When the nukes go flying

When the nukes go flying, I’d rather be in the southern hemisphere than the northern one, given that most of the boom-boom will be polluting the top half of the globe. But if you’ve got to be in the north, the Commonwealth might be a good bet. There are probably no likely targets immediately upwind of the CNMI. See? Now you’ve got an extra blessing to tally at the Thanksgiving table this year.

And save some leftover turkey for me; I’m re-stocking my homemade fallout shelter with extra beer and pretzels just in case. It looks to me like nuclear nastiness is a likely event in the next few years.

Now, most people get frothing at the mouth hysterical when the nuclear issue is brought up, but emotion never has been a substitute for reason when trying to crack the mystery of the future by the brute force of logic. I was a U.S. naval officer during a slice of the Cold War, and I can assure you that nuclear weapons are not an “unthinkable” option for nations armed with them. We had them on ships for anti-submarine use. We had them on aircraft carriers as payloads for attack aircraft. We had them in submarines in the strategic “boomer” fleet. And the Marines even fielded them in artillery for land skirmishes. The Soviets had a roughly similar posture, though they weren’t big in the aircraft carrier business.

But time has ticked by, and the Soviet Union is gone now, so why do I think that nuke nastiness is more, not less, likely these days? That’s a good question. And I won’t answer it; I’ve had the same pet theory on this note for a long time now, and I can see no mileage in airing my homespun hypothesis, no gain to be had from publicly bucking “conventional wisdom.” I don’t want every medicated neurotic screeching at me about this issue, so I won’t open this Pandora’s box.

As for nuclear warfare, the most ominous box of all is the one labeled “escalation.” That’s a mighty dicey one to unwrap. A little nuclear war can snowball into a big one if it invokes sufficient ire of a military with genuinely strategic capability. And so any theory–mine included–must address two elements: (1) The initial use of a nuke, and (2) The reaction of the world’s strategic nuclear parties to that initial use.

And on that latter note, we have to re-open the specter of Ivan the Commie. Russia isn’t asleep at the wheel, it is reportedly developing its first new strategic nuclear missile since the USSR collapsed. That must be a pretty high priority for such a poor country to chose nukes over food and vodka. Something must be compelling them to make such a decision, eh?

But at issue, to my mind, isn’t whether Uncle Sam and Ivan will spontaneously decide to duke it out directly. The issue is whether one or the other of them will opt for the nuclear option against smaller, problematic non-nuclear states. What then? Would Russia sit idly by if the U.S. hit, say, Iran with a tactical nuclear strike?

There are a lot more variables in the nuclear equation now than there were in the Cold War. There is a lot of room for deception and skullduggery. So we’ll be hearing a lot more about nukes, and nuclear threats, in the coming years. Some of the huff and puff will be legitimate news, and some will be smoke and mirrors to shape public opinion.

The day is coming when nuclear weapons are used. This would have no direct effect on the Commonwealth…unless the Nauru building is on somebody’s target list, which I sort of doubt. But if those scary old Cold War scenarios about intercontinental ballistic missiles crop up again, then the CNMI is going to join the rest of the world in having an angst party. What is past is prologue, and the atomic bomb pit on Tinian is a good place to visit and contemplate that fact.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)