https://www.globalresearch.ca/turning-a-blind-eye-towards-armageddon-u-s-leaders-reject-nuclear-winter-studies/5586228?utm_campaign=magnet&utm_source=article_page&utm_medium=related_articles
Turning a Blind Eye Towards Armageddon — U.S. Leaders Reject Nuclear Winter Studies
The greatest threat to humanity is nuclear war.
While public opinion is largely misinformed, US “decision-makers” including president Trump are also unaware and misinformed as to the consequences of their actions. Multi-billion dollar bonanza for the Military-Industrial Complex: “Scientific opinion” on contract to Pentagon presents tactical nuclear as “peace-making” bombs.
Global Research will be featuring on a regular basis a number of articles and reports on the dangers of nuclear war focussing on the scientific, policy and military dimensions.
Forward this article.
The objective is to build a cohesive and Worldwide campaign against nuclear weapons.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 21, 2017
Now 10 years ago, several of the world’s leading climatologists and physicists chose to reinvestigate the long-term environmental impacts of nuclear war. The peer-reviewed studies they produced are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research, which is subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before final publication in scholarly journals. No serious errors were found in these studies and their findings remain unchallenged.
Working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA, these scientists used state-of-the-art computer modeling to evaluate the consequences of a range of possible nuclear conflicts. They began with a hypothetical war in Southeast Asia, in which a total of 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs were detonated in the cities of India and Pakistan. Please consider the following images of Hiroshima, before and after the detonation of the atomic bomb, which had an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The detonation of an atomic bomb with this explosive power will instantly ignite fires over a surface area of three to five square miles. In the recent studies, the scientists calculated that the blast, fire, and radiation from a war fought with 100 atomic bombs could produce direct fatalities comparable to all of those worldwide in World War II, or to those once estimated for a “counterforce” nuclear war between the superpowers. However, the long-term environmental effects of the war could significantly disrupt the global weather for at least a decade, which would likely result in a vast global famine.
The scientists predicted that nuclear firestorms in the burning cities would cause at least five million tons of black carbon smoke to quickly rise above cloud level into the stratosphere, where it could not be rained out. The smoke would circle the Earth in less than two weeks and would form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would remain for more than a decade. The smoke would absorb warming sunlight, which would heat the smoke to temperatures near the boiling point of water, producing ozone losses of 20 to 50 percent over populated areas. This would almost double the amount of UV-B reaching the most populated regions of the mid-latitudes, and it would create UV-B indices unprecedented in human history. In North America and Central Europe, the time required to get a painful sunburn at mid-day in June could decrease to as little as six minutes for fair-skinned individuals.
As the smoke layer blocked warming sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface, it would produce the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years. The scientists calculated that global food production would decrease by 20 to 40 percent during a five-year period following such a war. Medical experts have predicted that the shortening of growing seasons and corresponding decreases in agricultural production could cause up to two billion people to perish from famine.
The climatologists also investigated the effects of a nuclear war fought with the vastly more powerful modern thermonuclear weapons possessed by the United States, Russia, China, France, and England. Some of the thermonuclear weapons constructed during the 1950s and 1960s were 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
During the last 30 years, the average size of thermonuclear or “strategic” nuclear weapons has decreased. Yet today, each of the approximately 3,540 strategic weapons deployed by the United States and Russia is seven to 80 times more powerful than the atomic bombs modeled in the India-Pakistan study. The smallest strategic nuclear weapon has an explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT, compared to an atomic bomb with an average explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.
Strategic nuclear weapons produce much larger nuclear firestorms than do atomic bombs. For example, a standard Russian 800-kiloton warhead, on an average day, will ignite fires covering a surface area of 90 to 152 square miles.
