By Steven Yates
December 27, 2024
This is the worst of the three threats. Reader Discretion Advised…
[Author’s note I: the opinions expressed here are my own, and should not be attributed to the NewsWithViews.com editorial staff or any other NewsWithViews.com writers.]
[Author’s note II: due both to the approach of Christmas and family issues outside my control, this will be my final article of 2024. I am grateful to my subscribers, and any others who find their way onto this site and see benefit to what I am doing.]
Praying that all my readers will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Note to Readers….
As this piece developed, I realized I did not want to publish it, especially this close to Christmas. Parts of it were giving me nightmares. I’d promised four parts, however. Plus: one of my core values is telling the truth to the best of my ability. No one ever said that the truth would make us happy. All of which militates in favor of publishing this, so here we go.
Nuclear War? The Ultimate Existential Threat to Civilization.
Once, eons ago, there was a serious antiwar movement on the left. There were conspiratorial suspicions on the right that it was controlled by the communists. Be that as it may, that left is deader than a doornail. Present-day cultural leftists are more interested in pronouns, protecting the “right” to kill unborn children, and demonizing Trump (or his appointees).
The upper echelons of the present-day left answer to corporate leviathans. The fact that over a billion flowed into Kamala Harris’s coffers following her endorsement by “Joe Biden” testifies to this.
Since these upper echelons include “legacy” corporate media (CNN, MSNBC, PBS, CBS, etc., etc.), we can’t expect anything truthful about, e.g., the Russia-Ukraine War: from eight years of events leading up to the hot war, to who is presently winning.
Hint: Putin’s special military operation of February 22, 2022, was not “unprovoked”; nor is Ukraine “winning.”
Now, as I noted in Part 1, missiles have been fired — endorsed by the U.S./NATO axis. Putin has threatened repeatedly that such recklessness could lead to a nuclear exchange.
Author and investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen has written what may be the most important book ever on just what a nuclear war would look like: Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024).
If Turchin’s book has the most intellectual depth of anything published during the 2020s so far, Jacobsen’s is definitely the most frightening. It relies on dozens of interviews with scientists, engineers, past defense department officials, and others associated with nuclear weapons design and testing — a few of whom deeply regretted their involvement with something able to kill millions of people in less than a minute.
To say that nuclear war would be horrific doesn’t even begin to cover it!!
First, it’s common knowledge that today’s nukes make what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like cherry bombs by comparison!
What we have today would be civilization-ending! It would make the dangers discussed in preceding sections academic! It would trivialize any debate on whatever is happening with the climate! That’s all there is to it!
We have a moral obligation to make sure the scenario to follow never happens!
The Scenario.
Were a single one-megaton nuclear weapon to strike a major city, it would create a fireball over a mile across in a matter of a few seconds. Everything inside that mile would be incinerated by temperatures magnitudes hotter than the interior of the sun (think: 180 million degrees at ground zero!).
A blast wave of superheated compressed air would surge outward at hundreds of miles per hour and level every structure for another three miles in every direction. The intense heat would shatter concrete structures, melt windows and asphalt streets, and ignite vehicles’ gas tanks. Megafires would rage as tankers bearing combustible substances exploded like lesser bombs.
Everything within 100 square miles or so would be destroyed. This would happen in under thirty seconds. A few parking garages and other underground structures might survive outside a ten-mile radius, but with the power out and generators fried, anyone who chanced to be in them would be in total darkness and quickly suffocate when the air became unbreathable.
The fireball would rise to a height of around three miles. A weird wind reversal would take place on the ground, as smoke and soot and debris were pulled in and upward inside a column as the iconic mushroom cloud began to form and darken the sky.
According to Jacobsen, millions would die in minutes. Those within the reach of the initial fireball would be instantly vaporized without regard to race, ethnicity, sex, age, “gender” identity, class status, national origin, or ideological belief. Those outside the immediate blast radius would die horribly (but quickly), clothing ignited and their flesh burned off in seconds (this science fiction sequence is not improbable — discretion advised!!), or struck or impaled by objects (chunks of masonry, parts of vehicles, shards of glass) flying at supersonic speeds. Those five, ten, fifteen miles out would suffer less severe but still third degree burns, now more from unquenchable megafires than the initial blast, and die less quickly!
Anyone who chanced to look at the fireball, even from a distance of fifteen miles, would be blinded. Its extreme brightness would fry their retinas.
Now imagine this scenario multiplied fifty to a hundred times, however many nukes struck U.S. soil (the same things would be happening in Russia, North Korea, China, or any other country that had allowed itself to be drawn into the war).
Plumes of smoke and ash would rise miles into the atmosphere from every blast point, mushroom clouds thirty to forty miles across would consist of pulverized objects … and human remains reduced to carbon.
