Category: War
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Dr. Dabbs – Why Ukraine Matters
Here’s a glimpse into the sausage factory that is my writing for GunsAmerica. I’ve been banging these columns out for years now. Crafting these things is the highlight of my week. It is indeed such a privilege. Thanks for acting interested–I literally couldn’t do it without you.
Table of contents
- Comments Are the Best Part
- The War in Ukraine Represents a Unique Opportunity
- Anatomy of a Monster
- Perhaps He’s Compensating for Something…
- Megalomaniacal Nutjob
- Volodymyr Zelensky: The Archetypal Underdog
- A Weird Segue To President of Ukraine
- The War In Ukraine
- The Devil is Always in the Details
- Tactical Relativity for Ukraine
- Big Picture
- READ MORE: Dipprasad Pun: A Remarkably Dangerous Little Man
- Ruminations On the War in Ukraine
Some are pure history. Others focus on a certain gun or particular weapon system. Periodically I’ll slip in something that’s just a wee bit silly. And then some sport a thin patina of politics. It is the political columns that always stimulate the most discussion.
Comments Are the Best Part
I can’t wait for the commentary at the bottom. I read every word. I have had my grammar corrected, my history tweaked, my motives questioned, and my honor impugned. I do love it all.
Today we are going to explore what I hope will be a fairly controversial subject. If you have opinions I’d love to read them down below. These are mine. Fortunately for me, I am unimportant so I can speak my mind without caring about offending anybody.
The War in Ukraine Represents a Unique Opportunity
I was born in 1966. I have lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Russians ever since I first drew breath. Like-minded buddies and I used to design subterranean fallout shelters in the margins of our notebooks in High School.
In 1989 the wall fell, and everything changed. For the first time in my life, we faced the possibility of a world not defined by the pervasive threat of nuclear war. Moreso than at any time since the end of WW2, there was hope and an expectation of a brighter, more peaceful future. And then Vladimir Putin happened.
Anatomy of a Monster
Vladimir Putin began work as a foreign intelligence officer in 1975. He resigned from the KGB in 1991 and dove headfirst into politics. For a time he helmed the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB). Putin was appointed Prime Minister in the summer of 1999.
Putin has had a stranglehold on power ever since, walking away with every election in which he has participated. He suspiciously won the most recent March 2024 plebiscite with 87.97% of the popular vote. Of course, his political enemies have a curious habit of falling out of windows, blowing up in airplanes, or being inexplicably contaminated with toxic Polonium-210. That might have something to do with it.
Perhaps He’s Compensating for Something…
I will admit that there was a time when I thought Putin was kind of cool. While our own President Clinton was chasing interns and President Obama didn’t get within a hundred yards of a bicycle without donning one of those lame-looking helmets, Putin was burning meat with friends, pumping iron, flying an ultralight airplane, and wrangling polar bears.
Megalomaniacal Nutjob
That’s not hyperbole. In 2013, he took a bathyscaphe to the seabed to explore the remains of the Russian naval frigate Oleg that sank in 1869. He went on expeditions to tranquilize Siberian tigers and polar bears before fitting them with radio collars. Putin holds a black belt in Judo and has authored a book on the subject titled, Judo: History, Theory, and Practice (3.9/5 on Goodreads). But, throughout it all, Vladimir Putin was actually a megalomaniacal nutjob.
Putin first showed his true colors in 1999 when he oversaw the Second Chechen War that claimed between 50,000 and 80,000 civilian lives. In 2014, he invaded Crimea, but President Obama didn’t really take him seriously. Thusly emboldened, in February of 2022 Putin massed some 180,000 combat troops on the border with Ukraine. 
His stated goals were to rid Ukraine of imaginary Nazis and create a buffer between Russia and NATO. His war plan had his triumphant forces marching victoriously through the streets of Kiev in three days. However, a certain Ukrainian television comedian had something to say about that.
Volodymyr Zelensky: The Archetypal Underdog
Volodymyr Zelensky is 49 years old. He is married and has two kids. Zelensky is Jewish and had relatives who perished in the Holocaust. His grandfather was an infantry Colonel in the Red Army during WW2.
Zelensky began his show business career at age seventeen, forming a comedy troupe called Kvartal 95. Kvartal 95 was a sort-of Ukrainian Saturday Night Live. Most of the videos of Zelensky circulating on the Internet that make him look androgynous or show him in a compromising light are taken from Kvartal 95 comedy sketches. That’s why there is always laughter in the background.
Zelensky’s extensive filmography includes a voiceover as Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of the two Paddington movies. He said the objective of Kvartal 95 was to, “Make the world a better place, a kinder and more joyful place with the help of those tools that we have, which are humor and creativity.”
