March 16, 2023

Ukraine; Biden's Manicheism; the U.S. cannot even conduct a nuclear arms race, let alone win one

Friends --

It is Thursday, March 16. Trish and Greg are visiting children and grandchildren near Amarillo, TX this week.

First, re Ukraine, the wider U.S. war on Russia, and the madness in this administration and among hawks in both major U.S. political parties, these few articles seem to capture recent developments.

• Russia Warns the United States about Continued Support for Ukraine by Downing MQ9 Reaper, Larry Johnson, A Son of the New American Revolution, Mar 14, 2023
• New Bakhmut Report: High Casualties - Low Morale - Russian Tactics, Moon of Alabama, 15, 2023
• BREAKING: Russian Su-27's Finally Down American Drone Near Crimea, Simplicius the Thinker, Mar 14, 2023

I (Greg) find Alastair Crooke's big-picture insights valuable. His article of March 13, 2023 ("Betting All on Hegemony; Risking All, To Stave Off Ruin") is quite worthwhile. (U.S. readers probably want to read past his comments on the revealing internal U.K. government documents about lockdowns). His conclusion:

Hence, we have seen Biden – lacking an alternative – resorting to radical Manichaeism to bolster Authority against his domestic opponents in the U.S. (ironically casting them as enemies of ‘democracy’), whilst using the Ukraine war as the tool by which to cast the West’s war on Russia too, as an epic struggle between the Light and Dark. These Manichean ideological source-codes for now, dominate western liberalism.

But the West has put itself into a trap: ‘Going Manichean’ puts the West into an ideological straight-jacket. It is a crisis of the West’s own making. Put bluntly, Manichaeism is the antithesis to any negotiated solution, or off-ramp. Carl Schmitt [link added] was clear on this point: the intent of conjuring up the blackest of enmities, precisely was to preclude (liberal) negotiation: How could ‘virtue’ strike a bargain with ‘evil’?

The West is too dysfunctional and weak now to fight on all fronts. Yet there can be no retreat (without some de-legitimising humiliation of the West).

The West has gambled all on its fear-led, ‘emergency-crisis’ managed ‘control’ system to save itself. It’s hopes now are pinned on its ‘Beware! The big boss has gone angry-mad’ act; he might do anything’, which it hopes will cause the world to back-off.

But the Rest of World is not backing off – it is becoming more assertive. Fewer believe what the western Élites say; fewer still trust their competence. The West has recklessly ‘placed its bet’; it may lose all. Or, more dangerously, in a fit of anger, it may kick over others’ gaming tables.

I would like to add that in our considered opinion, any U.S. attempt to conduct an arms race with Russia or China, let alone both, will fail. This is rather a momentous reality. Neocons and hawks do not understand this -- or if they do to some extent they believe the U.S. can generate lots more weapons, and even nuclear weapons, by simply trying harder, removing "red tape," and appropriating more money. The image of the U.S. as "arsenal of democracy" is their spoken or unspoken frame of reference. The reality is that this point, there is little ability in the U.S. to generate a much bigger military, or nuclear, arsenal on a relevant timescale (and little democracy).

This merits a longer essay. Far short of that consider just the following, just as regards nuclear warheads. First, the major National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) study "Evolving the Nuclear Security Enterprise (Sept, 2022) includes, right at the beginning and as a reason for the study in the first place, the following:

The team conducted over 250 interviews with federal and M&O senior leaders and subject matter experts from across the NSE.ii The team also interviewed select Department of Defense FFRDC program leaders and former or retired NNSA and national laboratory leaders...During the team’s site visits, most respondents agreed that the current operating environment will not get the enterprise to where it needs to be to meet mission. On the current path, warhead modernization programs, facility construction, and capability recapitalization will continue to slip and, even worse, we may not be able to attract and retain the needed workforce. (pp. 2-3, emphasis added)

In February, I attended the 2.5 day Nuclear Deterrence Summit organized by Exchange Monitor Publications. At this meeting, I would say that there was considerable nervousness -- an edginess -- regarding the ability of NNSA to meet its mission commitments. The entire meeting was devoted to ways to overcome perceived schedule and mission delivery problems. An informal conversation between sessions with an auditor revealed that all or essentially all line-item NNSA construction projects were experiencing some kind of delay, which is not surprising given the recent covid pandemic and on-going supply chain problems. Quoting now from Exchange Monitor Publications editor Dan Leone, the following two anecdotes (paywall) are revealing:

“It’s been almost an hour, probably, since I talked about pit production.” -- NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, Feb. 14, 2023. [emphasis added]

Hruby made the remark a half-hour through an hourlong appearance that included the summit’s opening keynote address and a lengthy question-and-answer session with the audience. It was the first session of the day.

The standing-room-only crowd appeared to get the joke.

Pits are the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages. The NNSA is building two new pit factories: one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, one at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The one in Los Alamos could be ready by the end of the decade.

People on stage at the conference talked about things other than pits, but not often.
...

During a question-and-answer session with four senior managers from NNSA’s production and test sites, an audience member took advantage of the ability to ask anonymous questions via mobile device and put the panel on the spot about how the government’s nuclear-weapon factories might return to a Cold War footing — or something even more severe.

“As we look at the geopolitical context,” the unidentified summit-goer asked in fluent strategic jargon, “if the nation has to upload the hedge to accommodate roughly doubling the number of counterforce targets, at least partially rebuild the hedge and deploy some hundreds of new theater nuclear weapons all in the next five to 10 years, how could the sites posture themselves for that?”

The room abruptly went the kind of quiet rooms usually only go when they’re empty.

On the stage, the NNSA’s production-site managers glanced around without speaking. They had spent the last hour discussing some of the challenges of coping with the agency’s current program of five serial nuclear-weapon modernizations — the largest workload of the 21st century by far, but nothing remotely approaching the frenzy of the Cold War.

It was anyone’s guess who would break the nervous silence weighing down the room, and if no one would have guessed that it would be Eric Wollerman, the president of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies in Kansas City, Mo., who had just finished quite a detailed story about polymers, anyone would have understood.

“We don’t have any requirements to do that,” Wollerman matter-of-factly answered the anonymous questioner. “We don’t have any funding to do that. But we can stand ready to serve whenever we need to,” said the man in charge of the NNSA’s factory for non-nuclear nuclear-weapon parts.

The pulse returned to the room. 

Laughter broke out. [Nervous laughter, I would say.] Then applause

That's it for now, thank you all so much for your efforts.

Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group