nuclear weapons

Hansai, or the Cleansing Fire.

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD History, Liberty, Philosophy, Religion , , , , , , , ,

How the Center of Japan’s Christian Community Became the Unintended Target for America’s Second Atomic Strike.

Eighty-one years ago today, the course of military history and the geography of faith collided in a flash of light brighter than a thousand suns. When the second atomic bomb detonated over Japan at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, it did not hit its intended destination. 

It did not strike the sprawling military arsenals or the heart of the industrialized shipping yards that planners in Washington had meticulously mapped out.

Instead, through a sequence of tactical mis-steps, weather anomalies, and sheer mechanical friction, the plutonium weapon known as “Fat Man” detonated directly above the twin spires of Urakami cathedral.

In that single, catastrophic moment, the heart of Japan’s oldest, largest, and most resilient Christian community was instantly vaporized.

Through the lens of Hansai (or burnt offering), I have come to view the tragedy of Nagasaki not simply as a calculated geopolitical gambit, or a callous act of malice, but as something arguably more terrifying: a horrific, unintended accident of war. 

It was an event where the classic Clausewitzian concepts of fog and friction literally intercepted the purity of faith in an unimaginably cruel way. The destruction of Urakami was not a deliberate strike against an enduring religious minority, but a profound demonstration of how total war, once unleashed, inevitably escapes the boundaries of human control and intent.

To understand the sheer accidental nature of this horror, one must look closely at the tactical chaos of that morning. The primary target for the B-29 bomber Bockscar was not Nagasaki at all; it was Kokura, a city heavily fortified with steel works and munitions factories. 

When the twice-delayed bomber arrived over Kokura, the crew found the city obscured by a dense blanket of cloud and smoke—a literal “fog of war”—compounded by residual haze of a conventional firebombing raid on nearby Yahata the previous night.

For nearly an hour, the aircraft circled Kokura. Three separate bombing runs were aborted because visual targeting proved impossible, and strict orders forbade dropping the weapon blindly through radar. 

With fuel reserves dwindling to a critical threshold and Japanese anti-aircraft fire beginning to close in, the mission commander faced a stark choice: abort entirely and ditch the world’s most expensive weapon in the Pacific, or divert to the secondary target.

Nagasaki was that secondary target, but it too was heavily obscured by clouds when Bockscar arrived. The crew was on the verge of aborting their war-ending mission when, at the very last  minute, a fleeting break opened in the overcast sky. 

The bombardier, catching a hurried glimpse of the ground below through his targeting scope, thought he was above his target, and released the five-ton weapon.

But the drop was not precise. Missing its intended aim point by more than two miles, the bomb drifted north of the city, channeling down the natural amphitheater of the Urakami Valley and exploded 1,650 feet above the Urakami Cathedral, where parishioners had gathered that morning to celebrate the feast of the Assumption.

The historical irony of this trajectory is devastating. The Urakami Christians were the descendants of Japan’s “Hidden Christians” (Kakure Kirishitan), a community that had survived over two and a half centuries of brutal, systemic persecution under the Tokugawa Shogunate. For generations, they had practiced their faith in absolute secrecy, passing down prayers in corrupted Latin and Portuguese, defying crucifix-trampling tests (fumi-e), and enduring torture, exile, and execution.

When Japan finally reopened to the world in the late nineteenth century, these resilient believers emerged from the shadows. With their own hands, brick by painful brick, they constructed Urakami Cathedral, a magnificent red-brick structure that stood as the largest Christian church in East Asia. 

It was a monument to survival, a physical testament that their faith had outlasted the wrath of emperors and shoguns.

Yet, in a cruel twist of historical fate, this community—which had successfully resisted centuries of domestic tyranny—was obliterated in a microsecond by a weapon dropped by a western nation whose values and leadership were profoundly shaped by the Christian tradition.