A Weird Segue To President of Ukraine
What got seriously strange was his sitcom Servant of the People. This show runs on Netflix, and it is surreal. Zelensky plays a school teacher whose students surreptitiously get his name on the ballot for President of Ukraine. In the show, his pupils record him ranting against government corruption and oligarchs without his knowledge, post the video online, and, against all odds, get him elected President. What follows is an amusing fish-out-of-water trope wherein the humble schoolteacher tries to adapt to the trappings of power and run a country. The Ukrainian people loved it.
The War In Ukraine
Zelensky’s political life has been defined by the Russian invasion. In the chaotic days following the initial assault, President Biden famously called Zelensky to offer safe passage for him and his family out of Ukraine on an American helicopter. Zelensky’s immortal response was, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
In the subsequent two years, the United States has provided around $74 billion in total aid to Ukraine. $46.3 billion of that has been for weapons, training, and military support. That’s a pretty epic chunk of change, but let’s dissect that number for context.
Since the 2010 earthquake, we have pumped some $13.5 billion into Haiti. That money is just gone. Haiti is a lawless failed state today. We sent $3 billion to Somalia, and I still can’t get too worked up about vacationing there.
We spent $72.7 billion in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2020. In the two decades since 911 we dumped an eye-popping $8 trillion on the Global War on Terror while directly or indirectly killing nearly a million people. That’s $24,000 for every man, woman, and child in our country. The money we have spent in Ukraine is undeniably substantial, but it pales in comparison to some of Uncle Sam’s other boondoggles. However, what do we actually get for this not-insubstantial investment?
The Devil is Always in the Details
$46.3 billion sounds like a lot of money, because it is a lot of money. However, that figure is misleading. Much of that cash was actually spent ages ago.
We have provided the Ukrainians with 31 M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, 186 M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, 300 obsolete M113 Armored Personnel Carriers, 157 Stryker vehicles, and about 2,000 Humvees along with a variety of other trucks and tracks.
We sent them 180 M777 towed 155mm howitzers, 18 M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers, and 20 of the famed 227mm HIMARS launchers. Ukraine has also received more than 2,000 Stinger missiles and a single Patriot battery which they have wielded as deftly as a surgeon’s scalpel.
Tactical Relativity for Ukraine
There’s a lot of other stuff on the list, but most of the big-ticket items were surplus left over from the Cold War. We sent the Ukrainians those 31 Abrams tanks, but we still have roughly 3,000 more sitting idle in the desert over and above the 2,000 or so we maintain in active inventory. The same goes for Bradleys, Humvees, and dozens of other combat vehicle types. While those numbers sound astronomical, in a manner of speaking what we are really doing is cleaning out our basement.
And that brings me to my main point. The United States spent enough on defense between the end of WW2 and the fall of the Iron Curtain to raze and rebuild every manmade structure in North America. We built all this stuff to fight the Russians in the first place. Thankfully we eventually just parked most of it in the desert waiting for a rainy day. Well, this is that rainy day.
Big Picture
Yes, Ukraine has a corruption problem. However, that’s nothing compared to Afghanistan, Somalia, and dozens of other tinpot fiefdoms we have propped up in recent times. Heck, our own political leaders are hardly paragons of altruistic virtue themselves.
Money is tight in America, tighter than it has been in ages. I agree that it seems insane to pump billions into countries overseas while our own infrastructure crumbles and our countrymen live homeless on the streets. However, this is the chance we have been waiting for ever since 1945. We now have a once-in-a-century opportunity to drive a knife into the heart of the Russian bear without spilling a drop of American blood. We would actually be insane not to take advantage of it.
Putin did this all by his lonesome. His invasion of Ukraine will go down in history as the greatest geopolitical blunder of the modern age. And all because he underestimated a Ukrainian comedian and the people who voted him into office.
The fight in Ukraine could indeed theoretically precipitate nuclear war. I certainly acknowledge that. However, the Russians have been threatening to nuke us every day for the last 75 years. I’m ready to get this done.
Ruminations On the War in Ukraine
Depending upon what you read, Russia has already lost 3,000 tanks, 20 naval vessels, and 294 combat aircraft. US government sources say the Russians have suffered a mindboggling 315,000 troops killed or wounded. The Ukrainians purportedly killed 10,000 Russians in February 2024 alone.
Now is not the time to falter. The Russian military was and is formidable, but the Ukrainians are currently bleeding them white. Zelensky is no saint, but I think we should give him absolutely anything he asks for. We didn’t start this war, but we may never get another opportunity like this.
We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are right now. If the conflict in Ukraine sparks a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, billions of people could die.
This is why so many of us desperately want leaders from both sides to sit down at the negotiating table and try to work out their differences peacefully. Perhaps a peaceful solution is not possible, but for the good of humanity they should at least make an attempt. Because as things stand right now, all it is going to take is one mistake for the world to be plunged into an unthinkable nuclear cataclysm.