A war fought with hundreds or thousands of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would ignite immense nuclear firestorms covering land surface areas of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. The scientists calculated that these fires would produce up to 180 million tons of black carbon soot and smoke, which would form a dense, global stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke would remain in the stratosphere for 10 to 20 years, and it would block as much as 70 percent of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 percent from the Southern Hemisphere. So much sunlight would be blocked by the smoke that the noonday sun would resemble a full moon at midnight.
Under such conditions, it would only require a matter of days or weeks for daily minimum temperatures to fall below freezing in the largest agricultural areas of the Northern Hemisphere, where freezing temperatures would occur every day for a period of between one to more than two years. Average surface temperatures would become colder than those experienced 18,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, and the prolonged cold would cause average rainfall to decrease by up to 90%. Growing seasons would be completely eliminated for more than a decade; it would be too cold and dark to grow food crops, which would doom the majority of the human population.
Nuclear Winter in Brief
The profound cold and darkness following nuclear war became known as nuclear winter and was first predicted in 1983 by a group of NASA scientists led by Carl Sagan. During the mid-1980s, a large body of research was done by such groups as the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), the World Meteorological Organization, and the U.S. National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; their work essentially supported the initial findings of the 1983 studies.
The idea of nuclear winter, published and supported by prominent scientists, generated extensive public alarm and put political pressure on the United States and Soviet Union to reverse a runaway nuclear arms race, which, by 1986, had created a global nuclear arsenal of more than 65,000 nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this created a backlash among many powerful military and industrial interests, who undertook an extensive media campaign to brand nuclear winter as “bad science” and the scientists who discovered it as “irresponsible.”
Critics used various uncertainties in the studies and the first climate models (which are primitive by today’s standards) as a basis to criticize and reject the concept of nuclear winter. In 1986, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who predicted drops in global cooling about half as large as those first predicted by the 1983 studies and described this as a “nuclear autumn.” The nuclear autumn studies were later shown to be deeply flawed, but the proof came too late to stop a massive smear campaign that effectively discredited the initial studies.
Nuclear winter was subject to criticism and damning articles in the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. In 1987, the National Review called nuclear winter a “fraud.” In 2000, Discover Magazine published an article that described nuclear winter as one of “The Twenty Greatest Scientific Blunders in History.” The endless smear campaign was successful; the general public, and even most anti-nuclear activists, were left with the idea that nuclear winter had been scientifically disproved.
Rejection by Leaders
Yet the scientists did not give up. In 2006, they returned to their labs to perform the research I have previously described. Their new research not only upheld the previous findings but also found that the earlier studies actually underestimated the environmental effects of nuclear war.
Dr. Robock of Rutgers and Dr. Toon of the University of Colorado have spent years attempting to bring official attention to their work and get follow-up research studies done by appropriate agencies in the federal government. In a recent (2016) interview, Dr. Toon stated:
The Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, which should be investigating this problem, have done absolutely nothing. They have not published a single paper, in the open literature, analyzing this problem … We have made a list of where we think the important issues are, and we have gone to every [federal] agency we can think of with these lists, and said “Don’t you think someone should study this?” Basically, everyone we have tried so far has said, “Well that’s not my job.”
In the same interview, Dr. Robock also noted:
The Department of Homeland Security really should fund this. They will fund you to study one terrorist bomb in New York City. When you explain to them that a war between India and Pakistan is a much greater threat to the U.S. homeland than one terrorist bomb, as horrible as that is, they respond with “Oh, well that’s not my job, go talk to some other program manager” — who, of course, doesn’t exist.
After the more recent series of studies were published in 2007 and 2008, Drs. Robock and Toon also made a number of requests to meet with members of the Obama administration. The scientists offered to brief Cabinet members and the White House staff about their findings, which they assumed would have a great impact upon nuclear weapons policy. Their offers were met with indifference.
Finally, after several years of trying, Drs. Robock and Toon were allowed an audience with John Holdren, Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama on Science and Technology. Dr. Robock also eventually met with Rose Gottemoeller, then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Dr. Robock has written to me that, after these meetings, he and Dr. Toon were left with the impression that neither Holdren nor Gottemoeller think the nuclear winter research “is correct.”
