Ukraine

Now is the time for CTCR

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Nov 6 JDN 2459890

We live in a terrifying time. As Ukraine gains ground in its war with Russia, thanks in part to the deployment of high-tech weapons from NATO, Vladimir Putin has begun to make thinly-veiled threats of deploying his nuclear arsenal in response. No one can be sure how serious he is about this. Most analysts believe that he was referring to the possible use of small-scale tactical nuclear weapons, not a full-scale apocalyptic assault. Many think he’s just bluffing and wouldn’t resort to any nukes at all. Putin has bluffed in the past, and could be doing so again. Honestly, “this is not a bluff” is exactly the sort of thing you say when you’re bluffing—people who aren’t bluffing have better ways of showing it. (It’s like whenever Trump would say “Trust me”, and you’d know immediately that this was an especially good time not to. Of course, any time is a good time not to trust Trump.)

(By the way, financial news is a really weird thing: I actually found this article discussing how a nuclear strike would be disastrous for the economy. Dude, if there’s a nuclear strike, we’ve got much bigger things to worry about than the economy. It reminds me of this XKCD.)

But if Russia did launch nuclear weapons, and NATO responded with its own, it could trigger a nuclear war that would kill millions in a matter of hours. So we need to be prepared, and think very carefully about the best way to respond.

The current debate seems to be over whether to use economic sanctions, conventional military retaliation, or our own nuclear weapons. Well, we already have economic sanctions, and they aren’t making Russia back down. (Though they probably are hurting its war effort, so I’m all for keeping them in place.) And if we were to use our own nuclear weapons, that would only further undermine the global taboo against nuclear weapons and could quite possibly trigger that catastrophic nuclear war. Right now, NATO seems to be going for a bluff of our own: We’ll threaten an overwhelming nuclear response, but then we obviously won’t actually carry it out because that would be murder-suicide on a global scale.

That leaves conventional military retaliation. What sort of retaliation? Several years ago I came up with a very specific method of conventional retaliation I call credible targeted conventional response (CTCR, which you can pronounce “cut-core”). I believe that now would be an excellent time to carry it out.

The basic principle of CTCR is really quite simple: Don’t try to threaten entire nations. A nation is an abstract entity. Threaten people. Decisions are made by people. The response to Vladimir Putin launching nuclear weapons shouldn’t be to kill millions of innocent people in Russia that probably mean even less to Putin than they do to us. It should be to kill Vladimir Putin.

How exactly to carry this out is a matter for military strategists to decide. There are a variety of weapons at our disposal, ranging from the prosaic (covert agents) to the exotic (precision strikes from high-altitude stealth drones). Indeed, I think we should leave it purposefully vague, so that Putin can’t try to defend himself against some particular mode of attack. The whole gamut of conventional military responses should be considered on the table, from a single missile strike to a full-scale invasion.

But the basic goal is quite simple: Launching a nuclear weapon is one of the worst possible war crimes, and it must be met with an absolute commitment to bring the perpetrator to justice. We should be willing to accept some collateral damage, even a lot of collateral damage; carpet-bombing a city shouldn’t be considered out of the question. (If that sounds extreme, consider that we’ve done it before for much weaker reasons.) The only thing that we should absolutely refuse to do is deploy nuclear weapons ourselves.

The great advantage of this strategy—even aside from being obviously more humane than nuclear retaliation—is that it is more credible. It sounds more like something we’d actually be willing to do. And in fact we likely could even get help from insiders in Russia, because there are surely many people in the Russian government who aren’t so loyal to Putin that they’d want him to get away with mass murder. It might not just be an assassination; it might end up turning into a coup. (Also something we’ve done for far weaker reasons.)


This is how we preserve the taboo on nuclear weapons: We refuse to use them, but otherwise stop at nothing to kill anyone who does use them.

I therefore call upon the world to make this threat:

Launch a nuclear weapon, Vladimir Putin, and we will kill you. Not your armies, not your generals—you. It could be a Tomahawk missile at the Kremlin. It could be a car bomb in your limousine, or a Stinger missile at Aircraft One. It could be a sniper at one of your speeches. Or perhaps we’ll poison your drink with polonium, like you do to your enemies. You won’t know when or where. You will live the rest of your short and miserable life in terror. There will be nowhere for you to hide. We will stop at nothing. We will deploy every available resource around the world, and it will be our top priority. And you will die.

That’s how you threaten a psychopath. And it’s what we must do in order to keep the world safe from nuclear war.

