With Enough Shovels

One theoretical approach to surviving a thermonuclear war, at least outside of the immediate blast zone (the "overpressure area"), is to construct a primitive bomb shelter as follows:  Dig a deep hole, as deep as your age and physical condition will allow you.  It needs to be large enough for you and for whomever else you wish to protect, but not so great in area that it cannot be completely covered by a pair of stout wooden doors.  You're going to be down there for a while so you might want to consider lining the floor and walls with planks so it will be homey.  The important part of the construction is the roof.  On top of the doors you need to pile three feet of earth; this is the key protection against radiation in the immediate aftermath of the explosion of hydrogen bombs.  You need to work out ventilation, because let's face it, this shelter is a little like burying yourself alive.  On the bright side, however, if you die in the shelter from radiation poisoning, you will have saved the trouble of your interment by others who will probably be in no shape to dispose of you.

These joyous thoughts occur to me in the aftermath of Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, in which she joins with Senator McCain in seeing all us here Americans as "Georgians now."  How can I say this?  These people are freaking crazy.  I don't suppose that Sarah Palin, in the course of bouncing around among various third-rate colleges for six years more than 20 years ago, read much history of the First World War.  But the way all of those European countries got themselves sucked into a stupid and ruinous war was through the existence of a bunch of "mutual defense pacts," which have their modern cognate in NATO. Substitute President's Saakashvili's stupid provocation of Russia for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and you get a sense of how these modern entanglements could spell doom.  George W. Bush wants every country he can find to be in NATO now; Poland, Georgia, maybe Russia itself. Maybe the new plan is to force Russia to attack Russia if one of our NATO allies goes to war with Russia.  That would make as much sense as stationing a battery of defense missiles in Poland as a first line of defense against Iranian missiles topped with nuclear warheads that don't exist.

This is getting extremely weird.  I'm beginning to wax nostalgic for George W. Bush.  Bush, in his naive, aw shucks way, at least wanted to get along with Vladimir Putin and to view Russia as a strategic ally.  I don't doubt that Putin was playing Bush a little, and if you have ever read any of the analyses of Russia written by the chess player Garry Kasparov, you would have little doubt about the kind of quasi-police state Putin is running over there with his United Russia party.  That, however, is not the point.  The point is simpler: why does the United States, and more particularly John McCain and his sidekick, Ma Barker Palin, want a new Cold War?

These are such dangerous games we're beginning to play.  McCain dispenses even with the pretense of coexisting peacefully with Russia.  He wants to kick Russia out of the G-8.  He wants to fast track Georgia into NATO so we'll be obligated by treaty to defend this little jerkwater hovel, Josef Stalin's home state, if Georgia decides to provoke another confrontation with Russia, as Georgia did in August.  Georgia cooperated with Bill Clinton, after all, in agreeing to construction of an oil pipeline between the Caspian and Black Seas, one that provides an alternative to the pipeline passing through Russia to the north.  This was Clinton's gambit in the neverending Great Game of access to oil in the Caucusus, which has prompted international conflict from Hitler to the present.  This lies at the root of everything going on over there.

South Ossetia, Abkhazia.  These are regions so vital to the U.S. that we should risk the destruction of human civilization to make sure they stay part of Georgia?  They're part of Georgia because Stalin, a Georgian, wanted them included in his home Soviet Republic.  So our defiant stand against Putin is to ensure that Stalin's legacy is honored and respected.  South Ossetia, not surprisingly, sees itself as naturally allied with North Ossetia, which is within Russia. Abkhazia is simply bitter because it knows its name is so stupid.

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice actually said, with a straight face in admonishing Russia, that "nations do not invade other countries to resolve differences in the 21st century."  As Mark Twain once said, some things are simply beyond satire.  Bush and Rice are "satire incarnate." Bush, sensing that something was amiss, later amended the Bush Doctrine 2.0 to state that countries don't invade "neighboring countries to resolve differences," and one could hear the collective sigh of relief in Canada and Mexico when he did so.  Probably the White House should post on its website the minimum distance from a nation's capital the invaded country must be to make invasion okay.  That could clear up a lot of confusion in Putin's mind, because he's hung up on our ongoing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

McCain simply does not appear to understand the concept of a zero sum game.  We cannot actually go to war with Russia for any reason whatsoever, with the exception of a nuclear attack by Russia on the United States.  Bush showed good judgment in ranting and raving about Russia's retaliation against Georgia and doing nothing else, because nothing else can be done.  In agitating for war against Russia, Sarah Palin has already done an immense amount of damage to the foreign policy and relations of the United States.  There's been no general election, she's not in national office, and already she's messing us up.  You just don't make statements like that; no sane leader in American history has ever talked enthusiastically about a war with Russia in the post-World War II era.  Crazed militarists, like General Curtis LeMay (satirized unforgettably by George C. Scott in "Dr. Strangelove"), have talked about a nuclear war with Russia as if it's a legitimate subject for discussion, but anyone who wants to survive never talks that way.  Dick Cheney, even, doesn't talk about war with Russia.

Yet here we go again, we've got a half-insane militarist running for President for the Republicans, an elderly man of no intellectual distinction whatsoever, with recurring bouts of invasive melanoma, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a doddering, confused manner suggestive of onrushing dementia, who is saber rattling about Russia; and he chooses as a running mate a nonentity with no background at all in foreign affairs, who's never been to Europe, Asia, South America or Africa, but who thinks she knows Russia because she can see it across the Bering Strait.  

Carl Sagan and others did some very valuable work concerning nuclear winter about twenty years ago when some of Reagan's advisers were suggesting we could survive a nuclear war with enough shovels to dig the rudimentary shelters described above.  Sagan's research indicated that a full-scale exchange of thermonuclear weapons between the superpowers would destroy the Earth's climate and most humans with it; there is no way to "confine" the damage done by H-bombs to the blast zone or the downwind victims of radioactive fall-out.  It's much, much worse than that.  More recent studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder led by Michael Mills have demonstrated that even a regional conflict between two countries such as Pakistan and India, which possess atom bombs, could spell the end of human civilization.  All that is necessary is for these countries to exchange 40 or 50 Hiroshima-sized A-bombs (10-15 kiloton range, cherry bombs by H-bomb standards) with cities as their targets.  The resulting soot plumes carried up into the troposphere would result in a 50% decrease in ozone levels in the Northern Latitudes (70% at higher latitudes).

So, knowing the answer before I ask the question: do these shitty students, McCain & Palin, know this?  Do they realize what they're playing with when they indulge themselves in all this uninformed macho posturing about Russia?  Does Bush realize how insane it is to station missile batteries in Poland, which reduce Russia's deterrent-reaction time from a few minutes to effectively zero if a missile is launched from Poland?  The Russians know.  They have told Poland that if they allow the placement of American missiles in Poland, the Russians will destroy them militarily.  And when you think about it, what choice would Russia have, regardless of your fond memories of the Cold War, when they were always bad and we were always good?  Would we allow the placement of "defensive" Russian missiles in Tijuana to protect their Venezuelan friend Chavez from North Korean missiles?

This is getting very, very serious.  

This is the way the world ends, 

this is the way the world ends, 

not with a bang but with an F in nuclear physics.