In the aftermath of the blast, survivors and theologians alike struggled to find meaning in a tragedy so starkly devoid of tactical logic. Among them was Dr. Takashi Nagai, a radiologist and Catholic convert who survived the explosion despite being grievously injured. Nagai popularized a deeply profound, if controversial, framework to process the trauma: the concept of Hansai, the spiritual burnt offering.

Nagai posited that the destruction of Urakami was not a punishment from God, nor was it a meaningless slaughter. Instead, he suggested that Urakami was chosen as a holy, spotless sacrifice to bring an end to the global slaughter of World War II. In his view, the cathedral and its faithful were consumed in a cleansing fire that finally quenched the flames of global conflict, prompting Japan’s immediate surrender.

While Nagai’s faith provided immense psychological comfort to a traumatized community, looking back through the cold clarity of military history reveals a parallel, secular truth. The “cleansing fire” that consumed Urakami was ignited by the messy mechanics of modern warfare. It was the ultimate casualty of tactical contingency and the persistent intrusion of chaos in even the best of military plans.

When we look back upon the records of the Manhattan Project and the deliberations of its Target Committee, it becomes clear that the destruction of the Christian valley was never a line item on America’s strategic ledger. The planners were looking at industrial outputs, harbor depths, and psychological shock value. They did not know that the city they designated as a secondary fallback contained the spiritual capital of Japanese Christianity, known as the Holy City of the East.

The bomb fell on Urakami because the wind blew a certain way over Kokura, because a fuel pump on Bockscar had malfunctioned at the start of the ill-fated Kokura mission, and because impenetrable cloud cover parted for a fraction of a second over a valley miles away from the intended target.

This realization does not diminish the horror; it amplifies it. It forces us to confront the reality that the most destructive weapons ever devised by human ingenuity are subject to the same unpredictable, chaotic forces as a stray bullet or a misplaced step on a muddy battlefield. The atomic bomb, for all its terrifying precision of physics, was deployed via a delivery system bound by human error and atmospheric whim.

The scorched, eyeless wooden head of the Urakami Madonna—recovered from the cathedral ruins by a young Japanese soldier from Hokkaido and eventually returned to the rebuilt church—remains a haunting visual metaphor for this intersection of faith and friction. Her face is blackened by the thermal radiation, her delicate features scarred by an atomic firestorm that she was never meant to witness.

To look back at Nagasaki through the framework of the Hansai is to recognize that total war inherently destabilizes our ability to control outcomes. When nations adopt strategies of total mobilization and absolute destruction, the line between a calculated tactical strike and a horrific accident completely dissolves. 

The Urakami Valley was not targeted for its faith, but it was destroyed because of our collective willingness to unleash forces where a shift in the wind can rewrite the spiritual history of a nation. As we look to the future, the ruins and rebirth of Urakami stand as a permanent warning. 

We must look past the sterile language of strategic deterrence and military necessity to see the human cost of tactical contingency. The destruction of the Holy City of the East was, in the end, a tragic accident, a manifestation of the terrifying truth that in the theater of total war, no one—not even the faithful, the innocent, or the hidden—is safe from the unpredictable trajectory of this most absolute of weapons, or the inescapable persistence of human fallibility.

A longer version of this article,  “Hansai, or the Cleansing Fire: How the Interplay of Fog, Friction, and Faith Resulted in the Unintended Atomic Annihilation of Nagasaki’s Christian Community – and Ended World War II 80 Years Ago,” previously appeared in Isonomia Quarterly 3:4 (Winter 2025).

My Realist Journey, Part 3: Strategy After Hiroshima (State of Doom).

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Books, History, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , , ,

As I updated and expanded my States of Mind series in the 2000s and 2010s, I found the need for a fourth, then a fifth, then a sixth, and finally a seventh volume to complete my treatise. What became volume 5 was an outgrowth of volume 3 (State of Awe), drilling in on the nuclear age which had culminated in volume three my with discussion of order in the age of total war.

