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Finland vs. Stalin and a Possible Endgame for Ukraine
As with Finland in 1939, national unity alongside a clear-eyed view of worst-case scenarios and the limited military options present the best hope for Ukrainian independence.
Dec 24, 2023
As public support for Ukraine has waned over time, and Washington’s policy elites are shifting their focus more toward the conflict in Gaza, an endgame for Ukraine is desperately needed. U.S. and European officials have reportedly broached the issue of possible peace negotiations with their Ukrainian counterparts. This begs the question: What could a peace treaty between Kyiv and Moscow look like? One historical instance stands out among many as a potential model for how the Russo-Ukrainian War could end.
The “Winter War,” or the Soviet-Finnish War that took place from November 1939 to March 1940 (and was renewed by the Finns as allies of Germany between June 1941 and September 1944), has drawn some comparisons with the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. After Finland rejected an ultimatum to concede a considerable portion of its territory and the Soviet signing of the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Joseph Stalin’s Red Army invaded Finland to install a puppet Communist Finnish government and eliminate a potentially hostile presence near the Soviet Union’s second city and only Baltic port of Leningrad.
Similar to the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Soviet officials predicted that Helsinki would fall to Soviet troops in as little as three days. However, despite the Soviets outnumbering the Finns in soldiers by three to one, Helsinki succeeded in holding off the Red Army for more than three months, inflicting extremely heavy casualties on the invading forces.
Though Finland was eventually defeated and forced to concede about 11 percent of its territory, the Finns scored a moral victory. It is widely considered that the grit and courage of Finland’s resistance convinced Stalin that incorporating Finland into the Soviet Union or turning it into a Communist client state like Poland would be more trouble than it was worth. This also contributed to Stalin’s eventual agreement to sign a peace treaty with Finland in 1944 in return for a small amount of additional territory and a commitment on Helsinki’s part to neutrality. Finland thus became the only part of the former Russian Empire that was not reincorporated into the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
Thereafter, Finland implemented the Paasikivi-Kekkonen doctrine, which aimed to preserve Finland’s survival as an independent country by maintaining a neutral foreign policy stance, while Finnish nationalism became a central ideological and political driving force in Finnish society. The Soviet Union stuck to the terms of the treaty with Finland, and during the Cold War Finland developed as a remarkably prosperous and successful Western democracy. On this basis, after the Cold War ended, Finland was able to join the European Union in 1995 and then NATO in 2023.
While “Finlandization” was considered a pejorative suggestive of accommodation, if not appeasement among Western geopoliticians during the Cold War, it turned out to be a diplomatic triumph. Finland has long had one of the world’s highest per capita GDPs, scores 100% on Freedom House’s Democracy Index (the United States scores 83), and Finns have long ranked as the world’s happiest people. The Austrian State Treaty of 1955, which guaranteed Austrian neutrality, by which Soviet and NATO troops withdrew from the country, also ensured that Austria developed as a successful and prosperous Western democracy.
Kyiv might learn from the Finnish example that surrendering some territory, though deeply painful, is still worth it if the greater part of the country thereby secures its independence and capacity for economic and political development. Hopefully, the strength of Ukrainian nationalism and the tough and united resistance of Ukrainians to Russia’s invasion have also persuaded Putin, as Stalin was persuaded by Finnish resistance, that his goal of turning the whole of Ukraine into a Russian client state is impossible.
This is already a great victory for Ukraine, not just in terms of Russia’s initial goals but the history of the past 300 years during which Russia has dominated Ukraine.
The government of Ukraine currently remains steadfast in its maximalist aims of recovering all of its internationally recognized territory, including Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Military reality, however, suggests that this goal is extremely unlikely to be achieved and that an agreement freezing the existing battle lines may well be the best that Kyiv can hope for, at least for the present.
On the other hand, if the war continues, Russia’s massive advantages in manpower, industry, and weapons production could lead to far more significant Ukrainian losses — just as Finland would likely have suffered complete disaster if it had continued to fight after March 1940 or September 1944.
Washington can do its part by not encouraging unrealistic war goals and thereby possibly exposing Ukraine to future disaster.
Ukraine has already won in key respects. Vladimir Putin has no hope of subjugating the whole of Ukraine as a vassal state in the foreseeable future. Kyiv is moving closer to the West and could be integrated into the European Union (EU) in the future. Moreover, Moscow’s actions have actually reinforced Ukrainian nationalism.
As with Finland, this national unity presents the best hope for Ukrainian independence.
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On Russia's Endless War—and Ours
Believing peace is possible becomes increasingly hard when your elected leaders and the propaganda all around you seem so committed to conflict and violence.
