How would they respond? what information would they glean from their training datasets and Internet sources in responding? LLM AIs are trained using enormous datasets of text. They use neural network deep learning AI technologies to analyze and predict sequences of words obtained from these datasets. Human programmers influence word relationship sequences when they create AI algorithms. That’s because different programmers, themselves, have biases, or may have different levels of language facility, and may see word relationships differently.

For AIs understanding the multiple meanings of the same word or the same spellings of words that have different meanings in context presents a challenge. In other words, it’s complicated to resolve and parse the ambiguities of human language.

How does the AI understand the intention of the writer’s words versus what the writer wrote? Are there hidden meanings? Are there emotional contexts to consider?

It is far more than just predicting what word follows another, and how AIs do this remains somewhat of a mystery to their creators.

Just how complex are LLM AIs?

When Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 or GPT-3 was launched in the spring of 2020, its LLM featured 175 billion parameters for learning patterns and relationships within language.

When its successor GPT-4 was introduced in March 2023, it featured 1.76 trillion parameters, ten times the size of its predecessor. Such is the pace of AI’s evolution.

Knowing this, I had to see how three of the latest LLM AIs handle a geopolitical question. I chose the current war between Russia and Ukraine. I didn’t give the LLM AIs anything more than the question posed at the beginning of this article.

These are the results from Copilot, Gemini and Monica.

Copilot

Wars Past and Present are Brutal

When Japan first launched its war on China in 1931 with the conquest of Manchuria, and then in 1937 on the rest of China; when Italy began its war of conquest in 1935 in Ethiopia; and when Nazi Germany began the European war with an assault on Poland in 1939, the average person away from the frontlines of these conflicts didn’t see the collateral damage. The average person saw newsreels of marching troops, airplanes taking off, the aftermath of bombings, and refugees fleeing with their possessions in tow. There were fewer images of death in the newsreels back then.

Imagine if the technology we have at present would have been available then. What would young people have said and done? What would they have said and done in witnessing on their mobile phones the assault on Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled by Nazi Germany? And what would they have said and done witnessing the Allied war response to Germany and Japan’s aggressions and crimes against humanity?

The list of past atrocities committed in and out of war is miles long.

• Japan’s rape of Nanking,
• Germany’s Final Solution,
• The Bataan Death March,
• The Amritsar massacre by the British in India,
• The Ottoman Armenian genocide,
• The Soviet Ukraine Holodomor,
• The Rwandan genocide,
• Italy’s civilian repression and mass executions in Ethiopia,
• The London Blitz,
• The nightmare of the Dresden bombing,
• The firebombing of Tokyo,
• The dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Modern Technology Has Given Us a Front Row Seat

With cell phones in hand, how many of these past horrific events would have blanketed the Internet making us voyeurs to carnage and destruction? The difference between now and the past is that we live in an age of ubiquitous always-on communication. We also live at a time when most wars are brushfires and not global conflicts like the one that ended 78 years ago.

But when you delve into the recent past we have civil wars in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen. Go back further and we have had wars between Israel and the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. Then there is America’s fateful war in Vietnam and Cambodia. In all of these, there are the same images of inflicted pain, destruction and death.

Even the “righteous act” of freeing Europe from Nazi Germany produced collateral damage to the very people the Allies were attempting to liberate. The D-Day assault on Normandy, including the Allied bombings preceding and after June 6, 1944, killed 20,000 with 5,000 more collateral French civilian deaths on the day of the invasion. The bombing of German and Japanese cities throughout that war, not including the two atom bombs, caused 600,000 civilian deaths in the former, and 200,000 in the latter.

The two contemporary wars making the headlines of Western media have produced thousands of collateral civilian casualties. Since February 2022, when Russia launched its war on Ukraine, more than 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. Since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Palestinian deaths have exceeded 20,000 civilians and militia, and Israel has seen 1,200 civilians and several hundred taken hostage. We have bore witness on television, online and in the news media daily to the suffering in both of these conflicts.

Wars Are a Product of History 

The challenges are numerous for young people in trying to understand the whys and wherefores of the wars they are witnessing. These conflicts are an assault on their senses. The issues behind them are subborned by the emotions they bring out. It is easier to side with the one being attacked than the one attacking. It is easier to accept “facts” on the Internet that have no historical foundation.

What’s Behind the Ukraine Conflict?

Let’s look at the history behind the Ukraine conflict. Was there ever a Ukrainian nation before the dissolution of the Soviet Union? No.

Ukraine was given a geographic status by the Soviet Union when the latter formed after World War One. Ukrainians, however, spoke a different language than their Russian neighbours and practiced different religious and cultural traditions.

Ukraine became a nation when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Its boundaries conformed to the geography established by the former Soviet Union. Ukraine entered into economic associations with the former Soviet republics that were now loosely joined in a commonwealth of nations.

Ukrainians, however, increasingly have seen themselves as part of Europe. They applied to become a member of the European Union and to join NATO, the defensive alliance formed after World War Two to counter the Soviet Union’s dominance of Eastern Europe. Russia has protested these moves.

