OUR PICKSThe Menace of Nuclear Annihilation | America’s Infectious-Disease Barometer Is Off | The Push to Ban TikTok Spurred a New Washington Influence Machine, and more
· Voters, Please Think About the Menace of Nuclear Annihilation
The speed at which nuclear war will unfold, and then escalate, all but guarantees that it will end in civilizational collapse
· How the Push to Ban TikTok Spurred a New Washington Influence Machine
The tech moguls and defense contractors behind the Hill and Valley Forum aim to expand their impact, prepping an executive order that would dismantle the Biden administration’s rules on artificial intelligence
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Voters, Please Think About the Menace of Nuclear Annihilation (George F. Will, Washington Post)
Today, uncountable dollars and unquantifiable hysteria are devoted to the distant threat of climate change, but, meanwhile, negligible public anxiety accompanies the intensifying danger of global incineration from nuclear war.
High anxiety is unsustainable, but in a presidential election year it can temporarily concentrate minds. Reading “Nuclear War: A Scenario” by reporter and historian Annie Jacobsen will take you much longer than the 30 or so minutes — 1,800 seconds — that would elapse between the launch of a single nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile in North Korea and its detonation on the Pentagon. Thereafter, in Jacobsen’s scenario, cascading and irreversible events extinguish civilization in two hours.
A few tenths of a second after the launch, a bus-size U.S. satellite 22,300 miles above Earth detects the missile’s plume. Six seconds later, computers in the command center beneath the Pentagon are predicting its destination: the Pentagon. Twenty-four seconds later, at the military’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, computers generate this message: “NUCLEAR LAUNCH ALERT.”
Jacobsen vividly imagines the horrors of unconstrained nuclear onslaughts: metal-melting heat, beyond-hurricane-level winds, radiation poisoning, the end of agriculture, social disintegration because of electric Armageddon (the electric grid vanishes, and with it the nation’s communications and financial infrastructure) and ecological collapse: swarms of disease-bearing mosquitos, the birds that preyed on them being dead, feast on sewage, garbage and the dead.
Jacobsen’s most chilling point: “The speed at which nuclear war will unfold, and then escalate, all but guarantees that it will end” in civilizational collapse. One of her sources, former defense secretary William J. Perry, says: “Many presidents come to the office uninformed about their role in a nuclear war. Some seem not to want to know.” They should know that the “launch on warning” policy could force them to go to nuclear war in the minutes required to brew a cup of coffee.
Jacobsen cannot be faulted for not proposing “solutions” to the dilemma of living with what physics hath wrought. Her point is that for a while now, and from now on, humanity’s survival depends on statesmanship and luck — as much the latter as the former. Remember that on Nov. 5.