Nov 02, 2023
Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel’s only possible decision was whether or not to launch a war against Gaza. In the country that waged a disastrous 20-year “global war on terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks, it seems strange that there’s been so little discussion about what such a decision might mean in the long term. Going to war is just that — one decision among many possibilities, including taking steps to strengthen and democratize the states where such armed militias may otherwise flourish.
As a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, it’s become a focus of mine to show just what’s happened to us because our government, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks, continues to fight a “war on terror” (whatever that may mean) in some 85 countries. Yes, that’s right: 85 countries! We’ve armed foreign militaries, flown our drones in a devastating fashion, run prisons (often in places with far laxer human-rights standards than ours), trained foreign militaries, and sometimes fought directly alongside them.
Over the years, the 2,977 American lives taken by Osama bin Laden and his followers on September 11, 2001, have exploded into nearly one million lives lost globally thanks to our government’s decision to go to war. Framed by the sheer scale of death and destruction wrought by this country’s forever wars, our hasty retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, long seen as a shamefully botched mission unaccomplished, should instead have been viewed as a genuinely courageous act, even if it was just one of dozens of countries where the U.S. hemorrhaged lives and dollars galore.
Imagine the “footprint” our post-9/11 wars created. For one thing, we’ve spent more than $8 trillion dollars (and counting) in that fight, money that could have funded the creation of millions of jobs here at home, provided affordable preschool in all 50 states, and jump-started the transition to clean energy. And now, we’ll probably be sending more than $75 billion in aid, most of it military rather than humanitarian, to Ukraine and Israel in the coming months. Regardless of what you think Israel’s response should be, the fact remains that we could do a lot with that money here at home.
And worse yet, those funds devoted to war were largely wasted. Since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, terrorist groups have only proliferated in number and strength globally. A case in point, in fact, was that very Hamas campaign. Remember that Israel always has been a vital U.S. military and intelligence partner and those October 7th surprise attacks represented a staggering intelligence failure of both governments. And mind you, over the years Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his opposition to allowing a stronger Palestinian Authority to develop in Gaza.
America’s Terrorism Problem
Meanwhile, our government’s forever wars have helped stoke terror here at home. Republican politicians and conservative journalists have used a combination of angry language and racist rhetoric and policies to ratchet up anxiety about people of color. As America’s forever wars entered their second decade and then their third, the notion of brown and black people as threats to our national identity came to be baked into policies and laws and into the popular imagination.
Forced registration requirements for young Muslim men placed tens of thousands of them on the government’s radar screen, while sting operations were carried out in Muslim-American communities. Meanwhile, several generations of young Americans were sent to fight disastrous counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond, returning to a war-starved healthcare system that couldn’t deal effectively with their multiple traumas. All of that contributed to a beleaguered national culture in which the dangerous Other looked like a young Muslim man, at least to deranged white people, as evidenced by the recent fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy by his 71-year-old landlord.
Through these trends and others, our war-on-terror culture also set in place government infrastructure aimed at the surveillance of our citizenry and expanded our sense of what our government can possibly do to us. That became all too clear when Department of Homeland Security officials began abducting peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020, and Trump administration officials tried to intimidate Black Lives Matter activists. Who knows where the fear institutionalized after the 9/11 attacks may be directed, depending on who becomes our next terrorizer-in-chief?
An Uncomfortable Parallel
Donald Trump has already given us a sense of some of his targets, were he to be re-elected in 2024, most recently in his threats against federal prosecutors and his urge to execute his own former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley. Of course, there was nothing new in that. In 2017, as president, he infamously labeled the news media an “enemy of the people” — a term used by one of the deadliest dictators in modern history, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, to single out millions of citizens for extrajudicial execution based on perceived disloyalty.
And by the way, my mentioning that Russian dictator was anything but unintentional. As someone who has, for more than 20 years, traveled to Russia, studied its history, and worked on human-rights issues there, while watching Russian President Vladimir Putin consolidate power, I have a sense of how historical trauma wrought by terror in your own homeland can impact the way you think, what you’re willing to tolerate, and what you might choose not to see.
During World War II (or to Russians, “The Great Patriotic War”), the collection of nation-states then known as the Soviet Union lost tens of millions of citizens or more than 10% of its population fighting off Adolf Hitler’s invading army. Most of the Russians I’ve gotten to know or interviewed in my years there had at least one parent, grandparent, or sibling whose life was either lost in or forever altered by that war. So I’ve been less than surprised by the way Russian President Vladimir Putin has all too successfully tapped into that shared trauma to reincarnate the figure of Stalin.
