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“I have a hard time imagining taking cities such as Kyiv. I can’t imagine how that would look,” pundit Karen Shakhnazarov, said on state TV show The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev on Wednesday, according to the Daily Beast.

“If this picture starts to transform into an absolute humanitarian disaster, even our close allies like China and India will be forced to distance themselves from us. This public opinion, with which they’re saturating the entire world, can play out badly for us.”

The pundit reportedly added: “Ending this operation will stabilise things within the country.”Media reported pro-Russian government host Soloviev frowned at such a stance.

The Daily Beast reported another guest, Semyon Bagdasarov, as saying: “We don’t need to stay there longer than necessary... Do we need to get into another Afghanistan, but even worse? There are more people and they’re more advanced in their handling of weapons. We don’t need that. Enough already,”

According to the Interfax news agency Russia said that China had refused to supply its airlines with parts. Russian officials said that they would seek to source components from other countries, including Turkey and India. Russia’s aviation sector is being hit by sanctions and Boeing and Airbus have halted their supply of parts.

At the conclusion of peace talks in the Turkish resort of Antalya, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Russia did not plan to attack other countries and claimed “we did not attack Ukraine”. Asked if the conflict could lead to nuclear war, he said: “I don’t want to believe, and I do not believe, that a nuclear war could start.”

Lavrov added: “We see how dangerously our Western colleagues, including in the European Union, are acting now, which, in violation of all their so-called principles and values, encourage the supply of deadly weapons to Ukraine. We believe these countries are creating a colossal danger for themselves.” Portable air defence systems could be used to create “risks for civil aviation”,

She said that she wanted China to follow through on its claims to respect sovereignty, adding: “China looms large over this debate. Beijing is increasing its assertiveness and expanding its armed forces at breakneck speed.”

Looking forward the most worrying issue for the Kremlin is the isolation of the country’s economy. Since the start of the war the Russian stock market has closed, interest rates have doubled, inflation has shot up, and the value of the rouble has plummeted. One recent estimate suggests that Russia faces a drop of from 7 to 15% in GDP in 2022. It risks defaulting on it’s debts.

it is hard to see how Russia is going to have much spare capacity to compensate Ukraine for the damage it has inflicted upon it, even in the unlikely event it was prepared to offer to do so as part of an agreement.  

Second, given what has happened over the past few weeks to the population of these territories, those remaining will be more hostile to Russia and will likely resist an imposed government.

At the very least Moscow will want the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in their entirety, and not just the previous separatist enclaves, to be annexed or given some independent status. This was, after all, the demand with which Russia entered the war.  

It is, however, by no means straightforward even from a Russian perspective.  

First, if Ukraine has not otherwise been defeated and so “demilitarised” then this will be a frontier that will require defending for the indefinite future.

There is a further issue here even if there is no agreement. The cities and towns that have suffered the worst as a result of Putin’s war are those that were once claimed to be pro-Russian and so required “liberation” from Ukrainian “genocide”.

So the cost of occupying even this limited part of the country will be considerable and that is before even thinking about the expense required to render those horribly damaged towns and cities at all habitable, with effective infrastructure and accommodation.

Their economies were in decline before 2014 and that process has since accelerated. They are now poorer than other parts of Ukraine and prone to criminality.

The capital Grozny was rebuilt but the economy functioned thereafter at barely a fraction of pre-war levels. Despite efforts to make the economy more productive, in 2017 it was estimated that Chechnya required 80% of the government budget to be subsidised.

The other implication is that while economic sanctions have not yet given the West much leverage over Putin’s war strategy they do offer it leverage over his peace strategy.

Attempts to turn the situation around have not been helped by Chechnya’s rampant corruption. So this relatively small territory is already costing Moscow close to $3 billion a year. Crimea, annexed in 2014, may be costing a similar amount.  

Or take Syria. Here Russian air power was also used in a  brutal way, this time against rebel populations and in support of the Assad regime. That campaign succeeded in keeping Assad in power but Russia lacks the resources to reconstruct Syria

“Now moving into its eleventh year, the conflict in Syria has inflicted an almost unimaginable degree of devastation and loss on the Syrian people and their economy. Over 350,000 verifiable deaths have been directly attributed to the conflict so far, but the number of unaccounted lethal and non-lethal casualties is almost certainly far higher

More than half the country’s pre-conflict population (of almost 21 million) has been displaced—one of the largest displacements of people since World War II—and, partly as a result, by 2019, economic activity in Syria had shrunk by more than 50% compared to what it had been in 2010.”   

Syria was a far cheaper war for Russia to wage, probably in the low billions of dollars, in fuel, ordnance, and personnel cost. Far less has gone into economic assistance and much of that has been returned to Russia as arms sales and gas and infrastructure contracts

The strains on the Russian war effort are already evident, from the army’s hesitation about trying to fight their way into cities and the recruitment of mercenaries, to the reported appeal to China for help with supplies of military equipment and Putin’s fury with his intelligence agencies for misleading assessments and wasting roubles on Ukrainian agents who turned out to be useless

He is now having to choose between a range of poor outcomes, which the US suggests may include escalation to chemical use (which would be both militarily pointless and test further Western determination not to get directly involved).

