Some commentators have correctly pointed out that we in the U.S. do not know war (at least since the U.S. Civil War). U.S. troops have certainly known the horrors of battle and conflict since that time being deployed somewhere else. But the population of the U.S. has never had to see its cities destroyed, death and destruction everywhere with battles in the 'homeland'; families wiped out; or looked into the sky - not to see a passenger plane, but a flight of bombers or incoming missiles aimed at them. Perhaps that's why the population is seemingly so blasé.
And maybe that's why the population seems willfully ignorant of what's happening now. The last several days have had reports of "EU riots" in Georgia and "rebel uprisings" in Syria - both undoubtedly funded and carried out by the CIA and MI6. NATO is talking of deploying 100,000 troops to western Ukraine (where they'll come from is, however, unclear). The Ukrainian escalation that leads to an overwhelming response by Russia seems inevitable.
There have been no direct contact between U.S. "leaders" (President, Sec. of State, Sec. of Defense) and their Russian counterparts for years. Unless there is a change of course, the U.S. population is going to learn what war is - and why it needed to be avoided.
> the population of the U.S. has never had to see its cities destroyed, death and destruction everywhere with battles in the 'homeland'; families wiped out;
Excuse me?
The city I was born in was an industrial powerhouse with a robust middle and skilled working class. It had green parks, rivers and lakes us kids could swim and boat and fish in in, huge shade trees, small but affordable and tidy houses, safe streets, good schools.
By the time I was in high school it was utterly gutted by race riots, absentee landlords, an eight-lane interstate highway punched through the nicest working class neighborhood, and destruction of the industrial job base.
Toxic pollution and waste dumping were so intense that it experienced the nation's worst-ever toxic waste dump fire (which you never heard of because it was silenced by media).
Don't you dare effin tell me that we never saw something as bad as nuclear war.
And those of us who survived the pollution were STILL doing duck and cover drills in school in the '70s, and being terrorized with nukewar, being right next to what by then was the remnants of a major refinery complex/target for Soviet ICBMs.
Seeing how my friends and family died, and what I went through healthwise, nukewar would have been a cakewalk.
Wilful ignorance exists, but let's not make it a mandatory excuse for death by the USA. Nothing beats war experience but, more than ever, the uninitiated have digital access to war, If they choose to ignore that education about THEIR country killing people in proxy wars, which is the same as learning 1+1, they are culpable. Similarly, no Israeli's, except children, were entirely innocent on Oct 7.
Absolutely - he should have been fired for those comments. That he wasn't is an indictment of his chain of command that allowed it and a military that at the highest levels seems cavalier about nuclear war.
Thank you for this post, Prof. Astore. What Admiral Buchanan is talking about when saying an "exchange" "in terms that are most acceptable to the United States," can only be interpreted as First-Strike implementation, rather than waiting to respond to an attack. And ALL of this, from the Manhattan Project onward, is the direct result of male-brain "logic" which somehow passes off as "this is just how things are," in news reports. It was all a gigantic mistake - War must be removed from the human toolkit, not be ratcheted up to higher and higher levels of destruction. This will require redefining national sovereignty.
Reflecting again about my first encounter with widespread American thinking. Fifty-eight years ago, I first learned of MAD and couldn’t understand how supposedly sane people could even consider this kind of thinking. But then I encountered the widespread popular, emphasis!!!, popular phrase “better dead than red”. This was the thinking of ordinary people who regularly attended weekly church. It seems that a form of mental sickness has been a constant condition of American thinking for most of my life. It might explain why Americans are seemingly incapable of comprehending the enormous number of deaths caused by this country’s wars or support of wars, inclusive genocides, since 1945. Why should anyone care about the deaths of tens of millions of human beings when one - the nation - has fallen for accepting nuclear annihilation to preserve U.S. hegemony. What happened to the notion of the SANCTITY OF LIFE? Where are the spiritual leaders? Why aren’t all chaplains resigning from their military commissions? Why asking questions like this when I already know the fatuous responses.
