Quotulatiousness

May 1, 2026

Spain joins the awkward squad

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Conservative Woman, Bepi Pezzulli outlines a few ways that the Spanish government is moving in quite different directions than their NATO allies and fellow EU members:

Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) – Calle Almirante Lobo, Seville – Spanish flag” by ell brown is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wants the privileges of alliance without the duties of one. Madrid remains in Nato, hosts critical American military infrastructure, and speaks the language of Atlantic solidarity – but only when convenient. On the central strategic questions of the age – Russia, Israel, and the wider Western posture in the Mediterranean – it increasingly behaves like a spoiler. What is troubling is that Spain is not merely posturing: it is rewriting its entire conception of statecraft, treating alliance as a shield, hostility as leverage, and strategic ambiguity as a governing doctrine.

When Washington needed alignment, Sánchez offered obstruction. When Israel faced existential war, Madrid offered moral lectures. When the West sought energy discipline against Moscow, Spain found room for Russian gas. All while preserving the old imperial obsession with Gibraltar and extracting advantages from London over the Rock.

Spain has discovered the pleasures of consequence-free hostility. That needs to end.

Anti-Americanism with diplomatic immunity

Sánchez has carefully cultivated the old European left’s anti-American reflexes: Nato when subsidised, moral neutrality when sacrifice is required. His government publicly resisted support for American military operations linked to Iran escalation and signalled clear reluctance to facilitate use of Spanish bases such as Rota and Morón for operations that might implicate Madrid politically. The message was unmistakable: American security guarantees are welcome but strategic co-operation is negotiable. The rhetoric matched the policy. “No to war” was not merely a slogan for domestic consumption. Sánchez is deliberately positioning Spain as the righteous dissenter against Washington’s harder strategic line.

At the same time, Spain maintained substantial imports of Russian gas well into the European sanctions era. While pipeline politics consumed Brussels, Madrid benefited from a convenient moral distinction: condemning Moscow loudly while continuing commercial accommodation where useful. The formal sanctions architecture left open some loopholes, and Spain was happy to live inside them.

An ally that profits from ambiguity while others bear the strategic burden is not an ally in the full sense. As US War Secretary Pete Hegseth noted, “An alliance cannot be ironclad if in reality or perception it is seen as one-sided”.

From criticism of Israel to open diplomatic hostility

On Israel, Sánchez has moved beyond criticism into active diplomatic confrontation. Recognition of Palestine was presented as humanitarian principle. In practice, it rewarded maximalism at the worst possible moment. Madrid helped transform October 7 from a terrorist massacre demanding strategic clarity into another European seminar on Israeli restraint. Spain became one of the loudest governmental amplifiers of the anti-Zionist campaign in Western Europe. Ministers normalised rhetoric that blurred the distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and systematic delegitimisation of the Jewish state itself. Arms restrictions followed. Then diplomatic actions. Symbolism became policy.

Gibraltar: Madrid’s imperial nostalgia

Spain’s sanctimony would be easier to tolerate if it were not paired with its own colonial fixation. For decades, Madrid has pursued sovereignty claims over Gibraltar with theological persistence. Brexit offered a fresh opening. With Brussels behind it, Spain extracted a remarkably favourable negotiating posture over the future relationship of the Rock with both the European Union and the United Kingdom. London, in the hands of the most Europhile government in recent history, conceded far more than many British voters imagined when they heard the word “sovereignty”. Spain never abandoned the long game. It simply learned to play it through institutions until a weaker opponent appeared. Madrid insists Gibraltar is unfinished history. Fair enough: is it not time then to conclude the same about Ceuta and Melilla?

April 23, 2026

QotD: The problems of a “no first use” nuclear weapons policy

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now, you might ask at this point: why not defuse some of this tension with a “no first use” policy – openly declare that you won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons even in a non-nuclear conflict?

For the United States during the Cold War, the problem with declaring a “no first use” policy was the worry that it would essentially serve as a “green light” for conventional Soviet military action in Europe. Recall, after all, that the Soviet military was stronger in conventional forces in Europe during the Cold War and that episodes like the Berlin Blockade (and resultant Berlin Airlift) seemed to confirm Soviet interest in expanding their control over central Europe. At the same time, the Soviet use of military force to crush the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968) continued to reaffirm that the USSR had no intention of letting Central or Eastern Europe choose their own fates – this was an empire that ruled by domination and intended to expand if it could.

