Waiting against preventing. What should the world do about the new nuclear threat?

Sergei Mitroshin

The social network took care of my safety and, knowing my intemperance by the tongue, just in case, blocked me for a few days. Although I didn’t do anything criminal, didn’t call for violence and didn’t demonstrate hatred for social associations, but just asked a question like: what is more noble in spirit - to submit to the slings and arrows of a violent fate, or is it necessary to resist ? But even that was enough.

In other words, this is what I asked: should we wait until this or that desperate politician, of which there are quite a few in the world, uses nuclear weapons (and there has been very intense talk about this lately) and thereby starts the Third World War, or should we ourselves ... how to say it ... "warn". Which, in fact, will also probably mean the same World War III. But it just so happens: no matter who moves e2-e4, you are guaranteed an endgame.

So yes or no"? After all, there aren't many options to choose from. Either prevent or wait.

For example, my friend and colleague Yuri S. believes that we, democrats, should under no circumstances encourage politicians to do anything that provokes a big war. And it’s more honest, more humane and more correct to wait until the so-called world outcasts start it, and only when we all see a nuclear glow over our heads, then ...

However, other less democratic and less restrained opponents still prefer a preemptive strike against a source of potential danger. As in the case with Saddam Hussein.

Suspicions alone that he was developing something there, they believe, were quite enough to change the regime in Iraq in 2003, and hang Saddam Hussein by court verdict in 2006. Such is the political given given to us in sensations and media.

History of the Great Delusion

There is a concept that weapons are the basis of security. Not only armed, but in general, since the accumulation of parity arms leads us to the inevitability of recognizing the senselessness of wars and eternal peace. Which is obviously not true.

Indeed, when metal swords were invented, didn’t it show that heroic hand-to-hand combat turns into a useless meat grinder? Showed. But everyone continued to cut for a sweet soul.

It is known that a small detachment, armed with innovative Colts, easily defeated an entire army of Indians without Colts. What kind of war is it then, when the “equalizer of chances” appeared? But then there was a whole machine gun, and everything remained the same.

A machine gun with an almost endless belt of bullets, as it were, proved that the infantry can now retire, and large human battles with attacks and counterattacks remain in the past. But both the First and Second World Wars, nevertheless, took place in the normal mode. And the fighters went on the attack, and others went towards, and killed each other, as if there were no machine guns.

When a person learned to throw bombs from an airplane, it again seemed that wars had outlived their usefulness and finally the eternal Kantian peace would come. After all, the pilot became unattainable for the defenders of the earth, and the "earthlings" could only stop the senseless battle. But they got used to the bombing, and learned to shoot down planes. Moreover, wars have not yet threatened the end of the world.

Since childhood, I have heard about the pacifist potential of the atomic bomb. In all seriousness, this was talked about quite recently, even at the beginning of the 21st century. In the opinion of the "experts", it was believed that it was nuclear parity that kept the planet in a state of relative calm. Although this point of view still referred more to the bipolar architecture of civilization, vulgarly divided into capitalism and socialism.

And then Soviet socialism left

Its place was taken by the Eurasian “empire of justice”, which entered into a hellish existential and surrealistic clinch with the “empire of injustice”. In the "empire of injustice", however, there were justice and police, and "in the empire of justice", a vague feeling a la Dugin, what should and should not be done. Basically what you shouldn't. This was strange and very dangerous due to the obscurity of the very nature of the conflict, its non-economic, non-Marxian evolution. But then again - a huge amount of accumulated nuclear weapons prevented both of them from resetting to zero.

As expected, the experts continued to praise nuclear weapons in this way, but progress threw up a problem. Nuclear weapons (which was supposed to happen) began to spread to the peripheries, to settle in suspicious countries. In the cinema, stories about terrorists with a nuclear bomb in a suitcase began to be exploited with might and main. The thought is that sooner or later it will be blown up anyway. (Such plots are used in the series "24" and in the latest "Bond".)