But it is not only Holdren and Gottemoeller who reject the nuclear winter research. Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, cites a source who confirms that the group that determines the “full range of activities related to the development, production, maintenance (upkeep) and elimination (retirement, disassembly and disposal) of all United States nuclear weapons — the members of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council — have stated that “the predictions of nuclear winter were disproved years ago.”
The members of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council include:
- Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics
- Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Under Secretary for Nuclear Security of the Department of Energy
- Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
- Commander of the United States Strategic Command
It is important to understand that some members of this group — especially the Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) — also develop the policies that guide the use of nuclear weapons.
Perhaps General John Hyten, Head of USSTRATCOM, who is in charge of the U.S. nuclear triad, and General Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second highest ranking officer in the United States, have never seen or heard of the 21st century nuclear winter studies. Perhaps when they hear a question about “nuclear winter,” they only remember the smear campaigns done against the early studies. Or, maybe, they just choose not to accept the new scientific research on nuclear winter, despite the fact that it has withstood the criticism of the global scientific community.
Regardless, the rejection of nuclear winter research by the top leaders of the United States raises some profoundly important questions:
Do U.S. military and political leaders fully understand the consequences of nuclear war? Do they realize that even a “successful” nuclear first-strike against Russia could cause most Americans to die from nuclear famine?
In 2010, Drs. Toon and Robock wrote in Physics Today:
We estimate that the direct effects of using the 2012 arsenals would lead to hundreds of millions of fatalities. The indirect effects would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.
In 2013, Drs. Toon and Robock wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that:
A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in Self-Assured Destruction.
Renewed Cold War
Although president-elect Trump appears to favor a return to the policy of détente with Russia, many if not most U.S. political leaders appear to support the Obama administration’s policies of direct confrontation with Putin’s Russia. Mainstream corporate media, including the editorial boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post, routinely engage in anti-Russian and anti-Putin rhetoric that surpasses the hate speech of the McCarthy era. Under President Obama, the United States has renewed the Cold War with Russia, with little or no debate or protest, and has subsequently engaged in proxy wars with Russia in Ukraine and Syria, as well as threatening military action against China in the South China Sea.
In response to what NATO leaders describe as Russia’s “dangerous and aggressive actions,” NATO has built up a “rapid-response force” of 40,000 troops on the Russian border in the Baltic States and Poland. This force includes hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery. NATO troops stationed in Estonia are within artillery range of St. Petersburg, the second largest city of Russia.
The United States has deployed its Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system in Romania and is constructing another such BMD system in Poland. The Mark 41 launch system used in the Aegis Ashore systems can be used to launch a variety of missiles, including long-range nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
In other words, the United States has built and is building launch sites for nuclear missiles on the Russian border. This fact has been widely reported on Russian TV and has infuriated the Russian public. In June, Russian President Putin specifically warned that Russia would be forced to retaliate against this threat.
While Russian officials maintain that its actions are normal and routine, Russia now appears to be preparing for war. On October 5, 2016, Russia conducted a nation-wide civil defense drill that included 40 million of its people being directed to fallout shelters. Reuters reported two days later that Russia had moved its Iskander nuclear-capable missiles to Kaliningrad, which borders Poland.
While the United States ignores the danger of nuclear war, Russian scholar Stephen Cohen reports that the danger of war with the United States is the leading news story in Russia. Cohen states:
Just as there is no discussion of the most existential question of our time, in the American political class — the possibility of war with Russia — it is the only thing being discussed in the Russian political class . . . These are two different political universes. In Russia, all the discussion in the newspapers, and there is plenty of free discussion on talk show TV, which echoes what the Kremlin is thinking, online, in the elite newspapers, and in the popular broadcasts, the number 1, 2, 3, and 4 topics of the day are the possibility of war with the United States.
