The end of the world? You wish!
"Nukes not so bad", mismanagement or malice, Cold War contrivances, and more, in Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs), Parts Eight
[All chapters can be read independently, but the previous chapters are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7]
Potential nuclear war returned as a topic of general conversation in early 2022, after Russian forces entered Ukraine. Across all platforms, personalities great and small weighed in on how real the threat had suddenly become. Would Putin resort to nukes out of desperation if his forces were repelled? Should the West support Ukraine indefinitely, even if the rising costs eventually went radioactive? Every time a world leader—Western or Russian—even referenced the nuclear option as a response to hypothetical red-line-crossing by the other side, various critics would accuse him of provoking the conflict further.
A year later, in January 2023, the longstanding Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists group moved the hands of the metaphorical Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. In the considered opinion of these experts—as expert as anyone can be about such matters—never before had the world been closer to nuclear disaster. Cue alarums. But previously, in 2020, the clock had been adjusted down to 100 seconds, and few noticed then. In fact, ever since 2007 the figure had stood at 6 minutes to midnight or under, and it had been steadily declining since 2010. These were levels of risk greater than those during the majority of the Cold War. And yet, as noted in the previous chapter, during those recent years nuclear Armageddon scarcely seemed possible anymore, no matter what the Clock said.
Despite the intensity of the current debate, from February 2022 onward, a sense of unreality has persisted. We no longer feel safe, but the danger doesn’t sit right—the discourses around the situation strike us as oddly proportioned. We seem closer to nuclear war than ever before, yet our conversations seek not to prevent it but to rationalize it in advance. We each need to prepare, you see, not for World War III itself so much as for our explanations of it if it does in fact break out. We need to learn the proper talking points and effective lines of bromidic self-therapy.
Some voices downplay the potential damage a nuclear conflict could cause, while others appear more interested in assigning proper blame. “This wouldn’t be happening if Trump was still president,” runs a semi-popular argument in some circles, “because Putin actually did fear him, no matter what the idiot lefties think.”
More troubling, however, have been the assertions, usually from avid apologists of the current Western regimes, that a “limited nuclear exchange” wouldn’t be so bad. They say that it would be far more survivable than we might think, and that it might be preferable to any alternative—even to peace. We will henceforth refer to this as the “nukes not so bad” perspective.
A clownworld headline from October 2022 typifies the bizarre, counter-intuitive thought process: “Putin’s nuclear threats are pushing people like Trump and Elon Musk to press for a Ukraine peace deal. A nuclear expert warns that’s ‘dangerous.’”1 Whether they do it for clicks or because their editors agree with the sentiment, it’s utterly bizarre for mainstream outlets to promote the notion that war—even nuclear war—is safer than (yuck!) peace. Note also the usual propaganda tactic of foregrounding vaunted “expert” analysis, and the frequent tactic of associating Trump and Musk—super-heels in the eyes of the target audience—with an outcome (peace with Russia) that the establishment finds undesirable. As an older millennial who grew up seeing peace commodified and marketed everywhere in culture, I cannot express how strange it is to see this counterintuitive suggestion, that somehow peace is more dangerous than war.
Late last year I remember seeing another headline, probably from a European news outlet, saying that a small-scale nuclear conflict with Russia actually wouldn’t devastate the eurozone or cause too much inflation. The editorial seemed an attempt to calm investors and stakeholders in advance, just in case: If something frightening happens, don’t worry; Europe is big—the radiation will not reach you!—and its economy is resilient. The contention was quite something. But I can’t find this article now.
What I can find is a plethora of one-off social media posts, mostly from young people who use pseudonyms, arguing variations of “Nuclear War Wouldn’t Be Too Bad, Actually”2. Sure, some of these messages come from small accounts with few followers, but similar statements were made by users with audiences of over a million. One such authoritative missive, from a popular YouTuber in March 2022, assures us that
A nuclear war right now would not be the end of humanity. Sure, it would suck, and by that I mean a LOT of people dying, at least a billion plus. However, it wouldn’t erase life from the planet. […] To sum up, Putin will threaten with nukes, but it’s unlikely he will actually use them. Even if he does though, the world won’t end, plus your chances of survival aren’t bad if the bomb wasn’t dropped directly on you, and you can stick it out in a basement for 3 days.3
Three Days in the Basement sounds like it could be the sequel to Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve.
