One Wrong Decision and Everything Turns to Dust

05/17/2025•Mises Wire•George Ford Smith

“The best way to destroy an enemy . . . is to make him your friend.”— Stanislav Petrov, The Man Who Saved the World

Humans—a problem-solving species—cannot solve its worst problem; not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Why is that the case? The solution’s in the hands of states that created it and they don’t want it solved.

Some problems go away on their own, and maybe this is one of them. It could happen in the next millisecond or 100 years from now. And, in the aftermath, all other problems—personal and societal—go away. Think about it: No more rigged elections, rampant immigration, lying politicians, or protest gatherings; no more arguments over money, the stock market, or the nature of truth and discovery. Whoever your number one evildoers are—whether it’s Putin or the IRS—they will no longer bother you.

Life on earth is the Gordian knot awaiting Alexander’s nuclear sword. A glance at the Doomsday Clock—maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947 and created by members of the Manhattan Project—tells us we’re fast approaching the midnight hour when the sword will fall for the last time.

It is no secret that the major powers keep everything relating to its nuclear programs as closely guarded as possible, but we know enough to be in a state of chronic disbelief. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US has 5,044 nuclear warheads as of May 2024, 400 of which are Minutemen III ICBMs. “Each ICBM carries one warhead, either a W87 or W78,” and are located in silos in the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountains. Ballistic missiles “can be launched promptly, are not recallable, and are fast flying, [thus] they reduce time for decision making in a crisis.” The W87 and W78 warheads—300 and 335 kilotons respectively—have roughly one-third the blast effect of the older W59 1-megaton ICBMs. By comparison, the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan unnecessarily were roughly equivalent to 15-20 kilotons.

Russia has developed a large, diverse nuclear arsenal, with its SS-18 “Satan” Mod 6 currently providing the most destructive power. In the single warhead version Satan can yield up to 20 megatons, while its 10 Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) configuration yields 500-750 kT per warhead. But this is old news. In 2018, Putin successfully tested the RS-28 Sarmat or Satan II ICBM, which can,

…launch a maximum payload with a yield of roughly 50 megatons of TNT compared with the U.S. Minuteman III, which fires a maximum payload of 1.425 megatons, according to the CSIS. Of equal concern is Russia’s claimed hypersonic capacity, which means it is able to accelerate some missiles faster than Mach 5 (3,836 miles per hour) on their way to their targets. Right now, both Russia and China claim to have missiles with hypersonic capacities in service.

In her exhaustively-researched NYT bestseller, Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen puts some of these figures in down-to-earth terms:

A 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the Earth’s sun.

In the first fraction of a millisecond after this thermonuclear bomb strikes the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., there is light. Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within a few seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of a little more than a mile (5,700 feet across), its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.

Keep in mind this scenario describes the effects of a 1-megaton warhead. What insane degree of destruction would a 50-megaton Satan II accomplish?

There are nine known states in possession of nuclear weapons: United States, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. The decision to use them at any time is in the hands of a few people and, historically, it has fallen on one person to make the call. Near-misses have been numerous and largely unknown or forgotten by the public. As reported in the National Security Archives, “During the Cold War, false alarms of missile attacks were closely held matters although news of them inevitably leaked.”

It was no different on the other side.

On September 26, 1983, [Stanislav Yevgrafovich] Petrov was on duty in charge of an early warning radar system in a bunker near Moscow.

Just after midnight, the radar screen started showing that a single missile had been launched in the US and was heading towards the USSR.

As Petrov tried to stop some 200 subordinates from panicking, the radar system showed that four more missiles had been launched. . . . Petrov only had 15 minutes to determine whether the threat was real, or whether it was a false alarm.

Fortunately for the world, Petrov remembered from his training—that, in a real attack, the US would launch an all-out offensive. He decided it was a false alarm. “What Soviet satellites had registered as missiles were actually rays of sunlight reflected on the clouds.”

Rather than praised as a hero, he was subsequently reprimanded for a mistake in his logbook. His actions that night were kept secret for 10 years. “Even his wife Raisa died in 1997 without knowing anything about it. She passed away from cancer, and was cared for in her final years by her husband.” Petrov passed away quietly on May 19, 2017, though by then his heroism had been recognized.

Conclusion

It takes money to blow up the world—money and the power to use it for destruction. The power resides in organizations called states, under which most of humanity toils obediently. States claim and enforce the power of taxation and, since World War I, the power of taxation through monetary inflation under the auspices of their central banks. Since monetary inflation is not understood by most people—thanks in part to economists on the payroll of the Federal Reserve—some states have been able to amass enormous destructive force that, if tripped, deliberately or otherwise, could bring all life on earth to an end, and possibly provide an answer to the Fermi paradox.

As long as we have states, we will have state coercion, which leads to the threats we’re facing now.

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