Dead Man’s Switch

The geopolitical problem we now face is called a Dead Man’s Switch. This is when a leader has boobytrapped themselves. If they are killed or someone tries to decapitate the leadership, something terrible will happen and everyone gets blown up, not just them. President Putin is like a suicide bomber in a room full of hostages and now he is threatening nuclear weapons. But, this sort of situation can be defused. If it is, this story almost surely ends with the greatest victory for open society since the end of the Cold War, a market that races upward, and a new era in which China concedes that this military/nuclear/strategic confrontation game is not worth the candle. But, like all rollercoaster rides, the thrust toward a thrilling Hollywood ending is going to scare the living daylights out of us. So, please read this till the end.

President Putin has thrust Europe into a nuclear standoff. Once Putin put the Russian arsenal into a state of readiness, nations had to close the airspace, which they have in droves. This is not a sanction. It is because they want to identify inbound missiles which may potentially be nuclear. That will sound quite insane to anyone under the age of probably 50. The young have no memory of Mutual Assured Destruction and cannot believe that anyone would actually deploy nuclear weapons. They need to watch Dr. Strangelove (full title Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and remember that the world has loaded up weapons makers with a record amount of cash in recent years. The innovations have been immense. Russia now has hypersonic and Thermobaric missiles that the West has no known defenses against. We are in a Post-Star Wars world where you cannot take a missile out with an Iron Dome because you did not build it. If you Google DEW Line you get articles about Mountain Dew sparkling drinks and not about the Distant Early Warning system of 63 manned radar stations in the Arctic that served to alert the West if the Soviet Union lobbed a missile towards them.

We must also consider the possibility that this is not a bluff, especially since almost everyone thought Putin was bluffing every step of the way until now. He clearly wasn’t. He’s lost his old best friends. The oligarchs are outraged. He’s lost his new best friend, China, who was clever enough to get Russia to go test the West’s reaction times and yet shrug their shoulders as soon as the blame came. Of course, the Russian public are outraged and finding that Putin is indeed restoring the old Soviet Empire which is obvious from the queues at banks and shops. They are reminded of the old controls on capital and human movement thanks to Mr. Putin. Most cannot leave the country now that flights from Russia are banned in so many places and at least 36 countries.

Putin’s key Generals are clearly disgusted based on the official photos and footage released from the recent Russian Security Council meeting. The viral video of the Director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, shows that even he is not on board with whatever Putin is up to. The Kremlin has unfollowed two of the most important figures in Russia on Instagram. This seems to be the modern equivalent of a point-blank execution in the digital era. One is the deeply experienced Foreign Minister Lavrov. The other is the deeply respected Defense Minister and Head of the Russian Army, Sergey Shoygu. The hope is that all these intelligent people do something about their own leader. But, they too know that Putin may have set up a Dead Man’s Switch. Like in a Hollywood film, the problem is not that the person hits a button but that he doesn’t.

Who in their right mind would plan out a Dead Man’s Switch? The same sort of person who would launch an old-fashioned military attack in a petulant huff without thinking through sufficient supplies of food and petrol. The same sort of person who assumed the regime change would be fast and easy and is annoyed that their efforts to secure control of another nation is taking too long.

How can this kind of leadership failure be happening in 2022? I quoted Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic @DRTCP  in my last two books, which were both about the reasons we are seeing so many leadership failures and how to stop this from happening. @DRTCP says that we love to put people with psychopathic qualities in charge (Note that psychopathy is not recognized in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, perhaps because they fear setting off psychopaths everywhere). Roughly 15% to 20% of all CEOs in the West are psychopaths. See The Psychopathic CEO: An Executive Survival Guide. The number of psychopaths in politics has to be larger! Russia has no monopoly on these qualities. Anyone can see that politics everywhere is dominated by people (the list of the specific individuals is too long to post here) with a particular and peculiar set of characteristics. These give rise to an equally long list but which includes: a tendency to believe that YOU made them do something terrible and total disregard for anyone else’s situation.

The Psychopathic CEO Amazon

One of the persistent features of a psychopath is their failure to properly anticipate the future because they are so busy plotting their revenge for the past.  If a person is revenge-led they can launch a war without thinking though how they are going to manage say a country the size of Ukraine after the conquest (woops) and yet carefully and completely think through how they’ll blow everybody to smithereens if they don’t get what they want. The research shows these folks are “ pitilessness, remorselessness, have an inability to love (though very good at the theater of love bombing as the President of Belarus probably now knows), and insensitivity to the possibility of harm.” They do, however, love being loved. This is perhaps a key reason NATO and the US are doing so little. We know from decades of research that a suicide bomber with hostages has to be talked to very very nicely and calmly. This is not appeasement. It is smart.