The solution to blocking that expansion was NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Not because NATO collectively could defeat the USSR in a conventional war – the general assumption was that they probably couldn’t – but because NATO’s article 5 clause pledging mutual defense essentially meant that the nuclear powers of NATO (Britain, the United States, and France) pledged to defend the territory of all NATO members with nuclear weapons. But just like deterrence, mutual defense alliances are based on the perception that all members will defend each other. Declaring that the United States wouldn’t use nuclear weapons first would essentially be telling the Germans, “we’ll fight for you, but we won’t use our most powerful weapons for you” in the event of a conventional war; it would be creating a giant unacceptable asterisk next to that mutual defense clause.

So the United States had to be committed to at least the possibility that it would respond to a conventional military assault on West Germany with nuclear retaliation (often envisaged as a “tactical” use of nuclear weapons – that is, using smaller nuclear weapons against enemy military formations. That said, even in the 1950s, Bernard Brodie was already warning that restraining the escalation to general use of nuclear weapons once a tactical nuclear weapon was used would be practically impossible).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

April 21, 2026

Ivan the Terrible – Feeding the Evil Russian Tsar

Filed under: Food, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Oct 2025

Soft buns filled with cabbage, onion and dill

City/Region: Russia
Time Period: 16th Century

In Russian, Ivan the Terrible is Ivan Grozny, and the translation of “terrible” was meant more in the way of “fearsome” or “formidable” rather than “cruel” or “awful”, though Ivan ended up being all of those. What started off as a good reign with military victories, building Saint Basil’s Cathedral, and restricting the boyars‘ (aristocracy) power over the people descended into a reign of terror with a secret police, the massacre of a city, and even killing his eldest son in a fit of rage.

While Ivan truly was terrible, these piroshki are not. They are absolutely delicious. The bread is soft, and the filling is savory and slightly sweet with the dill really coming through. These were made with all different kinds of fillings, so feel free to try out other ingredients, like meat, fish, fruit, or other vegetables, or put in a hard boiled egg for a modern touch.

    Small pies filled with mushrooms, poppy seeds, kasha, turnips, cabbage, or whatever else God sends.
    When the servants bake bread, order them to set some of the dough aside, to be stuffed for piroshki.

    — The Domostroi, 16th Century

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April 3, 2026

QotD: The Great Purge

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

The Z Man, “What Comes Next”, The Z Blog, 2020-08-03.

April 2, 2026

m/27PH aka m/37: Finland’s First Standard Sniper Rifle (and it’s really bad)

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Nov 2025

The m27PH, aka the m/37, was the first standardized Finnish sniper rifle. It was developed as part of the plan to make a whole family of m/27 rifles for the Finnish Army, including cavalry, trainer, and sniper models. The sniper model was delayed because of the structural problems with the m/27 base rifle, and it was not formally adopted until 1937. The rifle used a 2.2x prismatic scope made by Finnish company Physica Oy. The scope was heavy, fragile, and had a very short eye relief.

When first adopted, the rifles had short, slightly bent bolt handled and standard stocks. Once they began to see use in the Winter War (for which they were Finland’s only standardized sniper rifle), experience showed these features to be problems. The bolt handles were largely replaced with much longer Soviet-style sniper bolts, and wooden cheek rests were added to the stocks.

During the Continuation War, m/27PH rifles were still in service, but as they were damaged their scopes were generally used to build new m/39PH sniper rifles instead. Today they are extremely rare rifles.
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QotD: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain

Filed under: Education, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ever met someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain? You’d expect a mouse, right? You know, with the secret police and all? But they’re the exact opposite of that. People who grew up under the KGB’s iron heel are fucking obnoxious, because they’re utterly shameless. It’s not “give ’em and inch and they’ll take a mile”; it’s “they’ll start by grabbing a mile, then demand ten more”.