While this was indeed, a single era as war industrialized and later nuclearized, achieving absoluteness in its destructiveness, I felt both the need and the desire to explore the nuance of the nuclear age, in part in homage to Waltz whose neorealism, like Brodie’s deterrence theory, sought to tame the terror of the nuclear age (and did for a little while).

Both can be thought of as nuclear realists, but as I wrote, I came to find the literature on neorealism rather light and lacking in substance, while the literature on nuclear strategy was refreshingly complex and nuanced and provided the true foundation of the nuclear order (a dangerously brittle one that collapsed like a house of cards under the unforeseen massing of Gandhian people power in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.)

My 600-page dissertation, Bernard Brodie and the Bomb: At the Birth of the Bipolar World (published in book form in 2011 by Continuum (now Bloomsbury) as the much shortened (by 300 pages!) State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, the Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World), stands as a definitive professional biography and philosophical investigation of one of the 20th century’s most vital strategic minds. It explores how Bernard Brodie (1910–1978) earned his reputation as “America’s Clausewitz” or the “Clausewitz of the Nuclear Age.” 

By tracing Brodie’s intellectual journey from his pre-World War II writings on naval engineering to his foundational texts on atomic deterrence and his late-career work translating Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, it reveals the existential dilemma of the modern era: How can a state utilize military force for political objectives when the weapons at its disposal threaten total planetary destruction? Brodie answered these questions, which were left unanswered, uncomfortably so, by Waltz’s neorealism (which left all the heavy lifting to the imagined “system,” as if a cult or new religion structured upon God’s grace and infinite wisdom.)

Introduction: The Strategic Crucible of the Bipolar World

I frame his exploration around the transition from a multipolar global system to the rigid, highly tense bipolar structure of the Cold War. In this landscape, the United States and the Soviet Union faced an unprecedented security environment defined by the “balance of terror.” At the center of this transformation was Bernard Brodie. As one of the first civilian defense intellectuals to bridge the gap between academia and military policy—most notably through his long tenure at the RAND Corporation—Brodie fundamentally redefined the purpose of military force.

My core thesis is that Brodie’s intellectual life was a lifelong project to reconcile classic military theory with technological shifts. When the splitting of the atom yielded the absolute weapon, traditional concepts of victory, total mobilization, and kinetic warfare were shattered. Throughout his career, Brodie fought to bring politics back into command of military strategy, preventing the machine of war from triggering a global apocalypse.

Before the Bomb: Sea Power and Technological Determinism

Before becoming the premier architect of nuclear strategy, Brodie was a scholar of naval history and sea power.  I emphasize that understanding Brodie’s early work is essential, as it established his analytical framework for evaluating how technological paradigm shifts alter strategic realities.

Sea Power in the Machine Age (1941)

Brodie’s first major academic contribution analyzed the profound transition of naval warfare during the industrial revolution. He tracked four great technological revolutions that fundamentally altered naval architecture and strategy:

  1. The transition from sail to steam propulsion.
  2. The replacement of wooden hulls with iron and steel armor plating.
  3. The evolution from solid shot to explosive shells and rifled ordnance.
  4. The introduction of submarine warfare and the torpedo.

Brodie observed that military establishments are historically slow to grasp the true strategic implications of new inventions. Tacticians often attempt to force revolutionary technologies into outdated operational doctrines. I highlight this as Brodie’s first encounter with technological determinism—the idea that technology drives changes in human history and warfare, requiring an equal revolution in strategic thought to prevent catastrophe.

A Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (1942)

Published right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, this book established Brodie as a clear-eyed strategic communicator. It arrived at a moment when many critics believed the airplane had rendered the surface fleet obsolete.

Brodie took a nuanced, balanced view. He argued that while air power changed the tactics of naval engagement, it did not change the fundamental strategic purpose of sea power: the control of maritime lines of communication. This early insight previewed his nuclear-era philosophy—technological leaps change the means and costs of warfare, but they do not automatically erase basic geopolitical realities.

