Response to Technical Pushback on Note 2

Dear Readers,

I received push back on two issues from Note 2: Update on US Missiles, Ukraine, and Russian Response, that I address below. If this is of interest to you, please read. If not, I understand.

Briefly, emerging from the thesis of my book Zen Economics as well as Marxist social theory, I have a social theory of knowledge.

The format of the Note--- with deference to real and alleged content experts, is intended to add color to the thesis of the piece, which is political.

In practical terms, nuclear Armageddon is a political risk. Debate over emerging science that doesn’t impact this political risk is pedantic.

This doesn’t mean that it is either untrue or irrelevant. What it means is that should we, humans, fail to solve the political nature of the current crisis, there will be no humans left to debate the science.

Nature of the Criticism

The first is that the estimate of the destructive capacity of weapons claimed to be related to the Oreshnik missile (SATAN 2) is materially mis-scaled.

First, here is the source of the original claim: Doctorow interview.

One problem with the physics, as it was put to me, is that the largest bomb ever set off created a blast zone that was five miles across. Britain is three-hundred miles across. This difference cannot be overcome through ordinary physics using currently existing technology.

The second issue relates to the first. Nuclear weapons can in theory be attached to an Oreshnik type missile. In fact, the Western press is having a party claiming that the Oreshnik is ‘nuclear capable.’ But so is your car. In multiple searches, I couldn’t find V. Putin stating that the Russian plan was to attach nuclear warheads to the Oreshnik weapon. But he can be found (quote and link below) stating that a grouping of Oreshnik type weapons can cause destruction equivalent to a nuclear blast.

In fact, in explaining the Oreshnik, V. Putin has stated that the missile is ‘conventional,’ meaning non-nuclear.

“Concerning strike capabilities, I have already addressed this. If we deploy multiple such systems simultaneously in a single strike – say, two, three, or four systems – it would be comparable in force to the use of nuclear weapons, albeit they are not nuclear. This is because they are: a) high-precision; b) not equipped with a nuclear explosive device, thus they do not cause environmental contamination.” Yet, the force would be comparable. V. Putin.

The claim that the weapon is conventional carries with it a host of legal advantages under international law and nuclear treaties relative to nuclear weapons. In the current context, Russia was able to respond to the US firing ATACMS missiles into Russia without formally escalating the conflict.

With respect to the Oreshnik being a new type of weapon, this was being said by weapons physicist Ted Postol (min 11), as well as by weapons generalist Scott Ritter (mins 33, 40). To the question: in what way is it new, a first step is to account for what is already known. A second is to inquire into the nature of what is new about it.

In this regard, Scott Ritter is the more plain spoken of the two. Ritter states that the rocket used to propel the Oreshnik was previously known. And he demystifies (Ritter link above) the payload. It is composed of really hard metals configured to cause concentrated destruction. These metals are informally called ‘rods of God’ for both the direction they are delivered from and their physical makeup.

If this is all that there is to the matter, a known rocket carrying a payload with known physical properties, then what differentiates the Oreshnik is 1) the scale of the damage it causes when used in groupings, 2) its specific use-value in destroying buried objects.

Much of the (my) confusion with respect to the Note was over my use of Mr. Doctorow’s application of the qualities of the Oreshnik missile to much larger Russian missiles. The ‘land mass the size of Britain’ claim that I got from Doctorow appears to be an unproved trope related to Russia’s SATAN 2 missile that cites anonymous military sources (see here, here, here). It is the nuclear weapons attached to the SATAN 2 missile that cause the large-scale land mass destruction. But this isn’t what the Oreshnik missile does.

Per V. Putin (link above) and Scott Ritter (link above), the entire point of the Oreshnik missile is to produce narrowly concentrated destruction. Without attaching nuclear weapons, the damage caused is purposely concentrated, narrow, and deep.

This is particularly the case with the Oreshnik missile alone. Recall, I could find no public statement from V. Putin that the Russians plan to combine the Oreshnik technology with any other payload. Without nuclear weapons attached, the blast area is quite narrow. Were an Oreshnik missile to land in Philadelphia (my example in Note), the effect would be narrow but deep. It took six Oreshnik missiles in Ukraine to destroy a one-square-mile munitions facility.

From what I am able to find, the Oreshnik is the only Russian missile that uses its particular technology. Technical explanations of the Russian SATAN 2 and AVANGUARD systems describe them as hypersonic and ‘nuclear capable,’ but there is no mention of ‘rods from God’ or other technology specific to the Oreshnik.

My best guess as to why Mr. Doctorow (link above) framed his comments in terms of ICBMs was to extrapolate the new technology onto existing Russian weapons. But unless I missed a critical step, these combination weapons do not currently exist.

To tie this together, the Russian Oreshnik missile was designed with a very specific purpose in mind--- to destroy fortified and buried targets. It is therefore unsuitable for destroying large land masses--- and the humans that inhabit them.

To repeat, were an Oreshnik missile to land in a large American city, it would destroy what it directly hit, but the surrounding area would not be destroyed. And given that I could find no evidence that the technology has yet been applied to weapons carrying nuclear payloads, it is less than constructive to assert otherwise.

Purpose of ‘Notes’ versus Essays

Essays are for making detailed arguments from multiple angles and perspectives. Notes are hot takes for the purpose of sharing important and timely information in a timely manner.

The reason why I have not written Notes in the past is because I am not a fan of hot takes. What changed my mind is that the Americans keep lobbing missiles into Russia at the same time that Russia is warning that doing so is going to end the world via nuclear annihilation.

The very same Americans who assured us that the US would prevail in the US proxy war in Ukraine are today telling us that the Russians are bluffing with respect to their nuclear red lines. In retrospect, this may or may not prove out. Prospectively, which is all that ‘we’ have, risk adjusted probabilities of this occurring must quantify the risk of ending humanity. The question then for the politicians: is this quantum equivalent to a puppy missing a meal, a bus crash that kills a bicyclist, the Covid-19 pandemic, or something much, much worse?

The reason for quickly coming to consensus on what nuclear annihilation would mean for humanity is that it appears to otherwise be left to the psychological calculations of cloistered and ghettoized politicians who ‘feel’ that beating the other side is the primary consideration. The not-usefulness of doing so with nuclear weapons is that there is no winning a nuclear war. Once a nuclear war begins, the machines will keep firing missiles until long after the last human has been killed.

Part of what stood out in the back-and-forth with the physicists regarding the Note was the absence of urgency, worry, or a sense of a need to take action regarding the threat of nuclear annihilation. In this sense, the physics are a sideshow. Nothing in the back-and-forth was relevant to the political risk that overshadows local technical concerns. And the political risk is that the politicians that created the current mess place their own personal and political interests above those of the people of the world.

To my theory that human knowledge exists socially, that it exists between-us rather than as personal possession, the technical debate seems to have generated something like a consensus around what the new missile is (exactly what V. Putin said it is). The physicists deserve credit for their contribution. That a solution to the political crisis hasn’t been advanced one iota by the debate illustrates why I spent my energy on the politics, and left the details to, for better or worse, designated experts.