According to author Annie Jacobsen, the U.S. has a network of satellites that is constantly watching for an ICBM launch from one of our enemies…
“The US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America’s enemies.”
“So the moment an ICBM launches, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM a fraction of a second after it launches. And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and that’s the US counterattack.
“The reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike.
“That policy, launch on warning, is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.”
In the event of a surprise first strike, there would only be a handful of minutes to get the president out of bed and decide what to do.
Needless to say, the president would not want to launch a counterstrike if it is a false alarm.
Because once the missiles are in the air, there is no calling them back.
When a nuclear warhead explodes, a fireball is created that is unimaginably hot. The following comes from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…
Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.
The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.
The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.
If you are at ground zero, you will have zero chance of surviving.
According to a study that was conducted several years ago, approximately 34 million people would die during the first few hours of a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
But that would be just the first wave of death.
In the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, radioactive fallout would spread over much of the continental United States…
Using archived weather data over 48-hour periods across a number of dates in 2021 to simulate the expected radioactive plume, the scientists found that the West Coast states were the lowest risk due to a prevailing easterly wind.
However, depending on the exact wind direction, the worst fallout could fall over any part of the U.S. and Canada east of Idaho. Based on weather patterns on December 2, 2021, Chicago, Illinois and D.C., among other population centers, would be in the direct path of a fatal dose of radiation.
In a worst-case scenario, almost all of Montana and North Dakota, as well as parts of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Kansas would receive a dose more than 10 times what is considered lethal, resulting in deaths in a matter of days. Most of the Midwest would receive a lethal dose, while elsewhere would see deaths occur in weeks.
Radioactive fallout would kill far more people than the initial explosions would.
But the “good news” is that radiation levels would dissipate fairly rapidly.
So if you are far enough away from a ground zero and you are able to survive the initial tsunami of radioactive fallout, it will eventually be safe to go outside again.
But at that point there will be no more supply chains, people will be fighting for whatever dwindling resources are left, and “famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself”…
As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.
Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.
Two years after any nuclear war—small or large—famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself.
Ultimately, nuclear winter will kill more people than anything else.
For those of us that live in the northern hemisphere, it will be exceedingly difficult to grow much of anything once temperatures drop far below normal…
This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.
Can you imagine what our world would look like if such a war actually happened?
Unfortunately, relations between the United States and Russia are the worst that they have ever been, and we are getting closer to a nuclear war with each passing day.
Politicians in the western world assume that the Russians would never risk a nuclear war because the consequences would be so apocalyptic for everyone.
But Russian politicians have warned us over and over again that if we push Russia too far there will be a nuclear war.
And as I detailed in my new book entitled “Chaos”, the Russians have been feverishly preparing to fight a nuclear war for many years.
They know that there are no “winners” in a nuclear war.
But they also know that whoever strikes first will have the best chance of surviving one.
Right now, Russian forces are advancing and Ukrainian leaders are becoming increasingly desperate…
“Western leaders are bracing for the Ukrainian army’s collapse as it has only been able to slow the advance of Russian forces amid weapons and ammunition shortages, the Times writes.
In its editorial, titled ‘It’s time we talked about the fall of Kiev’, the paper points out that ‘contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual frozen conflict, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back’.
‘This is the nightmare scenario now being contemplated by western policymakers’, the Times notes.
Russia’s advance ‘would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians’. ‘It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges’, the newspaper says. ‘The consequences of a partial or complete defeat would be calamitous in ways western populations have barely begun to understand.
But we have a lazy habit in the comfortable West – away from Europe’s front line in east and south Ukraine – of wishful thinking and being unprepared for bad surprises’, the Times emphasizes.”
Ukrainian officials realize that the only way they can win the war is for NATO forces to intervene, and some western leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron are very open to the idea.
But Vladimir Putin has warned that this will put us one step away from nuclear war, and he has decided to conscript another 150,000 men into the Russian military…
Vladimir Putin has called up another 150,000 men for Russian army conscription, the highest figure for eight years.
This comes as Orthodox priests have been ordered to say prayers in church for the dictator’s victory in the war.
The recruits are aged 18 to 30 and will be conscripted between 1 April and 15 July amid his war against Ukraine.
The Russians are convinced that western leaders want to bring down the Russian government and divide Russia up into a bunch of smaller pieces.
On the other side, politicians in the western world are determined to do “whatever it takes” to keep the Russians from winning in Ukraine.
Both sides are being unreasonable and paranoid, and that is a recipe for disaster.
All it is going to take is one mistake to unleash a nuclear cataclysm, and billions of lives hang in the balance.
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Maxim PomPom 37mm Machine Gun
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