The Absolute Weapon: The Invention of Nuclear Deterrence

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 completely upended Brodie’s strategic worldview. Within months of these events, Brodie edited and co-authored a foundational text, The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (1946). It was in this work that modern nuclear deterrence theory was born.

The Inversion of Military Utility

I analyze this iconic quote to illustrate how profoundly Brodie broke from traditional military tradition. For centuries, military strategy focused on securing victory through the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces.

Brodie recognized that the atomic bomb rendered total war obsolete as an instrument of statecraft. Because an atomic exchange could destroy entire civilizations in a matter of hours, a war fought with such weapons could yield no rational political benefit. Therefore, the military’s primary job shifted from war-fighting to war-averting.

The Pillars of Early Deterrence Theory

In The Absolute Weapon, Brodie laid out the core principles that would govern U.S. and Soviet interactions for the next four decades:

  • The Futility of Defense: Brodie argued that there was no foreseeable, reliable defense against an atomic attack. Even if a defensive system intercepted 90% of incoming bombers, the remaining 10% would still deliver unacceptable, civilizational ruin.
  • The Primacy of Retaliation: Since defense was impossible, security could only be achieved through the guaranteed threat of overwhelming retaliation. A potential aggressor must understand that attacking would trigger their own destruction.
  • The Irrelevance of Superiority: Once a state possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy its opponent’s society, acquiring thousands more offers little strategic advantage. Nuclear utility hits a point of saturation.

Preserving Order in the Age of Apocalyptic War

As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, the strategic landscape grew vastly more complex and dangerous. I detail how Brodie’s early, clean models of deterrence were severely tested by fast-moving historical developments.

The Loss of the American Monopoly (1949)

When the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in August 1949, the United States lost its nuclear monopoly much faster than Washington political elites had predicted. This shift created a symmetric balance of terror, giving rise to the truly bipolar world.

Brodie had to adapt his theories to a world where both sides could instantly retaliate. This eliminated any lingering illusions that the atomic bomb could be used as an offensive tool of diplomatic coercion without risking domestic annihilation.

The Thermonuclear Revolution

The strategic equation changed again with the development of the Hydrogen Bomb (the thermonuclear weapon), first tested by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953.

While the atomic bomb measured its yield in kilotons (thousands of tons of TNT equivalent), the thermonuclear bomb measured its yield in megatons (millions of tons of TNT). Fission bombs were city-killers; fusion bombs were region-killers, capable of poisoning massive geographic areas with lethal radioactive fallout.

I point out that while some defense intellectuals, like those in the Air Force, viewed the H-bomb as just a larger explosive tool for strategic air power, Brodie saw it as a qualitative leap into absolute absurdity. The H-bomb removed any remaining doubt about his 1946 thesis: total war with thermonuclear weapons was absolute suicide.

Rethinking the Unthinkable: Escalation and Limited War

With total war off the table as a rational choice, Brodie turned his focus to preventing brushfire conflicts from escalating into all-out thermonuclear exchanges. My analysis of this period highlights Brodie’s tenure at the RAND Corporation, where he interacted and frequently sparred with other giants of nuclear strategy, such as Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, and Henry Kissinger.

The Problem of Massive Retaliation

During the Eisenhower administration, U.S. defense policy relied heavily on the doctrine of Massive Retaliation. This policy declared that the U.S. would respond to any communist aggression globally—even local, conventional incursions—using overwhelming nuclear forces at times and places of its own choosing.

Brodie emerged as a sharp critic of Massive Retaliation. He argued that the threat lacked credibility in an era of nuclear parity. If the Soviet Union launched a localized conventional attack in Europe or Asia, would an American president truly risk the destruction of New York and Washington to defend a distant border?

Brodie asserted that a non-credible threat fails to deter. If the enemy exposes the bluff, the U.S. would face a terrible choice: launch a suicidal nuclear war or suffer an embarrassing geopolitical retreat.

The Architecture of Limited War

To solve this credibility gap, Brodie helped develop the theory of Limited War, which he detailed in his 1959 masterpiece, Strategy in the Missile Age.