Absolutely language is important and it seems as though we have lost our rather accurate language about nuclear war. My son is a civilian employee of the Army at the Pentagon and even HE thinks nuclear war is no big deal and winnable. I'm gobsmacked by his nonchalance. I grew up in a small town where every Saturday the sirens were tested and even as an 8 year old, I went down to the basement where I had stored a coloring book and crayons to get me through the ordeal. I never could figure out why my parents stayed upstairs. Might today's "meh" reaction to nuclear war be connected with "war looks like a video game"? It all reminds me of the characters in "Dr. Strangelove."
Whether there is a Nuclear WAR or not, could be affected by our lack of Common Humanity?
The Palestinian Representative to the UN spelled out very clearly and succinctly in reaction to the US being the lone vote against an immediate unconditional CEASE FIRE in Gaza, 14 Nations against the US fronting for Israel.
He spoke eloquently yet simply, with genuine Sincerity and Passion, that obviously made the US and Israeli Representatives to the UN uncomfortable.
You definitely made your point Bill, and I for one am terrified now that you have shown us how the Pentagon and all related military groups are totally insane. The fact that Buchanan is an admiral is certainly scary. Apparently his training and leadership has pleased the generals and admirals above him as he rose to this mark which makes me think that they too are equally insane. And now we have an insane president (Biden) and are about to take on another insane president, so I wonder if there is any hope in this world. The human species (particularly the American version of this species) doesn't seem to be able to recognize insanity when it is presented in all its fullness, as it is in the short sample you provided. You know more than most of us about how the military functions, so how many of our admirals and generals are as insane as Buchanan? what would you say the percentage is -75% 80%? or is it more like 95%? What are our chances for survival? Do you believe in miracles - for I think that is our only hope, either that or maybe an alien group will fly in and save us.
"Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" turned 60 years old early this year. IMHO it has never been surpassed; it is THE statement on all this insanity. Terry Southern gets huge credit for his contribution to the screenplay. Gen. Jack D. Ripper famously deemed fluoridation of our drinking water a dastardly Commie plot to compromise "our precious bodily fluids." Hello, RFK Jr.!! Life imitating art that was imitating life?? [Younger readers may not be aware that this foolish notion was actually bandied about, long ago, by John Birch Society types.] MAD has "worked" for 80 years now. Unfortunately, that does not guarantee a bloody thing about the future.
Maybe Militarist Bliss Ninny cyberkids would be more concerned about the prospect of Nuclear War if they realized that one of the effects of a "limited strategic exchange" would entail an Electro Magnetic Pulse radiation sufficient to fry most every electronic device that isn't constructed using vacuum tubes.
"A high-altitude blast might even be calculated as a "limited strategic" strike: "Unlike a large nuclear weapons exchange, where retaliatory attacks would threaten all nations and citizens (mutually assured destruction, or MAD), according to Robertshaw, “HEMP effects leverage the geomagnetic field to achieve extremely wide-area destruction … without radioactively poisoning the earth’s inhabitants and ecosystems.”
In other words, by using multiple high-altitude nuclear explosions “a winnable nuclear war is possible,” Robertshaw says, “in bold contrast to the MAD doctrine.”
Blanche adds, “An effective HEMP attack may use only a few warheads and does not require the reentry vehicles to penetrate the atmosphere, a technical challenge for some adversaries today.”
An adversary might also see such an attack as being of lower risk than a direct attack upon the United States. If no one is directly killed by a HEMP attack, would the U.S. respond with the same force as it would to a direct military assault?..."
I can't speak to the premise that such a strike would necessarily be "low radioactivity"--that's only in comparison to a ground blast, which irradiates much of the territory within the blast radius and the dust cloud from the explosion. But a sufficiently powerful aerial blast would definitely shut down the electrical grid of most of the country. Just saying.
not surprised that can happen. Some tube gear is hybrid with transistors, too. Weird to think that the entire communications grid could conceivably shrink to a handful of preppers with ham radios.
