How is it possible to write this article without mentioning MAD? The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
Given how many close calls we had when their were only 2 relatively well-balanced superpowers and how the nuclear balance of power is becoming more unstable these days, I think the chance of nuclear war is a lot higher than most people think it is.
IMO, the chance of a nuclear war in any given year is about 1-2%. That's not very much for any particular year, but over a few decades...
Yes but while horrible India and Pakistan lobbing nukes at each other would be on a different order of magnitude to the US and Russia launching a global thermonuclear war.
The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
The UK had ~200 warheads about a quarter of which are deployed at anyone time, two US ballistic missile subs fields more than that (they have 18) and then the missile silos, the cruise missiles, the gravity bombs and on and on it goes...
> The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
Once just one single nuclear bomb destroys something significant, all bets are almost surely off. So counting doesn't help, the whole domino-effect constellation is simply too dangerous. The only sustainable solution is to reduce the arsenals the orders of magnitude, if we want to increase the chances for the humanity to survive.
The right perspective is exactly the WW I: Austrian Empire just wanted its own teeny-weeny local war (just as an perspective, as late as four years ago, some Austrian historians still claimed: "Austria didn't start the WW I -- we just started the war with Serbia -- everything else was done by everybody else"). But the domino effect ensued. The result was the whole world erupting, so badly that even WW II was a kind of an effect of WW I, as the article also recognizes.
Obviously I'm in favour of reducing warhead counts.
That said I don't think your analogy holds with pre and post nuclear powers.
The escalation in WW1 was complex but from the british side we just expected it to be a short war, we'd nip over there achieve our objectives and be home for Christmas (that was actually said at the time iirc).
Escalation between states with large nuclear arsenals would likely follow a very different path.
I mean the UK is a minor nuclear power but if everyone went collectively insane we could wreck most of western Europe and the US, I mean we'd all be dead minutes later but when you have that kind of capability on the table and more crucially when the people you are firing on have that kind of capability then the "it'll all be over by Christmas" line takes on a much more macabre undertone to those giving the orders.
The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
The US and Russia are already in the midst of several proxy wars: Ukraine, Syria and Libya. In addition, Russia is directly destabilizing Europe by funding alt-right parties financially (AfD/DE, FrontNational/FR, FPÖ/Austria, Jobbik/HU, Lega Nord/IT) and by promoting their crap on Twitter and Facebook, as well as their "media outlets" that historically have spread alt-right propaganda (Sputnik, RT), but now have expanded to liberal/leftie propaganda (Inthenow, Ruptly, Redfish).
The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
Also, both China and Russia engage in cyber warfare - the Chinese right now mostly for economic espionage, the Russians at the moment for destabilizing democracy.
What worries me is the shit some Arab countries are trying to play with Israel (esp. Turkey!) and the skirmishes between India and Pakistan, as well as Pakistan's problems with terrorism. Both countries are highly volatile and hell I don't want to experience the Taliban getting hands on Pakistani nukes.
So, there are LOTS of possibilities for nuclear-armed powers to go to war, and some not even violent. The key is that no power ever actively uses nuclear weapons, but there's nothing that prevents them from using conventional ammo. There's enough of that alone to blow the planet to pieces.
> The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
There is a key difference between the Marshall Plan and China's modern African investment. The Marshall Plan was pretty emphatically a plan to help coerce Western Europe into supporting what effectively became the West, and combined vigorous restoration efforts with criterion for supporting certain kinds of economic reforms. In particular, it was very much meant to build up Europe not so that it served as a market for American goods but rather so that Europe could be useful junior partners in a coalition. China's current investment hews much closer to neocolonialism: it's building African infrastructure, but managed by Chinese, owned by Chinese, and even built by Chinese imported for the labor. It is not engendering local goodwill for China, and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
> and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
China doesn't need African foot soldiers to burn away in the trenches, there are enough Chinese people to serve as cannon fodder. Sounds harsh but that's the ultimate advantage of China compared to any other military except maybe India's.
What the Chinese are doing actually is to ensure they control the world's reserves of uranium and rare-earth metals. Or, if they don't control it or the governments by puppet/bought governments directly, then by extortion a la "you give the West their uranium, we grind your economy to a halt". Or, by controlling the shipping ports in the sea countries of Africa so that resources from the landlocked countries cannot be exported, or at least the transport cost rises.
The latter strategy they are also pursuing in central Europe - they bought, for example, the port of Piraeus via Cosco.
Whoever crosses their path can be ground to pieces if the Chinese wish so. The West is too f...ing dependent on China and that's gonna bite us in our behinds.
American corporate control of Cuba sure did it well during the Cold War. Oh wait, the Cuban government nationalized everything the Americans owned.