Brodie argued that to make deterrence function at lower levels of conflict, the United States had to develop the capability and political will to fight limited wars using restricted means and targeting limited objectives.

  • Limitation of Means: Intentionally holding back maximum military power—such as avoiding the use of tactical nuclear weapons—to signaling a desire to avoid total war.
  • Limitation of Objectives: Fighting not for the unconditional surrender of the enemy or the total overthrow of their regime, but for specific geopolitical corrections (e.g., restoring a pre-war border).

I highlight the deep irony Brodie wrestled with: to prevent an absolute war, a superpower must become proficient at fighting restrained, sometimes frustratingly inconclusive limited wars.

A Clausewitz for America: Reuniting War and Politics

The final chapters of my book dive into the philosophical culmination of Brodie’s career: his deep engagement with the writings of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz:

The Clausewitzian Renaissance

In the late 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by the strategic failures of the Vietnam War, Brodie dedicated himself to a deep reassessment of classical strategic philosophy. He collaborated with historian Peter Paret to produce the landmark 1976 Princeton University Press translation of Clausewitz’s On War, providing an extensive commentary that contextualized the Prussian master for the nuclear age.

Brodie discovered that Clausewitz provided the perfect philosophical toolkit to fight the technocratic, math-heavy trends that had taken over American defense planning. Strategists like Robert McNamara had tried to turn war into a bureaucratic exercise of systems analysis, body counts, and raw cost-benefit equations. Brodie used Clausewitz to remind the world that war is inherently an unpredictable, messy, human phenomenon driven by emotion, chance, and politics.

Reconciling the Famous Dictum

The core of Clausewitzian theory rests on the famous dictum: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” This means that military violence must always serve as a tool for a specific political objective, and the political goal must entirely dictate the scale of military effort.

I carefully map out how Brodie solved the paradox of applying this 19th-century rule to the thermonuclear era:

  • The Separation Point: In an all-out nuclear war, the sheer scale of destruction breaks the connection between violence and statecraft. Because no political goal can justify the total annihilation of one’s own society, total thermonuclear war cannot be a continuation of politics. It is simply madness.
  • The Solution: Therefore, the only way to keep war Clausewitzian in the modern era is through nuclear deterrence and strict limitation. Deterrence uses the threat of force to achieve the political objective of stability and peace. When kinetic conflict does break out, it must be kept strictly limited so that the costs of fighting never outgrow the political value of the goal.

By aligning deterrence with Clausewitz, Brodie elevated it from a temporary military fix to a permanent, morally grounded framework for preserving global order.

The Lingering Legacy of the (Brief) Bipolar Peace

In my analysis, it becomes clear that Bernard Brodie’s contributions were central to preventing the Cold War from turning hot. The stable bipolar order was not an accidental byproduct of technology; it was a constructed intellectual architecture designed by thinkers who walked the world back from the brink of doom.

Brodie’s evolution reflects the journey of an era:

  • Technology and War: He began by studying how technology changes the machinery of war (Sea Power in the Machine Age, and Guide to Naval Strategy).
  • The Bomb and Obsolescence of Total War: He recognized when technology had made total war obsolete (The Absolute Weapon).
  • Escalation: He built the operational guardrails of escalation management (Strategy in the Missile Age and Escalation and the Nuclear Option).
  • He grounded the entire system in the timeless truth that military power must always serve political ends (“Guide to Reading On War“ and War and Politics).

I conclude that while the modern international system has continued its shift away from the bipolarity of the Cold War into a complex, multipolar landscape featuring asymmetric threats and nuclear proliferation, Brodie’s insights remain essential. The challenge of the 21st century mirrors that of 1946: ensuring that human political wisdom stays in control of our terrifying capacity for technological destruction.

The Return of the State of Doom: Drone Strikes, Desperation, and Putin’s Nuclear Temptation

Barry Scott Zellen, PhD Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

How Ukraine’s Successfully Waged War of Asymmetric Attrition Could Trigger Russia’s Nuclear Escalation, and Collapse the Western Order.