In regards to the "Fermi Paradox" its not going to look good if we mess this thing up and we are the only advanced civilization out there in the Universe. If not which I hope a UFO will land in my Cemetery right now across my way tomorrow I will be relieved because we know due to that Paradox there should be many such advanced civilizations out there because there are trillions of Planets orbiting Stars and there has been sufficient Time for advanced civilizations to form & evolve because the Universe age is 13.8 Billion years.... Immortality awaits us if we can only avoid our own self destruction!
Typical and predictable thinking in The Pentagram: with no statesmen/diplomats capable of talking down and cooling out rising passions, they are preparing to re-fight the last war (WW II), using the same tactics that prevailed in 1945. As in "Strangelove," no doubt the conclusions of an "unofficial study" - "World Targets in Megadeaths" - back up such thinking. But thinking the next war will be like the last war is what led to Dunkirk and the fall of France. The rebuttal to that, of course, is "Well, we didn't have nukes back then." But they don't appear to be the deterrent they once were. If anything, they seem to be regarded in the same light as "conventional" weapons. So, hey ... if anybody's got The Naz on speed-dial, you might want to tell him to put the "Second Coming" pedal to the metal ... "there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die."
I think this is one of the best articles you have ever written, Bill. Thank you. Linking it today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/ and restacking as well.!!!!!
Buchanan is clearly advocating for a first strike. How else do we have "an exchange" on our terms? The President should have sacked him immediately after his remarks became public, to make it clear to Putin that a nuclear first strike is not our policy. To have him think otherwise is incredibly dangerous.
Some commentators have correctly pointed out that we in the U.S. do not know war (at least since the U.S. Civil War). U.S. troops have certainly known the horrors of battle and conflict since that time being deployed somewhere else. But the population of the U.S. has never had to see its cities destroyed, death and destruction everywhere with battles in the 'homeland'; families wiped out; or looked into the sky - not to see a passenger plane, but a flight of bombers or incoming missiles aimed at them. Perhaps that's why the population is seemingly so blasé.
And maybe that's why the population seems willfully ignorant of what's happening now. The last several days have had reports of "EU riots" in Georgia and "rebel uprisings" in Syria - both undoubtedly funded and carried out by the CIA and MI6. NATO is talking of deploying 100,000 troops to western Ukraine (where they'll come from is, however, unclear). The Ukrainian escalation that leads to an overwhelming response by Russia seems inevitable.
There have been no direct contact between U.S. "leaders" (President, Sec. of State, Sec. of Defense) and their Russian counterparts for years. Unless there is a change of course, the U.S. population is going to learn what war is - and why it needed to be avoided.
"Unless there is a change of course, the U.S. population is going to learn what war is - and why it needed to be avoided."
Sadly, by the time Americans learn what war is, it will be too late.
Yep, that's my fear too.
> the population of the U.S. has never had to see its cities destroyed, death and destruction everywhere with battles in the 'homeland'; families wiped out;
Excuse me?
The city I was born in was an industrial powerhouse with a robust middle and skilled working class. It had green parks, rivers and lakes us kids could swim and boat and fish in in, huge shade trees, small but affordable and tidy houses, safe streets, good schools.
By the time I was in high school it was utterly gutted by race riots, absentee landlords, an eight-lane interstate highway punched through the nicest working class neighborhood, and destruction of the industrial job base.
Toxic pollution and waste dumping were so intense that it experienced the nation's worst-ever toxic waste dump fire (which you never heard of because it was silenced by media).
Don't you dare effin tell me that we never saw something as bad as nuclear war.
And those of us who survived the pollution were STILL doing duck and cover drills in school in the '70s, and being terrorized with nukewar, being right next to what by then was the remnants of a major refinery complex/target for Soviet ICBMs.
Seeing how my friends and family died, and what I went through healthwise, nukewar would have been a cakewalk.
Wilful ignorance exists, but let's not make it a mandatory excuse for death by the USA. Nothing beats war experience but, more than ever, the uninitiated have digital access to war, If they choose to ignore that education about THEIR country killing people in proxy wars, which is the same as learning 1+1, they are culpable. Similarly, no Israeli's, except children, were entirely innocent on Oct 7.
War is not a zero sum game. Everyone loses. The "winners" just don't lose as much as the "losers", but they still lose.
