A Brief, Bright Fire in the Dark

The Fallout of a Second American Civil War

It’s a Small World, After All

One of the great things about Disneyland, back when it was still pretty well maintained and not perpetually choked with people, was the beautiful use of perspective to fool the park-goer into feeling as if he is in a completely different world than the one he left outside the gates. With the exception of a few, isolated locations (the top of the Matterhorn, the top of a particular rise in Mickey’s Toontown, some spots on the Monorail, etc.) when you’re in the park you’re really in the park, as my character Suave Rob would say.

Which is why I got shocked to a standstill as I was queuing up for It’s a Small World and I looked up to see this:

This is not an image of the exact event, but what I saw looked very like this.

That is a test of an ICBM interception system. It shoots a missile to knock another missile out of the sky. Think Israel’s Iron Dome, but for world-ending missiles that go into space before plummeting back down. I had been following the news and knew I might see a test during my trip to LA, but to actually see it on the steps of Walt Disney’s fanciful tribute to a world of laughter, tears, and peace brought together by the smallness of our globe moved me to tears.

The outside world had breached the magical borders of Disneyland with another kind of magic, the likes of which a this child of the Cold War, barely out of his teens, could barely dare dream of:

A world in which nuclear war wouldn’t wipe out the United States.

The future was here. The whimsical past of Disneyland, paradoxically, was even sweeter the rest of that day.

The World You Think You Live In

I’ve spilled many thousands of words explaining how the world got here, and what’s really going on under the surface. To get the full picture, read the opening series on this Substack—it constitutes a thorough survey of how our world came to the current crisis point and what might be in store for us.

But from the beginning I’ve left something out of the explicit details of that analysis, and this element is the reason I have never discussed the possibility of a second American Civil War in any depth.

I omitted this element partly because it’s such a constant bit of the background noise that everyone over a certain age more-or-less knows it, but ignores it. And I also omitted it because I didn’t know how to explain it to people under a certain age without inducing the kind of existential crisis that would drive them away to do something less disturbing.

However, given the excellent new book just released by Annie Jacobsen, the topic is coming into public consciousness again, so I’m going to dive into the darkest hole in the modern world and show you what’s lurking at its bottom.

I talked in a previous column about how the Post-War Order was built to box the Soviets in. I’ve alluded to how, and why, the American system changed from Republican Constitutionalism to Imperial Fascism at that point (though, to be frank, the change had been underway since the Civil War, something I’ll tackle in a history column at some point). Nonetheless, for all intents and purposes, the world has gone on in much the way it always has—economies and wars, people having children (well, occasionally), governments growing in power and scope, then slumping into corruption and decay. It’s an old story sung to a new tune because the globalized system has spread material prosperity around to an astonishing degree.

The world you think you inhabit is one where Climate Change is a big problem (or a big scam, depending on your politics), where political corruption and culture war items are the most urgent issues. It’s a world where society seems to be unraveling, and it will soon either collapse or re-form in a new and better way (again, depending on your politics and your temperament). It’s a world that might just be perched on the cusp of an era where everyone lives a life of possibility in a world of abundance.

The world you think you live in has been in a constant state of war for the last twenty years, with a break of only a few months between the War on Terror and the war in Ukraine.

The world you think you live in has global institutions that might be out to create a prison planet or a utopia, but whichever it is, there is definitely an agenda.

The world you think you live in is kept safe by the careful regulation of finance and nuclear weapons, and America is secured by its new missile defense system and by being the keeper of the world reserve currency.

The world you think you live in is basically safe, and the worst that can happen in the United States is a brief civil war that might kill a few million people, but it’ll be okay in the end.

But that is not the world you really live in.

My Discussion with the Diplomat

A few short years after witnessing the missile defense test, I found myself standing in the home of one of the key officials in the post-Cold War US foreign policy establishment (I swear this is not a fiction piece). I was holding his trench coat—the prize I’d come to claim—and, as he’d fetched it to loan it to me for a costuming project, we’d started talking shop.

The coat was a heavy thing, made of thick leather. The owner was built like a pro-wrestler who’d just barely missed his calling as an NBA benchwarmer.

The conversation was heavy, too.