Europe is paying the price for relying on Russian natural gas

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 18 JDN 2459841

For far too long, Europe has relied upon importing cheap natural gas from Russia to supply a large proportion of its energy needs. Now that the war in Ukraine has led to mutual sanctions, they are paying the price—literally, as the price of natural gas has absolutely ballooned. Dutch natural gas futures have soared from about €15 per megawatt-hour in 2020 to over €200 today.

Natural gas prices are rising worldwide, but not nearly as much: Henry Hub natural gas prices (a standard metric for natural gas prices in the US) have risen from under $2 per million BTU in 2020 to nearly $9 today. This substantial divide in prices can only be sustained because transporting natural gas is expensive and requires substantial infrastructure. (1 megawatt-hour is about 3.4 million BTU, and the euro is trading at parity with the dollar (!), so effectively US prices rose from €7 per MWh to €31 per MWh—as opposed to €200.)

As a result, a lot of people in Europe are suddenly finding their utility bills unaffordable. (I’m fortunate that my flat is relatively well-insulated and my income is reasonably high, so I’m not among them; the higher prices will be annoying, but not beyond my means.) What should we do about this?

There are some economists who would say we should do nothing at all: Laissez-faire. Markets are efficient, right? So just let people freeze! Fortunately, Europe is not governed by such people nearly as much as the US is.

But while most economists would agree that we should do something, it’s much harder to get them to agree on exactly what.

Rising prices of natural gas are sort of a good thing, from an environmental perspective; they’ll provide an incentive to reduce carbon emissions. So it’s tempting to say that we should just let the prices rise and then compensate by raising taxes and paying transfers to poor families. But that probably isn’t politically viable; all three parts—letting prices rise, raising taxes, and increasing transfers—are all going to make enemies, and we really must have all three for such a plan to work.

The current approach seems to be based on price controls: Don’t let the prices rise so much. The UK has such a policy in place: Natural gas prices for consumers are capped by regulations. The cap has been increased in response to the crisis (itself an unpopular, but clearly necessary, move), but even so 31 gas companies have already gone under across the UK since the start of 2021. It really seems to be the case that for many gas companies, especially the smaller ones with less economy of scale, it’s simply not possible to continue providing natural gas to homes with input prices so high and output prices capped so low.

Or, we could let prices rise that high for producers, but subsidize consumers so that they don’t feel it; several European countries are already doing this. That at least won’t result in gas companies failing, but it will cost a lot of government funds. Greece in particular is spending over 3% of their GDP on it! (For comparison, the US military budget is about 4% of GDP.) I think this might actually be the best option, though all that spending will mean more government debt or higher taxes.

European governments have also been building up strategic reserves of natural gas, which may help us get through the winter—but it also makes the current price increases even worse.

We could also ration energy use, as we’ve often done during wartime. (Is this wartime? Kind of? Not really? It certainly is starting to feel like Cold War II.) Indeed, the President of the European Commission basically said that this should happen. That, at least, would reap some of the environmental benefits of reduced natural gas consumption. Rationing also feels fair to most people in a way that simply letting market prices rise does not; there is a sense of shared sacrifice. What worries me, however, is that the rations won’t be well-designed enough to account for energy usage that isn’t in a family’s immediate control. If you’re renting a flat that is poorly insulated, you can’t immediately fix that. You can try to pressure the landlord into buying better insulation, but in the meantime you’re the one paying the energy bills—or getting cold when the natural gas ration isn’t enough.

Actually I strongly suspect that most household usage of natural gas is of this kind; people don’t generally heat their homes more than necessary just because gas is cheap. Maybe they can set the thermostat a degree or two lower when gas is expensive, or maybe they use the gas oven less often and the microwave more; but the vast majority of their gas consumption is a function of the climate they live in and the insulation of their home, not their day-to-day choices. So if we’re trying to incentivize more efficient energy usage, that’s a question of long-term investment in construction and retrofitting, not something that sudden price spikes will really help with.

In the long run, what we really need to do is wean ourselves off of natural gas. Currently natural gas provides 33% of energy and nearly 40% of heating in Europe. (US figures are comparable.) Switching to electric heat pumps and powering them with solar and wind power isn’t something we can do overnight—but it is something we surely must do.

I think ultimately what is going to happen is all of the above: Different countries will adopt different policy mixes, all of them will involve difficult compromises, none of them will be particularly well-designed, and we’ll all sort of muddle through as best we can.

