Decline and Fall by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer [Greer, John Michael]
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781550925579
Publisher: New Society Publishers (eBook)
Published: 2014-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

7

THE CONSEQUENCES OF COLLAPSE

WHETHER OR NOT it ends in a military debacle, the decline and fall of America’s empire will have an immense impact on nearly every aspect of life across much of the globe, just as the parallel implosion of the British Empire had in its day. A book much bigger than this one could be filled with speculations and educated guesses about how that impact will play out. For our purposes, though, it’s enough to focus on the way the end of American empire will affect three parts of the contemporary world order: the calculus of nuclear deterrence, the survival of American client states such as Israel, and the troubled southern border of the United States.

All three of these have gathered a bumper crop of misunderstanding and mythology in recent years. It’s remarkable, for example, how many people seem to forget that a nuclear weapon is simply an explosive. It’s a very powerful explosive, and one that produces some dangerous residues when it blows up, but it’s still just an explosive. All it can do is blow things to smithereens, and unless your problem can be solved by blowing something to smithereens — or threatening to do so — a nuclear weapon will do you no good at all. You’d have a hard time figuring that out from the way nuclear weapons get discussed in this country, though. Once the prospect of using a nuclear weapon enters the discussion, even the most basic sort of rational thought waves goodbye and sends back a forwarding address from another state.

Follow military debates on the blogosphere and you can find plenty of examples of nuclear irrationality. Every time the United States and China end up at loggerheads, for example, it’s a safe bet that online forums will be swamped with claims that the United States ought to carry out a nuclear first strike on the Chinese. It’s hard to think of a better example that people simply aren’t thinking things through.

Let’s suppose that a US president, faced with a crisis, does in fact order a nuclear first strike on China’s strategic nuclear arsenal. Let’s also suppose that, ignoring all the rules of strategy from Sun Tsu on down, the Chinese haven’t anticipated the possibility, don’t have their arsenal ready to launch, and haven’t informed the American government that the bombs will go up and the boom will come down the moment an American missile crosses into Chinese airspace. We’ll say that the US strike is enormously, un-realistically effective; of the 175 or so Chinese nuclear weapons, 174 of them are vaporized on the ground along with their launch systems, and only one missile, with a single 100-kiloton warhead on the business end, arcs through the ionosphere and explodes in a low air burst over San Francisco.

The result? The United States has just suffered the greatest disaster in its history.1 The total death toll from that one warhead would likely exceed the 600,000 military deaths in the Civil War, our nation’s bloodiest conflict to date.

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