After WWII, Europe was divided into East and West, with the West being the American sphere of influence and the East being the Russian sphere of influence. On account of the Soviet Union being communist, and supporting communist revolutions in all of Eastern Europe, tensions rose considerably. The outcome of all of this was the division of Europe into NATO and the Warsaw Pact. These were both big, complicated military cooperation agreements but at their core they were mutual defense treaties, which in the NATO’s case is specified in Article V: an attack on one shall be considered an attack on all.
The military situation was this: the Soviet Union was the most powerful country in Europe by far, and in tandem with the Eastern European powers had an overwhelming advantage in a land war. This is because the only power which could compete with it was the US, and there was no way to move the entire US Army to Europe in time to make a difference. This introduces a problem of how to make US air and naval power important, and it was determined that the cost of maintaining sufficient forward operating airbases would be ruinous. However, at the end of WWII the US is the only nuclear power; so the threat is that if the Soviets invade, the Americans will use nukes. Enter deterrence.
The Soviets develop the bomb in 1949. This is the same year NATO is formed, and the joke in diplomatic circles is that it had three objectives: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. So now there is a problem: while the Americans can use nukes to deter conventional invasion, the Russians can use nukes back to deter first strike, and to make a rich and varied story short and boring both teams spent the next 25 years building up huge stockpiles and various delivery systems to ensure that each side was guaranteed the ability to hit the other with nuclear weapons. This culminated in a doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): both sides were guaranteed the ability to destroy the other.
This is the part which is germane to your question: at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other. So strong was this commitment that they both refrained from taking significant defensive measures (mostly). They built automatedsolutions to ensure armageddon would still happen even if all of leadership were destroyed. For a long time, the way of the world was that if the US and Russia went to war it was the end of the world; and if any NATO country and Russia went to war it would mean the US and Russia went to war.
The Russia-Ukraine issue is just the sort of event that began WW2, and also that spreads into a broader regional war. But a regional war in Europe means US v. Russia, which is the most terrible fear in geopolitics.
Mind you, lots of things have happened to make the nightmare scenarios less likely; but also lots of things have happened to make medium-grade global catastrophes more likely.
While I lived through and can confirm the prevlance of the ‘extinguish all civilization’ MAD narrative, I wonder today how extinguished it actually would have been. (famine due to a year of reduced sunlight from dust floating around was part of the story)
My understanding is that at least the United States considered this problem, and made adjustments for it. The nuclear winter problem is much worse for ground detonations, which I already mentioned; air bursts have less impact, while simultaneously having a much more powerful EMP effect. As electronics became more important over time, the latter weighed much more heavily in American thinking on the subject.
There was also a general shift towards precision in American weapons development, which included nuclear weapons. This is the line of research that lead to tactical nuclear weapons, which have the benefits of fewer side effects like nuclear winter, or killing our own troops, etc.
As a consequence my impression is that the everything-except-microbes-dies scenario was never likely, even in the worst period. On the other hand, I now think governments and the attendant international system are quite a bit more fragile; so a general descent into bloody anarchy and the simultaneous loss of civilization’s high achievements requires much less damage to achieve.
Well, I lived through that time to. And there was much about not just civilization, but all of humanity, being extinguished (eg, the novels On the Beach and Level 7). However, though I recall as a teenager thinking that nuclear war was quite likely, and that it would be catastrophic, I did not think (like many did/do) that every last human would die in a nuclear war. That was too obviously contrary to physical intuition.
So, there was a lot of `extinguish all civilization’ narrative. But nevertheless, I don’t think it was the official line—that was about retaliating by nuking all the Russian military installations. And I think it’s quite believable that that really was the policy. If US bases and/or cities have been nuked, it makes sense to try to make sure the Russians don’t follow up with an occupying army. It doesn’t make sense to also try to kill vast numbers of Russian civilians (though many would die anyway, of course).
“at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other.”
Do you have a reference? Which time in particular are you thinking of? My recollections are that at least from the 1970s on, US doctrine was to hit only militarily significant targets. Of course, millions of civilians would die as a side effect, and perhaps civilization would end in some sense, but it was not an explicit policy.
You are correct, it was not an explicit policy; the death of civilization is a natural consequence of the nuclear winter which comes from hitting thousands of militarily significant targets. The big factor there is that every nuclear weapons site is a military target, and many of them are underground missile silos. These require ground impact to destroy, which increases the nuclear winter effect.
But speaking to the broader point about explicit policies: there is a strong belief that explicit policies are bad on critical issues, and that strategic ambiguity is preferable because it reduces the ability of the opponent to calculate whether unilateral action is worth the risk. A lot of this kind of reasoning is due to Thomas Schelling, and there’s a good review of his book Strategies of Conflict on LessWrong which covers the section which explains why so much overwhelming destructive power was desirable. The best description I have found recently of strategic ambiguity is in a piece for the National Institute of Public Policy by Keith B. Payne, which discusses it in the context of Taiwan. The author is notable here because he’s a fairly comprehensive critic of the Schelling-school of nuclear deterrence thought, and wrote a good book on the subject.