Which makes sense if you think about it. When everybody’s snitching on everybody else, shameless is the only way to live. Everybody’s guilty of something, so own it — being, of course, perpetually prepared to snitch anyone and everyone else at a moment’s notice if someone drops the dime on you. Also, if you have to stand in line six hours to maybe get a few potatoes, damn it, you’re gonna get those potatoes. It doesn’t matter if you like potatoes, or have any possible use for potatoes at the present time. You’re going to take every single spud you can get your hands on, plus steal anything that isn’t nailed down, because you never know when you’ll get another chance.

As it turns out, overabundance creates the same conditions. When you’ve been standing in line for six hours with 1,000 of your new best friends just to get some tampons — and you’re a guy, you don’t need tampons, but you can always barter them for something — you’re not going to scruple to do anything and everything to get them. Indeed you want people to know Ivan’s got some tampons, because that’s how the black market works …

… anyway, as I say, we’re not in line for six hours, but we are perpetually at least under the threat of surveillance. And not from the Feds — just as Ivan’s not worried about the KGB, but rather his neighbors, so we don’t have to worry about the Feebs monitoring us. Instead, it’s that Basic College Girl with the iPhone. She’s not filming you, of course, she’s filming herself, but there you are anyway, in the background, doing whatever. Under those conditions — and when everyone’s volunteering the most intimate details of their lives on Fakebook and Twatter — shameless is the only way to live.

In other words, thanks to constant social media “surveillance”, it has gone in the blink of an eye from “It didn’t happen unless someone caught it on film” to “It’s all on film anyway, so fuck it, I’m gonna get mine”. I used to see this all the time in class. Basic College Girls will lie straight to your face, for any reason or no reason. They’ll do it on spec, just to see if you bite. More importantly, they’ll tell you such obvious, easily disproven whoppers that you start wondering if they’re having a schizoid break. You have to know I know you’re lying, right? That Dead Grandma Story is very sad, but you have pictures of yourself all over Twitter drunk at the sorority formal, when you told me you were at Nana’s funeral.

It’s not that they don’t know. It’s that they don’t care. Because somehow I’m the asshole for not believing them, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes.

Severian, “Friday Male Bag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-03.

March 31, 2026

QotD: Slavery

Filed under: China, History, Law, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As sociologist Orlando Patterson (b.1940) has observed:

    It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)

What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.

This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.

Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.

Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.

Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.

All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)

None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.

While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.

The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.

In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.

To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:

    without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)

Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:

    All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)

In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.

In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.

The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.

Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)

Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.

So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.

For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.

The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)

Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.

The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.

Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.

The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.

Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.

Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.

The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)

Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.

Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.

Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.

March 29, 2026

Adventures in Surplus! Finnish M28 “Ski Trooper”

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Nov 2025

Today we are going to take a look at just how much historical [information can] be read from the features and markings of an individual rifle. This is an early production Finnish M28 “ski trooper” Mosin Nagant that can be traced from Russian manufacture to WW1 Russian use, Austro-Hungarian capture, rechambering to 8x50mm Mannlicher, concession to Italy as war reparations, sale to Finland, rebuilding as a Civil Guard M28, use in the Winter War and Continuation War, transfer to the Finnish Army, and finally importation into the United States.
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March 16, 2026

Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan 1979

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 24 Oct 2025

Christmas 1979. Soviet armor pours across the Afghan border towards Kabul as helicopters secure the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush mountains. In Moscow, the Politburo has decided to save Afghanistan’s communist government from collapse. Afghan rebels have taken up arms against the unpopular regime and control most of the countryside. But the Red Army leadership doubts it can pacify the country – so why did the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan?
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February 28, 2026

QotD: The “Balance of Terror” in the missile age

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The advance of missile and rocket technology in the late 1950s started to change the strategic picture; the significance of Sputnik (launched in 1957) was always that if the USSR could orbit a small satellite around the Earth, they could do the same with a nuclear weapon. By 1959, both the USA and the USSR had mounted nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), fulfilling Brodie’s prophecy that nuclear weapons would accelerate the development of longer-range and harder to intercept platforms: now the platforms had effectively infinite range and were effectively impossible to intercept.

