In 1944, as Germany suffered increasing losses on the ground, and experienced deeper shortaqes of critical war materiel, Hitler rained more and more bombs down on London and other British cities. It made no difference. On the battlefield he was a beaten man.
In a similar manner it may be that, with his armies in the field beaten and exhausted, Vladimir Putin is raining missiles down on Ukrainian cities. But this Russian tantrum cannot have any great effect.
The discussion of a potential Russian first use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine should be setting off alarm bells in rational people’s heads
There’s a concept in relations between nuclear armed belligerents (or potential belligerents) called the firebreak. It goes like this: Threats are one thing; saber rattling happens, and in the absence of other stimuli, it doesn’t necessarily create a desperate situation. An example of this is North Korea. Little Kim pretends to lose his mind and threatens terrible things on a regular basis, but nobody takes him seriously. He wants attention, not war. He has neither a casus belli nor an ongoing kinetic relationship with South Korea or the United States.
But when two nuclear powers already have a conventional kinetic relationship, the danger increases exponentially. It is generally believed that rational leaders are constrained from employing nuclear weapons by common sense and the survival instinct in all but the most extreme circumstances. The problem arises when one belligerent employs a single nuclear weapon, perhaps out of desperation, or as a demonstration to increase leverage. That single employment brings the conflict through the firebreak to the point where both powers are unconstrained in nuclear employment. The probability of nuclear employment stopping at one is low.
There is no such thing as a singular, precipitate use of a nuke that holds belligerents within some imaginary firebreak. That firebreak will evaporate.
How might we restore he firebreak in the face of Russian employment of a battlefield nuclear weapon? The solution would rest with a large, costly operation that employs conventional forces to destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and a joint NATO operation to rid the skies over and adjacent to Ukraine of Russian aircraft. Such an operation would be logistically intensive, and fraught with hazards, as are all war making operations. For those who haven’t noticed, war isn’t clean.
Russia is already back on its heels. Its missile attacks on Ukraine are mostly being carried out by converted surface to air weapons. The Russian military logistics system in general is strained near the breaking point.
Sadly, there are no guarantees in warfare. Those of us not in control must wait it out while mediocrities named Biden, Blinken, and Sullivan try to save the free world — not a comforting thought.
If history teaches us anything, it's that unintended consequences are the most likely outcome of any historical event. The unanswered question is always: "Who will learn the lesson?"
Vladimir Putin clearly learnt one when he invaded Ukraine, but the forces he set in motion have not come to a halt. Rulers such as Putin don't know how to stop until they get what they want, so we can only guess where the correlation of forces is leading.
The danger rests in the fact that Putin has no exit strategy. The only hope for the West, and Ukraine, is in the Kremlin leadership deposing him. Otherwise, the minimum danger is of a nuclear 'demonstration'. Such a demonstration would involve a nuclear attack on an uninhabited area. Such a demonstration was proposed as an option against the Japanese as an alternative to the attack on Hiroshima, but abandoned. It was decided that the Japanese would perceive such a n on-attack as a sign of weakness.
I hold the Biden Asministration foreign policy team in the lowest possible regard. If Tony Blinken is a fool, Jake Sullivan is an idiot. I hope they are making plans. They need to be at their very best.
On this September day,
One last time,
That small island
Might just seem,
The center of the world,
As so many wept
God save the Queen.
Today is Labor Day, a lesser holiday to all except those devoted to the backyard barbecue. A real landmark today is the 45th anniversary of Voyager I’s launch. That aged satellite is now over 14.6 billion miles from earth, having completed its primary mission of touring the gas giants of our solar system. It, and its sister, Voyager II, have now exited our solar system and will continue on forever (unless one of them collides with some cosmic object) in hopes that they will eventually encounter another civilization. Both Voyagers carry messages of earth on gold records. Why gold? For its durability? Yes. Why a record? Forty-five years ago, that’s how we transferred data. The fact is, when the Voyagers were born, the phonograph record was our standard. They’ve been gone that long, and NASA has been monitoring them that long. The Voyagers weren’t meant to function into the twenty-first century, but their engineers built them well. Still, their plutonium reactors are gradually running down, producing less and less electricity, and their feeble radio signals will soon go silent. At that point they will continue sailing through deep space at 35,000 miles per hour, carrying our hope that they might someday encounter another civilization, giving them the first hint of a distant civilization.
My mother took her right to vote very seriously. After all, she was a proud American citizen; a thankful American immigrant who read the news religiously, listened to the radio, and watched television back when there were only three stations on the big box in the living room.
She stood in line at our polling place; entering that voting booth confident in the knowledge that it was a secret ballot; allowing her to vote her mind and her conscience. Mom took me along when I was very little, and I still remember the feeling of the black cloth and the swish sound of the metal track as we were surrounded by the privacy curtain. There was a hushed quiet in the room; not a library quiet, but rather the quiet of a chapel. To her, voting was a sacred act; a rite as well as a right. Although it wasn’t her birth right, upon becoming an American citizen, it was her entitlement. It was also her right as a woman. You see my mother was born in 1917. In 1917 an American woman did NOT have the right to vote. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote was only passed by Congress on June 4, 1919 and ratified on August 18, 1920.
That swish of the sacred curtain of the voting booth has been replaced by a sonic boom capable of shaking the very foundations our faith in the Democratic process. That sonic boom is the noise of protest revolving around the separation of Church and State.
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Americans find themselves struggling with the voting booth, or the separation of Church and State. Our Founding Fathers wrestled with it. [In England and America a Religious Test was administered in order to promote certain religious beliefs and exclude others.] On September 17, 1787, Article VI, the “No Religious Test Clause” was signed into the American Constitution and ratified on June 21, 1788. “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
At the time the United States Constitution was adopted, religious qualifications for holding state and local office were pervasive. Delaware’s constitution, for example, required government officials to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost.” North Carolina barred anyone “who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion” from serving in the government. Religious Tests effectively barred Catholics, non-believers, and non-Christians from holding office. And until struck down by the Supreme Court in 1978, many states had laws prohibiting clergy from holding office!
In the late 1950s, Catholic politicians were viewed with open suspicion by many mainline Protestants and Evangelicals, not exactly a great climate for the presidential campaign of the first Catholic elected President of the United States. Catholic candidates were accused of having “dual loyalties” to both the Vatican and the United States, prompting John Fitzgerald Kennedy to say, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
On September 12, 1960, Candidate Kennedy addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, in an attempt to mitigate the reluctance of Protestant faith leaders to support a Catholic Candidate. I leave you today with his words that ring just as true today as then, and which may give today’s voters a lens into how America has changed and perhaps give them the courage to “vote their convictions” when the time comes.
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew-- or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.”
Wishing you a thoughtful week of wrestling with your convictions; it is good exercise.
Rabbi Rose
“A wise man is confident of his ignorance, and hopes to learn from others.”
“A foolish man is confident that he’s right, and can’t wait to tell others.”