It's sad that a man like Rear Admiral Buchanan is held in such esteem (https://www.navy.mil/Leadership/Flag-Officer-Biographies/Search/Article/2709418/rear-admiral-thomas-r-tr-buchanan/). It should be obvious to any thinking person that his opinion on the results of a nuclear "exchange" are insane.
Absolutely - he should have been fired for those comments. That he wasn't is an indictment of his chain of command that allowed it and a military that at the highest levels seems cavalier about nuclear war.
Thank you for this post, Prof. Astore. What Admiral Buchanan is talking about when saying an "exchange" "in terms that are most acceptable to the United States," can only be interpreted as First-Strike implementation, rather than waiting to respond to an attack. And ALL of this, from the Manhattan Project onward, is the direct result of male-brain "logic" which somehow passes off as "this is just how things are," in news reports. It was all a gigantic mistake - War must be removed from the human toolkit, not be ratcheted up to higher and higher levels of destruction. This will require redefining national sovereignty.
Reflecting again about my first encounter with widespread American thinking. Fifty-eight years ago, I first learned of MAD and couldn’t understand how supposedly sane people could even consider this kind of thinking. But then I encountered the widespread popular, emphasis!!!, popular phrase “better dead than red”. This was the thinking of ordinary people who regularly attended weekly church. It seems that a form of mental sickness has been a constant condition of American thinking for most of my life. It might explain why Americans are seemingly incapable of comprehending the enormous number of deaths caused by this country’s wars or support of wars, inclusive genocides, since 1945. Why should anyone care about the deaths of tens of millions of human beings when one - the nation - has fallen for accepting nuclear annihilation to preserve U.S. hegemony. What happened to the notion of the SANCTITY OF LIFE? Where are the spiritual leaders? Why aren’t all chaplains resigning from their military commissions? Why asking questions like this when I already know the fatuous responses.
Absolutely language is important and it seems as though we have lost our rather accurate language about nuclear war. My son is a civilian employee of the Army at the Pentagon and even HE thinks nuclear war is no big deal and winnable. I'm gobsmacked by his nonchalance. I grew up in a small town where every Saturday the sirens were tested and even as an 8 year old, I went down to the basement where I had stored a coloring book and crayons to get me through the ordeal. I never could figure out why my parents stayed upstairs. Might today's "meh" reaction to nuclear war be connected with "war looks like a video game"? It all reminds me of the characters in "Dr. Strangelove."
Whether there is a Nuclear WAR or not, could be affected by our lack of Common Humanity?
The Palestinian Representative to the UN spelled out very clearly and succinctly in reaction to the US being the lone vote against an immediate unconditional CEASE FIRE in Gaza, 14 Nations against the US fronting for Israel.
He spoke eloquently yet simply, with genuine Sincerity and Passion, that obviously made the US and Israeli Representatives to the UN uncomfortable.
https://youtu.be/KJg8YZtLOxk
So many experts and pundits on something that has never happened. In this case the old phrase "live and learn" needs to be modified to "die and learn"
You definitely made your point Bill, and I for one am terrified now that you have shown us how the Pentagon and all related military groups are totally insane. The fact that Buchanan is an admiral is certainly scary. Apparently his training and leadership has pleased the generals and admirals above him as he rose to this mark which makes me think that they too are equally insane. And now we have an insane president (Biden) and are about to take on another insane president, so I wonder if there is any hope in this world. The human species (particularly the American version of this species) doesn't seem to be able to recognize insanity when it is presented in all its fullness, as it is in the short sample you provided. You know more than most of us about how the military functions, so how many of our admirals and generals are as insane as Buchanan? what would you say the percentage is -75% 80%? or is it more like 95%? What are our chances for survival? Do you believe in miracles - for I think that is our only hope, either that or maybe an alien group will fly in and save us.
"Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" turned 60 years old early this year. IMHO it has never been surpassed; it is THE statement on all this insanity. Terry Southern gets huge credit for his contribution to the screenplay. Gen. Jack D. Ripper famously deemed fluoridation of our drinking water a dastardly Commie plot to compromise "our precious bodily fluids." Hello, RFK Jr.!! Life imitating art that was imitating life?? [Younger readers may not be aware that this foolish notion was actually bandied about, long ago, by John Birch Society types.] MAD has "worked" for 80 years now. Unfortunately, that does not guarantee a bloody thing about the future.