The YouTuber’s sentiments don’t exactly ring false—if forced to play Omniscient Geopolitics Guy, I would basically agree with them myself—but a discomfiting casualness accompanies all of this. It’s weird enough that we’re even having these discussions, but the resigned attitude of it all makes the discourse so much worse. “Sure, it would suck.” It seems as though a directive had been ordered: Keep Calm and Hypothesize Nuclear War.
Be Here NWO, or How It Came to Be
Let’s take stock. The world suddenly found itself in this new position due to the Russian invasion, which itself was partly motivated by the West’s military support of Ukraine prior to 2022, including and especially the training of Ukrainian troops within Ukraine. In 2015 the British military set up a headquarters in Kiev and proceeded to instruct tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers4. This was seen by some to have violated the Minsk II peace treaty, which demanded a “Pullout of all foreign armed formations, military equipment, and also mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine”5. Others believe that Minsk II had already been forfeited due to Russia’s continued support of separatists in the Donbas. Regardless, in September 2021 NATO troops (including Americans) entered Ukraine and commenced training domestic military forces.6 Interpreting this as a provocation, Putin marshaled his army, initially claiming that they would only be stepping in to protect the Russian-leaning eastern regions of Ukraine. Russia then proceeded to invade from three sides and started making sporadic attempts to occupy the interior of the country.
Despite Putin’s obvious overreach, Western leadership bears a degree of responsibility for the conflict. Training Ukrainian troops during times of supposed peace could not but worry Russia. (Imagine if the Russian or Chinese armies had begun doing various exercises in Mexico, accompanied by the Mexican military at the behest of their government:—What would Washington think about that?) Most Western civilians were (and are) so uninformed on these matters, relative to their potential consequences, that it is reasonable to say they were deliberately left in the dark. I doubt more than 1% of the population realizes that US and UK forces were in Ukraine conducting drills with Ukrainian troops just prior to Russia’s invasion. Instead, Western politicians and state-supplicant media sold Putin’s reaction as wholly unprovoked—thus not a reaction at all, but rather the behavior of a greedy little troublemaker. Some of our pundits were so baffled by Putin that they even claimed the Russian operation was the result of a brain supposedly addled by “long Covid”. Our leadership choose to poke the Russian bear just after a two-year pandemic, during a time of extreme economic uncertainty, while their people’s collective mental health was—by every metric—plummeting. This is the moment when they went ahead and risked taking actions and making statements that could lead to World War III. Their demeanor suggests that they want this conflict to escalate.
Nukes Not So Bad, experts agree
Whether it is poor management or willful megalomania on the part of our decision-makers, the unpleasantness here can be obscured—and any consequences preemptively mitigated—if the starkness of nuclear war might somehow be softened in the public mind. If nuclear war actually doesn’t mean the end of the world, then our diplomats and politicians actually haven’t risked everything to protect a nation that until 2022 was widely seen as a place whose corruption rivaled Russia’s7. Alleviating concerns about nuclear weapons would help mitigate the negative publicity and unfavorable polling data that may affect the ruling class.
More importantly, such mental maneuvering protects the fragile egos of the Western elites and their toadying spokesmouths. The power structure has become so pressurized that no one trapped within it wants to admit error, much less allow the possibility that their self-righteous attitudes might have real deleterious consequences. Everyone invested—monetarily but even more so psychologically invested—in the system instinctively understands this. We will all suffer some terrible, portentous possibilities that these people, through their arrogance and ineptitude, have unleashed—the only question is how much we will suffer. How much trouble have the US State Department and their friends caused the world this time? We will just have to wait and see! Meanwhile, many apparachiks will readily “well acktewally” on cue, to cover for their defacto bosses, and to shield their self-esteem from the mean reality of the mess they’ve made. They really do like downplaying the potential damage.