Ukraine being both politically and culturally different from Russia, was now perceived by the latter to have betrayed its Russian historic associations. The Russian leadership has responded by sending its army into Ukraine with a plan to end the European quest and incorporate a sizable chunk of the country into Russia.

What’s Behind the Israel-Hamas Conflict?

With Israel and Hamas, the seeds of the conflict go back to the 19th century when a small community of Jews in what was then a province within the Ottoman Empire began to see other Jews arrive from Russia and Europe fleeing pogroms and persecution. The carving up of the Ottoman Empire by France and Britain after World War One also included a British promise to a nationalist Jewish movement called Zionism with its goal of establishing a homeland in Palestine. The British also promised the Arabs a degree of national autonomy in the same region. The Holocaust of World War Two brought surviving European Jews to British Palestine.

In 1947, the British decided to leave and the United Nations recognized a British plan to partition the territory. This is where Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are today. The Jews of Palestine declared their partitioned area to be the state of Israel. The neighbouring Arab states, also carved from the Ottoman Empire with no prior existence as nations themselves, refused to recognize Israel’s declaration of independence and promptly invaded. They lost the war with the boundaries of the Jewish state expanding with displacement of the local native population. The Arab states expelled their Jewish communities who found refuge in the new state of Israel.

The two remaining geographic segments of Palestine remained in Arab nation hands. The one in Gaza was incorporated into Egypt. The one in the West Bank became part of Jordan. Neither Arab state recognized Palestine and the territories they absorbed as a nation. The people of Gaza and the West Bank weren’t made citizens of these states. Palestinians became refugees. Subsequent wars between Israel and Arab neighbouring states have left the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza under the military control of Israel. Today, they are two jurisdictions with a degree of local autonomy. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007. The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank.

In both wars, who is in the right, and who is in the wrong?

For young people not familiar with the history and assailed by thousands of disturbing images, it is hard to determine who has been wronged. These images bring out passionate emotions. Where they appear on the Internet and in social media they come attached to expressed opinions, the spin of disinformation, and the doctoring of facts. It’s easy to do, to ascribe an image to a current event that comes from elsewhere and a different conflict. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists, and ideologues who have a different agenda in mind, one focused on hatred and bigotry.

War is ugly. Hate feeds wars and wars feed hate. Will we ever get rid of war? Will we ever end hate and bigotry? When ignorance is overcome by knowledge, and when our shared planet becomes a collective project worth nurturing and saving, maybe we will find our better nature.

In World War Two, and in other wars, humans have done unspeakable acts to other humans and to the planet. What happened then has happened again and again. The youth of the world in whatever nation they reside, whatever their creed, skin colour, or sex, need to learn from those who preceded them and have never learned how to stop the kind of wars fought in the past and present.

There is, however, one righteous war still ahead. It is the one to save the planet. This is the existential battle, to mitigate climate change, to help those hurt by it to adapt, and to ensure that those escaping its consequences are welcomed wherever they go and whenever they arrive.

Participants aiding Ukraine include volunteer brigades from western countries playing a role similar to what was seen for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Meanwhile, NATO countries are playing the role the United States took on in the first two years of World War Two, arming the underdog, Ukraine, much like America’s support of Great Britain against Nazi Germany and its partner, Fascist Italy.

The war has become schizophrenic. It resembles trench warfare from World War One on the Eastern Ukraine front. There is an absence of aerial dogfights between combatant airforces, the stuff of Top Gun, Billy Bishop, and the Red Baron. Instead, this aerial war uses smart lethal machines: intelligence and surveillance drones, drones with weapon systems, and kamikaze swarms.

Russia is also using guided and cruise missiles to target areas behind the frontlines including Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. The deployment is similar to the use of the V1 and V2 weapons that Germany used in retreat against British, Belgian and Dutch cities. Tens of thousands of civilians died from buzz bomb and guided missile attacks in the concluding year of that war.

Getting back to the present, behind the scenes of the Ukraine war are growing numbers of 21st-century technologies already altering how war is and will be fought today and in the future.

I had hoped to cover the full range of this subject in one posting but it appears that it will take three to describe what is happening with war in the 21st century. So this first part focuses on airborne military drones. Subsequent articles will look at other technologies from satellite networks to artificial intelligence (AI).

Aerial Drones and Warfare

Non-lethal aerial intelligence gathering goes back to the Montgolfier brothers who were the first to launch balloons with humans aboard in France back in 1783. The use of human observers in balloons moved from these first flights of fancy to military deployment following the French Revolution. During the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, the Union army regularly deployed balloons to see what was happening on the Confederate side of the line.

In both 20th-century world wars, aerial surveillance moved to dirigibles and airplanes. The advent of two-way radio communications meant observers in the air could send information about what they were seeing to commanders in the field.

Today, the multi-million dollar Predator drones that the U.S. used in Afghanistan are still being deployed. But smaller, cheaper drones inspired by hobbyist kits are replacing them. These are drones with inexpensive yet sophisticated navigation technology, onboard wireless communications and video cameras to send coordinates and real-time imaging to operators.