This also meant that a devastating nuclear “first strike” could now be delivered before an opponent would know it was coming, or at least on extremely short notice. A nuclear power could no longer count on having enough warning to get its nuclear weapons off before the enemy’s nuclear strike had arrived. Bernard Brodie grappled with these problems in Strategy in the Missile Age (1959) but let’s focus on a different theorist, Albert Wohlstetter, also with the RAND Corporation, who wrote The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958) the year prior.

Wohlstetter argued that deterrence was not assured, but was in fact fragile: any development which allowed one party to break the other’s nuclear strike capability (e.g. the ability to deliver your strike so powerfully that the enemy’s retaliation was impossible) would encourage that power to strike in the window of vulnerability. Wohstetter, writing in the post-Sputnik shock, saw the likelihood that the USSR’s momentary advantage in missile technology would create such a moment of vulnerability for the United States.

Like Brodie, Wohlstetter concluded that the only way to avoid being the victim of a nuclear first strike (that having the enemy hit you with their nukes) was being able to credibly deliver a second strike. This is an important distinction that is often misunderstood; there is a tendency to read these theorists (Dr. Strangelove does this to a degree and influences public perception on this point) as planning for a “winnable” nuclear war (and some did, just not these fellows here), but indeed the point is quite the opposite: they assume nuclear war is fundamentally unwinnable and to be avoided, but that the only way to avoid it successfully is through deterrence and deterrence can only be maintained if the second strike (that is, your retaliation after your opponent’s nuclear weapons have already gone off) can be assured. Consequently, planning for nuclear war is the only way to avoid nuclear war – a point we’ll come back to.

Wohlstetter identifies six hurdles that must be overcome in order to provide a durable, credible second strike system – and remember, it is the perception of the system, not its reality that matters (though reality may be the best way to create perception). Such systems need to be stable in peacetime (and Wohlstetter notes that stability is both in the sense of being able to work in the event after a period of peace, but also such that they do not cause unintended escalation; he thus warns against, for instance, just keeping lots of nuclear-armed bombers in the air all of the time), they must be able to survive the enemy’s initial nuclear strikes, it must be possible to decide to retaliate and communicate that to the units with the nuclear weapons, then they must be able to reach enemy territory, then they have to penetrate enemy defenses, and finally they have to be powerful enough to guarantee that whatever fraction do penetrate those defenses are powerful enough to inflict irrecoverable damage.

You can think of these hurdles as a series of filters. You start a conflict with a certain number of systems and then each hurdle filters some of them out. Some may not work in the event, some may be destroyed by the enemy attack, some may be out of communication, some may be intercepted by enemy defenses. You need enough at the end to do so much damage that it would never be worth it to sustain such damage.

This is the logic behind the otherwise preposterously large nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Russian Federation (inherited from the USSR). In order to sustain your nuclear deterrent, you need more weapons than you would need in the event because you are planning for scenarios in which some large number of weapons are lost in the enemy’s first strike. At the same time, as you overbuild nuclear weapons to counter this, you both look more like you are planning a first strike and your opponent has to estimate that a larger portion of their nuclear arsenal may be destroyed in that (theoretical) first strike, which means they too need more missiles.

What I want to note about this logic is that it neatly explains why nuclear disarmament is so hard: nuclear weapons are, in a deterrence scenario, both necessary and useless. Necessary, because your nuclear arsenal is the only thing which can deter an enemy with nuclear weapons, but that very deterrence renders the weapons useless in the sense that you are trying to avoid any scenario in which you use them. If one side unilaterally disarmed, nuclear weapons would suddenly become useful – if only one side has them, well, they are the “absolute” weapon, able to make up for essentially any deficiency in conventional strength – and once useful, they would be used. Humanity has never once developed a useful weapon they would not use in extremis; and war is the land of in extremis.

Thus the absurd-sounding conclusion to fairly solid chain of logic: to avoid the use of nuclear weapons, you have to build so many nuclear weapons that it is impossible for a nuclear-armed opponent to destroy them all in a first strike, ensuring your second-strike lands. You build extra missiles for the purpose of not having to fire them.