The skies over Moscow, once an untouchable symbol of Russia’s impenetrable imperial security, have become the Ukraine War’s latest contested territory.

As Ukrainian drones routinely slip past Russian air defenses to strike at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s capital, the psychological, economic and strategic landscape of the war in Ukraine is undergoing a tectonic shift. It is a stunning display of asymmetrical ingenuity and a testament to Ukraine’s unbroken resolve four years into a brutal war.

But for those of us who study the grim calculus of international relations, realist theory, and nuclear strategy, this tactical triumph casts a profound existential shadow. We are edging precariously close to the terrifying reality that Bernard Brodie—the founding father of modern nuclear strategy—recognized at the dawn of the atomic age. We are re-entering a state of doom.

Fifteen years ago, in my 2011 book, State of Doom: Bernard Brodie, The Bomb, and the Birth of the Bipolar World, I explored how the advent of the absolute weapon fundamentally altered the nature of war and statecraft. Brodie famously observed in 1946 that, until the atomic bomb, the chief purpose of a military establishment was to win wars. “From now on,” he wrote, “its chief purpose must be to avert them.” For 80 years, this logic of deterrence has held firm. Nuclear weapons became the ultimate insurance policy against regime collapse and total state defeat, creating a stable, if terrifying, equilibrium among superpowers.

But what happens when that insurance policy is held by an authoritarian leader who launched a war of choice, only to find himself entangled in a humiliating, multi-year quagmire—and suffering more than one million casualties and counting?

As we navigate 2026, the conflict has evolved into a grinding war of attrition that has systematically bled Russian conventional forces. Now, with drones detonating in Moscow, the illusion of Russian invulnerability has been entirely shattered. The war is no longer a distant “special military operation” broadcast safely on state television; it is rattling the windows of the Kremlin.

From a classical realist perspective, a state’s primary imperative is survival. However, in my research on the tribal foundations of world politics, I have often noted that beneath the veneer of the modern Westphalian state, older, primal loyalties dictate behavior—rooted in an unyielding tribalism. Putin’s Russia has increasingly shed the trappings of a modern institutional state, reverting to an insular, tribal autocracy run by the its security elite (the siloviki). For this ruling clan, the survival of the Russian state and the survival of their regime are inextricably linked.

The drone strikes on Moscow are not measured strictly in military terms; they are profound political humiliations. They signal to the Russian elite and the public that Putin cannot protect his own stronghold. In the brutal logic of power politics, humiliation breeds desperation. And when the tribe’s inner-most sanctum is breached, the leadership’s risk calculus can radically change.

This is precisely where the architecture of nuclear deterrence begins to buckle. Deterrence relies on rationality—on the shared understanding that the costs of crossing the nuclear threshold outweigh any conceivable benefit. But rationality is subjective, bound by the specific pressures and fears of the decision-maker. If Putin believes that a conventional defeat in Ukraine, or the steady erosion of his domestic authority brought about by persistent strikes on the Russian homeland, will lead to his downfall, the unthinkable suddenly becomes thinkable. Using the bomb, of which Putin has so many, becomes a viable strategic option when their continued non-use could cause both military defeat and regime collapse.

The immediate fear has never been that Putin will launch a strategic first strike against Washington or London, triggering the near-certainty and totality of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The far more chilling and realistic peril is the use of a non-strategic, or “tactical,” nuclear weapon within the Ukrainian theater. A low-yield detonation—perhaps over a military concentration, an infrastructure hub, or even as a demonstration over the Black Sea—would serve a dual purpose for a desperate autocrat.

First, it would aim to reverse the fortunes of a failing conventional campaign, dramatically persuading Kyiv to compromise via the same unimaginable explosive shock that did the same for the unyielding Emperor of Japan eighty years earlier.