Those far enough out to avoid the intense heat and fires, and not be crushed by collapsed buildings or struck and killed by flying debris, would die of radiation poisoning acquired from fallout filled with radioisotopes released into the air. Depending on their degree of exposure, during a period of time ranging from a few hours to a few days their hair would begin falling out; they would experience extreme nausea, begin vomiting blood, have uncontrollable diarrhea; lesions would form on their skin like blisters and burst; severe internal pain would set in as their internal organs disintegrated. Jacobsen’s description is horrifying. Radiation poisoning is about as horrible a death as you can imagine.
There would be no medical help for anyone. Hospitals would be destroyed. Every communications channel would be down, so no 9-1-1. Those who survived this long, however badly burned or injured or suffering from radiation sickness, would be on their own.
There are underground facilities in Cheyenne, Wy., Omaha, Neb., and beneath the Pentagon. If Jacobsen could learn of them, you can guarantee that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un know about them. There are missile siloes in the hinterlands. “Flyover country” would not be spared from attack, nor from deadly fallout.
Survivors would envy the dead. Jacobsen quotes the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who clearly understood this as he and President John F. Kennedy agreed to the standdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1961. Even then, our arsenal had around 20,000 nukes; the Soviet Union had a smaller but no less deadly number, when a single nuke hitting a major city would kill ten million people.
The Aftermath. Nuclear Winter.
Those sufficiently far into the wilderness to avoid dying in the first 24 hours would still be at risk of contracting leukemia, a product either of exposure to low-grade radiation in airborne particles or from having ingested irradiated food. This could show up anywhere from a few months to five years, again depending on degree of exposure to remaining radioisotopes with half-lives of years (e.g., strontium-90, caesium-157).
Survivors would have lost everything including loved ones. Most would quickly be sick and malnourished. They would die like animals, many of them alone and terrified, and while Jacobsen doesn’t mention it (that I recall), I would not rule out cannibalism by those sufficiently demoralized, desperate for food, and ruthless.
(Another book to read, if you can handle it, as it is strongly suggestive of taking place during a nuclear winter, is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.)
Temperatures would have begun to drop. They would go down 27 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus would begin nuclear winter, as around 50 million tons of ash and soot blanketed the planet and blocked out sunlight, especially in the northern hemisphere. Many inland regions would experience unbroken subfreezing temperatures for a period long enough to entomb every body of fresh water under a thick sheet of ice. Coastal regions, too, would be solidly iced in.
While there is disagreement about how long nuclear winter would last, Jacobsen cites scientists suggesting that it could take as long as ten years for the atmosphere to begin to heal itself. That would be long enough to destroy remaining food-growing capacity except in a few southern hemispheric countries like New Zealand and Australia, or in South America (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay).
Is this why some of “our” corporate elites are quietly having underground bunkers built in the first of these?
In the aftermath of an all-out nuclear exchange, there would be large swaths of land with no edible food, no uncontaminated water, no heat. Corpses of animals and humans would be everywhere. Insects largely impervious to radiation and previously kept in check by natural enemies now extinct or almost extinct would breed out of control.
Yes, a nuclear war would be an ELE (extinction-level event).
Jacobsen contends, based on her scientific and technical sources, that in the long run at least 5 billion people would be dead. Those not killed by radiation or by the cold temperatures would starve to death.
Gradually, nuclear winter would dissipate. The sun would return, but remaining survivors would face a new problem. The many firestorms would have released mass amounts of nitrous oxides into the air. These would filter up to the stratosphere and reach the ozone layer, with which they would react chemically and destroy as much as 75 percent of its shielding power against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.
People would have to go underground.
Some bunkers are designed to sustain small groups potentially for years. Superelites able to ride out a nuclear winter in such facilities had better pray to whatever God they believe in that they weren’t discovered by those above ground, and that they still had ammo. Above-ground survivors, some still dying of leukemia or cancer, others rendered sterile due to chromosomal damage, a few able to give birth to children born with grotesque deformities, wouldn’t mess around. Anyone capable might figure he had nothing to lose by killing the elites where they stood and occupying their facilities.
Speaking of God….
I know Christians who believe God wouldn’t allow a scenario as awful as this to happen, that He would intervene directly to stop it.
Maybe He would. But—
Does anyone know this?
Matthew 4:7; Luke 4:12: “ … You shall not test the Lord your God.”
There are passages in Revelation (e.g., Rev. 8) strongly suggestive of a nuclear exchange.
Are many Evangelicals “testing the Lord [their] God,” thinking they will be raptured away before something like this could happen, so they aren’t as motivated as any non-Christian to speak up?
I wouldn’t count on God saving us from the consequences of our leaders’ stupidity, or our own if we are stupid enough not to do whatever it takes to prevent this!
The Day After.
Many of us probably remember the 1983 made-for-TV film The Day After. With brutal realism, this film depicted a fictional nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and its aftermath.
Over 100 million Americans watched that movie. (Attack scene here; again, viewer discretion advised!!)
I was one of them, then in my 20s, doing graduate work. That movie scared the crap out of me. I gathered that was the intent.
Reagan saw it. He’d been a nuclear weapons hawk. Not after seeing The Day After. He sought a meeting with then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: the Reykjavik Summit happened in 1986, in neutral Iceland. Whatever their differences — the summit was only partly successful — they agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Deterrence was already the philosophy behind nuclear proliferation. Supposedly, the fact that “we” have nukes and “they” have nukes prevents either of us from using them. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)!
