Russia's Nuclear Missile Defeat

When Vladimir Putin, Russia's President, recently announced an array of new Russian nuclear weapons (see https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/europe/putin-russia-weapons-analysis-intl/index.html), he unwittingly acknowledged another strategic defeat for Russia.  To be an effective threat, these weapons will have to produced in significant numbers.  Russia is relatively poor nation with a falling life expectancy.  The price of petroleum, its primary export, has fallen sharply in recent years, causing economic contraction.  It has massive environmental problems and a slow birth rate that will lead to the same demographic time bomb that bedevils many nations today. By any reasonable estimation, Russia doesn't have the money for these new weapons.

Putin, like a bad general, is fighting the last war.  For understandable reasons, Russians are paranoid about being attacked militarily by other nations.  They suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis during World War II, losing 20 million or more people.  But generals who prepare for the next war, not the last one, are the ones headed for victory.  Whether or not Putin believes it, America won't attack Russia militarily.  It will only defend itself, as it did recently when Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops in Syria.  The lopsided American victory in that instance should give Putin pause about further military engagement with the United States.  But who knows what goes on in his head.

By diverting large sums of money into weapons technology and the building of a new, large nuclear arsenal, Putin guarantees that his nation will be economically crippled for decades.  The United States won the Cold War because its economy vastly outgrew the Soviet economy, and the Soviet Union no longer had the wealth to maintain its Eurasian empire.  It had to break up and it did.  China is far more powerful than Russia today, not because it has better weapons but because it has a far stronger economy.  America, too, is far more powerful because it is economically way ahead of Russia and widening the gap.  By designing and building more nuclear weapons, Putin has put Russia on the path to another defeat.

Why North Korea Can't Afford to Nuke America

Despite all the noise Kim Jong Un is making about nuking America, he can't afford to do it.  That's not simply because of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction and his inability to touch America's Trident submarines, any one of which could obliterate North Korea.  It's also because he'd target North Korea if he tried to hit America.

Recent news reports indicate that North Korea has ballistic missiles that either can or soon will be able to reach Washington, D.C.  The nation's capital would naturally be a primary target for Kim's missiles, and he'd no doubt put his most powerful nukes on the missiles headed for DC.  Those missiles, if they actually succeeded in reaching their target, would likely cause a lot of damage in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington.  The damage could come either from explosive blast or from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), or both.

Somewhere around 70% of the world's Internet traffic flows through servers located in northern Virginia (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/data-centers-boom-in-loudoun-county-but-jobs-arent-following/2014/01/17/b4a704c8-7f0e-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html?utm_term=.181c4b46bfa0).  The effects of the blast and the EMP could knock out a large portion of those servers and the infrastructure in which they operate.  The Internet could promptly become one gigantic, intractable traffic jam.

North Korea is about as isolated as any country in the world.  One of its main connections to the outside world is through the Internet.  The Internet is a crucial tool for North Korea, to steal money, do business (often illicit), to spy on other people, and to find out the truth (the problem with purveying fake news is that you still have to know the truth or the truth will sooner or later smack you up one side and down the other).  Without the Internet, North Korea would have to rely largely on its own internal resources.  And those aren't sufficient even to feed its own population a nutritionally adequate diet, let alone provide a decent standard of living.

So if North Korea nukes America, it loses its Internet connection.  And these days, that's almost the worst thing that can happen.