Monthly Archives: November 2024

My knowledge of the latest military hardware is second hand. I am a historian, not an insider, and my observations here are based on the accounts of former military and intelligence officers that are publicly available.

The world has apparently entered a new era of aerial warfare, of military history. The idea of hypersonic ballistic missiles has been around since the 1930s, but the first use of hypersonic, intermediate-range, ballistic missiles in combat was last Thursday (November 21, 2024) against a Ukrainian weapons facility in Dnipropetrovsk.¹ This was in response to the use of ATACMS missiles against targets in the Bryansk Oblast in western Russia two days before (November 19, 2024). The new Russian weapon, the Oreshnik Intermediate-Range Ballistic missile, flies at mach 11, and there is no effective countermeasure in Western arsenals.

According to one source, these missiles fly so fast and their conventional payloads hits so hard, that they can approximate the advantages of a small tactical nuclear weapon without the drawbacks (i.e. radioactive contamination and fallout). Complicating things further, each missile can carry up to 6 multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), each carrying 6 smaller warheads. The Oreshnik can also carry nuclear payloads.

On August 6, 1914, barely a week into the First World War, Liege became the first target of aerial bombs in wartime. Exactly thirty-one years later, Hiroshima was the first of two targets of an atomic bombing. Dnipro now shares the distinction of being the target of the latest kind of attack from above.

Russia has said that it is putting the missile into mass production.

Note
1. Russia used the hypersonic 3M22 Zircon cruise missile against Kiev on February 7, 2024.

By Michael F. Duggan

On the evening of November 8, 2016, I started watching the election returns. It was early and all of the pundits on the cable propaganda stations for both sides were charged and upbeat. After a half hour, I decided to watch a movie, so I put a DVD in the player. It was the 1995 Robert Downey, Jr. historical comedy-drama, Restoration. I would stop the film and check on the election coverage every half hour to 45 minutes.

After 10:00 (I don’t remember the exact time), some of the experts observed that things were not going the Democrats’ way in a couple of key states. I read a lot of Marcus Aurelius, and know that most things are out of my hands, and so I went to bed. The night was darker and quieter than usual, and during the few times I woke up overnight, I sensed what had happened.

Then I had this crazy idea: perhaps if I did not listen to the news, perhaps the election would remain in a state of superposition, like Schrodinger’s cat–both dead and alive–in quantum mechanics, and that if I turned on the radio in the morning, it would decohere into a fixed outcome (it was kind of like an infant who believes that the world disappears when he closes his eyes in a game of peekaboo). When I got up, I did not turn on the radio. I left the house to go to work, and drove to the train station in silence, but I knew. That was eight years ago.

Last night I tried to watch a movie again (an old American Experience documentary about Alexander Hamilton), but grew edgy and went upstairs early to read (some Marcus Aurelius, but also a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and a little from the new biography of Jimmy Breslin). Around 10:30 I went downstairs and saw that the PBS coverage was calling North Carolina for the GOP. I had seen this movie before. I went back upstairs and read for a couple more hours and went to bed.

Again, the night was unusually dark and quiet. Again I had this crazy idea that if I didn’t check the news, that events would be suspended indefinitely in superposition, an election neither won nor lost. I got up and did not turn on the radio. I checked my Facebook account and the second thing I saw was a friend who posted, “I guess this is who we really are.” Once again events had de-cohered. In a conversation a week or more ago not specifically on politics, a friend of mine who knows more than I do about Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, told me that the only real dignity in life is to accept the parts of the world that we cannot change as they are without complaint.

And for the record, I know that elections aren’t like particle physics.