Editor’s note: Marshall Brain – futurist, inventor, NCSU professor, writer and creator of “How Stuff Works” is a contributor to WRAL TechWire, taking a serious as well as entertaining world of possibilities for the world and the human race.
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RALEIGH – As the war in Ukraine unfolds, each day brings new reports of Russian attacks, Russian destruction, and Russian murders. The war is so horrible, so absurd, so pre-meditated that it seems impossible. And the whole thing is being live-streamed, so we know exactly what it looks like to Ukrainians who have to endure the attacks.
To thoughtful humans, the entire affair feels like an indictment of the human species. On the one hand, one part of the human species started the war and all its destruction for no reason. And then on the other hand the rest of the human species seems to stand by and refuses to stop the war, even though they could. In the year 2022, why is this doomsday scenario happening at all?
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Ukraine is a sovereign democratic country, and a peaceful one, with a population of 44 million people. But Ukraine is experiencing its own doomsday scenario at the hands of Russia. Never before has the injustice of war been so stark:
- Ukraine was simply sitting there, minding its own business, when Russia brought 100,000+ troops and equipment up to its border.
- Then on February 24, Russia invaded without provocation.
- Therefore, every time a person dies in Ukraine during this war, it is a senseless murder that Russia commits for no reason. Russia has murdered thousands of thousands of people in Ukraine.
- Every time a building collapses in Ukraine because of a Russian bomb or missile or tank round, it is obvious that Russia is causing the destruction for no reason. Russia has destroyed thousands of buildings in Ukraine.
- Every time a city becomes so incapacitated that it falls to Russia, it is a city that Russia captures with no justification.
- These fallen cities and destroyed buildings then create millions of Ukrainian refugees.
Murder, destruction of property, captured cities, a refugee crisis – in this situation, Russia looks no different than any other large-scale terrorist organization.
So as Russia massed its troops at the Ukrainian border in January and February, why didn’t NATO or the United States treat the Russian army like any other terrorist threat and start blowing it up? Why not use cruise missiles, smart bombs, tank-killing drones, MOABs, and everything else in the arsenal to keep the innocent people in Ukraine safe? Why let all of the suffering in Ukraine occur when it could have been prevented?
Doomsday scenarios
This is happening because there are two even larger doomsday scenarios that are waiting in the wings, neither of which are good for humanity as a whole:
- World War III in Europe
- Global nuclear Armageddon
#1 would certainly be bad, but it now seems clear who would win. Russia has demonstrated several important weaknesses that would give us hope in the case of #1.
It is global nuclear Armageddon that is the truly worrisome case, and this is the worst doomsday scenario that humanity faces today. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia would certainly destroy human civilization on Planet Earth in just a few hours, and it could happen at any moment.
Imagine the following situation. Say that Russia gets frustrated in its attempts to capture Kyiv with conventional weapons. Russia therefore decides to destroy Kyiv with a small nuclear bomb so that Ukraine surrenders to Russia. This would be similar to the scenario with Hiroshima in World War II, where the United States used a tiny nuclear bomb (by today’s standards) with “only” a 15 kiloton yield to utterly destroy Hiroshima. The immediate effects would be catastrophic of course, but the long-term effects would be mild – Hiroshima has returned to a bustling city today. Russia wins the war with one or two small nuclear bombs like this. Ukraine surrenders and becomes a part of the re-emerging Soviet Union that Russia seems to be attempting to build.
Marshall Brain: We don’t have a magic crystal ball so let’s talk possibilties & probabilities
How does the rest of the world respond? Under the standard model of “an eye for an eye”, the rest of the world might try to avenge the destruction of Kyiv by destroying a similarly sized city in Russia. As horrible as it sounds, this approach “makes sense” proportionally to some people. Perhaps all the innocent people in the Russian target city are given advanced warning so they can leave the city before it is utterly destroyed.
The problem is that Russia appears to be irrational, thus the reason for starting this war in the first place. Therefore, Russia interprets the loss of the Russian city as a fresh attack, and then bombs another city in retribution. Now what? The only “fair” thing to do seems to be destroy another Russian city, but perhaps this time it is two Russian cities in the hope that Russia would “get the message” and capitulate.
The problem is that this kind of tit-for-tat, when one of the parties is irrational, has no good outcome. Eventually Russia gets tired of losing cities and decides to take drastic action. It might try to destroy the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States (see the simulations by the Princeton University Nuclear Futures Lab). Russia has the power to do this (at least the silo-based arsenal) because it has at least 1,000 nuclear missiles ready to fly at a moment’s notice. And so does the United States. Therefore, before the U.S. loses its arsenal, the U.S. also unleashes everything it’s got towards Russia.
Nuclear winter?
Hundreds of nuclear warheads would be detonating all over the world in a matter of hours. And thus humanity – the whole planet – would find itself plunged into nuclear winter. In this doomsday scenario, all the debris and soot from the incinerated cities blankets the whole earth in a cloud of dust that blocks out sunlight. The planet enters a year or more of winter temperatures and darkness, so no plants can grow. So many cities and industries are lost, and food cannot be grown, while dust and fallout gums up everything else. Human civilization as we know it collapses, not to mention much of Earth’s ecosystem.
Given this potential disaster, if Russia decides to nuke Kyiv, what is the rest of humanity to do? Do we watch it happen and do nothing? This might actually be a valid course of action in terms of the planet as a whole. But it gives Russia the green light to invade more countries with impunity.
Humanity needs to avoid nuclear Armageddon at all costs. We must hope that a combination of severe economic sanctions against Russia, plus diplomacy, plus a change of government inside Russia where more rational people take over, can allow the Ukraine crisis to de-escalate gracefully and fall away. And then, hopefully, humanity can steer toward a place where more rational actors start eliminating nuclear weapons, which are the root problem here.
A large-scale nuclear war represents the ultimate doomsday scenario for the human species.