More than a decade ago, I first noticed banners featuring his face in the May 9th “Victory Day” celebratory parades in Moscow and St. Petersburg that marked the defeat of the Germans in World War II. Such images were often featured alongside aging war veterans who recounted their memories of ancient battles, as people wept. (Note that veterans of Russia’s more recent counterinsurgency wars in Chechnya, to the south, featured far less prominently, perhaps because the country never did quite “win” that war and still continues to face threats of armed violence there.)
Elevating Stalin has become a vital part of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to justify his unprovoked war on Ukraine. In fact, following his decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin ordered all school textbooks revised to downplay the violence Stalin wrought, while elevating him as a leader who — future shades of Putin and Russia — “clearly defended the Soviet Union’s foreign policy interests.”
In reality, when it came to Ukraine, Stalin’s decision in the 1930s, amid a devastating man-made famine, to collectivize farming and forcibly relocate staggering numbers of Ukrainians resulted in millions starving to death, followed by the devastation of the Nazi invasion. So, consider it an irony indeed that Putin continues to use the term “Nazi” to describe the present Ukrainian government and its forces, even though a Jewish president leads them. In a recent Victory Day speech, he insisted that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are “fighting for the same thing their fathers and grandfathers did.”
Creating Dangers Within
Long before invading Ukraine, Putin and his state-supported media normalized violence against Russians deemed foreign or different — especially those seen as being influenced by the West — to deflect attention from the country’s real problems, including burgeoning inequality and a remarkably low life expectancy. A series of laws targeting “gay propaganda” formalized long-standing homophobia, while imposing hefty sanctions on media outlets, nonprofit agencies, and schools that depicted anything remotely considered gay or transgender in nature.
At the same time, state-sponsored white supremacist groups encouraged hatred towards migrants from majority-Muslim regions of Russia and nearby Central Asian countries. The police increasingly conducted raids on majority-Muslim neighborhoods and mosques in Russian cities and acts of violence against such groups were generally overlooked by the authorities. In addition, they stepped up raids on migrant communities, expressly to forcibly enlist men to fight in Ukraine. At the same time, the Kremlin and its political allies launched assassination campaigns against journalists and activists who sought to document human rights abuses, especially by the country’s military.
With the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s efforts to suppress dissent only intensified. The country’s last independent media outlets were forced to close, due to laws forbidding public dissemination of “deliberate false information” about the country’s armed forces. Antiwar demonstrations and opinion have been similarly suppressed. Recently, the leader of a prominent human rights organization documenting Stalin’s purges and more recent atrocities in Ukraine was detained on charges of supposedly “rehabilitating Naziism,” which could result in up to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Russia as a Warning
Compared to our still reasonably healthy civil society, such actions may appear beyond the pale, but they still strike me as a stark warning about the dangers of, among other things, putting a country’s military on a pedestal in the wake of national trauma. That’s certainly something we in the United States have also tended to do, as ever more issues divide us. Admittedly, most Americans have by now largely forgotten that we are, in some sense, still at war.
That’s obviously harder to do in Russia, though better-off Russians in relatively wealthy cities have similarly been largely shielded from the direct effects of the war in Ukraine that has already taken a staggering human toll, at least tens of thousands of Russian deaths. The reason? Because the bulk of those casualties have been sustained by poor, rural communities. Yet even ordinary citizens are increasingly finding their lives altered by that devastating war and the repressive environment that now surrounds it. I shuddered recently upon learning of a Russian father who was sentenced to prison after his teenage daughter drew a picture in school expressing opposition to the war.
Here in America, I’m ashamed to say that I barely blink anymore when I hear about people facing threats or even actual attacks because of their racial or ethnic identity, or their political views. For me, this started in 2011 when we launched the Costs of War Project and I began to bone up on America’s foreign wars. Images of bloodied Iraqi children being carried away from sites U.S. planes had bombed and of our troops returning from our spreading war zones with dazed looks and missing limbs were just the beginning. My own desensitization continued during the Trump era when police attacks on unarmed Black men like George Floyd became more common, those January 6th rioters erected a noose in front of the capitol intended for Vice President Mike Pence, and I found myself repeatedly answering the incredulous questions of my young children about such incidents and my work.
All too sadly, the transition from a vibrant civil society to some version of authoritarianism tends to be gradual. (Think, for instance, about the possibility of Trump 2025 and how slowly it might creep up on us.)
I remember one weeknight in 2008 sitting at a table in a café in the Russian city of St. Petersburg. I was working on my (sadly all too topical) doctoral dissertation involving Vladimir Putin’s suppression of political activism. All of a sudden, I heard a rumbling sound on the main thoroughfare outside. When I looked out the window, a line of tanks had appeared on the main street. This was no national holiday with a military parade, but the government had evidently decided to run a training exercise through the city to place part of its shiny arsenal on display. Many of those around me didn’t even give the tanks a passing glance, nor admittedly was I that surprised.