Moreover, such terrorists cannot be intimidated by parity. The end of the hated world is not an annoyance for them, but a goal. Obviously, the parity of the main nuclear powers, thus, ceases to work, nuclear weapons from a peacekeeper becomes a danger, and now humanity must either completely abandon nuclear weapons or come up with some new control. Well, here, for example, to hand over all nuclear weapons to some international planetary committee.

New nuclear aspect

... it lies in the fact that if any use of nuclear weapons by any side leads to the guaranteed destruction of civilization, and this is a natural barrier-prohibition for the response of progressive forces to the outrages of rogue countries, then dictatorships possessing nuclear weapons are encapsulated in their moral and political failure, becoming unreformable and untouchable. Moreover, in their military-political doctrines they directly write down (DPRK): automatic nuclear weapons response to events that threaten the existence of the regime. And the dictatorship regime, as you know, can be threatened by anything: free elections, and new products that have appeared in competing countries, and even local social games of parents No. 1 and No. 2.

At the same time, the question again arises: to what extent can the civilized world, from a moral point of view, afford to coexist next to repressive regimes? Put up? And what happens when the regime gathers strength? Hussein was destroyed because either he did not have time to prepare, or, even if he had time to prepare, he did not have the means to deliver nuclear weapons to the enemy. And if he had, would he still be sitting there? And if Milosevic had nuclear weapons, would he never have answered for Srebrenica and, moreover, would not have died in The Hague? Is that how it works?

It turns out that the new world with differentiated possession of nuclear weapons is not a world without wars, but a world of encapsulated tyrannies. From now on, nuclear weapons cease to be a deterrent, and become a threat to the continued existence of all. The inoculation of the first nuclear attack, which, by the way, was carried out not by some kind of misanthropic dictatorship, but by the most liberal outpost of democracy at that time (it’s true, you can’t erase a word from a song, rejoice patriots!) practically ceased to work. And did it work?

After all, the Japanese militarists were not at all afraid of the first explosion (in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945). Maybe there is only one bomb? - they decided, - and by that time they themselves had killed a lot of people, without any bomb. Some Chinese up to fifteen million, bringing China into second place in terms of losses in World War II. And this is not some 80,000 people, as in Hiroshima from the American bomb.

Only the second bomb (in Nagasaki on August 9) taught Japan to capitulate.

Nuclear and anti-nuclear mythologies

But the first nuclear bombing gave rise to a vast anti-nuclear mythology. From morning to evening in the USSR they talked about a girl folding paper "cranes" in the hope that this would cure her of radiation sickness. Which, of course, didn't happen. The pacifists sacralized the ruins of Hiroshima. “Look, this is what will happen to all of us if we don’t stop!” And there is no doubt that the events of August 6-9, 1945 really turned out to be a traumatic experience for all mankind. Undoubtedly, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was relatively easy to extinguish at that time precisely because all the rulers by that time had watched documentaries from the crash site of 1945 and had footage of that first nuclear bombing in front of their eyes.

But the American pilot Paul Tibbets (died at 92), who directly dropped the first nuclear bomb in History, never felt the pangs of regret that he personally (one) killed 80,000 people, among whom not all were Japanese militarists. (In particular, about 3,200 US citizens of Japanese origin were killed, as well as forcibly mobilized Chinese and Koreans). He named his plane after his mother, who was proud of it all her life, and, taking off her legs after the bomb was dropped, he did not even see the devilish beauty of the explosion, only the pilot in the tail of the plane saw it. He believed that he had ended the war, and perhaps all the big wars in the future.

For some reason (and now I see that not in vain) a fantastic story by an eminent author of that time ran into my memory. In it, the people of the future in a time machine still tried to erase from History the traumatic and obviously disgraceful events of August 1945, and they succeeded, but it turned out that at the same time, in the 21st century, those belatedly, but still happened . Moreover, when not two or three, but thousands and thousands of bombs accumulated and they were installed on supersonic missiles, and the politicians were fools, they did not see what and how happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is no need to add that our current time machine seems to be racing towards this "corrected" point in History.