Focusing on the levers of control given by corporate control of strategic foreign sectors ignores the ability of host countries to unilaterally seize control of those assets at their own whim. China's hold over Africa is a very tenuous grasp at best.
The Cuban missile crisis is an example of MAD working as intended. If it weren't for the threat of nuclear war the Cuban missile crisis would have turned into the "Russian tanks in Paris and Marines in Havana crisis"
We came really close to war between two nuclear powers at the Cuban blockade[0]. A Russian submarine didn't torpedo a US ship only because 1 of 3 officers on the sub voted against it.
Rising nationalism and games of "chicken" don't mix well.
There wasn’t MAD during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US had the ability to completely destroy the USSR but the reverse was not true, which is why they wanted to put missiles in Cuba in the first place.
If a war had occurred, the US would have suffered enormously, but it would have come out of the conflict largely intact. Think the “get our hair mussed” bit from Dr. Strangelove.
The Crisis just shows that war can be avoided even when one side has a huge advantage, if neither side really wants it.
Actually, the US only thought that there wasn't MAD. As mentioned in the documentary "The Fog of War", only decades later did the US discover that there were already nuclear missiles with warheads in Cuba when they began the blockade. And Castro was willing to use them!
That made the situation even more dangerous than they realized at the time. The US would not have come out intact. It's very lucky for everyone that the Soviets decided not to escalate the situation.
Of course, I suppose MAD isn't MAD if there isn't also mutual knowledge of mutually assured destruction. It's something even worse when both sides think they have the advantage.
No it did not. Up until eighties, accuracy of ICBMs was so bad, that they were completely useless against even a brigade sized formation in an open field. There is even a theory that Khrushchev intentionally nudged USA into believing into "missile gap," as a part of diversion.
TBMs were another story, but there USSR had a sizeable lead in them.
ICBMs wouldn't get used against military forces in the field. Shorter range missiles and other tactical weapons existed for that. ICBMs were for destroying military bases, factories, and cities. Their accuracy in the early 1960s sucked, but it was good enough for that job.
That's the very point — while US were to be wasting megatons on Soviet cities without a plan B, Soviet paratroopers would be already landing on their lawn, and their main force moving down whatever left of enemy land force with a rain of short range tactical nukes.
The Soviets had no ability to land any significant force in the US. They would have poured forces into Western Europe, but both sides had so many tactical nukes there that the whole place would have ended up flattened.
Right, so the outcome would have been: USSR wrecked by US strategic forces, Europe wrecked by medium-range forces on both sides, US hurt by Soviet strategic forces but largely intact. I didn’t mention Europe but that’s otherwise what I said.
MAD is not necessarily a silver bullet preventative here. If two nuclear-armed states are fighting, for either of them to bring out the nukes would be a huge, difficult decision. It's entirely possible to imagine them settling into an unspoken "gentleman's agreement" to stick to conventional weapons only, as long as the conflict stays within certain parameters (i.e. the war doesn't pose an existential threat to either).
India and Pakistan fought a war in 1999, despite both having sizable nuclear arsenals (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). The risk of escalation kept the scale of the fighting limited, but it didn't prevent the war altogether.
The article is specifically talking about another "Great War", not limited conventional conflicts. All out, generation crippling war is a far cry from anything we've seen large industrialized countries engage in since World War II. I can't see how anything like another "Great War" could be possible without going nuclear.
Nobody brought out chemical weapons in World War II, though both sides had them. (Granted, chemical weapon defenses were practical in WWII, whereas nuclear weapon defenses are not today. Still, even in great wars, there have been weapons that were not used.)
That's a very good point. They weren't widely used. But Japan did use both chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese. We don't really know why Hitler didn't use them, but it's likely that his experience in WWI gave him a unique hatred of chemical warfare.
Regardless by the time Germany accepted that they were facing an existential threat, they couldn't have used Chemical weapons to completely decimate their enemy the way a losing country could with ICBMS (both land based and on submarines).
They had no way to reach America, or even Britain at the end of the war (with enough munitions), so chemical attacks would have been pointless by that time. If Hitler could have pressed a button completely destroy America, Britain, and Russia when he was in his bunker in Berlin, I'm willing to bet he would have.
All right, not exactly, but close. Close enough that I think the point still stands - they had these weapons, but they were mostly not used, because of the fear of retaliation with the same weapon, even in the heat of a great war.
The Germans couldn't match the Allied expertise with biological weapons, and were warned that using chemical weapons would be responded to with far more effective biological weapons. I don't see anything "greater than nuclear" that would complete the analogy here.
