wreck the United States beyond recovery for decades.
By Fred Reed
Pleasurable excitement ripples through
the usual boredom of Washington, and the resident curiosities enjoy
exquisite frissons,
over the possibility of nuclear war over the Ukraine. Some official
of the EU, or maybe it was the mediocrity in the White House with
the truculence problem, but anyway one of the geniuses ruling the
planet’s fate has said that if Russia used nukes, the Russian army
would be destroyed, grrr,
bowwow, woof. Exactly how it
would be destroyed, the sayer didn’t say. Anyway, the threats and
counterthreats swirl around the idea that a nuke war between Russia
and the West might occur. Maybe, with tactical nukes in the Ukraine,
about which nobody gives a rat’s nether region. The world is full of
damned fools.
But:-
The general staffs of both Russia and China are, whatever else you may think of them, sane. They know of America’s massive nuclear forces. They are not going to launch an atomic war. Sane behavior cannot be relied on with Washington’s second-rate lawyers, but the generals in the Pentagon are not crazy. They like hobbyist wars and big budgets, but if Biden ordered a nuclear strike, they would be likely to suddenly remember that Congress has to declare war and, seeing that their radar screens were empty of incoming missiles, and say, “Mr. President, we are not authorized to do that.” And recommend a committee.
What would such a war be like? Let’s guess.
America is fragile. We don’t notice because it works smoothly and because when a local catastrophe occurs—earthquake, hurricane, tornado—the rest of the country steps in to remedy things. The country can handle normal and regional catastrophes. But nuclear war is neither normal nor regional. Very few warheads would serve to wreck the United States beyond recovery for decades. This should be clear to anyone who actually thinks about it.
Defense is impossible. Missile defenses are meaningless except as money funnels to the arms industry. This is not the place to go into decoys, hypersonics, Poseidon, maneuvering glide vehicles, bastion stationing, MIRV, just plain boring old cruise missiles, and so on. Coastal cities are particularly easy targets, being vulnerable to submarine-launched sea-skimming missiles. Washington, New York, Boston, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle for starters, all gone.
A modern country is a system of systems of systems, interdependent and interconnected—water, electricity, manufacturing, energy, telecommunications, transportation, pipelines, and complex supply chains. These are interconnected, interdependent, and rely on large numbers of trained people showing up for work. Modern warheads are not the popgun squibs of Hiroshima. Talking of repair any time soon after the nuclear bombing of a conurbation is foolish because the city would have many hundreds of thousand of dead, housing destroyed, massive fires, horrendously burned people with no hope of medical care, and, in general, populations too focused on staying alive to worry about abstractions like supply chains.
The elimination of transportation might cause more death than the bombs. Cities, suburbs, and towns cannot feed themselves. They rely on a constant, heavy influx of food grown in remote regions. This food is shipped by rail or truck to distribution centers, as for example Chicago, whence it is transshipped to cities like New York. Heavy megatonnage on Chicago would disrupt rail lines and trucking firms. Trains and trucks need gasoline and diesel which come from somewhere, presumably in pipelines. These, broken by the blast, burning furiously, would take time to repair. Time is what cities would not have.
What would happen in, say, New York City even if, improbably, it were not bombed? Here we will ignore the likelihood of sheer, boiling panic and resultant chaos on learning that much of the country had been flattened. In the first few days there would be panic buying with shelves at supermarkets being emptied. Hunger would soon become serious. By day four, people would be hunting each other with knives to get their food. By the end of the second week, people would be eating each other. Literally. This happens in famines.
Most things in America rely on electricity. This comes from generating plants which burn stuff, usually natural gas or coal. These arrive on trains, which would not be running, or in trucks, not likely to be running. They depend on oil fields, refineries, and pipelines unlikely to function. All of the foregoing depend on employees continuing to go to work instead of trying to save their families. So—no electricity in New York, which goes dark.
