The State of the World Is...What Is the State of the World?

Those who know me well know I tend to read about things that would tend to depress someone. And generally, when I am already depressed to start. So with POTUS giving us his view of the State of the Union, I was thinking about the state of the world. With the crisis in the Crimea and Putin threatening new classes of nukes and other nastiness, I was wondering if we had made any progress over the last few years. Or fifty. I read an interesting quote about war and aggression: " 'Our position,' explained the American prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nurenberg, 'is whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions'. Aggression was seen to be the most deviant forms of international behavior. It was deviant not only because it violated an international code of conduct, but because it was patently foolish. As it inevitably lead to disaster, it could never be an act of men possessed of rationality and moral sensibilities, who would use peaceful means to settle disputes." Wow! The last big time that America was involved in military tribunals, we were arguing that there was no legal reason to commit aggressive warfare. We used that argument to justify hanging a bunch of Nazis, if you will recall, and again in the Pacific to do the same to some Japanese. What has changed in the past 70 years? Is it because we just didn't start those wars? Is it because we are the aggressor this time? Or do we believe that aggressive war, in the modern era, doesn't inevitably lead to disaster? The Nuremberg Legalism was based on the combined experience of two World Wars. Maybe we can control things a little better. So I was reading an article online that was discussing the several new Russian ICBMs that are or will be soon available, and which talked about the poor state of the US Strategic arsenal (it is), and I got to wondering just how many nukes the US and Russia are still pointing...somewhere. It turns out that it is pretty easy to find out the number and sizes of US strategic weapons, and not so easy for the Russian ones. But several interesting things came to light. First, between the US and Russia, we no longer have Megaton class warheads to throw around. Only China still fields (multi-)megaton city busters. The direction of modernization has been towards greater accuracy allowing smaller warheads, in the move from counter-value to counter-force. Which might not make much difference if you are commanding a missile silo, but is important to those of us in cities. Second, the US still fields a respectable 142Mt in ICBMs, 259Mt in SLBMs, and 64Mt in Air-launched warheads. Not exactly the days of SAC. On the other hand, how much is enough in deterrence? Dr. Strangelove might argue the value of the over-kill, but any sane person would be deterred after the first few warheads. 465Mt should be a pretty good deterrent. The Russian throw-weight seems to be about 1034Mt, more than twice ours, but I was being very conservative in my estimates, and went by the maximum MIRVs/missile, not what is necessarily implemented or bound by treaty. Third, enhanced radiation devices (neutron bomb, cobalt liners) are a nightmare of the past. We seem to have outgrown that era where we were focusing on either eliminating the other side's population or contaminating their soil for thousands of years. Hopefully we got past eliminating Homo sapiens as a species. And the price of oil tells us...what? US production up, global demand down, world economy slowing, peak oil a myth? Surely there hasn't been any speculation in the oil markets. I'm sure that oil prices can't be rigged the way interest rates or currency exchanges can be. Can they? But that's a sideline. Since the 1900's our economy and way of life is dependent on oil, to an extent we seldom think about. We should remember that America fought World War II because of oil. Oh, we were a victim of aggression at Pearl Harbor (see above), but Japan attacked because they had less than two years of oil stocks, we had all the oil we needed, and we inflicted sanctions, including oil sanctions, because they wanted to be a first-class world party and we didn't want them to be. Since our way of life depends on oil, what is the state of the world's oil? Oil stats seem to be almost as obscure as those for nuclear warheads. But a quick check of the numbers brings to light a couple of items. As far as short-term numbers are concerned, they seem to go up or down quite a bit. But for reserves, the amount of oil that is in the ground and that we might be able to extract, the US has about four and a half years of oil left, versus forty nine for the entire world. (There seems to be a lot of debate about that number, though.) And as far as stocks, the amount of oil that is available to be used, the US has about eleven days versus twenty two for the world. Days. Think about what a modern-day World War would do to those stocks, in our just-in-time delivery model world. So the state of the world is...better, worse, the same? Who knows? Maybe it's best just to concentrate on getting by another day.