Cohen goes on to say:
I conclude from this that the leadership of Russia actually believes now, in reaction to what the United States and NATO have said and done over the last two years, and particularly in reaction to the breakdown of the proposed cooperation in Syria, and the rhetoric coming out of Washington, that war is a real possibility. I can’t remember when, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, that the Moscow leadership came to this conclusion in its collective head.
Perhaps this narrative will change under president-elect Trump. However, he is inheriting a situation fraught with danger, which retains the possibility of direct military conflict with Russia in Ukraine and Syria, as well as increasingly militarized confrontation with China in the South China Sea.
My own personal assessment of the state of the nuclear danger today is that it is profound. The United States is sleepwalking towards nuclear war. Our leaders have turned a blind eye to the scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war, and our military appears to be intent on making “Russia back down.” This is a recipe for unlimited human disaster.
It is still not too late to seek dialogue, diplomacy, and détente with Russia and China, and to create a global dialogue about the existential dangers of nuclear war. We must return to the understanding that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. This can be achieved if our political and military leaders listen to the warnings from the scientific community about the long-term global environmental consequences of nuclear war.
President-elect Trump and President Putin must publically acknowledge and discuss the peer-reviewed studies that predict a U.S.-Russian nuclear war will likely wipe out most of the human race. All nations and peoples have a vested interest in eliminating the nuclear arsenals that continue to threaten their existence.
....
https://edwardcurtin.com/the-world-wants-to-be-deceived/
The World Wants to Be Deceived
My title comes from a 19th century author whose name does not matter nor would it mean much if I mentioned him. It’s an old truth that has not changed a bit over the centuries. I think, however, it would be more linguistically accurate to say that most people want to be deceived, for the world, the earth doesn’t give a damn, as the French poet Jacques Prévert reminds us in “Song in the Blood”:
There are great puddles of blood on the world
where’s it all going all this spilled blood
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk
funny kind of drunkography then
so wise . . . so monotonous . . .
No the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly its four seasons
rain . . . snow
hail . . . fair weather
never is it drunk
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It doesn’t give a damn
The earth
But people, the thinking reeds as Pascal called us, we, who through the support of wars and violence of all sorts, care just enough to want to be deceived as to what we are doing by making so much blood that is inside people get to the outside for the earth to drink.
I could, of course, quote liberally from truth tellers down through history who have said the same thing about self-deception with all its shades and nuances. Those quotations are endless. Why bother? At some very deep level in the recesses of their hearts, people know it’s true. I could make a pretty essay here, be erudite and eloquent, and weave a web of wisdom from all those the world says were the great thinkers because they are now dead and can no longer detect hypocrisy.
For the desire to be deceived and hypocrisy (Greek hypokrites, stage actor, a pretender) are kissing cousins. I write this to try to say something of value about the mass idiocy of the media’s daily barrage of lies and stupidities that pass for news on the front pages and newscasts of the corporate media. And the people who believe them.
It is not easy. No matter how obviously absurd the claims about Chinese “spy” balloons, the shooting down of unidentified flying objects, reports of how Russia is losing the war in Ukraine, all the support for presidents and prime ministers who shill for the war industries, etc. – a list that could be extended indefinitely on a daily basis – these media are relentless in presenting government propaganda juxtaposed with trivia.
When you think they must realize they have gone too far since even a moron could see through their fabrications, they double down. And I am referring only to what they do report, not what they omit – e.g. how the U.S. has restricted aid to the earthquake victims in Syria or Seymour Hersh’s report on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, two examples of terror by a terrorist state that must be protected at all costs. This is the protection racket by omission and commission.