This means no telephones, no internet, no lighting, and no elevators. How would this work out in a city of high rises? Most people would be nearly incommunicado in a lightless city. Huge traffic jams would form as people with cars tried to leave—to go where?—as long as gasoline in the tank lasted.
Where does water come from in New York? I don’t know, but it doesn’t flow spontaneously to the thirtieth floor. It needs to be pumped, which involves electricity, from wherever it comes from to wherever it has to go. No electricity, no pump. No pump, no water. And no flushing of toilets. River water could be drunk, of course. Think of the crowds.
In all likelihood, civil society would collapse by the end of the fourth day. The more virile ethnics would surge from the ghettos with guns and clubs to feed. Police would have disappeared or be either looking after their families or themselves looting. Civilization is a thin veneer. The streets and subways are not safe even without a nuclear war. The majority would be unarmed and unable to defend themselves. People who had never touched a gun would suddenly understand the appeal. If you think this would not happen, give my best to Tinker Belle.
Thus it would not be necessary to bomb a city to destroy it, only to cut it off from transport hubs for a couple of weeks. An attacker would of course destroy many cities in addition to necessary infrastructure. Those who plan nuclear wars may be psychopaths, or just insular geeks fiddling with bloodless abstractions, but they are not fools. They have carefully calculated how to most seriously damage a target country. In no more than a couple of months, perhaps two hundred million people would starve to death. Do you think this fantastic? Tell me why it is fantastic.
Parenthetically, in my days of walking the E-ring in the Pentagon, I read manuals on how to keep soldiers fighting after they had received lethal doses of radiation. They don’t die immediately and, depending on dosage, might be administered stimulants to keep them on their feet, or so the manuals said. These manuals also discussed whether these walking dead should be told that they were about to die. The authors used the evocative phrase “terrain alteration” to describe landscapes with all the trees lying on their sides, and we have all heard of “overkill.” After a nuclear war, millions would slowly die of radiation—read up on Nagasaki and Hiroshima—and burned corpses would rot in the streets, too numerous for burial by survivors with other things on their minds.
How would the next season’s crops be planted? Answer: they wouldn’t be. Where would fertilizer come from? Parts for tractors, trucks, harvesters? Making these requires functioning factories which require electricity, raw materials, and workers. If the attacker chose to hit agricultural lands with radiation-dirty cobalt bombs, these regions would be lethal for years. Nuclear planners think about these things.
Among “defense intellectuals,” there is, or was when I covered such things, insane talk of how America could “absorb” a Russian first strike and have enough missiles in reserve to destroy Russia. These people should be locked in sealed boxes and kept in abandoned coal mines.
Note also that Biden, Blinken, and Bolton, bibbety bobbety boo, and their families, live in DC, the priority target. While the rats are aboard the ship, they won’t sink it. If they are discovered boarding a Greyhound out of Washington at three a.m., dressed as washerwomen, it will be time to worry. [ Fred really has read The Wind in the Willows - Editor ]
Buy Fred’s Books! Solidly Built. You can squash bugs with them.
******************************************
FRED REED
describes himself as [previously] a
“Washington police reporter, former Washington editor for Harper’s
and staff writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, Marine combat vet
from Viet Nam, and former long-haul hitchhiker, part-time sociopath,
who once lived in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from
the Yankee Capital.”
His essays “on the collapse of America”
Mr. Reed calls “wildly funny, sometimes wacky, always provocative.”
“Fred is the Hunter Thompson of the
right,”
seconds
Thomas E. Ricks in Foreign Policy magazine. His commentary is
“well-written, pungent political incorrectness mixed with smart
military commentary and libertarian impulses, topped off with a
splash of Third World sunshine and tequila.”
Fred,
NYC water comes mostly from a series of reservoirs in upstate New York. The water flows to NYC mostly from gravity however of course electricity is needed for pumping.
As you said it would be a disaster.
You did not mention the effects of a US counterstrike against Russia or China who would face the same disaster.