Although I briefly gloried in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early 2000s I stumbled upon something disturbing that presented a worldbuilding problem in the science fiction podcast novel I was working on. Since I was borrowing the man’s coat, I took the opportunity to pick his brain.

I laid out to the diplomat what I’d put together about the disposition of nuclear weapons after the Cold War, the protocols for nuclear weapons release in our country and in others, and the availability of materials and know-how necessary to make a genuine nuclear weapon rather than just a dirty bomb, then I hit him with this:

“So it looks to me that the day-to-day risk of a global thermonuclear exchange is higher now than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is just the baseline. The chances of this not happening sometime in my lifetime are pretty near zero, aren’t they?”

He looked around, waved me out to a balcony, turned on the radio, and said:

“You’re not supposed to know that. What else do you know?”

I laid out for him the game theoretical realities as I saw them.

He nodded.

“So it’s that bad?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. It’s much worse than that.”

We went on to talk, under cover of sound, for another hour. I can’t prove that he told me anything that he wasn’t supposed to, but I did go on to read a lot of what he said in materials that were declassified many years later.

I never did get to return the coat. He died (yes, of natural causes) before the project was finished. I passed the coat on to a friend who was tall, broad, down on his luck, and in desperate need of something to keep the rain off.

Since that day, domestic politics have never looked the same.

Hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, March 1954

The World As It Is

According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Oppenheimer was the best picture of 2023. It’s a Christopher Nolan biopic of the man who spearheaded the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bombs.

Those bombs went on to win the Pacific Theater in World War 2. They then went on to bifurcate the world, and were subsequently developed into thermonuclear weapons (i.e. fusion bombs—the atom bomb was a fission bomb).

Now, if you’ve seen Terminator 2 you’ve got a rough idea of what a thermonuclear bomb does. If you haven’t, here’s the clip:

Pretty horrific.

But as horrific as it is—and as horrific as are the tales of Nuclear Winter (of which I remain skeptical despite Jacobsen’s noble attempt to make it plausible in her book)—the horror that it represents is a mere fraction of the way it shapes the world you live in.

So let’s the the full horror out of the way, because without that, the other part won’t make sense:

The US and Russia each have over a thousand deliverable thermonuclear devices deployed in silos, on submarines, and in flying bombers.¹ Each have protocols for conducting nuclear war. Each has protocols for attempting to prevent a nuclear war.

For eighty years both powers have, to their great credit, managed to prevent the apocalypse. But should a single nuclear device ever be deployed on any battlefield anywhere in the world ever again, the leaders of both nuclear superpowers will have around six minutes to decide whether to launch a full counterstrike, and what places to target. Currently, the policy of both of the nuclear superpowers is, as far as we know, to hit the button as soon as the launch or detonation of a nuclear missile or device is detected by their satellites…anywhere in the world.

Any such launch by either superpower will naturally trigger a counter-strike by the other nuclear superpower—a decision, remember, that must be made within six minutes while these officials are being dragged off to safety—unless the Presidents of both countries are able to reach an agreement over the red phone during the decision window. These protocols assume that both the Presidents and their advisors are of sound mind and good judgment in the heat of panic as they watch the civilization-ending events play out around them.

Oh, yes, speaking of the end of civilization…

There aren’t as many nuclear weapons in play as once there were. The most believable estimates I’ve seen show a full-scale nuclear war killing off only about 40% of the world’s population in the first few minutes, and a further 20-40% over the next couple years due to famine, radiation sickness, and chaotic violence in the aftermath.

And don’t count on that Missile Defense System to save our bacon. The Pentagon suspended that program when it couldn’t push the success rate up over fifty percent, leaving the Continental United States defended by…forty interceptor missiles.

Forty, with a fifty-percent success rate, defending against up to a thousand in-bound strategic missiles launched from silos, submarines, and bomber aircraft.

Yes, if the worse happens, humanity will, in all probability, go on.

But consider that in any such exchange, the US, China, and Russia will all be wiped off the map. Since these places (and their near allies who are all within the strike zones) are where the bulk of the world’s technology, energy production, and agriculture happen, a nuclear war will end technological civilization, probably permanently.

