Underneath the Hazelnut Tree

A comment on wars and exterminations by Albert Bates

This post is reproduced from Albert Bates’ blog “The Great Change” with the kind permission of the author. It cites my recent book “Exterminations”

Underneath the Hazelnut Tree, Me Honey and Me

It doesn’t mean we stop shooting at each other, it just means we could switch from bullets to paint balls.

Albert Bates

Dec 17, 2024

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Sometime in the next few weeks, the Science and Security Board of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with its nine Nobel laureates, will announce the 2025 setting of the Doomsday Clock. The clock was started ticking by Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other Manhattan Project veterans in January, 1947, using the countdown to zero to convey the near-term extinction threat to us all. The clock reached two minutes to midnight in 2019 and moved up to 100 seconds in 2022. In 2023 it moved still closer, to 90 seconds—the nearest to global catastrophe it has ever been—and where it remains.

I suspect that the hand will now advance a few more ticks forward in January, but I could be wrong. There is a new player on the field, one that might just change the game. It goes by name of Hazelnut Tree, or Oreshnik (фундук) in Russian.

First, for any recent arrivals, here is some historical context.

Getty Images: MacArthur map briefing, 1951.

Flush with the atomic victory over Japan, in April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US Forces in the Pacific, proposed dropping between 30 and 50 nuclear bombs on both sides of the North Korean/Chinese border. While knowledge of the lingering effects of fallout was primitive at the time, MacArthur expected, from his observations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the whole border would likely be rendered impassable for years, perhaps decades. Of course, we know now the Demilitarized Zone created by such bombing would remain lethal for centuries to millennia and would gradually spill over into surrounding ecosystems, doing unseen damage over a much broader, potentially global, area. We are still experiencing something like that from Chernobyl and Fukushima.

As Ugo Bardi recounts in his book Exterminations: Preparing for the Unthinkable, President Harry Truman not only denied MacArthur’s outlandish request, but he recalled the general to Washington and fired him. Bardi writes:

Remarkably, the decision not to use nuclear weapons in Korea was made by a single person, Harry Truman. Even more remarkably, Truman was the same president who had authorized the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians by nuclear weapons in 1945.

A few years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to ease tensions and possibly forestall nations like China and Russia from acquiring nuclear weapons by announcing the “Atoms for Peace” program. Essentially, the US would cloak its nuclear arsenal expansion in electricity-producing nuclear reactors, the technology owned and licensed by the government, and collection of the “waste” (bomb-suitable material) entirely the remit of the Atomic Energy Commission, later renamed the Department of Energy. With its bomb factories disguised as power plants, the United States went on to build an impressive arsenal of atomic weapons.

As might easily have been foreseen, China, Russia and several other nations ramped up their own atomic bomb programs. The true number of such countries is still a bit of a mystery—South Africa? Iran?—but with AI and MUF (Missing Unaccounted For), the technology is no longer far from the reach of small states and non-state actors. The clock ticks ever closer to midnight.

Except that the Ukraine war may have just stopped time.

The development of the international nuclear arsenal from 1945 to the present has been marked by significant milestones, including the emergence of new nuclear states and fluctuations in the total number of nuclear warheads.

Anyone who has watched Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (available on YouTube) will recognize how slippery the slope is to all-out nuclear armageddon. Bardi recalls:

Nevertheless, for a while, the military authorities gallantly attempted to convince people that a nuclear war could be survived and even "won." You may have seen the clip titled Duck and Cover produced in 1952 by the United States Civil Defense Agency. Together with various booklets, it provided instructions on what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Apparently, ducking under a desk was supposed to be enough.

Fortunately, an agreement was reached in the 1970s that an all-out nuclear war would have been so destructive that it would have had no winners and perhaps not even survivors. A certain degree of sanity eventually appeared in the debate, and the result was the" Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," which entered into force in 1970, with 191 states signing it. The "Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty," opened for signature in 1996. It is not yet in force, but it has been effective in stopping nuclear tests in the atmosphere.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the stockpiled nuclear bombs were dismantled, and the highly enriched uranium they contained was downgraded to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. Today, the total number of warheads worldwide has declined to about 12,000, of which only a few thousand are kept on high alert and ready to be launched. This is good news, but the number of warheads is still way too large for any purpose conceivable by human beings not affected by serious psychotic impairment.

Unfortunately, that seems to be a common pathology among government officials, and the result is that some military organizations still keep more than enough nuclear warheads to destroy civilization and exterminate most of humankind.

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There seems to exist a general agreement that at least a few thousand nuclear explosions would be needed to generate a radioactive fallout cloud sufficient to exterminate a large fraction of humankind That is already something to ponder because such a scenario is not impossible in the current situation. Unfortunately, some scenarios are even more disastrous.

Detonating about a hundred warheads on large cities would generate a decline in the average global surface temperatures of 1° -2° C, which would last for about a decade.

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If thousands of nuclear warheads were detonated, the fall in temperatures could be about 7°-8° C, and it would last for about a century. It might well kill everyone and perhaps everything on this planet.

Now along comes the Hazelnut Tree. The good news is that nuclear warheads are no longer needed to destroy whole cities. The missile’s damage is not radioactive and does not linger for millions of years, assuming that uranium is not employed in its construction. The kinetic energy (KE) of a hypersonic missile can be calculated using these formulae:

Martin Holsinger sums up the net effect of a MACH-10 impact:

Actually, it’s not even technically “an explosive.” It’s just an extremely dense slug of heavy metal propelled at an incredibly high rate of speed, with an excellent guidance system, a kind of guided meteor strike. Have you heard of the Tunguska meteor strike? The Russians can now do that at will.

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A warhead the size of the one used in Ukraine could also vaporize the Pentagon without harming nearby civilians. As weapons, Oreshniks lack the disadvantages of nuclear weapons–no radiation, no firestorm, no masses of dust kicked into the upper atmosphere to create a nuclear winter.

The Oreshnik missile’s production cost likely exceeds that of conventional systems like the $3 million per unit Iskander-M but is probably less than the hypersonic Yars ICBM costing $30 million. For a petrostate like Iran, Syria or Azerbaijan, even $30 million would be chump change. One Oreshnik could wipe Tel Aviv off the map for less than one day’s profits from a single oil field.

So, why is this a good thing?

From an Israeli perspective, or that of any country living under the shadow of a hostile neighbor, this must surely be disconcerting, but from the standpoint of terrestrial ecosystems and the survival of the human species, it offers a long-awaited way out of the cold war—a path back from the brink.

Human history is full of mass exterminations. We are witnessing more than one right now. Blaming exterminators is not enough: if we don't want to be the next victims, we must understand why exterminations take place, how they develop, what can make them stop.

—Ugo Bardi

If weapons of mass destruction no longer need to be atomic, it means the world could now negotiate a complete elimination of nuclear weapons (and its evil twin, nuclear power) while leaving in place the delicate balance of detente between superpowers. It doesn’t mean we stop shooting at each other, it just means we could switch from bullets to paint balls.

I guess we have Vladimir Putin to thank. Thanks, V.

Underneath the mango tree.
Me honey and me make boolooloop soon.

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The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, pled for the lives of his staff, saying, “Recent attacks have further damaged the oxygen supply, generators, and broken windows and doors of the patients’ rooms. The conditions in the hospital are simply appalling. We urge for the protection of health care and for this hell to stop! Ceasefire!”

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger, Substack and Medium subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.