Second, it would test the ultimate resolve of the West. Putin may gamble that while NATO is willing to supply advanced conventional technology to maintain Ukrainian territorial integrity, it is not willing to risk Western capitals for Kyiv. Putin might calculate that a limited nuclear strike would paralyze the Western alliance with the fear of further annihilation.

Western analysts often comfort themselves with the assumption that a nuclear strike would turn Russia into a global pariah, completely alienating its remaining partners. But they may be dangerously wrong. In a fracturing global order, a successful, unpunished tactical nuclear strike could achieve the exact opposite of isolation: it would send a seismic shockwave through the international system, demonstrating that the West is ultimately a paper tiger when confronted by the East’s absolute resolve.

Rather than repelling Beijing, Tehran, or Pyongyang, such an unapologetic display of power might further unite the autocratic world around a newly dominant center of gravity. It could reinvigorate Russia’s diplomatic leadership among revisionist states, positioning Moscow as the ultimate vanguard against Western hegemony.

This is the hidden trapdoor of the current crisis: the very real temptation that nuclear brinkmanship could pay off, rewriting the rules of global governance in favor of autocracy. Hence the temptation for Putin; hence the danger for us.

We are currently witnessing a volatile collision between the paradigms of modern conflict. Asymmetric, unconventional tactics are now colliding with the rigid, devastating power structures of traditional states. Ukraine has brilliantly exposed the hollow core of Russian conventional might, utilizing decentralized, high-tech drone warfare to outmaneuver a lumbering superpower. Yet, in doing so, it has inadvertently increased the utility of Russia’s unconventional, apocalyptic deterrent.

By bringing the pain of war to Moscow, Ukraine is effectively cornering the bear. And a cornered bear, armed with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, could become the most dangerous actor in the international system.

Recognizing the danger of Putin’s nuclear temptation is not a call for appeasement; it is a prerequisite for survival. For years, the West has walked a geopolitical tightrope: arming Ukraine sufficiently to defend its sovereignty without provoking a Russian nuclear response. The drone strikes on Moscow represent a fraying of that tightrope.

Brodie warned us that the absolute weapon demands an absolute transformation in how we manage conflict. In this renewed state of doom, the ghosts of the Cold War have returned, armed with new anxieties and asymmetric triggers. As waves of drones continue to fly east toward Moscow, the distance between conventional humiliation and nuclear retaliation shrinks by the day.

We must tread ever carefully, for the absolute weapon forgives no miscalculation.

“Towards a Complete Libertarianism”

Brandon Christensen Liberty , , , , , , , ,

from Kevin Vallier, in the latest issue of Isonomia Quarterly.

Don’t forget to check out the rest, which includes essays on Hayek, the geopolitics of Greenland, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, and a poem by Robert Frost.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Required reading at French military schools Michael Shurkin, War on the Rocks
  2. Stealing libertarianism Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
  3. Liberty is self-government, not rights alone Richard Reinsch, Modern Age
  4. How Big Film distorts colonialism’s legacy Lipton Matthews, Mises Wire

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Confessions of a nuclear war planner Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Inference
  2. Quest of the avatars (internet history) Claire Evans, LARB
  3. Melancholy liberalism (Calhoun’s ghost) Adam Kirsch, City Journal
  4. Putting global governance in its place Dani Rodrik, NBER

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The missing backlash against finance Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
  2. A contrarian take on the Trump tariffs Scott Sumner, MoneyIllusion
  3. Brave Nuclear World Emma Ashford, InkStick
  4. A classic in Persian literature is relevant again Joobin Bekhrad, Los Angeles Review of Books

BC’s weekend reads

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Saudi-Iran Conflict Is Not America’s Fault
  2. Gains from trade: China and the United States
  3. How Bad Is Trump’s Brand of Authoritarianism?
  4. How Hiroshima Became A War Crime
  5. Art and Porn in Edo Period Japan
  6. The [True?] Meaning of Marxism

Which countries are of US interest?