Thankfully that stayed a limited war with combat in one region and relatively modest forces and casualties on both sides. It's when a country feels that its existence is threatened, as in WWI, that the use of nuclear weapons becomes very likely.
the fear of MAD also implies that a big power spends a lot of effort to avoid running into a direct military confrontation against another great power; direct confrontations run the risk of escalating into all out war. That's why you have so many proxy conflicts - these ugly little conflicts add some layers of indirection so to speak.
Consider what happens when effective ballistic missile defense is developed. This still leaves the threat of tactical nuclear weapons (artillery) and short range missiles from submarines. It will also spur the development of improved ballistic missile delivery systems. However, if technology brings MAD into question and causes a shift in thinking to acceptable risk/losses, we may find ourselves in a destructive situation very reminiscent of 100 years ago.
I don't really see MAD as being a given, especially depending on if China or the US develops rapid technological advancements over the next few decades. I think it's a really unlikely idea to assume the nuke will be the great deterrent or equalizer for the rest of this century. China could easily conquer the planet if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
>if they pull sufficiently ahead in China, which is a fair possibility, looking at the current state of the US and Europe
Be careful with extrapolation. People said the same thing about the USSR, Japan, and the EU.
Sure the US won't be as dominant as they are now forever, but extrapolating China's growth from a very poor developing country to their current level and assuming that means that they might make some kind of leap that allows them to take over the world is going too far.
I don't think it's going far enough. There are several hundreds variables completely separating China and the USSR and Japan from a blanket comparison.
I would like to hope that they hit the breaks in the same way that Japan did, and there's certainly plenty of evidence that it's possible. However, if their model remains viable and they continue growing at the same rate, they'll certainly eclipse us in political and economic influence in 10-20 years at most - potentially technologically as well. I'm not sure that's even a disputable claim - it should be self evident. The question is if we'll suddenly outperform or if they'll hit a stumbling block, which remains to be seen.
That's what I mean by the problem with extrapolation. There is absolutely no reason to think that they will continue growing at the same rate. The likely scenario based on all the historical evidence we have is that they won't.
Their GDP growth rate has been declining since 2010, there's no reason to assume that they'll be able to stop it. The most likely scenario is that it flattens out to a more reasonable rate.
Also this is the state reported GDP, which no one believes is accurate. And this is without taking into account China's demographic problems and potential hidden debt issues.
And even if China's economy does overtake the US, it took decades and a World War for the US to eclipse the rest of the world politically and militarily after it's economy became the largest.
By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future. They have 1.5 billion people with a higher average IQ than the US with a strong educational culture, increasing economic opportunity with a lot of i's to dot in various industries, their per capita is still a fraction of that of a developed company, and there are another 1000 reasons to paint a fuller picture beyond my small sampling. In contrast, for example, Japan had less than half our population, didn't manage to steal all of our trade secrets, reached a high stage of development, and really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer.
I'm aware of what you're saying about the potential issues they're facing, but we really don't know how that will play out - it strikes me as western optimism.
That is true, but China is already setting the stage to assert itself as an imperial power.
I don't mean to come across as a sinophile - I don't want a hologram of Xi Jinping standing over me in 10 years, but, there is plenty of reason to worry and to not draw conclusions on whether or not they'll pull ahead or how quickly - that remains to be seen.
>By the same token, there's no reason to think they'll fall anywhere near or under 5% in the near future.
Why? It's fallen 6 points since 2010. The OECD long term forecast puts it at 5% in just 2 years, and predicts it will drop down to around 3% within 10 years. This is without any serious problems.
These numbers are also based on official GDP estimates, and there are studies that estimate that China's GDP is 30% lower than reported due to padding at the local and national level.
>They have 1.5 billion people
Their official population count is 1.386 billion, rounding up to 1.5 seems a bit much. And we don't even know if that is true. There are reports that they've overestimated their population by around 100 million people.
>with a higher average IQ than the US
We can't even remove all of the cultural biases to make accurate comparisons between native English speakers within the US. There's no way we are going to be able to accurately compare countries as different as the US and China. Not to mention sample differences, suppressed scores from the children of migrant workers etc...
>strong educational culture
And many parts of that educational culture have been criticized. Regardless this is a completely subjective metric that isn't worth comparing.
>really didn't have anything revolutionary to offer
Last one regarding, for example, US developing a massive competitive advantage with the internet right after their housing market crash.
I won't debate any further because clearly I'm going to get downvoted for doing anything other than linking a business insider article on why chinese local debt is going to collapse tomorrow in the HN echo chamber. If you want to believe it's inevitable China is going to plateau in rapidly, by all means.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but I linked to a lot more than articles about local debt. Perhaps you could refute the OECD long term forecast that predicts a plateau rather than setting up a straw man about business insider articles.
By the way, I'm not even saying that China won't overtake the US economy sometime this century, I'm saying that naive extrapolation based on current growth rates is a terrible way to predict the future.