This new age of cheap drones has given underdog Ukraine the ability to fight Russia both at and behind the front. Drone operators send coordinates and pictures to artillery batteries that target Russian tanks, troop carriers, and field guns. Their successes are posted on Twitter for all the world to see. They have helped level the playing field in this deadly conflict.

Russia has also deployed drones in the war targeting Ukraine’s cities, transportation and energy infrastructure. The Russians use swarms of kamikaze drones containing onboard explosives. Iran is the supplier. They are a substitute for missiles and a fraction of the cost at approximately $20,000 apiece. They are even giving artillery shells a run for the money. And although Ukraine’s air defence systems can knock down many incoming missiles, enough of these kamikaze drones sent in swarms can get through to inflict damage and kill people.

Currently, for both Ukraine and Russia, it is human operators in control of these growing drone armies. But onboard AI could soon make future drones autonomous, capable of deciding what and who to target.

How far are we away, then, from fleets of future AI-guided drones and even AI-robotic infantry being used on future battlefields? The world community needs to act to outlaw this next evolutionary step or I’m afraid wars in the 21st century will have machines making independent decisions on who to kill and what to destroy.

The war in Ukraine is one conflict zone of many where nuclear weapons are very much in the mix. Russia sees NATO countries on its European frontier as threats that could justify using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a military conflict. The paranoid state of North Korea sees enemies all around it and without China serving to constrain it, probably would have used its missiles and its nuclear war capability by now. China and the United States in the South China Sea, and over the issue of Taiwan, may become a flashpoint for nuclear escalation. India and Pakistan, both armed with nuclear weapons, enjoy an uneasy armistice in their dispute over Kashmir. And India and China have already fought one border war along their Himalayan frontier, and recently have seen troops from both sides fighting each other. Then there is Israel and its nuclear deterrent capability in addressing a potential threat from Iran. The latter continues to enrich uranium well beyond the needs of nuclear power plant requirements as it pursues joining the nuclear arms club.

Yesterday, William Burr published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Burr directs the Nuclear Documentation Project for George Washington University’s National Security Archive. Entitled, “Cold War estimates of deaths in nuclear conflict,” Burr describes the apprehension raised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the speculation that President Putin is talking about using limited nuclear strikes. The danger that this would draw NATO directly into the conflict leading to a nuclear exchange has led to speculation on what would be considered acceptable casualty levels should this be the outcome.

The very thought, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that any nation would consider using nuclear weapons is abhorrent. And to think that back at the height of the Cold War, nuclear powers were bandying about casualty numbers is equally horrific.

Just after the first two atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, the American military began planning for a future nuclear war with the Soviet Union. At the time, the U.S. was the sole owner of atomic weapons. The Soviets within a few years matched them. The military planners in the U.S. estimated acceptable casualty levels in a nuclear war they could win. Those numbers were kept top secret. At the time, nobody in governments or the military thought about the conditions after a nuclear strike and post-apocalyptic casualties.

In the late 1940s, the estimates of deaths from a nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. talked about millions. In the 1950s with the hydrogen bomb, the number rose to tens of millions. Then with intercontinental ballistic missiles, the number escalated to hundreds of millions.

A 1958 report estimated 50 million American deaths and 9 million injured in a war between the U.S., the People’s Republic of China and the Soviets. The casualty numbers for the other side were estimated to be 71 million immediately with 196 million more dying within the next thirty days.

In 1983 the television drama, The Day After which can be viewed on YouTube, was watched by more than 100 million Americans at the time. It showed the post-apocalyptic devastation of a thermonuclear war. For those who watched it, I was one of them, we were introduced to nuclear winter, a climate-forcing change to weather resulting from a thermonuclear exchange.

In 2013, the second edition of Nuclear Famine, produced by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility, concluded that two billion on the planet would be at risk from the nuclear winter that would follow even a limited thermonuclear exchange between countries like India and Pakistan.

Nature published an article in August of last year about the post-apocalyptic impacts of nuclear war on food security. It describes what soot injections into the stratosphere from a thermonuclear exchange between adversaries would do to global agricultural production and marine food sources. The article concurs with the Nuclear Famine study previously mentioned in terms of the number of casualties in a limited confrontation between India and Pakistan. But it goes on to look at casualties from a U.S.-Russia thermonuclear war which it estimates would kill upwards of 5 billion.

Who plans for wars that could cause holocausts that kill billions? Apparently, all of the militaries and governments of these aforementioned countries. Reams of classified studies are revealed in William Burr’s article. These come from U.S. military archives. And one can assume the same can be found in the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, China, India, Pakistan, and other nuclear-armed countries.

Is There Such a Thing as a Small Nuclear Confrontation?

What is the thinking behind Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats? There are big nuclear weapons and then there are small ones. Those with the latter call them battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. They are theoretically designed to target conventional military forces in the field. In most cases, they produce energy yields smaller than the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But evidence published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, last July, that describes the tactical nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia contradicts the smallness of these weapons.