You, your loved ones, your culture, your identity groups, and everything you value owes its continued existence on this planet to one, single thing:

In the last eighty years, nobody in either government has made a mistake when it counted. Despite a handful of publicly-reported near-misses (where one power or another was within minutes of launching everything due to an error at some point in the decision chain), the courage and sober judgment of the individuals who understood that the fate of humanity rode on their shoulders prevailed.

Humans really are astonishing creatures.

Now, consider:

Several warheads are still unaccounted for after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Several countries who are not signatories of existing non-proliferation agreements (including North Korea and Iran) either have nukes or could acquire them over a long weekend.

On top of that, very few people now in the chain of command for nuclear war were in the game during the Cold War. The people that were in the game back then sit at the top of these chains, but they are (like Biden, Putin, and Xi) mostly old, rash, and demonstrably compromised in their judgment—and surrounded by advisors who no longer reliably relay important information to them.

This ruling class is not part of the culture of very serious men who took the fate of humanity in their hands to develop these weapons, and then balanced the world so that their use would be unthinkable.

Our elites know this. They have access to bunkers and systems that will protect them in the aftermath of such a war. And—as I found out when I talked to that diplomat lo these many years ago—they know that some terrorist or nutcase is going to launch or detonate a nuke sooner or later. When they do, there’s a good chance that a full-scale civilization-ending war won’t be avoidable.

Now, cast your mind back to the Covid panic. Think about how quickly the store shelves emptied. Consider how easily the cultures of the Western World fractured and turned on each other as each micro-group tried to see to their own good without regard to the expense they might impose on their neighbors (or, especially, their political enemies).

Why should you not expect at least some of the leaders who know the odds to turn their minds towards plundering the world while it’s still there to plunder, and to do it without regard to a future that, in their view, will probably never come anyway?

A National Divorce

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about a national divorce or a second American civil war, and for good reasons. A lot of the factors that preceded major civil wars in the past are present today in many countries across the world, including in the United States, Russia, and China.

Some of the best analytic work on this topic—outside the corridors of power—is being done by anarchists in the social media sphere. Some, looking at the recent examples of the Bloodless Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the subsequent peaceful separation of that country into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, believe a peaceful (or nearly peaceful) divorce is possible in the United States, which, after all, has multiple geographic regions that could, in theory, operate as allied-but-independent countries.

Others are not so optimistic, but are nonetheless thirsty for (or resigned to) a violent revolution.

One such anarchist writer—an astute (if weirdly racialist) analyst of historical culture and warfare, as well as of contemporary game theory—is Cat Girl Kulak of the Anarchonomicon here on Substack.

She has recently published two columns that shine a very sharp light on exactly how precarious the position of the United States is right now. One deals with the fragility of welfare-centric governments, the other argues that a civil war—a real, genuine, full-fledged civil war in which several million people are killed—would be an acceptable hell to wade through in order to correct the catastrophic self-destructive spiral that the West is currently caught in (and that it would be less costly in the long run compared with letting everything decay gradually).

I, also, am no stranger to this topic—I’ve explored some very soft versions of such scenarios myself. Long story short, talk is cheap, but when talk is ubiquitous about such a big issue, and when it continues on as long as this talk has, there’s often something to it. There are good reasons to expect that such a future might be in store for us in the next decade.

But none of the scenarios I’ve read seriously consider the nuclear question.

Not the question “Will the government use nukes against the dissident factions?” Quite obviously they won’t, even to stave off a loss. The risks are far too high for anyone but a madman to pull that kind of move—and, despite propaganda, neither Putin nor Trump nor Xi nor Biden are madmen.

Instead, I mean this question:

“How do you keep control of nuclear weapons in the event of a civil war?”

And, perhaps more worryingly:

“Who will have an interest in shaping the answer to that question?”

A Civil War, Isn’t

A “civil war” is, as we all know, a war between partisans within a country to decide the fate of its government. The dissidents think they’ve got a raw deal, and they want to change up who’s going to set the terms and who’s going to be left out in the cold. They fight about it. Someone wins. The country unifies (or not), and history proceeds along the line of the new normal.

