No one really seems to be all that concerned about nuclear war anymore

Growing up in the 80s/90s, my peers and I were terrorized with the concept. Any day could be our last. One misstep or miscalculation by the U.S. or Russia and boom -- it's all over. So what's changed?

Today, I’m taking a slight detour from contemporary UFO topic developments. There isn’t much to discuss at the moment anyway. Of course, there were some Peruvian “mummies” of some sort paraded around Mexican congress as aliens recently but that’s about it. I don’t expect much more substantial UFO noise until there are further Galileo Project developments — after all, my primary argument is that this project is the direct target of the current disinformation campaign. Aside from UFOs, there’s something else that’s long bugged me and incidentally I’ve brushed up against it now a few times in the course of research for these blog posts. That’s the issue of a global thermonuclear war.

I’m generally skeptical of any and all claims regarding armageddon or apocalypse. Substantial incentives exist to convince the world the sky is falling. You can more easily control people with fear and also sell them the salvation. If the sky ultimately doesn’t end up falling (either due to your cure or not) people tend to be pleased with that result and aren’t very eager to dig into why the world didn’t end. We’re content to breathe a sigh of relief and move on. During my childhood, the biggest and longest standing claim of imminent armageddon was the threat of global thermonuclear war. There were countless movies and media stories about the ever present threat. But how much of a threat is it really?

Scene from the 1983 film WarGames

I don’t know exactly what is going on in Ukraine these days. I’m familiar with the current media narrative but I don’t know all that much about the reality there. That region is a closed-off intelligence hotbed right now so I don’t expect much in the way of factual content to emerge. While I’m mostly agnostic about what’s going on, the conspicuous lack of concern about affairs spiraling into a nuclear war has caught my attention. It’s in sharp contrast to all of the rhetoric I experienced growing up. In trying to resolve this dissonance, I found myself considering 3 possibilities:

1. The war isn’t strictly real. I don’t want to go down another rabbit hole here but there is a possibility that all sides are mutually interested in continuing whatever is taking place and Russia/U.S./Ukraine aren’t truly enemy combatants but something more accurately described as quasi-business partners. None of the parties intend to use any weapons of last resort because in reality none of them are truly fighting for their existence.

2. The U.S. and Russia are being cavalier and reckless. Perhaps they are under-appreciating the détente of the last 30 years or so. Memories such as mine may have sufficiently faded and people don’t clearly remember how dangerous nuclear war can be.

3. Something about the classic nuclear weapon WW3 armageddon scenario itself is a lie and for whatever reason the world isn’t in much actual danger from their use.

My suspicion lately is that some combination of all 3 are adequate and necessary explanations for the observed behavior. While 1) may be true to whatever extent, how can the involved parties be sure everyone in command is on the same page? Counting on rationality seems fraught especially given the current proliferation of psychological warfare techniques which could seemingly trigger poor decision making somewhere in nearly all chains of command. There may be no intention to trigger open nuclear war but perhaps an errant surface-to-air defense missile or other hostile aircraft interaction could result in a cascade effect that quickly causes things to escalate out of control. While I think 2) is the case for many people, I don’t think it’s likely to be the sole explanation for the behavior of those in the highest echelons of power. Therefore, I’ve reasoned something about the classic nuclear armageddon scenario must also be a lie.

What could the lie be? One option could be that Russia doesn’t have significant nuclear capabilities. It could very well be true that they aren’t equipped to carry out a full-scale nuclear attack on the U.S. and allies. While a civilization-ending attack may or may not be a possibility, I think it’s reasonable to assume significant devastation on the order of 10s of millions of lives could result from whatever nuclear weapon delivery capabilities they do have — assuming the U.S. has no effective counter-measures. But what I’ve been wondering about lately is the possibility that the U.S. does in fact have extremely effective counter-measures and has had them for a long time. Perhaps they have just kept them mostly quiet.

Readers of this blog may recall my piece concerning the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. In going through his physical files and researching him online with respect to the UFO topic, it became very clear to me that active defense from global thermonuclear war was at the forefront of his thinking. He considered it absurd to rely on game theory to save us all from nuclear armageddon when there was no reason to believe we couldn’t engineer adequate active defense mechanisms. Lobbying efforts partially on his part seem likely to have influenced Ronald Reagan’s official initiation of the Strategic Defense Initiative. For people who lived through that era, they may better remember SDI by the term pejoratively used by the media of the time: Star Wars. My recollection of it was hazy but prior to researching it recently, if you had asked me what it was about I would’ve said some goofy idea about shooting ICBMs with space lasers that Reagan cooked up due to some fever dream and after spending a bunch of money on the project it was declared ridiculously infeasible and mothballed sometime in the early 90s. But perhaps my recollection is of a narrative and not necessarily reality.

Artist’s depiction of a nuclear detonation pumped laser array engaging three targets.

Bringing this article back to the subject of UFOs, one particular case I read about made an impression on me. In 1964, USAF officer Robert Jacobs was tasked with providing profile-view imaging of test ICBM missile launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base using a tracking site he installed further up the coast in Big Sur. During a test launch of a dummy warhead on an Atlas D missile, his equipment recorded something unusual. According to him, after separation of the final stage rocket booster, he saw what seemed like a flying saucer shaped object shoot some sort of energy-directed weapon from 4 different angles at the warhead causing it to tumble out of the sky. Through the years he’s told the same very specific and consistent story. He seems to believe whatever was responsible was some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence. But what if SDI-like efforts had already been underway well before its public launch in 1983? We know there were efforts out of Teller’s lab going back to at least the 70s where directed energy weapons were being conceived of for missile defense. Is it possible what Jacobs actually saw was a proto-SDI system? I don’t know but it sounds slightly more plausible to me than his own theory. In any case, I highly encourage you to watch his first-hand account below.

The notion of using directed energy weapons for missile defense had been publicly deemed infeasible almost as soon as work on SDI began. The notion allegedly came about as the result of a failed test of creating nuclear detonation powered X-ray lasers. SDI launched in 1983 and this was the same year this test was carried out. It seems odd to give up on the idea so quickly. Maybe it was given up on or maybe in reality it wasn’t. The military certainly seems interested in it more recently. What’s not clear is what actually happened to Star Wars. It’s said that the program by that name officially ended in 1993 but at least parts of it were renamed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Was SDI really a boondoggle or is it a very functional defense system still in use today? Maybe we should ask Avi Loeb, founder of the Galileo Project, for his opinion. His bio states that he worked on SDI from 1983-1988.

In 2019, we’re told space-based interceptor development resumed for the first time in 25 years with President Trump’s singing of the National Defense Authorization Act. Early development contracts have been awarded to L3Harris and SpaceX. It’s been referred to by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo as the “Strategic Defense Initiative of our time.” If we’re still concerned with neutralizing threats from space then why did we allegedly give up on it for the 25 years prior? That doesn’t make sense to me. Whether or not the current apparent lack of concern with nuclear war has something to do with U.S. defense capabilities, something about the general nuclear armageddon narrative seems inconsistent with the behavior of people in power. Curious if any of you have any thoughts on the matter.

Thanks for reading!