I truly appreciate your feedback. Being able to read the commentary from smart realists like yourself is tremendously helpful in developing my own understanding about our climate crisis and the follow-on consequences (which are dire).

My knowledge about nukes and their supporting technologies is superficial, but my gut tells me that the deployment of nuclear weapons requires practiced cooperation along the chain of command and out to the field. Having a nuke blow up in your own face would be a bad thing. If the circumstances of a battle are confusing and unfamiliar to learned practice then deployment becomes a crapshoot.

In the same line of logic, radicals of any stripe thinking they can gather up radioactive materials to spread along a long and complex border to make the selected border impassable is a kind of game theory fantasy in an unfamiliar world order. The radicals would simply be spreading more chaos and unpredictable outcomes.

I think of collapse as happening slowly in isolated places (primarily) as the effects of the climate crisis intensify. Then at some critical point, the collapse spreads at an accelerating rate while directly impacting more robust economic centers.

It’s likely that political leaders will be caught flatfooted in the face of sudden collapse. This is because during our current period of spotty collapse the political response is to try rebuilding the “disconnected” disruptions and to push away from acknowledging the trend line leading to a new climate reality of dire circumstances everywhere.

Just this morning (April 26, 2023), I watched a TV report about the desire and ongoing efforts to rebuild Rolling Fork, Mississippi (outside Jackson) so the displaced population can return and get on with getting on. Major parts of Rolling Fork were destroyed recently by an EF4 tornado (170mph winds). Nothing is mentioned about the death of the old climate normal and pivoting toward a new pattern of survival for human populations.

Nevertheless, the trend line of global heating is only accelerating (despite our efforts to ignore facts).

People in vulnerable places need to be relocating and taking up residence where intentional communities are learning how life might be continued in a time of climate disaster, political disruption, and military danger.

Society writ large is not capable of that type of thinking right now.

I’m not totally sure what the situation in Ukraine exemplifies as a larger example of our spreading nodes of chaos in this era of climate crisis. I’m just certain that the nation of Ukraine will never be rebuilt. The tornado that is destroying Ukraine is one made of Putin’s psychological makeup and his authoritarian views about Russia in this new era of a hot earth.

And what will the authoritarians do in China and North Korea? What happens as the Middle East and Israel boil and Pakistan continues collapsing? Nothing good.