The US fought its Civil War over the issue of slavery (well, kind-of, but that’s another long article), a just cause if ever there was one. Partly because of this, and partly because we Americans tend to think of politics as a moral and religious endeavor, we think of Civil Wars as moral affairs.

In all of these matters, we are sadly mistaken.

Civil wars, like all wars, are about power. Who gets to be in charge? They happen, like all wars, when the ruling regime shows itself to be weak enough for long enough that its subjects no longer trust it to do its job, and notice that it is no longer strong enough to enforce its will.

The United States is not in a good position where enforcing its will is concerned. Americans don’t like to be forced, and are a startlingly non-compliant people. Looking at the Covid years, it’s tempting to think that we’ve been well-pacified, but we are no longer a tenth as compliant as was the World War 2 generation, which submitted to mass conscription, rationing, near-total economic nationalization, and (in some cases) internment without much in the way of squawking.

Sure, today’s politics are so tribal that many Americans are likely to blindly follow the diktats of their preferred political party, but that’s always less than half the populace.

The American government has always been in the position that it must woo as well as intimidate to get what it wants from its people (assuming it even knows what it wants). And, despite its astonishing technological capacity, the America government has a very small footprint relative to population size, and it has always failed to effectively govern those elements of society who don’t wish to be governed.

If you doubt me, consider that despite the fact that the Federal Government has had the ability to totally financially surveil the entire economy for decades, and to choke off money flows at will, the drug trade and the cartels it finances are stronger now than at any point in history. Technological capacity and State capacity are not the same thing.

From the outside, of course, the American government looks different. Despite not having won a war since World War 2 (other than the occasional Pyrrhic victory and/or short-term engagement), the US military is terrifyingly strong, and other countries fuck with it at their peril.

Outwardly strong, inwardly weak—this has always been the contradiction of the American Federal system. It would be a curiosity if not for another strange fact of history:

Civil wars, aren’t.

Aren’t civil wars, I mean.

Any time a country goes to war with itself, its neighbors and patrons jump in. The Vietnam War, The Korean War, the Yugoslavian Civil War, the Chechen War, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the English Civil War, the War of the Roses, and on and on back to Ancient Rome—all of these were international affairs that sucked in all manner of other powers who supplied weapons, financed one side or another, committed troops and military advisors, and supplied mercenaries.

This dynamic also holds true any time an out-of-power elite makes a play for the throne—they line up with enemies of the current establishment, not because they detest their own country, but because they need allies once they get into power (and, often, assistance in seizing power). It’s rare that a coup results in the winner actually selling out their country to a foreign power for personal gain (this is a more common move with established rulers in the fourth or fifth generation of a decaying system), but it’s almost always the case that winners in a coup, however soft that coup is, have the backing of foreign actors who don’t like their country’s current rulers.

In light of all of the above, consider this question:

What happens when the most powerful country in the history of the world collapses into civil war, especially when that country has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and another nuclear superpower with automatic launch capabilities remains in play on the geopolitical stage?

That’s the kind of geopolitical black hole that will suck everyone in. Even if they don’t have the manpower to spare, even if they don’t have the money because of a global financial collapse, even if they’re on the other side of the world, the merest whisper of the kind of disorder that threatens the escape of nuclear weapons into civilian hands—whether to be used on the battlefield or sold on the international market or traded for small arms and tanks—will suck in every single military power on the planet that can float a ship or fly a plane.

This is to say nothing of the value of the plunder available on the American continent. Oil, engineers and inventors, mineral wealth, agricultural land, the bulk of world’s gold reserves, and control of the world’s best satellites will be available for the taking.

The second American Civil War won’t be an American war. It will be a world war fought on American soil, the spoils divided up among those who were once allies, enemies, and subjects of the Global Post-War American Empire.

Because of the nuclear question alone (to say nothing of the plunder on offer), the United States of America will never have a second Civil War. She will either find her way, or she will play host to the most destructive world war in history, and will afterwards be heard no more in the halls of history.

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If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy the Reconnecting with History installment on Understanding Before Thinking, and this essay on learning to think through language and story: Are You Fluent in English?

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

1. China has hundreds, at least, though, as with anything related to China, it’s hard to know which numbers to believe