The Union article notes that the U.S. has approximately 200 tactical nuclear gravity bombs yielding between 0.3 and 170 kilotons. (Hiroshima’s explosive yield was 15 kilotons, so that means the biggest of these small weapons is 11 times more destructive.) The deployment of 100 of these tactical nuclear weapons is in NATO countries in Europe.

Russia, the article estimates, has approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons. The Russian arsenal of small nuclear produces energy yields per each of up to 100 kilotons. These can be delivered by air, ship, and ground-based conventional weapon systems such as those currently being used in Russia’s Ukraine “special military operation.”

Burr describes the Ukraine conflict as “a newer danger” because of Putin’s nuclear sabre rattling. He asks that the countries with nuclear weapons not take any rash steps that could make the casualty estimates of past war planners “more than historical curiosities.”

After losing the initiative in its attempts to seize Kyiv in the early days of the assault, and because of Ukraine’s military pushback against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine, Russia has resorted to attacking civilian targets and focusing on the country’s energy infrastructure.

In Russia’s past efforts to destabilize Ukraine, the power grid was targeted by cyberattacks. At the outset of the 2022 invasion, Russia attempted a cyber assault. But Ukraine had learned from the 2014 Crimea invasion which was accompanied by cyberattacks and hardened its grid security to block the Russian assault. Ukraine did this by distributing its network management infrastructure to be able to restart damaged systems by isolating those still working and operating them locally. Now Russia is using missiles and drones to destroy as much of the grid infrastructure as it can in the hope it will force the hand of the Ukrainian government to ask for terms.

In anticipation of future Russian aggression back in 2017, Ukraine began to disconnect its power grid from its neighbour. On February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded the country, Ukrenergo, the national grid operator was running a trial disconnection from Russia’s grid and doing a synchronization test with the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E). Since March 16, 2022, Ukraine’s grid is now linked to ENTSO-E and no longer to Russia.

Russian missiles, shelling and drones continue to try to sever the European link and destroy the distribution of electricity within the country. As one part of the grid goes down after an attack, Ukrenergo, while it does emergency repairs, has resorted to rolling blackouts to give people heat and light for at least part of the time in the face of winter cold and darkness. Each attack, stated Ukrenergo recently, is making it harder to repair the grid. In the face of this assault, the Ukrainian government asked businesses to go dark so that homes in Kyiv and elsewhere could stay lit during Christmas and the New Year celebration.

Ukraine also is home to four operating nuclear power plants with 15 pressurized water reactors of Russian design. Energoatom is the country’s nuclear energy operator. Two nuclear sites were overrun by Russian forces in the early days of the war, the first, Chornobyl, where the Soviet Union’s worst nuclear disaster occurred back in 1986. Today, Chornobyl is not operational although it is used as a storage area for spent nuclear fuel.   The second, Zaporizhzhya, is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Zaporizhzhya has suffered damage in the fighting and Russian occupiers continue to try and sever its link to Ukraine’s grid. One operating 750-kilovolt line remains with the intergovernmental Nuclear Energy Agency having established observers on site to monitor the health and safety of the plant operating in war conditions.

One lesson to learn from Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s power infrastructure is that electricity coming almost exclusively from a national operator over the grid can prove to be the Achilles’ heel for a country.

In hindsight, as Ukraine back in 2017 was figuring out ways to disconnect from Russia’s power grid, it may have considered implementing a policy to encourage the building of distributed energy based on renewable sources such as rooftop solar and geothermal installations. Where the debate about distributed energy has tended to focus on how utilities can accommodate distributed energy being fed to the grid, in the future, there should be a second conversation. It should be about grid vulnerability to cyberattacks and physical bombardment in the event of war. Countries and utilities need to learn from the Ukraine experience and develop distributed energy strategies to keep the heat and lights on.

The entire nuclear arsenal of the United States at the time was the two bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe a tiny part of the decision to use them was a warning shot across Joseph Stalin’s bow. And maybe, Vladimir Putin’s threat to deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict is his warning shot to NATO, the European Union, and the rest of the planet.

The more compelling reason for this one-time use of atomic bombs was a world still at war for more than half a decade. Tens of millions had already died. To end it, the bombs may have been the least casualty-producing choice from a series of policy alternatives that included:

• continuing the firebombing of Japanese cities (a bombing raid of this type on Tokyo killed more Japanese than the two atomic bombs).
• blockading the home islands of Japan to starve its population to surrender, an outcome that would have taken years and inflicted millions with starvation and death.
• an invasion to conquer the country which would have led to millions of American and allied casualties let alone millions more Japanese deaths.
• dropping two atomic bombs and promising more of the same if the government of Japan didn’t surrender.

In the end, it was the last of these that Truman chose, what he would have considered a lesser of many difficult policy decisions. Yes, it was unprecedented. So much so, that no repeat has occurred since, even though nuclear weapons have spread to several countries. None, however, have ever used them even though many have fought wars since 1945.

Vladimir Putin recently stated that America’s use of atomic bombs provided a “precedent” to justify his right to use them. Maybe he sees deploying nuclear weapons on the battlefield or bombing a Ukrainian city as a way to bring the latter to sue for peace, just as Japan did after two bombs were dropped.