Still, that random and ominous display of military might would not have been possible at the start of Putin’s reign. Russian streets were then still a chaotic, colorful mix of market stalls, migrants speaking a cacophony of different languages, and vendors selling newspapers and magazines on almost any topic imaginable. By 2008, however, those streets had been cleared and many vendors were afraid to set up shop lest their activities be deemed offensive.
I told a Russian friend of mine whose academic research focused specifically on casualties within the armed forces during the Chechen wars about those tanks. She had already begun to face harassment and anonymous threats of violence from those who found her work “insulting to the armed forces of Russia.”
“Here in Russia,” she warned me, “we are like slowly boiling frogs.”
Just as “Nazi” has come to represent anything that offends the personal wishes of Russian elites or gets in the way of their political and imperial desires, so has “terrorism” come to stand in for so much here in America. Despite the vast differences between us and our political foe, leaders on both sides focus on funding armed conflicts even as deficits wrought by prolonged war have deprived and angered ordinary citizens.
Russia is a warning of what we might someday face as a nation if we become inured to violence at home and abroad. It’s not just Israel’s response that’s at issue now, though there’s ample evidence to suggest that a brutal counterinsurgency war in Gaza will only weaken an already divided, anti-democratic government. The U.S. decision to continue to fund and fight our war on terror, not to speak of wars and cold wars of various kinds globally, will determine the environment in which we and our children live going forward. All too sadly, war, when we are the ones fighting it, has been largely missing in action in our own media sphere and that, believe me, is anything but healthy.
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The Doomsday Clock
Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change, and the Prospects for Survival
Jun 13, 2016
In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin's statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and "unchecked climate change." The call condemned world leaders, who "have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe," endangering "every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty -- ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization."
Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.
As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of "unchecked climate change." Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, "broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat," an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier "holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it's on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean."
Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would "act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe." And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.
When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is "legally binding." That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.
In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: "Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets." And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.
"Because of the United States." More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.
The conclusions are underscored in another Times piece on the Paris agreement. At the end of a long story lauding the achievement, the article notes that the system created at the conference "depends heavily on the views of the future world leaders who will carry out those policies. In the United States, every Republican candidate running for president in 2016 has publicly questioned or denied the science of climate change, and has voiced opposition to Mr. Obama's climate change policies. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who has led the charge against Mr. Obama's climate change agenda, said, 'Before his international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject.'"
"The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation."
Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called "moderate Republicans." Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a "radical insurgency" that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With the rightward drift, the Republican Party's dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that "they" are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.
In recent years, the Republican establishment had managed to suppress the voices of the base that it has mobilized. But no longer. By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control.
Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time -- Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson -- adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all.
The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions. As the press reported, this was "a provocative message to more than 100 [world] leaders that the American president does not have the full support of his government on climate policy" -- a bit of an understatement. Meanwhile Lamar Smith, Republican head of the House's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, carried forward his jihad against government scientists who dare to report the facts.
The message is clear. American citizens face an enormous responsibility right at home.
A companion story in the New York Times reports that "two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions." And by a five-to-three margin, Americans regard the climate as more important than the economy. But it doesn't matter. Public opinion is dismissed. That fact, once again, sends a strong message to Americans. It is their task to cure the dysfunctional political system, in which popular opinion is a marginal factor. The disparity between public opinion and policy, in this case, has significant implications for the fate of the world.
We should, of course, have no illusions about a past "golden age." Nevertheless, the developments just reviewed constitute significant changes. The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world's population in the past generation. And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.
The Black Swan We Can Never See
Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.
The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.
We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. "In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin," Goodman writes, "the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon's risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets."
We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.
Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that "the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm."
This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.
Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, "a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order." A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha "retransmitted an exercise... launch order as an actual real-world launch order." In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. "But you get the drift here," Blair adds. "It just wasn't that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur."
Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.
As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: "Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive."
These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems.The Russian ones aredoubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.
"A War Is No Longer Unthinkable"
Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.
With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence." The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they "cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict." It also urges a "national persona" of irrationality and vindictiveness to intimidate the world.
Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to "strategic primacy" -- that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama's "new triad" (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its "no first use" policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.
The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO -- quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia's borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia's geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.
Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia's borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy -- immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia's militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.
One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a "fateful geographical paradox": that NATO "exists to manage the risks created by its existence."
The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.
"It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter."
In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be "ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft," Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.
Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that "U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War." Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and "both believe a war is no longer unthinkable."
Prospects for Survival
If that is so, both sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.
But that is today's world. And not just today's -- that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts -- apparently not even expressed thoughts -- to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.
"Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course."
That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.
Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands -- the opportunities as well.
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