We have no nuclear strategy
And other highlights of my weekend on the web
A Monday morning topup
I decided that maybe people would prefer these emails as twice weekly to reduce their size on Saturday morning. So here’s your first Monday morning top up — and why not start Monday morning with a bit of procrastination. And can you really afford to delay attending to nuclear anihilation?
We Have No Nuclear Strategy
Tom Nichols, former nuclear strategist provides his hair-raising perspective.
There was a time when citizens of the United States cared about nuclear weapons. The reality of nuclear war was constantly present in their lives. … In 2010, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, warned that American defense institutions were no longer minting nuclear strategists. “We don’t have anybody in our military that does that anymore,” Mullen said.…
If we do not in fact wish to use nuclear weapons, then what must we do to ensure that our conventional capabilities match our international commitments?
We have accepted evasions from our leaders because we take strategic nuclear deterrence for granted—as something that exists around us almost independently, like gravity or the weather. But deterrence relies on human psychology and on the agency and decisions of actual people, who must continually manage it.
Decades of denial have left Americans ill-prepared to think about the many choices that keep the nuclear peace. Effective deterrence, even in a post–Cold War world, requires the capacity to face the reality of nuclear war squarely. And it means understanding once again what it would feel like to hear the sirens—and to wonder whether they are only a drill.
Ban Nuclear Weapons Now
I found this article rather oddly argued. Which is a pity, because of course we should try to ban nuclear weapons, and of course we should be thinking about that now. Imagine if the US’s hegemony since the fall of the wall had been used to dramatically reduce great powers’ access to nuclear weapons.
Great clip
Slavery in the early 19th-century
Informing us of his intention to write his next book on J. S. Mill, the author of a great biography of J. M. Keynes, Zac Carter had this to say about Mill’s evisceration of the Edinburgh Review’s presumption that the British should back the French in crushing the slave revolt on Haiti. These are wonderful words I think. Carter thinks his fourth point is ‘perhaps most important’. I beg to differ. The third point is so on point for our time — or any time. People routinely think they’re on the side of the good, while in practice, and to be ‘realistic’ they embrace the vile.
This tells us at least four important things about the intellectual climate of the early 19th century. First, there were people who regarded what France was doing to Haiti as a great crime, and said so. Second, for a substantial population, merely reciting what France had done to Haiti was enough to generate moral outrage. You didn't have to explain to this crowd that it was wrong to enslave human beings, or that it was wrong to fight wars in defense of slavery. They knew.
Third, there was a very detailed spectrum of opinion in 19th century Europe on human rights. Even Mill’s targets at the Edinburgh explicitly acknowledged “the unmerited sufferings of the unhappy negroes” in Haiti — they simply denied that righting those wrongs trumped the commercial interests of British colonists. In the United States, we’re accustomed to thinking about the slavery question as a pro-con dichotomy, a habit encouraged by a very bloody Civil War that was fought to end “the peculiar institution.” But there were many different ways to “oppose” slavery. There were reformers who wanted to pay off enslavers, reformers who wanted to imprison enslavers, and reformers who only had a problem with slavery when it was carried out by other empires. Functionally, this meant that a great many people could applaud themselves as broad-minded humanitarians, while also esteeming political “moderation” that bent public policy to the benefit of those who profited from slavery.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, Mill’s missive helps demonstrate the political limits of intellectual discourse in the early Liberal era. Some of the most famous minds in Europe decried the plundering of Haiti, and it was plundered anyway, and then plundered again, and again. Not because nobody knew any better, or because plundering was inevitable, but because people with power really wanted to do it.
Magnitsky and Rupert
If the west could find the courage, it would order an immediate freeze of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. His Fox News presenters and Russia’s propagandists are so intermeshed that separating the two is as impossible as unbaking a cake.
On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the 40 countries supporting Ukraine were “today’s collective Hitler”, viewers were told last week – to the apocalyptic delirium of the boss of RT (Russia Today) Margarita Simonyan. Nuclear war is my “horror”, she shuddered, “but we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak”.
Russia would never give genuine western journalists airtime. But it can always find a slot for its favourite quisling: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He pushes out Russian propaganda lines or perhaps creates his own lies for Russia to use. Ukraine, not Russia, is the real tyranny. Nato provoked poor Vladimir Putin. The west is plotting to use biological weapons. Last week, he floated the theory that the war was not the result of an unprovoked invasion by a colonialist dictatorship but of the Biden administration’s desire to avenge Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.
Philosophy with my kids: Great podcast
Churchill: the downside
As a fan of Winston Churchill, I’m always on the lookout for credible reasons for why maybe I shouldn't be. I’m still a fan, but perhaps out of willfulness. He did have some good qualities. But this is an excellent and eye-opening interview.
A not very good article about an important subject: the reduction of art to messaging
Historians a century from now will know better than we do. What can be stated with some certainty is the debasement is nearly complete: The institutions tasked with the promotion and preservation of art have determined that the artwork is a message-delivery system. …
Private and public museums and galleries; colleges and universities; the art media; nonprofit, for-profit, and state-run agencies and foundations: These institutions adjudicate which living artists are backed financially, awarded commissions, profiled, taught in classrooms, decorated with prizes, publicized, and exhibited.
Institutional bureaucrats, not billionaires, have the power to constrain the possibilities for aesthetic development in the present. The figure of the contemporary artist we know today is an invention of the bureaucrats. He, like them, is a managerial type: polished, efficient, a very moderate, top-shelf drinker. His CV is always up to date. He worries about climate change. The likelihood he graduated from an Ivy League university is especially high; he may himself be a tenured professor (a near given for literary artists).
My goodness Nicholas - such a wide range of thinking and viewing - and all of it fascinating. I may not write lengthy responses but I really enjoy ALL your posts! Thanks. Jim K.