But Putin’s justification of precedent is seriously flawed. In historical context, the one he is most closely following in this war is that of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany with the 1939 invasion of Poland. And his invasion of Ukraine isn’t too far removed from Joseph Stalin’s land grab of Eastern Poland as the country was trying to fend off Germany.

Putin in his speeches in the run-up to the invasion used language akin to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to justify the incorporation of Ukraine into a Greater Russia. Sounds a lot like Hitler’s lebensraum. Unlike Truman, Putin’s consideration of nuclear weapons use is based on outright aggression and bullying ignoring guarantees given to Ukraine about its territorial inviability when it agreed to remove its nuclear arsenal after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The world over the past seventy-seven years has experienced many conflicts: China, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel and its Arab neighbours, Lebanon, India and Pakistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, The Congo, Angola, Nicaragua, and more. Civil wars have disrupted nations. Governments have fallen. But through all of these conflicts no nation, even those with nukes, has made a policy decision to deploy them.

After World War Two and the onset of The Cold War, a group of scientists formed the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with its Doomsday Clock. The hands of the timepiece were initially set not too far from midnight, the hour of Armageddon. The clock was a reminder remind of the perilous nature of unleashing nuclear weapons.

More than a week ago on Bil Maher’s talk show, prominent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated that a nuclear war would be unacceptable but that our perception of the outcome would not be the same as what happened in Japan. He noted that modern nuclear weapons are different.

It was disconcerting to hear this and I decided to do a little more investigation. What did he mean by modern nuclear weapons? Was he differentiating fission versus fusion bombs? Was he talking about battlefield nukes?

In an article entitled “Nowhere to Hide: How a nuclear war would kill you and almost everyone else,” Francois Diaz-Maurin has written about the consequences of a nuclear attack stating, “it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.” 

I think deGrasse Tyson’s comment was an attempt to differentiate the degree of radiation and fallout between fission and fusion weapons. The bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission devices. Today’s nuclear arsenals are a mix of fission and fusion bombs. Most current fission armaments are low-yield explosives when compared to the 1945 bombs. Most fusion bombs are hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped on Japan.

A typical American nuclear weapon is the 300-kiloton W87 warhead deployed on Minuteman III missiles. This bomb blast releases massive amounts of gamma rays, neutrons, x-rays, and a fireball that extends 600 metres (2,000 feet) from the blast’s ground zero. It produces light so powerful it would blind anyone looking at the blast without protective goggles. The heat it produces causes first-degree burns to anyone within 13 kilometres (8 miles) of the blast epicentre. The shockwave exerts 0.3 atmospheres of over-pressure up to 4.7 kilometres (2.9 miles) from ground zero. That’s enough force to flatten homes and buildings and cause widespread casualties in a few seconds.

Fission weapons add long-term radioactive contamination which spreads through the atmosphere for days and weeks. Survivors of a fission blast would have to remain in shelters for at least 48 hours before radiation levels would drop sufficiently to allow them to go outside.

Radioactive contamination plays a smaller part in fusion bombs. But at the heart of every one of them is a fission chain reaction. So there is radiation but the more significant damage comes from a fusion detonation that produces heat and blast radii thousands of square kilometres in size.

Then there are tactical battlefield nuclear weapons of which Russia has many. These weapons are smaller with small blast yields. But used in quantity in a battle could have a significant cumulative effect equivalent to the use of a single fission or fusion bomb. In the face of current Russian battlefield setbacks in Ukraine, Putin may be considering battlefield nukes to stop current Ukrainian counterattacks. The damage they would cause would be localized to military targets and nearby civilian populations. But once detonated, the consequences of their deployment could lead to a counter-escalation in terms of weapons the United States and NATO would be willing to send to Ukraine for its forces to use.

This is the slippery slope leading to a global nuclear escalation and hundreds of millions dying as collateral damage draws more countries into the conflict. Diaz-Maurin describes the consequences of this as a catastrophe that would“encompass the whole world”  leading to global climatic changes, radioactive contamination, the collapse of entire nations and societies, and the onset of famine that would lead to far more lives lost than by the nuclear blasts themselves.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is the last time the world came this close to a nuclear Armageddon. Let’s hope we see the same outcome as back then, a war averted, and the beginning of what led to nuclear detente between the United States and the U.S.S.R. The nuclear football is in Russia’s hands. And in this lethal game will they continue to rely on Putin as their quarterback?

COVID-19 Fight Victimized by War

As Ukrainians die from Russian missile strikes and the shelling of their cities, those who gather in bomb shelters are likely also having to deal with the spread of the latest COVID-19 Omicron variant which is running rampant around the planet. How do you combat a pandemic while your hospitals are targeted by a hostile military? It is practically impossible for Ukraine’s health system to deal equally with war injuries and the virus.

Food Insecurity Endangers Over 300 Million

Another consequence of Russia’s special operation is being felt in countries dependent on Ukraine for food. In a recent statement, the Executive Director of the United Nations’ World Food Program, David Beasley, noted that the war is putting 283 million on the planet at food risk and 45 million in immediate danger of famine. This is happening in countries that have depended on Ukraine for food staples including North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and countries in the Middle East.