Russia has invaded Ukraine.

pnrj core principles, current events, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 6 JDN 2459645

Russia has invaded Ukraine. No doubt you have heard it by now, as it’s all over the news now in dozens of outlets, from CNN to NBC to The Guardian to Al-Jazeera. And as well it should be, as this is the first time in history that a nuclear power has annexed another country. Yes, nuclear powers have fought wars before—the US just got out of one in Afghanistan as you may recall. They have even started wars and led invasions—the US did that in Iraq. And certainly, countries have been annexing and conquering other countries for millennia. But never before—never before, in human history—has a nuclear-armed state invaded another country simply to claim it as part of itself. (Trump said he thought the US should have done something like that, and the world was rightly horrified.)

Ukraine is not a nuclear power—not anymore. The Soviet Union built up a great deal of its nuclear production in Ukraine, and in 1991 when Ukraine became independent it still had a sizable nuclear arsenal. But starting in 1994 Ukraine began disarming that arsenal, and now it is gone. Now that Russia has invaded them, the government of Ukraine has begun publicly reconsidering their agreements to disarm their nuclear arsenal.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just disproved the most optimistic models of international relations, which basically said that major power wars for territory were over at the end of WW2. Some thought it was nuclear weapons, others the United Nations, still others a general improvement in trade integration and living standards around the world. But they’ve all turned out to be wrong; maybe such wars are rarer, but they can clearly still happen, because one just did.

I would say that only two major theories of the Long Peace are still left standing in light of this invasion, and that is nuclear deterrence and the democratic peace. Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal and later got attacked—that’s consistent with nuclear deterrence. Russia under Putin is nearly as authoritarian as the Soviet Union, and Ukraine is a “hybrid regime” (let’s call it a solid D), so there’s no reason the democratic peace would stop this invasion. But any model which posits that trade or the UN prevent war is pretty much off the table now, as Ukraine had very extensive trade with both Russia and the EU and the UN has been utterly toothless so far. (Maybe we could say the UN prevents wars except those led by permanent Security Council members.)

Well, then, what if the nuclear deterrence theory is right? What would have happened if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons? Would that have made this situation better, or worse? It could have made it better, if it acted as a deterrent against Russian aggression. But it could also have made it much, much worse, if it resulted in a nuclear exchange between Russia and Ukraine.

This is the problem with nukes. They are not a guarantee of safety. They are a guarantee of fat tails. To explain what I mean by that, let’s take a brief detour into statistics.

A fat-tailed distribution is one for which very extreme events have non-negligible probability. For some distributions, like a uniform distribution, events are clearly contained within a certain interval and nothing outside is even possible. For others, like a normal distribution or lognormal distribution, extreme events are theoretically possible, but so vanishingly improbable they aren’t worth worrying about. But for fat-tailed distributions like a Cauchy distribution or a Pareto distribution, extreme events are not so improbable. They may be unlikely, but they are not so unlikely they can simply be ignored. Indeed, they can actually dominate the average—most of what happens, happens in a handful of extreme events.

Deaths in war seem to be fat-tailed, even in conventional warfare. They seem to follow a Pareto distribution. There are lots of tiny skirmishes, relatively frequent regional conflicts, occasional major wars, and a handful of super-deadly global wars. This kind of pattern tends to emerge when a phenomenon is self-reinforcing by positive feedback—hence why we also see it in distributions of income and wildfire intensity.

Fat-tailed distributions typically (though not always—it’s easy to construct counterexamples, like the Cauchy distribution with low values truncated off) have another property as well, which is that minor events are common. More common, in fact, than they would be under a normal distribution. What seems to happen is that the probability mass moves away from the moderate outcomes and shifts to both the extreme outcomes and the minor ones.

Nuclear weapons fit this pattern perfectly. They may in fact reduce the probability of moderate, regional conflicts, in favor of increasing the probability of tiny skirmishes or peaceful negotiations. But they also increase the probability of utterly catastrophic outcomes—a full-scale nuclear war could kill billions of people. It probably wouldn’t wipe out all of humanity, and more recent analyses suggest that a catastrophic “nuclear winter” is unlikely. But even 2 billion people dead would be literally the worst thing that has ever happened, and nukes could make it happen in hours when such a death toll by conventional weapons would take years.

If we could somehow guarantee that such an outcome would never occur, then the lower rate of moderate conflicts nuclear weapons provide would justify their existence. But we can’t. It hasn’t happened yet, but it doesn’t have to happen often to be terrible. Really, just once would be bad enough.

Let us hope, then, that the democratic peace turns out to be the theory that’s right. Because a more democratic world would clearly be better—while a more nuclearized world could be better, but could also be much, much worse.