Hence Official Regime Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, in October 2022, saying
that modern nuclear weapons radiation is not the problem that’s touted [sic], and the real concern is the minor inconveniences of “being vaporized or blown to bits by the shockwave.” He added, “There’s a reaction to nukes that’s out of proportion to what they really do.”8
You know what? He’s right. As alluded to previously in this series of essays, there has indeed been a cartoonish overestimation of nukes’ destructive capacity. After all, we already dropped two A-bombs on Japan. The entire planetary atmosphere didn’t burn up in 1945, nor did our entire stockpile somehow explode in a spontaneous chain reaction. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki are livable, populated, modern cities today. The world didn’t end. This might seem unbelievable to many children of the Cold War years, but it’s demonstrably true: Nukes going off don’t end the world.
Further, as one Twitterer remarked after wondering how “survivable” a “nuclear exchange” might be: “We essentially spent the entire Cold War nuking ourselves.”9 That’s right. All those tests in the American southwest: sure, there was health fallout for a while10, but life still definitely goes on in Nevada. The US government detonated nearly 1,000 nukes there11, but today you wouldn’t know it.
The amount of damage would depend on the type of bomb (A- or H- or otherwise) being dropped or detonated. That was another consideration that rarely (if ever) entered our heads decades ago. We had no sense of context or scale. So of course TV Scientist Man and his blue-check brethren were right to inform us last year that, yeah, actually civilization could survive a few nuclear explosions. It already has survived many nuclear explosions. The experts are right on this specific point, and the word is getting around.
Why this? Why now?
What’s worrying isn’t the corrective in perspective—one nuke going off would not end life on earth—but rather the timing and the rollout of this More-You-Know-style public awareness campaign. It seems calculated to slowly ease the Science™-trusting smarty-pants squad into supporting a direct war against Russia (and possibly China). While it’s probably true that a “limited nuclear exchange” wouldn’t wreck the world, the very idea is a flawed one, a fallacy12. In all-out conflict between world powers, there would be no way or reason to keep the bombings “limited”. The United States itself, champion of ethics, demonstrated that evidently the best use of nukes was to drop them in places distant from the theater of war, on cities full of civilians.
So that is why we raise eyebrows and then squint, studying the “nukes not so bad” propaganda push and wondering why exactly it’s been initiated.
Nine out of ten chatbots agree that in a high-pressure environment such as ours, individuals experiencing stress may perceive new sources of anxiety as covert attacks from untrustworthy factions. We are hyperaware, but we don’t trust anything. The social media habitat has become so frenzied, its messaging so overdetermined, that it’s hard not to notice when a configuration of NPCs (Neurolinked Political Cogs) all begin to “nudge”, suspiciously, in the same way. They stand out like cockroaches on a white background:
System supporters arrived at this idea almost simultaneously. Whether someone paid a few of them to promote the message or manipulated many of them into believing that they actually came up with it on their own, either way the end result is the same: curtailing dissent before it arises, running interference for higher interests, giving The Powers That Be even more political capital, and making the nuclear option more socially acceptable.
So whether it was an initiative of government operatives or a predictable “big think” bad idea from increasingly deranged journalists, the recent overtures toward “survivable nuclear war” seem like psychic driving. Even if World War III doesn’t happen, the public is being conditioned (and is conditioning itself) to accept greater risk and lowered standards of living. On the level of mass psychology, “nukes not so bad” registers as “If something really bad happens, don’t worry, put up with it. And put up with the irascible, irresponsible smirkers who made it possible.” It’s all being done for democracy, after all.
Spread by deniers
To be fair, in terms of big-audience voices and institutional publications, there seem to have been more rebuttals to the “nukes not so bad” hot-take than there were instances of the hot-take coming from name-brand outlets. Forbes, for example, cautioned in August 2022 that “Even a Limited Nuclear War Could Kill Billions by Starvation”13. The article refutes “nukes not so bad” but doesn’t cite any previous source that argued as such; rather, it seems simply to be responding to a sinister message that had become prevalent in the noosphere.
In fact, while researching this article I was astonished by the lack of impressive primary sources that illustrate the “nukes not so bad” precept. For over a year now many dissident-minded people have believed that this argument was being espoused everywhere, seeded from the top down, but finding good examples of it is difficult. Rather than the expected assembly line of decorated journalists, generals, and “former” members of the intelligence community proposing the nuclear option or minimizing its likely costs, instead I found an infinite number of aghast critics simply saying that they were seeing and hearing such messages. Rarely did anyone say where they encountered these ideas or why “everyone” (who?) suddenly, supposedly, believed this.