For Europe A Choice: Fight Climate Change or Supply Energy

The fight to mitigate climate change is also a victim of this Russian aggression. Both Canada and the United States, as well as other fossil-fuel producing countries, are being encouraged to produce more coal, oil, and natural gas to offset the sanctioning of Russian energy resources. Meanwhile, Russia is still mining and pumping fossil fuels, finding alternate markets for its products. That means more greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are entering our atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

Threatening Nuclear War

And as if to make our lives in the 21st century even more precarious, Russian leaders keep the threat of nuclear war in the public conversation. Very early in the special operation, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, raised the spectre of a World War Three with atomic weapons being used not only on the battlefield but potentially as retaliation against nations helping Ukraine.

Yesterday, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeated this warning noting that Western assistance to Ukraine was turning into a proxy war between his country and NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the defensive pact including countries from North America and Europe. No longer a special action, Lavrov, referenced the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 as being a comparable moment in history, when the United States and the former Soviet Union took the world to the brink of a nuclear war. Lavrov condemned NATO countries for supplying Ukraine with defensive antitank weapons, drones, and armour to fight off the current Russian offensive in the south and east.

Three Tipping Points Tough to Reverse, One Irreversible

Ending Russia’s special operation now will not resolve three of four challenges. Russia’s aggression has set back our dealing with the latest COVID-19 variant. Besides Ukrainians killed by Russian bombs, shellfire, guns and missiles, there will now be victims of a broken healthcare system unable to treat those weakened by war and more susceptible to the virus.

Many experts believe that Russia’s aggression will speed up the conversion of the world’s economy from fossil fuels to low and zero-carbon energy alternatives. But realistically, before that and until well after the war ends we will see a rise in global GHG emissions from offsetting coal, oil and gas producers.

If Ukrainian farmers are unable to attend to fields, care for and harvest crops, and ensure that what is produced gets to market from a country severely disrupted by war, nations facing food insecurity and dependent on Ukraine for staples will see little relief for the foreseeable future without finding new sources of supply.

There is no immediate fix for Europe to replace Russian fossil fuel production. Finding alternative sources will require building a new import infrastructure. This could take several years requiring both ends of the supply chain to invest in the build. Europe likely will experience energy rationing next winter and may have to rethink its carbon-reduction plans. Germany in particular, the most Russian energy-dependent country on the continent, will need to consider energy alternatives which may require the reopening of coal mines, and continuing to use nuclear power plants that were to be decommissioned by years end.

But as for the nuclear threat Russia is brandishing over the rest of the world, this has to stop and it is the Russian people who need to act. How can Russians let their leaders take them on this thermonuclear destructive path? No one from Ukraine or from NATO is threatening nuclear war in response. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagaski can never be forgotten. That’s what makes the Putin-Lavrov comments and threats so heinous.

The challenge for most poor nations is to have some electricity to keep machines operating and the lights on. Today, approximately 80% of the planet has access to electricity. For example, in 2010, only 66% of Indian and 50% of Nigerian households had electricity. Those with no access continue to shrink but not by much. And when you compare what Indian and Nigerian homes consume (see the graph below) versus American or Canadian homes it becomes clearer why the speaker could make the Western conceit comment.

It’s a big ask to tell countries with very little access to electricity to accept the same level of responsibility as electricity-rich nations striving to achieve the net-zero emissions target that the United Nations has set for the mid-century.

It was proposed that one solution could be for Global South countries to skip building the same kind of electrical-power infrastructure that richer nations already have. The example used was how African countries bypassed building landline telecommunications and went directly to mobile cellular networks and smartphones rather than stringing telephone poles and wires across their countries. Similarly, these countries could bypass the building of thermal power plants and national grids and instead rely on local power distribution models fueled by renewable sources backed by baseload modular small nuclear reactors and large-scale energy storage to overcome intermittency issues.

Nuclear was central to much of the Foreign Policy online discussion. A speaker from Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) used the example of the UAE’s new Barakah nuclear power plant to demonstrate how an oil-rich country could transition to a clean energy future with this type of zero-emission facility.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was used to explain how the European Union’s aggressive goal setting on emission reductions could be upset dramatically by external events. In many EU countries, the closing of coal-fired power plants as well as nuclear power facilities has left utilities almost exclusively reliant on Russian fossil fuel sources or having to restart decommissioned coal and nuclear plants. Coal is easier to get up and running. Nuclear not so much.

Throughout the online event which included people from the nuclear industry and consultants to energy companies, the focus on nuclear was largely on the technologies in current use in France, the United States, and China. There was a brief chat about smaller modular nuclear power when a question from viewers asked could a city set up its own distributed energy cluster of mixed solar, wind and some geothermal, with a modular reactor for baseload power. None of the panellists saw this in the near future.

I sent in several questions of which none were answered. I wanted to know what these experts were thinking about nuclear fusion (see previous postings on this subject on this site) and the timelines for its emergence. And I also asked about alternative fission reactor technologies that are suddenly being introduced.