(I should note here that these concerns were not the only things driving the US and USSR’s buildup of nuclear weapons. Often politics and a lack of clear information contributed as well. In the 1960s, US fears of a “missile gap” – which were unfounded and which many of the politicians pushing them knew were unfounded – were used to push for more investment in the US’s nuclear arsenal despite the United States already having at that time a stronger position in terms of nuclear weapons. In the 1970s and 1980s, the push for the development of precision guidance systems – partly driven by inter-agency rivalry in the USA and not designed to make a first strike possible – played a role in the massive Soviet nuclear buildup in that period; the USSR feared that precision systems might be designed for a “counter-force” first strike (that is a first strike targeting Soviet nuclear weapons themselves) and so built up to try to have enough missiles to ensure survivable second strike capability. This buildup, driven by concerns beyond even deterrence did lead to absurdities: when the SIOP (“Single Integrated Operational Plan”) for a nuclear war was assessed by General George Lee Butler in 1991, he declared it, “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life”. Having more warheads than targets had lead to the assignment of absurd amounts of nuclear firepower on increasingly trivial targets.)

All of this theory eventually filtered into American policy making in the form of “mutually assured destruction” (initially phrased as “assured destruction” by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964). The idea here was, as we have laid out, that US nuclear forces would be designed to withstand a first nuclear strike still able to launch a retaliatory second strike of such scale that the attacker would be utterly destroyed; by doing so it was hoped that one would avoid nuclear war in general. Because different kinds of systems would have different survivability capabilities, it also led to procurement focused on a nuclear “triad” with nuclear systems split between land-based ICBMs in hardened silos, forward-deployed long-range bombers operating from bases in Europe and nuclear-armed missiles launched from submarines which could lurk off an enemy coast undetected. The idea here is that with a triad it would be impossible for an enemy to assure themselves that they could neutralize all of these systems, which assures the second strike, which assures the destruction, which deters the nuclear war you don’t want to have in the first place.

It is worth noting that while the United States and the USSR both developed such a nuclear triad, other nuclear powers have often seen this sort of secure, absolute second-strike capability as not being essential to create deterrence. The People’s Republic of China, for instance, has generally focused their resources on a fewer number of systems, confident that even with a smaller number of bombs, the risk of any of them striking an enemy city (typically an American city) would be enough to deter an enemy. As I’ve heard it phrased informally by one western observer, a strategy of, “one bomb and we’ll be sure to get it to L.A.” though of course that requires more than one bomb and one doubts the PRC phrases their doctrine so glibly (note that China is, in theory committed to developing a triad, they just haven’t bothered to actually really do so).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

February 16, 2026

Unsung Heroes of the Eastern Front – Soviet Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 08

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Feb 2026

We’re back with another helping of fighter ace tales, this time taking us to the USSR. From the personal brilliance of Ivan Kozhedub, to the cerebral genius of Alexander Pokryshkin, come with us as we explore five more individual stories of skill, determination, self-sacrifice, and tragedy, who defined a generation of Soviet aviation in a theatre of WW2 where the aerial campaign is so often overlooked in favor of the ground war.

Check out Sabaton History‘s episode about the Night Witches: • Night Witches – Female Soviet Pilots – Sab…
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QotD: How nuclear weapons were viewed right after WW2

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In that context [clear Soviet superiority of conventional forces in Europe], the fact that it had been the United States which had been the first to successfully develop nuclear weapons (and use them in anger, a decision which remains hotly debated to this day) must have seemed like an act of divine providence, as it enabled the western allies to retain a form of military parity with the USSR (and thus deterrence) while still demobilizing. US airbases in Europe put much of the Soviet Union in range of American bombers which could carry nuclear weapons, which served to “balance” the conventional disparity. It’s important to keep in mind also that nuclear weapons emerged in the context where “strategic” urban bombing had been extensively normalized during the Second World War; the idea that the next major war would include the destruction of cities from the air wasn’t quite as shocking to them as it was to us – indeed, it was assumed. Consequently, planners in the US military went about planning how they would use nuclear weapons on the battlefield (and beyond it) should a war with a non-nuclear Soviet Union occur.