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , , , , ,

I was reading my news stream when I noted a blog post from the Cato Institute discussing the silliness of adding Montenegro to NATO. I don’t disagree per se. I certainly don’t see the value of adding Montenegro to NATO, if the purpose of NATO is to protect the US. Nor do I disagree with the general US-libertarian belief that the US has over extended itself in terms of military alliances.

I do wonder though what countries US-libertarians should desire to maintain a military alliance with. A North American military alliance, ranging from Canada to Panama and including the Caribbean, makes sense to me. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are our greatest defenses, but I welcome military cooperation from our geographical neighbors.

Beyond there though it gets tricky. Western Europe is certainly rich enough to protect itself. The main reason I am hesitant to leave NATO altogether is the nuclear question. France and the UK are the only European powers with nuclear weapons, but several others are part of NATO’s nuclear sharing program. Should the US leave NATO would these countries seek nuclear weapons for themselves? Would the UK/France provide substitute weapons? Ending military ties with Europe would likely be the easiest option in terms of cutting down on allies.

Japan and South Korea are likewise rich countries, but here too the nuclear question arises. Japan has a cultural aversion to nuclear weapons that I do not see it overcoming in the foreseeable future. South Korea may be willing to use nuclear weapons, but its strained historical relationship with Japan leaves me concerned about the future possibility of a Korean-Japanese alliance to counterweight China PRC. I believe that Japan should be encouraged to modify its constitution to allow its military greater freedom in action and to consider acquiring nuclear weapons of its own. Other nations in the region, such as the Philippines, are outmatched in conventional weaponry or, in the case of Australia, too far away geographically to be of much use in restraining China PRC’s influence in east Asia.

I am hopeful that within my lifetime China PRC will transition to a liberal democracy, but till then I am skeptical about allowing it free reign in east Asia. For the foreseeable future it is hard for me to consider an east Asia without a significant role for the US. Nor would I be particularly against offering South Korea and/or Japan statehood in a United States of the Pacific.

Thoughts? I admit that international politics is not my area of expertise and I more than welcome other’s thoughts on the matter. I also admit that I am not viewing these issues from a pure libertarian perspective but with a splash of nationalism.

As readers may know our own Brandon is playing around with creating a NOL foreign policy quiz similar to the Nolan libertarian quiz.

North Korea’s “Artificial Earthquake”: What is to be Done?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , ,

Foreign policy has been awfully quiet these days. President Obama has been murdering people left and right on a whim, and nobody in Washington seems to care. You can imagine what the reaction would be in Washington if a Republican had been the one flaunting the rule of law. The Economist has a good article on this development if anyone is interested.

One newsworthy item that concerns American foreign policy has been centered on the Korean peninsula, a place that the United States first became involved militarily during the 1950’s. Given that our government is currently mired in two foreign occupations at the peripheries of the Islamic world (Afghanistan and the Balkans) as well as being embroiled in conflicts along the Sahel (thanks to President Obama’s attacks on the Libyan state), one should naturally be curious as to why the current affairs of the Korean peninsula are of interest to the United States government.

To make a long story short, the US government currently has some 50,000 troops stationed along the border of the North-South divide (drawn up in the 1950’s after a devastating war was fought between communist and conservative factions within Korea, China, and the United States), and has an alliance with the South that guarantees military help in case of a war with the communist North. The later state is actively attempting to build a nuclear weapon.

As a rule, I think it is appropriate that when citizens of a republic hear about other nations and events, the subject matter ought to revolve around how beautiful the geography of a said nation is, or how beautiful the women are, or how bad the food is, or which team won the national championship, and in which sport. That American citizens are hearing about a possible escalation of military tension in the region is, by itself, not a bad thing nor a surprising thing, but when our military and our tax dollars are suddenly involved in the escalation itself, then American citizens have ample cause to be worried, angry, and tense. These are not qualities that are often sought out by individuals on a daily basis, and when a government that claims to be republican in nature begins to cause these said psychological factors within it’s borders, then citizens ought to question the supposed republicanism of their government. Continue reading →