On the subject of nuclear power, concern about the exposure of Ukraine’s plants to Russian military incursions was raised. The general consensus was that the risk of radiation contamination so far was minimal to non-existent. But an article in yesterday’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists disagrees. Jungmin Kang, a South Korean member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, and Eva Lisowski, who is a participant in the MIT Nuclear Weapons Education Project, are the authors.

The attacks that occurred at Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhya damaged external buildings, not those containing the reactors themselves. But even attacks on outbuildings have consequences. Fires can spread and lead to damage to power backup systems which could impact the circulation of coolants within the reactors themselves. And if a reactor is shut down and left in non-operational mode, if cooling pumps have no power because backup generators are damaged, then even the spent fuel becomes a danger that could lead to a fire releasing radioactive contaminants.

Why the Russian military targeted two nuclear reactor facilities in Ukraine shows reckless ignorance. Do Russian soldiers not have a memory of the consequences of Chernobyl? How could they enter an exclusion zone that has been off-limits to people since December 1986? Why would they track tanks and troop transports through contaminated soils covering the 2,600 square kilometres around the reactor site?

One of the speakers at the Foreign Policy online event stated he was more concerned about the Russian bombing of a Ukrainian chemical plant that led to an ammonia leak. Hearing that I just shook my head. Why? Because to this day, the meltdown of Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 because of human operational errors, is not fully accounted for in terms of human long-term health effects. And final cleanup of the site in Ukraine wasn’t scheduled for completion until 2065.

Kang and Lisowski don’t pull any punches. They note that a war that envelops areas where nuclear power plants are operating can only have negative consequences. Missiles and artillery could lead to the breach of a building’s shell and damage to both primary and secondary cooling and safety systems. The cascade of consequences could be immeasurable and last decades if not centuries.

At the conclusion of the Foreign Policy online event, for all the opinions raised that I couldn’t agree with, the one conclusion I could concur with was that nuclear power will be essential in the mix for us to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. But I don’t believe it will be the legacy nuclear power plants helping us to meet the goal. Instead, a next-generation nuclear industry that is moving out of planning and off the drawing boards right now will provide us with a safe solution.

Russian forces have indiscriminately shelled and fired rockets at hospitals, residential buildings, theatres, places of worship, and other civilian targets with no other purpose than to create terror. And now, a report which is described in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes recovered images of a crashed drone near Kyiv that is a known artificial intelligence (AI) weapon system. How many more lines can Putin give the Russian military the license to cross?

The wrecked drone is a KUB-BLA, manufactured by the Kalashnikov Group. A similar drone was downed in Syria back in 2019. At the time it was not operating in autonomous mode, and it should be noted that this latest incident and the investigation of its use has yet to determine if the drone was operating using AI to pick and fire on targets.

The United Nations has been working towards a ban on autonomous weapons that target people. Agreement on a treaty is being held up because of resistance from the United States, Russia, Israel and a few other countries. It appears they object to a blanket ban. But nonetheless, the discussion continues as many raise ethical objections to AI-directed weapons in general based on principle.

How can an AI-directed weapon understand human rights or conform to humanitarian law? What algorithms can be built into the software to ensure that agreed to laws are followed? And what types of military deployment could justify the use of an AI weapon system? What happens if an AI weapon develops a bug, or is hacked? Who would be responsible should such a weapon end up killing people? Is there any acceptable error or accident rate for an AI-directed weapon that wouldn’t involve criminal prosecution of those deploying it?

An obvious solution is to pass an international agreement to ensure that all AI-guided weapons are under human control at all times. Without this, AI-directed weapons could start a world war. This could easily come true if weapons development to deploy AI in swarms becomes a reality. But wait, this has already happened.

In May 2021, when Israel and Hamas got into another border skirmish along the Gaza Strip, the former deployed AI-guided drone swarms to geolocate and strike Hamas targets. Was the deployment justified? That question remains unanswered and may explain why Israel has been reluctant to agree to the human constraint in the use of AI-directed weapon systems.

When Isaac Asimov, the noted science fiction author and scientist, created his three laws governing the behaviour of robots, the first one stated “a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” The second stated that “a robot must obey the orders given it by a human being except where such orders conflict with the first law.” Asimov’s third law gave a robot the right to protect itself as long as it wasn’t in conflict with the first two laws. What Asimov didn’t cover is the interaction among robots such as in swarms and the ethics to govern their relationships.

Substitute AI for robots and you have guiding principles that appear to no longer be under consideration by those who are developing autonomous weapon systems.