While the straight-out “nukes not so bad” proponents were comparatively few, the notion was massively signal-boosted by ornery, disenfranchised Westerners arguing against it. Some referenced the dangerous message as if it were wall-to-wall propaganda pumped out by the despicable global elite. Others popularized the idea in an effort to make their political opponents look bad: “Can you see the ‘nuclear war is not so bad’ DEMOCRAT talking point?” asks one Audacious Pundit.14 In reality, the scrappy dissidents have actually, inadvertently spread “nukes not so bad” more than anyone, vis-à-vis blind-item rage posts about what T.H.E.Y. want us to think.
Remember the editorial I mentioned, the one I can’t find now, about how “limited nuclear exchange” actually wouldn’t tank European markets? I realize now that I may have imagined it. You might say T.H.E.Y. memoryholed the article, but there’s no way they could have scrubbed the internet of people sharing it around or quoting it, and I can’t find any evidence of it now. Maybe everything else going on at the time—the surrounding discourse and general drift—left me with the false impression that I had seen such a headline. I don’t know anymore.
Resigned to mismanagement, the story of US
Either way, in all this, the actions of Western leaders starting in early 2022 seemed to imply that they were becoming more comfortable with risking nuclear conflict. The fallout, literal and political, was being excused in advance by various regime loyalists. Was this an orchestrated attempt to normalize the proactive use of nuclear weapons? Provable intention here may not matter any more than it does in the case of professional wrestlers. Whether the man in the red trunks is really trying to pin the man in the blue trunks or not, the crowd behaves as if they believe so, even if some of them suspect otherwise. In other words, it’s concerning enough that we were trending toward “nukes not so bad”—that our mass psychology exhibited a capacity to drift in that direction. Whether it was a deliberate plan is almost beside the point, because we already have ample evidence of our leadership class’s corruption anyway.
The bigger, more important phenomenon now might be the sense people have that the government doesn’t care about us or about preserving our way of life. The same high-level operators going all-out to defend Ukraine’s borders have let our nation’s integrity and standards collapse on every front. Whatever moral authority the West could once claim has largely been squandered. In the last few years many supposed freedoms have either been taken away or been revealed as illusory. There is no need to provide a litany—every sentient person knows this is true—but I’ll list a few comparisons.
After starting the 2000s ranked 6th, the United States has fallen out of the top 20 on the 2023 Human Freedom Index. The US flirted around the tenth spot for a decade and a half, before declining and then cratering to its current position of number 23.—But this is supposed to be the land of the free.
Similarly, the US languishes in 25th place on the 2023 Index of Economic Freedom. Its overall composite score of 70.6 represents a decline of over six points since 2019. In 2008 the US rated a stellar 81.0. The downward trend since was first fairly gradual, but then since 2020 the trajectory plummeted.15—But this is supposed to be the place for the free market.
Gallop reports that depression rates have hit new highs. Nearly a quarter of American women and over a tenth of American men currently have or are being treated for depression.—What happened to our vaunted pursuit of happiness?
Things aren’t any better in the nation that wrote the Magna Carta. In 2019 the UK government arrested of their citizens for making disapproved posts on social media; the same year, the Russian government arrested only 400 people for the same “crime”.16—Note that the population in the UK is less than half that of Russia’s. Yet we call ourselves the defenders of liberty and openness.
Many people in Western nations have noticed these sorts of hypocrisies, even if the decision-makers themselves cannot bear to recognize much less admit as much. Whatever our rulers’ actual beliefs about their wreckless statements and actions, however safe or necessary they might consider them, at this point all remaining sane citizens simply posit a harmful warped logic behind everything the management does.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Dick Halloran’s assessment of the Torrences, the family put in charge of the Overlook Hotel, doubles as a comment on the ruling class of the West:
Larry, just between you and me, we’ve got a very serious problem with the people who are taking care of the place. They’ve turned out to be completely unreliable assholes.