Annie Jacobsen’s motivating question, was: what if deterrence for some reason fails?
I’ve often thought that a nuclear war would only happen if the global ruling elite class believed it was losing control with no possibility of recovery. One of their controlled minions in the political class would then be the first to push those buttons.
Consider: their covid power grab arguably failed. There are more of us aware of them and what they’ve done to the world than ever before.
A CBDC gambit (discussed in Part 3) would have no guarantee of succeeding if enough people rejected it and opted out, whatever the price.
It is important to realize that despite their immense resources, the globalists are not omnipotent. They don’t control everything.
They’re not God, however much they want to transcend their humanity!
They could not prevent, e.g., a rogue figure from an unstable Middle Eastern nation detonating a nuke in a major city, something that could easily escalate.
Computer Error. Should We Be Worried About AI?
Nor could the globalists prevent a computer error, such as the one back in 1983 that “saw” four nuclear missiles on their way to the Soviet Union from the U.S.
Soviet official Stanislav Petrov, doubtless paralyzed with fear, refused to believe what his instruments were telling him, and yes, it turned out to be a false alarm.
That was our closest call to date!
Now think of how the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is proliferating, how more and more decisions are handed to something that, as I noted in an earlier segment, isn’t human, isn’t sentient, isn’t intelligent, despite the hype. AI simulates certain aspects of human intelligence, and its recursive programming enables it to “learn” within those limits.
It won’t become Skynet (the computerized villain of the Terminator films) or come to control the Matrix.
AI may not be conscious, but its controllers and those who stand to profit handsomely from its use certainly are. What AI is most likely to do is put several hundred thousand more people out of work before the end of the 2020s, because AI demands neither pay nor time off nor any other inconvenience associated with human workers.
But never mind that here. How prone might an AI be to interpreting as real an erroneous signal that North Korea has launched, unannounced, a nuclear-tipped missile against the U.S.?
Or misreading some natural atmospheric phenomenon, which is what happened in the 1983 case?
We can’t know in advance, and that’s just the problem!
Summations.
Summing up Part 4 of this series:
Once, as I said, long ago, there was an antiwar movement on the left.
That movement is dead.
The task has fallen to “right wing” counter-elite podcasters like Tucker Carlson and a few counter-elite author/journalists like Paul Craig Roberts — and investigators like Annie Jacobsen — to outline how a nuclear war might start and how it would unfold, in all its graphic violence and intensity.
There are still people who will declare this to be communist propaganda. Others will say these figures are exaggerating and that I’ve fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
Do you really want to take that chance?
Read the book (Annie Jacobsen’s)!
Sadly, most people will never see this. My readership remains discouragingly small.
What will it take? We’ve reached the point in our society where the only way of getting people to put down their phones and pay attention is to hit them over the head with something they can’t ignore!
Neither Putin nor the Bidenistas will take the use of nukes off the table. At least they announce nuclear tests in advance to each other, to minimize the danger of a civilization-ending mistake. This realization transcends all their other differences.
North Korea conducts nuclear tests unannounced. Arguably, Kim Jong-Un is the least mentally stable foreign leader who has nukes.
Which may be why Annie Jacobsen chose North Korea as most likely to initiate the hypothetical attack that in her scenario ends civilization.
Joe Biden has had dementia for the past four years, leaving us wondering who has really been running the Executive Branch of the U.S. government! The Bidenistas are on their way out, after four years of demonizing Trump and trying to destroy him.
One hopes that whoever is still in charge isn’t insane enough to pull some kind of stunt at the last possible minute!
To save democracy, of course!
Whatever else, this is a deadlier threat than economic inequality, or indebtedness, which will exact their consequences over time. Nuclear war would exact its consequences in a matter of seconds and minutes. Most of us would be equally dead, and our debts resolved when we came face to face with the Almighty (whom I doubt would be in the best of moods!).
This is a deadlier threat than man-made climate change, even assuming that’s real and not another hoax perpetuated in the name of The Science. We’d go from global warming based on computer models and hockey sticks to a sustained multiyear winter in the real, physical world: a veritable ice age that would reduce the small fraction of the human race that survived to hunter-gatherer status, if even that.
Annie Jacobsen compares nuclear war to the event many geologists believe killed the dinosaurs: an asteroid a few miles across hitting the Earth somewhere on what is now the Yucatan peninsula, in Mexico.
An asteroid, she says, is not something we could do anything about.
This, we can do something about!
Let’s revive that antiwar sentiment … and ensure that it isn’t steeped in an ideology of the left or the right, but in our common humanity and the intrinsic value of every person on this Earth!
Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4,
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates’s Substack site is called Navigating the New Normal. You’ll find content there that isn’t available here. While more and more of the Internet is disappearing behind paywalls, NtNN is still free. Consider subscribing, as that is how the Substack algorithm knows I exist.
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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