At the same time, US strategists (particularly associated with the RAND Corporation) were beginning to puzzle out the long term strategic implications of nuclear weapons. In 1946, Bernard Brodie published The Absolute Weapon which set out the basic outlines of deterrence theory; he did this, to be clear, three years before the USSR successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 (far earlier than anyone expected because the USSR had spies in the Manhattan Project). Brodie is thus predicting what the strategic situation will be like when the USSR developed nuclear weapons; his predictions proved startlingly accurate, in the event.

Brodie’s argument proceeds as a series of propositions (paraphrased):

  1. The power of a nuclear bomb is such that any city can be destroyed by less than ten bombs.
  2. No adequate defense against the bomb exists and the possibilities of such are very unlikely.
  3. Nuclear weapons will motivate the development of newer, longer range and harder to stop delivery systems.
  4. Superiority in the air is not going to be enough to stop sufficient nuclear weapons getting through.
  5. Superiority in nuclear arms also cannot guarantee meaningful strategic superiority. It does not matter that you had more bombs if all of your cities are rubble.
  6. Within five to ten years (of 1946), other powers will have nuclear weapons. [This happened in just three years.]

All of which, in the following years were shown to be true. Consequently, Brodie notes that while nuclear weapons are “the apotheosis of aggressive instruments”, any attacker who used them would fear retaliation with their enemy’s nuclear weapons which would in turn also be so destructive such that “no victory, even if guaranteed in advance – which it never is – would be worth the price”. Crucially, it is not the fact of retaliation, but the fear of it, which matters and “the threat of retaliation does not have to be 100 per cent certain; it is sufficient if there is a good chance of it, or if there is a belief that there is a good chance of it. The prediction is more important than the fact.” [emphasis mine]

This does not “make war impossible” by any means, but rather turns strategy towards focusing on making sure that nuclear weapons are not used, by making it clear to any potential aggressor that nuclear weapons would be used against them. And that leads to Brodie’s final, key conclusion:

    Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind. The writer in making that statement is not for the moment concerned about who will win the next war in which atomic bombs are used. Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

To sum that up, because both the United States and its key enemies will have nuclear weapons and because their destructive power is effectively absolute (so high as to make any “victory” meaningless) and because there is no effective defense against such weapons, consequently the only rational response is to avoid the use of nuclear weapons and the only way to do that is to be able to credibly threaten to retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of war (since if you cannot so retaliate, your opponent could use their nuclear weapons without fear).

That thinking actually took a while to take hold in actual American policy and instead during the 1940s and 1950s, the United States focused resources on bomber fleets with the assumption that they would match Soviet superiority in conventional arms in Europe with American nuclear superiority, striking military and industrial targets (“precision attacks with an area weapon”, a notion that is as preposterous as it feels) to immediately cripple the USSR in the event of war, or else aim to “win” a “limited” nuclear exchange.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

February 15, 2026

WW1: The Siege of Przemyśl: Austria-Hungary’s Horror Story | EP 6

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 11 Sept 2025

After endeavouring to wreak their revenge on Serbia, what would be the greatest hammer blow to the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War? With Leviv having fallen apocalyptically to the Russian hordes, what had gone so wrong? How might the war have been brought to an end before Christmas of 1914? And, with the darkness gathering around the Austrian defences, could the great fortress of Przemyśl hold out against the Russian barrage for a second time?

Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian advance, on the brutal Eastern front, as the first year of the First World War grinds bloodily on…