Maybe an anecdote would help. A week ago, I ran into an old friend at a coffee shop. Hersh’s article, aspects of which I question, had just come out and I asked him if he had seen it. He said he hadn’t but didn’t know anything about such pipelines being blown up. I was stunned. A devout consumer of mainstream media, yet he somehow missed this major September 2022 event in the U.S. war against Russia that was reported widely by the media he relies upon. Those media went on to suggest that Russia blew up its own pipelines, a claim beyond ridicule but one that was part of its war propaganda narrative. My friend is a guy who has strong opinions about everything and finds NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, etc. to be credible news sources. How could he have missed one of the major stories of 2022, one that The New York Times, etc. was reporting on into December, still suggesting that Russia did the deed? How could he have missed the pipeline story whose reverberations spread through all aspects of the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine when it was referenced in so many reports of gas and oil prices, a cold winter for Europe, and so many other issues? Its ramifications are manifold and have been reported as such, but he had never heard of it. I was stunned.
I wanted to quote him Dylan’s facetious words from “The Ballad of the Thin Man”: “’Cause something is happening/And you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” But I did not.
I have spent a week wondering how it is possible that he didn’t know anything about the pipeline explosions. I am sure he wasn’t lying to me. So how explain it?
In the interim, as I have been trying to comprehend these matters, the Super Bowl with its mesmeric half-time spectacle replete with crotch grabbing has come and gone, and I have read an interesting article by Ethan Strauss, a sports journalist, “Why America Needs Football. Even its Brutality” that raises important questions.
Much has been written about football’s violence and the injuries it causes, the most recent example being the near fatal injury to Damar Hamlin of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills that garnered headlines for weeks (even though why he suffered cardiac arrest has been left unanswered since that would raise the COVID vaccine problem, which is also taboo). Strauss notes the many arguments calling for the banning of football – the war game – because of its violence. He notes that it is very true that football is very violent but that this is part of its great appeal. He writes:
And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.
Today, at 6:30 p.m., eastern time, begins the biggest spectacle of them all: the Super Bowl, where we channel those ancient animal spirits into a highly commercialized event that ends with fireworks and a shiny trophy.
We should celebrate that.
He doesn’t argue for the celebration of war, which he opposes, but for the war-like game of football. To Malcolm Gladwell’s statement in support of the banning of football as “a moral abomination” – “This is a sport that is living in the past that has no connection to the realities to the game right now and no connection to American society.” – he responds quite rightly that Gladwell is wrong:
In 2022, 82 of the top 100 TV shows in America were NFL games, and the top 50 most viewed sporting events were football games or events that immediately followed football games. By contrast, in 2016, only 33 of the top 50 were football-related. The country has lost interest in so much else, but football remains a huge draw and, in fact, is gaining relative market share.
Americans love violence, not just the military propaganda that precedes the Super Bowl game, but the smashing hits that players make and take in the games. It is hard to deny. Strauss goes on to show how over ninety percent of former NFL players who suffer from daily lifelong pain say they would do it again. The violence is intoxicating and Americans get drunk on it. It is the American Way.
I don’t agree with all of Strauss’s points or assumptions, especially his imperative that “we have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage,” but he clearly is right that despite all the rhetoric about how terrible violence is, there is something about it that Americans love. D. H. Lawrence’s point a century ago still applies: “The essential America soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
But this killer soul must be hidden behind a wall of deceptions as the U.S. warfare state ceaselessly wages wars all around the world. It must be hidden behind feel good news stories about how Americans really care about others, but only others that they are officially allowed to care about. Not Syrians, Yemenis, Russian speakers of the Donbass, Palestinians, et al. The terrorist nature of decades upon decades of U.S. savagery and the indifference of so many Americans go hand-in-hand but escape notice in the corporate media. The major theme of these media is that the United States government is the great defender of freedom, peace, and democracy. Every once in a while, a scapegoat, one rotten apple in the barrel, is offered up to show that all is not perfect in paradise. But essentially it is one massive deception.
There’s a make-believe quality to this vast spectacle of violent power and false innocence that baffles the mind. To see and hear the corporate masked media magicians’ daily reports is to enter a world of pure illusion that deserves only sardonic laughter but sadly captivates so many adult children desperate to believe. This is so even as the propagandists’ trial balloons are popped in the society of the comedic spectacle.