On Long Island we use ground water that needs to be pumped out.
Won’t the serfs get a vote on Doomsday as part of muh democracy?
Ohh, it isn’t on the ballot. (sad trombone)
Hi Fred.
While I think the probability of the Generals’ and their families’ own deaths is a powerful deterrent (unlike sending off some stupid hayseed to die, good riddance, they think), the path to nuclear war is not only via intentional executive/legislative decision. There are more than one step between non-nuclear and strategic nuclear conflicts, and these steps can happen gradually. Witness the alleged intention by Kyiv to use dirty bombs.
Let’s say Zelenskyy goes ahead. With the fog of war and the deliberate twisting of facts for propaganda reasons, how hard would it be for that to be turned into a purported false-flag attack by Moscow? Piece of cake. CIA does it all the effing time, so they presume everything is a false-flag op until proven otherwise (and not even then, if it suits the narrative, see Washington’s destruction of NS1&2).
So there has to be some retaliation, right? Otherwise precedents and all that.
Ok, so non-nuclear attack by NATO on Russian materiel, troops or even soil.
Moscow cannot hope to beat NATO in a symmetrical war. Russia would prefer not to be dismembered and handed out in pieces to Epstein’s client list.
So Moscow goes tactical nuke on NATO base/s that launched the attack.
The escalation from that point needs to inference.
An effective cyber attack on the grid would accomplish the same chaos. We are a fragile society today. In past wars tens of millions were killed and the world recovered quickly and the balance of power changed. Let’s try hundreds of millions this time. What could go wrong? God’s on our side.
All will happen soon after the church is raptured……….
Surprise! Facebook won’t allow me to link your post!
Voting for any Democrat or RINO is voting for what this essay describes.
Fred, Both you and I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a 14 year old boy with 6 younger siblings we all knew that the sun we were so use to may not rise, in an orbital arc, a mushroom cloud a very real maybe.
To let Putin threaten the world with strategic nuclear weapons, then say, ‘welp, maybe only use tac-nuke’s on Ukraine’, is a logical absurdity.
Still I appreciated your view however skewed it seems
You are a f*cking genius. So am I, but not in your league. Live long and prosper.
Well, if you want to talk about nukes, address your concerns to Russia using “tactical nukes” in Ukraine. Until the US built up the military under RR, it was policy that were the Warsaw Pact to attack, NATO & and the US would use “tactical nukes” again Russia & company. The hope was that it wouldn’t start WWIII.
If Putin does the same thing in 2022 that the US threated to do in 1985, would the US start WWIII?
I don’t know but the question should be addressed.
youre, John Gilmer
Just a note: lady-cops are more likely to resort to guns and these girly-men have overseen the great feminization of the US Military As they poison their troops with a jab that they must know is toxic, maybe the generals used to be rational
Yes, “brzo,” all hyperlinks originating in ilanaMercer.com, including BarelyABlog.com, are banned by Facef-ck. Readers can always try to petition these scum bags.
You can use bit.ly to post to FB, though you get some warnings.
Hey Fred-
Politicians need a strong dose of reality…at least those pondering the use of nukes. Your summary is likely the scenario we’d see. I read articles by some survivors of the Balkan war. They were generally what you have written here. A wealthy couple barricaded in their home meant nothing in those apocalyptic times. An extended family banded together for mutual security often survived. The couple in their barricaded home did not last a week. As Biden continues to arm the various departments in the bureaucracy, he likely believes this “augmentation of force” has meaning. What a laugh, because placing a firearm in the hands of an accountant will only mean they are more of a threat to themselves and their peers than to Biden’s foes. From what I remember from the Balkans, arms/ammunition, food, hard currency (silver and gold), and alcohol were of the most value in the now-barter economy.
Too bad the mainstream news liars do not have scribes like you as well as a realistic view of the times rather than their foolish dreams of molding America through their socialist throne.