Alexander Watson’s The Fortress, the book heavily referenced in this episode, is available to purchase here: http://bit.ly/41NKRrq
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00:00 – Cold open: “intricacies of war” reading
01:13 – Adobe
01:51 – Nick Lloyd & the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger
03:26 – Austria-Hungary’s coming unraveling: setting the stakes
06:50 – Why Przemyśl is a fortress; garrison & geography
08:31 – August 1914: Conrad’s plan and its unraveling
17:48 – Catastrophe for the Habsburg army
18:32 – The siege begins
24:50 – Pendulum swings back; Russians advance again
27:01 – Civilian exodus chaos; encircled again (8 Nov)
28:10 – Uber
28:50 – Folio Society
30:17 – Russian occupation & pogroms in Galicia (1914)
31:39 – War aims: Russification under Count Bobrinsky
33:00 – Russian antisemitism context; pogroms & deportations
37:05 – Second siege strategy: starve them out; General Kusman
38:04 – Early aerial bombing of civilians (Dec 1)
39:10 – Christmas Eve gestures; brief humanity, then darkness
41:04 – Conrad’s Carpathian rescue bid (23 Jan): campaign from hell
42:02 – Carpathian horrors; Tyrolean memoir; morale collapses
47:10 – POW fate: officers vs men; camps & Murmansk railway
49:01 – Austria-Hungary reels from the disaster
50:17 – Germany’s opinion of Austria Hungary
51:13 – Italy cuts a deal, joins war; the Italian Front beckons
53:38 – Tsar’s visit; enforced Russification in Przemyśl
55:14 – Mackensen’s offensive; Germans “liberate” Przemyśl; Austria eclipsed
56:10 – Foreshadowing WW2?
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February 8, 2026

WW1: The Eastern Front in 1914 | EP 5

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:45

The Rest Is History
Published 8 Sept 2025

While the Western front was raging following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, what was unfolding on the Eastern Front? Why was it an even bloodier and more brutal arena than the West? As Austria took on its great antagonist — the spark of the entire war — Serbia, why were its early campaigns constantly blighted by disaster? What terrible mistake did Russia, with its behemoth of an army, make? How would its dramatic war with Germany unfold? And, would this be the beginning of the end of the Habsburg Empire?

Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the outbreak of the First World War on the Eastern Front, and its early clashes.

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0:00 Adobe AD
0:50 Intro
3:27 The Eastern Front explained
5:15 The Serbian Front
33:23 Uber AD
34:02 Folio Society AD
35:33 Russia invades Germany
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January 25, 2026

QotD: Dostoevsky’s views on revolutionaries in Demons

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In a novel about political radicalism you might expect the ideas to take center stage, but here they’re treated as pure comic relief (if you’ve read The Man Who Was Thursday, the vibe is very similar). The guy who wants to kill all of humanity and the guy who wants to enslave all of humanity have some seriously conflicting objectives (and don’t forget the guy who just wants to kill himself and the guy who refuses to say what his goal is), yet they all belong to the same revolutionary society. The leader of their society takes it to an extreme, he has no specific ideas at all. His political objectives and philosophical premises are literally never mentioned, by him or by others. What he has is boundless energy, an annoying wheedling voice,1 and an infinite capacity for psychological cruelty. But all these impressive capacities are directed at nothing in particular, just at crushing others for the sheer joy of it,2 at destruction without purpose and without meaning.

Does that seem unrealistic? That ringleader was actually based on a real life student revolutionary named Sergey Nechayev, whose trial Dostoevsky eagerly followed. Nechayev wrote a manifesto called The Catechism of a Revolutionary, here’s an excerpt from that charming document:

    The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution … The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one science: the science of destruction … The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order … For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction.

The ideas don’t matter, because at the end of the day they’re pretexts for desires — the desire to dominate, the desire to obliterate the world, the desire to obliterate the self, the desire to negate.3 Just as in their parents’ generation the desire for status came first and wrapped itself in liberal politics in order to reproduce and advance itself, so in their children the desire for blood and death reigns supreme, and the radical politics serve only as a mechanism of self-justification and a lever to pull. This is not a novel about people, and it’s also not a novel about ideas. It’s a novel about desires, motives, urges, and the ways in which we construct stories to make sense of them.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.

  1. To Dostoevsky’s own surprise, when he wrote the main bad guy of the story, he turned out a very funny, almost buffoonish figure. He may be the most evil person in literature who’s also almost totally comic.
  2. Dostoevsky is notorious for dropping hints via the names of his characters — applied nominative determinism — and this one’s name means something like “supremacy”.
  3. Or as another famous book about demons once put it:

    4. I am the spirit that negates
    And rightly so, for all that comes to be
    Deserves to perish wretchedly;
    ‘Twere better nothing would begin.
    Thus everything that your terms, sin,
    Destruction, evil represent —
    That is my proper element.

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