How About A Winnable Nuclear Exchange, America?

Sure, we might get our hair mussed ...

Like too many people, I sometimes make the mistake of talking about nuclear war, when it's really annihilation and genocide we're talking about.

Wars have winners and losers. In nuclear "war," everyone loses. The planet loses. Life loses and death triumphs on a scale we simply can't imagine.

Language is so important here. I grew up learning about nuclear exchanges. EXCHANGES! The U.S. military talks of nuclear modernization and "investing" in nukes when the only dividend of this "investment" is mass death.

One of the few honest acronyms is MAD, or mutually assured destruction. Lately, it's an acronym that's largely disappeared from American discourse.

More than anything, though, realistic images of a nuclear attack are perhaps the most compelling evidence against building more nukes, as in this powerful and unforgettable scene from Terminator 2:

To me, nothing beats that scene. That is nuclear “war.”

The U.S. has over 5000 nuclear weapons; the Russians close to 6000. That's more than enough to destroy the earth and a few other earth-sized planets. Imagine the scene above repeated eleven thousand times on our planet.

The insanity, the immorality of spending another $2 trillion on new nukes ... well, it boggles my mind. We've become like the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, worshipping the bomb, acolytes of death and destruction.

If we all don't end up killing ourselves and the planet in “an exchange,” we'll likely degenerate into utter barbarism, as depicted in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. And even that grim novel has a life-affirming ending that is most unlikely.

Amazingly, after I wrote the above passages about nuclear “war” and “exchanges,” I came across Admiral TR Buchanan’s recent keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he uses the word "exchange" in a remarkably banal (and frightening!) way.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript (available at https://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/3976019/project-atom-2024-csis-poni-keynote/) with emphasis added.

BUCHANAN: Yeah, so it's certainly complex because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that's a place we'd like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don't want to have an exchange, right?

I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it's terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader.

And do we lead the world in an area where we've considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we'd have to have sufficient capability.

We'd have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn't expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.

So very complex problem, of course. And as I think many people understand, nuclear weapons are political weapons. I think Susan Rice said that at one point.

The motto of Admiral Buchanan might be: We had to destroy the world in order to lead it. Buchanan here is less sane than General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove.

This admiral thinks we might have to have "an exchange" with Russia, and that, if we do, we could do so "in terms that are most acceptable to the United States," and that even after "an exchange," the U.S. can still "continue to lead the world."

Truly this is the banality of evil. I like how even after "the exchange," we need to have a "reserve capacity" so that we can nuke the world again.

This is madness--sheer madness--but it's received as probity and sane "strategic" thinking by the national security blob.

This guy was promoted to admiral precisely because he thinks this way. He thinks without thinking. With no humanity.

Well, as General Turgidson says in Dr. Strangelove, we might just get our hair mussed during a nuclear “exchange,” but does it really matter as long as we can kill more of them than us?