You could say that’s old news, that our leaders suck. But recently they’ve seemed more deranged than usual. Even worse, the masses at large seemed to have resigned themselves to whatever destruction their rulers—whether through incompetence or malevolence or both—have let loose upon them. As long as we get to complain about it, we’ll put up with it. En masse, we would rather vicariously blame our favorite political heel for an imminent disaster than take steps to prevent the disaster from occurring, even if the disaster in question may prove almost an extinction-level event.
Simon Says Protest
Despite the high stakes and real suffering (direct and physical for the Ukrainians, indirect and economic for Westerners), no peace movement of any note has arisen in the last year and a half. The entertainers and actor-intellectuals, who normally lecture about “peace”, simply support Ukraine instead. Perhaps the astonishing absence of any antiwar movement at all indicates that most if not all other such previous protest groups were significantly astroturfed. Perhaps this time around the war is so desirable that none of the big players feels like vicariously funding a pointless opposition. It may no longer be necessary to keep up the pretense of two sides. Or perhaps the populace has become so listless and corrupt themselves that there simply isn’t a sizeable portion willing to organize and demonstrate for peace, whatever good that would do.
The 1980s saw the rise of fairly prominent nuclear disarmament movements, even as the Cold War was ending. Is it cynical to suspect that none of this was serious, that it was all larping? Or at this point would it be foolish not to suspect that it was merely a way of keeping dejected leftists engaged in the political process? It happened because the rank-and-file opposition wanted to feel morally superior to mean ol’ Reagan and Maggie Thatcher. The anti-nuke marches would not have been nearly as large if a Democrat president and a Labour PM had been in office, not even if the exact same policies were in place and the same anti-communist statements had been made by Western leadership. It’s that simple. At best some of the protestors meant well, but the high-level operators controlling them—and siphoning their energy—had no intention of ever allowing their nations to disarm.
Why do I suspect this? Because now, with geopolitical tensions more severe than they were 40 years ago, these same voices (or their descendants) either agitate for war with Russia or go along with those who do. Unconcerned with the Doomsday Clock, they dismiss the very notion of peace as pro-Putin propaganda.
Cold War, Cold Work
Starting on February 22, 2022, the West did almost everything it could to stop Russia from participating in global economic activity. All throughout the Cold War, however, the West (with the United States very much included) had constantly looked for ways, reasons, and excuses for trading with the USSR.17 To no small extent our capitalist system seems to have financed and supported the Soviet experiment. Various Wall Street interests funded the Russian Revolution—and these financiers were neither punished by the American government nor called out as traitors by our media. Despite the Red Scare of the 1930s, “United States technology and capital equipment and some entrepreneurship assisted Soviet economic development between the two world wars.”18
What about the unforgettably psychologically terroristic McCarthyism of the 1950s? It couldn’t have been too bad, since in 1959 Khrushchev visited America at Eisenhower’s invitation. The Soviet Premier toured Hollywood, partying with the entire A-list: Gary Cooper, Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Judy Garland, Kim Novak, Dean Martin, Shelley Winters, Jack Benny, and of course Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe.19 This was only a few years after the “We will bury you” statement. It sounds like an AI art prompt—“Khrushchev schmoozing in 1950s Hollywood”—but no, it happened and was publicized in broad view of the American people. None of the actors feared being blacklisted or boycotted.
Only VP Richard Nixon seems to have had much of a problem with it; he urged Americans to not refrain from speaking out against the Soviet leader during his visit, since politeness “is a grave mistake where men like Mr. Khrushchev are concerned.”20 (Thirteen years later Nixon would smilingly shake hands with Mao.)
