Chapter 11: California Uber Alles vs. Back-to-Back Civil War Champs: Part III

In some regards, there are good reasons not to fear the threat of space warfare too much. As like last time, only the generals will turn traitor, and having grown up hearing about their incompetent time-wasting machinations over the dinner table, I can inform a curious world that most of our current generals ain't exactly Bobby Lee. But the semi-secret DoD space program involving an unmanned successor to the space shuttle will likely stay as loyal as the rest of the Pentagon, and whatever warfighting capabilities it has, will at least be able to disable satellites. Air-to-space missiles launched from the jets of several nations have also demonstrated the capability of neutralizing satellites. Unless kinetic warfare and orbital bombing begins in earnest, satellite destruction, protection and deployment will be the primary function of space warfare.

But the losers in the orbital theater will always have an ace up their sleeve: Kessler syndrome. Because orbital velocity is so fast, any collision in orbit will cause the colliding objects to splinter, which will eventually hit other things in orbit and cause them to break, et cetera in a cascading effect until literally everything in orbit is a cloud of broken junk and nothing usable can be launched until it all falls to Earth first. The spacefaring nations of Earth currently go to great lengths to prevent this, but it's probably fairly easy to make it happen on purpose if necessary. If your enemy will rule space otherwise, it's better to make space temporarily unusable.

Granted, any satellites beyond low Earth orbit will probably be safe: anything at a Lagrange point, probably anything in geostationary orbit unless specifically shot at, and anything in lunar orbit. But resupply missions to any manned post from Earth will be temporarily impossible, and the bad press from forcing astronauts from neutral countries to slowly starve to death means that the Kessler effect will only be invoked in great desperation, probably with a warning to evacuate the ISS first.

Any notion of war beyond low Earth orbit is highly unlikely, unless both sides have interplanetary craft. Even if they do, there is little military advantage to taking over the moon or Mars in the next decade or two. The only thing that might change this is the advent of large scale asteroid or lunar mining. A moonbase with a railgun aimed at Earth could fire kinetic weapons at their least favorite states in leisure and relative safety. At most, this might be a capability one of the combatants gets most of the way through the war, like a latter-day Manhattan Project. But like George Friedman, I consider this scenario unlikely in the given timeframe, but inevitable in the long run (George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, 193-198).

A final possibility to consider is the likelihood of nuclear civil war. Neither side will start the war willing to glass the enemy. But though the military will keep loyal, the missileers may rebel. Their job is difficult and therefore requires specialists, adding a petty academic layer onto their class interests. From personal experience, the Air Force is the most reactionary branch of the US military, and some level of defection to the rebellion should almost be expected there. The most encouraging aspect of this countervailing that tendency, however, is where the ICBMs are located: deep in the heart of the rural Midwest, beyond the immediate reach of the cities. The B-52 nuclear bomber fleet is based out of North Dakota, and the stealth bomber fleet is based out of Missouri. The Trident nuclear submarine fleet, which falls under the purview of the US Navy, is based out of Virginia, which despite its bougie DC suburbs will be kept loyal at gunpoint for the safety of the government in DC.

I find it highly likely that Wall Street, on the verge of losing, will consider its own "Samson option." The Zionist state has long let it be known in diplomatic backchannels (because it denies its nuclear arsenal publicly) that if it falls, its last act will be to glass Berlin, Paris, and any other capital of a historically antisemitic nation. The petulant bougies may well decide that if they can't have America, nobody else can either. They will be perfectly capable, at least on a psychological level, of slaughtering us all in thermonuclear Armageddon.

The most reassuring thing I can say about the possibility of a bougie Samson option is that the imperialists' own psychological models suggest that around one-fourth to one-third of the missileers in the field would have refused to obey a theoretical order to glass the Soviet Union. This was during the Cold War, when tensions were high and the most reactionary branch of the military was taught from birth to hate and fear their ideology. This doesn't mean that only one-fourth to one-third of the missiles wouldn't launch, though. Each missile silo is manned by two missileers, and they both must turn their keys, which are deliberately placed too far apart for one person to turn both, at the same time, in order to launch. Therefore, if one-third of the missileers refused an order to fire, up to two-thirds of the missiles could be disabled. It is for this reason that missileers are armed with guns: to threaten the lives of their disobedient fellows in order to maintain the credibility of the American nuclear deterrent. But even if they shoot, that missile still isn't going anywhere.

Well, how many missileers will obey the order of a dying regime to commit a crime against their own countrymen that they will certainly be vilified for the rest of history for committing? Maybe a bougie could turn the key, but it won't be them in the silos. If one in ten nukes launches in such a scenario, I'd be surprised.

Would we use nukes? Probably not. We have little to gain and much to lose. If Wall Street nukes us, we will have to nuke them if possible to maintain the credibility of our own deterrent. But we would have no reason to begin the nuclear exchange.

Moreover, we will not be the only nuclear state involved in the civil war. I expect that Russia's nuclear umbrella would be extended to the Union in the civil war, as Russia's Pacific Fleet protected San Francisco in the last one. If the capitalist rot they're dealing with over there enjoys a resurgence, China may extend its own nuclear umbrella over Wall Street; but Xi's recent actions against his domestic capitalists suggests this is unlikely. The effect of this would be to remove nuclear weapons from a Russia-China proxy war fought on the North American continent.

Continue reading Part IV