Asimov’s three laws inspired others to add to them. Back in 2012, I ran across such an effort which I believe includes the kind of governing constraints we need to put in place in all nations when dealing with AI. Instead of three laws, the author of these proposed the five that follow. I have put comments on each in brackets:

1. Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans. [That law has already been broken.]
2. Humans, not robots, are responsible agents. Robots are tools designed to achieve human goals. [Accountability for the use of AI lies with the humans who created the technology.]
3. Robots should be designed in ways that assure their safety and security. [The definition of what is safe and secure remains fuzzy.]
4. Robots are artifacts; they should not be designed to exploit vulnerable users by evoking an emotional response or dependency. It should always be possible to tell a robot from a human. [The question of whether at some point in the future AI should be equated as being equal to any living creatures or humans needs resolution.]
5. It should always be possible to find out who is legally responsible for a robot. [If Israel, who has used, or Russia, who is being questioned about use with this latest discovery, are using AI-directed weapons, then both are accountable for the destruction and loss of human life from their deployment.]

The world needs unanimous agreement in banning AI-directed weapon systems because one day one or more nations may add the word nuclear to the equation. That would be an ominous development. And when you consider Putin’s recent threat to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine, we could be moving one step closer to such an outcome.

Putin sees the restoration of Mother Russia as his goal. His Mother Russia is delineated by the Baltic Sea coast and the eastern borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Putin’s Mother Russia contains Belarus and Ukraine which in his eyes have no historical legitimacy as nations. He feels the same about Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. The pretext named is coming to the aid of Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainians in the Donbas. The multifront assault bears no resemblance to a peacekeeping operation. It’s about crushing Ukraine as an independent nation.

By initiating this assault he has temporarily pushed Europe into reconsidering the decommissioning of many of its coal-fired thermal powerplants. His actions have also caused Europe to look elsewhere for gas and oil, places like North America, and the Middle East. Liquified natural gas will replace gas supplied over pipelines. Giant tankers will transit the oceans with their emissions contributing to atmospheric warming.

In a Politico article published on February 28th, Karl Mathiesen writes that war has become a giant distraction taking our collective eye off combatting climate change. The timing of the assault on Ukraine has pushed into the background the eye-opening report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that describes just how far behind we are globally in implementing mitigating and adaptation strategies.

Mathiesen notes, “Whatever disorder we make in the world will ally itself with climate change and deplete our ability to respond to either.” He goes further describing the Ukraine and Russia as critical players in dealing with the fallout from climate change. Ukraine is a critical food exporter to countries in Africa where global warming is negatively impacting crop yields. And Russia is a petrostate that sees aggressive climate change mitigation as a threat to its economic wellbeing. Mathiesen notes that as the Russian invasion started it was the Ukrainian scientists working on the final IPCC draft who had to take shelter from Russian missile strikes while their attackers were still working on the language of the report inserting notes about positive benefits from global warming.

In a security conference held in Munich prior to Putin’s invasion, German attendees noted that depending on Russian oil and gas was making Europe as much a victim as Ukraine would be if it were attacked. They noted that finding alternative fossil fuel energy sources would be a short-term challenge and a distraction from dealing with the much greater long-term existential threat of climate change.

From reading the headlines on business pages in North American newspapers, it looks like fossil fuel producers are the winners here. The war is turning out to be a good thing as disruptive supply lines drive up prices. Regular unleaded gas at the pumps today here in Toronto was $1.95 CDN per litre ($5.77 US per gallon).

In the March 2nd New York Times, Somini Sengupta, the Times international climate correspondent, and Lisa Friedman, a federal climate and environment policy reporter stationed in Washington, wrote about Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel sources. They quoted Kadri Simson, the European Union’s energy commissioner who said, “this war will have deep repercussions one way or another on our own energy system.” In the same article, the writers refer to John Kerry, the American climate czar, who called Putin’s action the weaponizing of fossil fuels. Kerry further stated that the climate effort will suffer. “It’s not what we want, it’s not going to be positive.”

In a March 7th article published in the State of the Planet, from the Columbia Climate School, Steve Cohen wrote:

“Europe is like a junkie trying to attack its favourite drug pusher.” His analogy is a good one when you think of how the EU is now invoking sanctions on Russia’s leaders and its energy sector. Cohen went on to state “in the near term, climate advocates are concerned because the war and need for Russia’s resources seem to have displaced climate change from the political agenda.” But he believes the short-term shift away from climate policy in face of this war is an appropriate tack and notes the need “to shift our focus from climate policy to trying to stop a murderous lunatic from destroying Ukraine and then possibly turning his attention to other nearby nations.”

Cohen cited environmental consequences to the war in his article stating, “The recklessness of the Russian invasion was never more apparent than last week’s attack and near destruction of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine.” In his conclusion, he believed that ending the conflict sooner would allow us to “return to the long-term threat of global warming…For now, the people of Ukraine deserve our help, support, and prayers.”

How long can the world wait? Sea level rise, one of the many consequences of global warming, won’t abate without all of us making the effort to decarbonize. Mathiesen in his article asked us to consider the plight of the citizens of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, who see any delay as existential. He wrote stating they “are building seawalls from broken coral because it’s all they have to fight the invading sea….and then what?”

Ending this Putin aggression and getting back to fighting climate change is critical. Every delay in implementing mitigation and adaptation strategies means the degrees of warming will continue to climb upward to and past 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) that the IPCC says is our target ceiling. Exceeding 1.5 comes with escalating environmental, human, and financial costs. The world cannot afford to go there.