In retrospect, it doesn’t seem serious. The cultural mythmakers have taken the example of McCarthyism and exaggerated it, making it seem as if what some entertainers went through for a few years had been indicative of what the entire country went through for several decades. In actuality, America helped set up the Soviet Union, then partnered with the Soviet Union in World War II, and then made use of the Soviet Union as part of a false dichotomy to control the ideology of the Western population. The Cold War was something for the peanut gallery to bicker about. The “maverick” American leftists who supported the USSR were simply backing a bad guy wrestler that was secretly funded and supported by the Western capitalist babyface. This is indeed the proper analogy. Beyond the surface-level reading of Nikolai Volkoff as a cartoonish cliché derived from popular conceptions of the Soviet Union, understand that Nikolai Volkoff served the same function in the WWF’s business model as the Soviet Union did on the world stage. Hulk Hogan’s team wins, i.e. America wins, but the contest was never a real one and neither side really wanted to truly defeat the other. The Soviets needed us—actually needed us to feed them, as the next paragraph will explain—and we wanted them around to make ourselves look better by comparison, to justify all sorts of funding. The Cold War was a work. That’s how it played out even if many (perhaps all) members of leadership didn’t understand the dynamic at the time. But even under Nixon the US did what it could to keep the Soviet system alive, quite literally:
In the early 1970s the US began selling the USSR wheat and corn at low prices—subsidized by American taxpayers—because the challenges of a Russian draught had been compounded by Soviet mismanagement. This led to such low grain production that the Kremlin feared devastating hardship and famine. Uncle Sam stepped in to help. Rather than take the opportunity to announce proof of Marxism’s failure—literally the blight of Marxism—American officials downplayed the seriousness of the problem. They professed, at the time, to believe that the crops we sent over were simply to feed some Soviet farm animals, not to feed the Soviet population itself. Our official history texts say that the US government had no idea how catastrophic the Soviet crop shortfall had been in the early ’70s.21 That would beg the question, if the problem wasn’t serious, why were we delivering mass amounts of cheap food to our supposed geopolitical enemy? Even by 1972, it’s estimated that the Soviets received over $1 billion worth of food from Western nations, including the United States. In July of that year the Soviets used up their entire $750 million credit limit, meant to last them three years, in only one month. And that was before an even larger deal for wheat was signed in 1973.
We haven’t often talked about episodes like this one in our national “conversation”. Doing so would upset the usual Cold War storyline. Instead, our education/media has led us to assume that between 1950 and 1990 no one was allowed to voice any public sympathy for communism lest he risk his career—might even git drugged before Congress and have yer life ruint, cuz we don’t like pinkos ’round here. The truth was far different.
It was a work, and the drama was embellished retroactively, with tireless mythologizing about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reagan in Berlin, etc. But the reality of the Cold War has come into greater question recently. What’s been going on since 2022 seems markedly realer than the pantomime they gave us before.
“άποθανεîν θέλω”
It’s as dark as it’s ever been, and yet in other ways it seems less of a big deal than it used to be. We’re kinda blasé about the whole thing, even those among us who still believe that a single nuke would lead to the end of everything. We see our leaders not defending us, not defending civilization—but we’re not defending it either. We’re not defending ourselves. Does that mean we want to be obliterated?
>do it pussy, i want to die, start wwiii
Last September I found this tweet revolting for its supreme nihilism, and I thought it incomprehensible as well. I still find it revolting, but I now have a better understanding of the underlying sentiment, where it comes from, and why disaffected Westerners have been responding this way.
At our postmodern end is our modernist beginning. As the last remnants of his biological instincts fade away, the doomer zoomer becomes host to the Cumaean Sibyl referenced in Eliot’s Waste Land: trapped in a jar, or a pod, having seen more than enough already, she simply wants to die.22
One way or the other, we want the world to end. On our worst behavior, we want someone to push the button.
But in the meantime, oversensitive fussbudgets that we are, we don’t want anyone to push our buttons.
We’re sulky and we’re lazy, so thank God we can still be animated by certain offending words.
______
This ends the eighth chapter in this series. Thanks for reading, and if you like what I’m doing, consider sharing this post, and subscribe if you haven’t.
The Guardian called Ukraine “the most corrupt nation in Europe” (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-most-corrupt-nation-in-europe-ukraine).
The reader who dismisses this and the previous index as being “conservatively biased”—since they come from the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation—is welcome to accept, as an alternative, any number of leftish reports that say America is more racist, sexist, etc. than ever before. One way or the other, the feeling of decline has intensified in the last few years.
Michael Kaser, British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Jul., 1977), p. 137.
The title of this section (“άποθανεîν θέλω”) is the last line of an excerpt taken from the Satyricon by Petronius, which appears as the epigraph to Eliot’s Waste Land. As translated:
[I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her “What do you want?” she answered “I want to die.”]