Maybe Militarist Bliss Ninny cyberkids would be more concerned about the prospect of Nuclear War if they realized that one of the effects of a "limited strategic exchange" would entail an Electro Magnetic Pulse radiation sufficient to fry most every electronic device that isn't constructed using vacuum tubes.
https://nuclearweaponsedproj.mit.edu/high-altitude-electromagnetic-pulse-emp-attack-scenario-against-usa
https://www.mitre.org/news-insights/impact-story/electromagnetic-pulse-dangerous-overlooked-threat
"A high-altitude blast might even be calculated as a "limited strategic" strike: "Unlike a large nuclear weapons exchange, where retaliatory attacks would threaten all nations and citizens (mutually assured destruction, or MAD), according to Robertshaw, “HEMP effects leverage the geomagnetic field to achieve extremely wide-area destruction … without radioactively poisoning the earth’s inhabitants and ecosystems.”
In other words, by using multiple high-altitude nuclear explosions “a winnable nuclear war is possible,” Robertshaw says, “in bold contrast to the MAD doctrine.”
Blanche adds, “An effective HEMP attack may use only a few warheads and does not require the reentry vehicles to penetrate the atmosphere, a technical challenge for some adversaries today.”
An adversary might also see such an attack as being of lower risk than a direct attack upon the United States. If no one is directly killed by a HEMP attack, would the U.S. respond with the same force as it would to a direct military assault?..."
I can't speak to the premise that such a strike would necessarily be "low radioactivity"--that's only in comparison to a ground blast, which irradiates much of the territory within the blast radius and the dust cloud from the explosion. But a sufficiently powerful aerial blast would definitely shut down the electrical grid of most of the country. Just saying.
No, parts of your vacuum tube devices can be damaged by induced currents. Keep your back-up devices in a steel box.
not surprised that can happen. Some tube gear is hybrid with transistors, too. Weird to think that the entire communications grid could conceivably shrink to a handful of preppers with ham radios.
The current US nuclear posture seems to be a repeat of the cold war strategy of 'brinkmanship.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkmanship
The problem with that approach is how do you distinguish between someone who's only pretending to be insane vs. someone who actually is?
In regards to the "Fermi Paradox" its not going to look good if we mess this thing up and we are the only advanced civilization out there in the Universe. If not which I hope a UFO will land in my Cemetery right now across my way tomorrow I will be relieved because we know due to that Paradox there should be many such advanced civilizations out there because there are trillions of Planets orbiting Stars and there has been sufficient Time for advanced civilizations to form & evolve because the Universe age is 13.8 Billion years.... Immortality awaits us if we can only avoid our own self destruction!
"An evil man will burn his own Nation to the ground to rule over the ashes...!" -- Sun Tzu
Typical and predictable thinking in The Pentagram: with no statesmen/diplomats capable of talking down and cooling out rising passions, they are preparing to re-fight the last war (WW II), using the same tactics that prevailed in 1945. As in "Strangelove," no doubt the conclusions of an "unofficial study" - "World Targets in Megadeaths" - back up such thinking. But thinking the next war will be like the last war is what led to Dunkirk and the fall of France. The rebuttal to that, of course, is "Well, we didn't have nukes back then." But they don't appear to be the deterrent they once were. If anything, they seem to be regarded in the same light as "conventional" weapons. So, hey ... if anybody's got The Naz on speed-dial, you might want to tell him to put the "Second Coming" pedal to the metal ... "there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die."
I think this is one of the best articles you have ever written, Bill. Thank you. Linking it today @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/ and restacking as well.!!!!!
Buchanan is clearly advocating for a first strike. How else do we have "an exchange" on our terms? The President should have sacked him immediately after his remarks became public, to make it clear to Putin that a nuclear first strike is not our policy. To have him think otherwise is incredibly dangerous.