But back to my friend I mentioned earlier. He hates violence in all its forms, is strongly opposed to war, and has a most compassionate heart, yet he remains devoted to the media that have lied to us – and continue to do so – into war after war, a media that clearly fronts for the warfare state. I still can’t explain how he knew nothing about the pipeline explosions. Nor can I explain his allegiance to the media that lie to him daily.
Even as his government, led by that very media, leads the world toward nuclear annihilation, he remains true to his media informants.
I am stunned.
....
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/18/what-we-know-about-the-us-air-forces-balloon-party-so-far/
What We Know About The US Air Force’s Balloon Party So Far
You know, everyone’s always talking about how the US military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military-industrial complex, but that’s not entirely true. Turns out the US military is also used for shooting down party balloons.
In an article titled “Object downed by US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon,” The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports the following:
The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory.
In a blogpost, the group did not link the two events. But the trajectory of the pico balloon before its last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48am that day suggests a connection – as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its seventh circumnavigation.
If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 (£365,000) to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12 (£10).
“The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type,” writes Steve Trimble for Aviation Week, who first broke the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade story.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1626746188656693248?s=20
This information would put a bit of a wobble on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s comments to ABC’s This Week on Sunday that all three of the balloons shot down through the weekend were Chinese surveillance devices, saying “the Chinese were humiliated” by the US catching them in their sinister espionage plot. If the US air force did in fact just spent millions of dollars shooting down American party balloons, it wouldn’t be the Chinese who are humiliated.
And it looks like that is indeed what happened. On Tuesday the National Security Council’s John Kirby said the “leading explanation” for the three unidentified flying objects that were shot down is that they were “balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.” On Thursday President Biden told the press that “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”
US and Canadian authorities have reportedly given up searching for debris from two of the objects that were shot down, which would make sense given that one wouldn’t expect to find much debris from a small balloon that was exploded by an air-to-air missile designed to take out fighter planes.
And this all comes out after US officials told The Washington Post that the “Chinese spy balloon” which started this historically unprecedented multi-day frenzy of aerial kinetic warfare over North America was probably never intended for surveillance of the United States at all. Experts assess that the balloon was blown over the continent entirely by accident, trying to reconcile that narrative with the contradictory US government claims of intentional Chinese espionage by suggesting that perhaps the Chinese had intended for the balloon to be used for spying on US military forces in the Pacific or something.
So to recap, the US air force shot down a Chinese balloon which US officials have subsequently admitted was only blown over the US by accident, then went on a spree of shooting things out of the sky which it turns out were probably civilian party balloons. The entire American political/media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more cold war escalations over what is in all probability four harmless balloons.
And what’s really crazy is that they’re probably going to get those increases in militarism and cold war escalations they’ve been calling for, despite the entire ordeal originating primarily in the overactive imaginations of the drivers of the US empire. The shrieking hysterical panic about “Chinese spy balloons” has dwarfed the coverage of the revelations contradicting that narrative, and China hawks have been using the occasion to argue for increases in military spending. The Atlantic’s Richard Fontaine got all excited and wrote a whole article about how the threat of Chinese spy balloons can be used “to rally public concern and build international solidarity” against China.
These are the people who rule our world. They are not wise. They are not insightful. They are not even particularly intelligent. The US empire is a Yosemite Sam cartoon character who at any time can just flip out and start firing Sidewinder missiles at random pieces of junk in the sky, screaming “I’ll blast yer head off ya varmint!” If the US war machine was a civilian human, their family would be quietly talking amongst themselves about the possibility of conservatorship.
These are the last people in the world who should be running things, and they are the last people in the world who should be armed with nuclear weapons. But that’s exactly where we find ourselves in this bizarre slice of spacetime. God help us all.
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