Washington and NATO knew that Putin would eventually escalate to nuclear. The Russians always do because they have so little else to work with. Putin has now done so by declaring that his arsenal is in a state of “combat readiness”. The problem is that they have a lot of nukes to work with. They have something like 6000 of them altogether and 2000 are tactical nukes positioned in Kaliningrad, now Belarus, and around the borders of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (hello Northern Fleet), the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The hope is that Putin’s people run out of supplies and willpower well before that. But, Putin has now effectively annexed Belarus. Its soldiers and Special Ops will now be deployed to turn Kyiv into “a meat grinder”. Belarus will now host an array of Russian nuclear weapons. The combination of ground power with the threat of tactical nuclear weapons may be enough to permit Russia to punch a channel through the Suwalki Gap to create a land bridge that allows Russia to surround the Baltics. People keep forgetting that he has a vast un-uniformed army reporting into his situation room as well. These off-balance sheet mercenary types range from Chechen Assassins to former GRU and Spetznaz operatives who often work for private enterprises. They can capture valuable assets without any reporter being able to describe the situation as “an invasion”.

The critical question now, at this moment when the aircraft are grounded but the shellfire is escalating to horrifying Thermobaric weapons, what is Putin’s intention? Could he consider deploying tactical weapons to create the buffer he has so long claimed he wanted? Is the logic, “If I can’t have it, you can’t have it either”. Or, is the threat squarely aimed at the West? I agree with my colleague Malcolm Chalmers at RUSI. The nuclear threat is aimed at Britain, and at Poland, and at the Baltics. Remember that Putin threatened the Danes only a few years ago with the possibility of nukes hitting their ships if they dared to join NATO.

In which case, where is the Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov or the Vasili Arkhipov of this moment in history? Stanislav realized in 1983 that the computer system was wrong when it warned of a full nuclear first strike involving 5 ICBMs coming from the US. he was trained to push a button and meet the first strike with total annihilation. But, breaking all the protocols, he did nothing. He just could not believe the US would launch a first strike. It turned out to be the sunshine bouncing off of clouds, not nukes. He saved the world from MAD incinerations. In 1962 Arkhipov was the Chief of Staff and second in Command of a Russian fleet on a Russian sub armed with nuclear torpedoes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He refused to fire them and “saved the world”. Who on Putin’s team will refuse to fire today? I suspect many, most and maybe all. How much of his arsenal has automated the response? No one knows.

So, we still have the Dead Man’s Switch. Let’s assume he means what the man means what he says. If so, everybody needs to be very calm and speak to him very very nicely which is what the FBI does in such situations. This one is just bigger.

Putin has no path out right now. We need to offer him and all his hostages a way out:

1. Invite Russia to join the West. Stop breaking the vodka bottles and drink vodka with the survivor hostages. Deploy empathy for the victims. Remember that in the West the penalty for messing up is a fine or jail time. In Russia, organized crime is so embedded that the penalty for screwing up is a bullet or the assassination of your family. Russians need help weaning their nation off of organized crime. The country needs help coming into the family of nations. It seems likely that Putin himself, once disarmed, may well end up like the two men who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union,  Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze. They also developed and oversaw a massive bioweapons program called the Biopreparat even as they shook hands with Reagan and shepherded in the end of the Soviet Union. We can start Helsinki 2.0 even though we know Putin or Russia might continue doing very bad things and persist in being a very good liar. That beats the risk of WMDs going off. Lie to me, don’t incinerate me please.  

   

So, when you blame the West for paltry sanctions remember that they are dealing with a suicide bomber who might be rigged to blow us all up. There is a reason for the “gently gently, nicely nicely” tone our leaders are taking while at the same time not giving an inch on terms.

It is only human to want justice. To want reparations. To want revenge. Ukrainians will be first on a long line. But, when dealing with someone like this, getting out alive is a win. Half of Russians do not want Putin to be re-elected in 2024, and more than 40 per cent of young Russians want to leave the country. So, he’ll soon be out of office, and out of power anyway. But, at least he has some possibility of defining his legacy other than the man who dropped a nuke on Western Europe. We know what we all want Mr. Putin to do. We could make it easier for him to take the good road and harder to take the bad one.

2. Agree to Helsinki 2.0 knowing that the whole world now supports the US/NATO position. Neocons dream of a moment like this. He gets what he wants, which is to kick off these talks.  The West gets what they want, which is control over the outcome of such talks. That will resolve all this definitively for generations to come. The markets will fly upwards. Europe will expand Eastward with investment. China will have to back down and play nice too if this happens.

3. Commence the new Strategic Arms Limitations/Reductions talks. We had SALT I and SALT II. Now we need SALT III and GALT (Genetic Arms Limitations Talks) and BALT (Bioweapons Arms Limitations Talks). Technology has dramatically changed since we last had treaties inhibiting weapons development. Now nobody knows exactly what weapons everybody has anymore. Why not lay our weapons on the table. We don’t have to give them up. We just have to declare them. The US is already doing this by regularly showing the world where our nuclear submarines are and where our satellites are.

   

   Crew of the USS Ohio in Guam 2022

Take all that money and energy and throw it into solving the meta-problems of our time and create a world that has viable alternative energy, sufficient water, enough food, and more. Look at the boost the world received when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. It was called “The Peace Dividend”. All that money was diverted from a nuclear arsenal into the building of tomorrow’s economy. It gave us boom years. That’s the road we all need to take today.

Stay informed on new developments as they bubble up.