pile? Or, with a near-totality of US nukes headed to Chinese targets, would Russian missile command seize that chance to launch a third strike - against the US? It would no longer be quite so completely suicidal in the short term if the US had just used most or all of its arsenal on China, and given Russian paranoia and world-historical ambition, can one be sure they would not try? The resulting 3-way nuclear holocaust might be enough to cause the 'nuclear winter' that Carl Sagan foresaw in 1983, in a study that concluded: "...the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded."

Have another nice day!