A radically oversimplified background:
After WWII, Europe was divided into East and West, with the West being the American sphere of influence and the East being the Russian sphere of influence. On account of the Soviet Union being communist, and supporting communist revolutions in all of Eastern Europe, tensions rose considerably. The outcome of all of this was the division of Europe into NATO and the Warsaw Pact. These were both big, complicated military cooperation agreements but at their core they were mutual defense treaties, which in the NATO’s case is specified in Article V: an attack on one shall be considered an attack on all.
The military situation was this: the Soviet Union was the most powerful country in Europe by far, and in tandem with the Eastern European powers had an overwhelming advantage in a land war. This is because the only power which could compete with it was the US, and there was no way to move the entire US Army to Europe in time to make a difference. This introduces a problem of how to make US air and naval power important, and it was determined that the cost of maintaining sufficient forward operating airbases would be ruinous. However, at the end of WWII the US is the only nuclear power; so the threat is that if the Soviets invade, the Americans will use nukes. Enter deterrence.
The Soviets develop the bomb in 1949. This is the same year NATO is formed, and the joke in diplomatic circles is that it had three objectives: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. So now there is a problem: while the Americans can use nukes to deter conventional invasion, the Russians can use nukes back to deter first strike, and to make a rich and varied story short and boring both teams spent the next 25 years building up huge stockpiles and various delivery systems to ensure that each side was guaranteed the ability to hit the other with nuclear weapons. This culminated in a doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD): both sides were guaranteed the ability to destroy the other.
This is the part which is germane to your question: at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other. So strong was this commitment that they both refrained from taking significant defensive measures (mostly). They built automated solutions to ensure armageddon would still happen even if all of leadership were destroyed. For a long time, the way of the world was that if the US and Russia went to war it was the end of the world; and if any NATO country and Russia went to war it would mean the US and Russia went to war.
The Russia-Ukraine issue is just the sort of event that began WW2, and also that spreads into a broader regional war. But a regional war in Europe means US v. Russia, which is the most terrible fear in geopolitics.
Mind you, lots of things have happened to make the nightmare scenarios less likely; but also lots of things have happened to make medium-grade global catastrophes more likely.
While I lived through and can confirm the prevlance of the ‘extinguish all civilization’ MAD narrative, I wonder today how extinguished it actually would have been. (famine due to a year of reduced sunlight from dust floating around was part of the story)
My understanding is that at least the United States considered this problem, and made adjustments for it. The nuclear winter problem is much worse for ground detonations, which I already mentioned; air bursts have less impact, while simultaneously having a much more powerful EMP effect. As electronics became more important over time, the latter weighed much more heavily in American thinking on the subject.
There was also a general shift towards precision in American weapons development, which included nuclear weapons. This is the line of research that lead to tactical nuclear weapons, which have the benefits of fewer side effects like nuclear winter, or killing our own troops, etc.
As a consequence my impression is that the everything-except-microbes-dies scenario was never likely, even in the worst period. On the other hand, I now think governments and the attendant international system are quite a bit more fragile; so a general descent into bloody anarchy and the simultaneous loss of civilization’s high achievements requires much less damage to achieve.
Well, I lived through that time to. And there was much about not just civilization, but all of humanity, being extinguished (eg, the novels On the Beach and Level 7). However, though I recall as a teenager thinking that nuclear war was quite likely, and that it would be catastrophic, I did not think (like many did/do) that every last human would die in a nuclear war. That was too obviously contrary to physical intuition.
So, there was a lot of `extinguish all civilization’ narrative. But nevertheless, I don’t think it was the official line—that was about retaliating by nuking all the Russian military installations. And I think it’s quite believable that that really was the policy. If US bases and/or cities have been nuked, it makes sense to try to make sure the Russians don’t follow up with an occupying army. It doesn’t make sense to also try to kill vast numbers of Russian civilians (though many would die anyway, of course).
“at one point the US and Russia had both pre-committed to extinguishing all of civilization if either were to attack the other.”
Do you have a reference? Which time in particular are you thinking of? My recollections are that at least from the 1970s on, US doctrine was to hit only militarily significant targets. Of course, millions of civilians would die as a side effect, and perhaps civilization would end in some sense, but it was not an explicit policy.
You are correct, it was not an explicit policy; the death of civilization is a natural consequence of the nuclear winter which comes from hitting thousands of militarily significant targets. The big factor there is that every nuclear weapons site is a military target, and many of them are underground missile silos. These require ground impact to destroy, which increases the nuclear winter effect.
But speaking to the broader point about explicit policies: there is a strong belief that explicit policies are bad on critical issues, and that strategic ambiguity is preferable because it reduces the ability of the opponent to calculate whether unilateral action is worth the risk. A lot of this kind of reasoning is due to Thomas Schelling, and there’s a good review of his book Strategies of Conflict on LessWrong which covers the section which explains why so much overwhelming destructive power was desirable. The best description I have found recently of strategic ambiguity is in a piece for the National Institute of Public Policy by Keith B. Payne, which discusses it in the context of Taiwan. The author is notable here because he’s a fairly comprehensive critic of the Schelling-school of nuclear deterrence thought, and wrote a good book on the subject.