War is rarely a good investment. Putin has acted for reasons of political and not economic opportunism. The prospects for any territory “liberated” by Russia is bleak. They will not prosper and will remain cut off from the international economy. To the extent that people stay they will have to be subsidised for all their needs while there will be little economic activity.  

Because of the destruction the short-term prospects will be bleak even if these territories are fully returned to Ukraine. But over the longer-term they will be much better off because of the amount of economic assistance Ukraine will receive and its integration into the international economy.

as Germany and Japan showed after 1945 even shattered economies can be rebuilt to even greater levels of efficiency with sufficient resilience and resources. That is another reason why Western financial assistance and investment will be especially vital - Ukraine’s full recovery will serve as a testament to Putin’s failure.

 it is worth keeping this analysis in mind when considering prospective peace deals. The Russians may have underestimated the costs of conquest from the start but their approach to war has raised those costs considerably, especially in those parts of Ukraine close to Russia.

Third, these territories will be economically wrecked and with no prospect of recovery so long as they are separated from Ukraine. 

The question of the future of sanctions and how they might be unwound is not one to be discussed separately from any peace talks. They are a vital part of the negotiations. As there can be no Western-led peace talks without Ukraine, it should be made clear to Moscow that for now this is a card for Zelensky to play.

The future of the Russian economy can then be in his hands. Should a moment come to start to ease sanctions, some leverage will be required to ensure that any agreement is being honoured. There could be a link  to reparations for the terrible damage caused.

As his original war plans failed Putin has insisted his forces follow a disruptive and cruel strategy that has put his original aims even more out of reach and Ukraine with a say over the future of the Russian economy.

In Ukraine no such Security Council resolution has been adopted—but only because Russia, a permanent member, vetoed it. The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the invasion

when the UN Security Council condemns an act of aggression, that resolution is legally binding on all member states.

As for states becoming co-belligerents, the bar is even higher, argues Michael Schmitt of the United States Military Academy at West Point. German supplies of arms to Ukraine do not make Germany a party to the conflict with Russia because “there are no hostilities between the States concerned”—their soldiers are not killing each other.

“If Russia wants to feel provoked and attack NATO it will do it, independently of whether we have delivered tanks,”

thers think that if supplying heavy weapons increases the risk of a direct conflict, it is mainly because they make more inviting targets

it is wrong to dismiss the legal aspects of co-belligerency entirely: they help prevent a conflict escalating to nuclear war. When America and other NATO countries rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine, they emphasise such a step would make them parties to the conflict. This, Mr Haque thinks, is a useful way to draw red lines between nuclear powers. “America is using these rules of international law to signal to Russia that we will come up to a clear red line but not cross it. I think Russia understands that signalling,”

“But they will try to contest the American interpretation of those rules and invent their own red lines—not based on law—to serve their aims.”

America never accused the Soviets or Chinese of being co-belligerents, and the nuclear powers never came close to direct conflict. American bombers avoided Soviet freighters: when US Air Force pilots accidentally strafed one in 1967, they were court-martialled. America was restrained not by international law but by the fact that bringing the Soviets or Chinese into the war would not have been in its interests.

That will be the decisive factor for Russia in Ukraine, too. “If Russia wanted the conflict to spill over and drag us in, it would have already succeeded in doing that,”

In the movie, one scene has J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the laboratory, seeking to reassure his boss, Gen. Leslie Groves, on the eve of the test. Upon investigation, Oppenheimer tells him, physicists have concluded that the chances the test detonation will destroy the world are “near zero.” Realizing the news has alarmed, not reassured, the general, Oppenheimer asks, “What do you want from theory alone?”“Zero would be nice,” the general replies.

no physicists or historians interviewed for this story recalled coming across any mention of such a conversation between Oppenheimer and the general in the historical record.

Still, the discussions and calculations persisted long after the Trinity test. In 1946, three Manhattan project scientists, including Teller, who would later become known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, wrote a report concluding that the explosive force of the first atomic bomb wasn’t even close to what would be required to trigger a planet-destroying chain reaction in air. The report was not declassified until 1973.

At a conference in the summer of 1942, almost a full year before Los Alamos opened, physicist Edward Teller raised the possibility of atomic bombs igniting Earth’s oceans or atmosphere. According to Rhodes’s account, Hans Bethe, who headed the theoretical division at Los Alamos, “didn’t believe it from the first minute” but nonetheless performed the calculations convincing the other physicists that such a disaster was not a reasonable possibility.

“I don’t think any physicists seriously worried about it,” said John Preskill, a professor of theoretical physics at California Institute of Technology.

“Did the actual exchange happen at that moment? No, I don’t think so,” said Alex Wellerstein, an associate professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and author of the 2021 book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”“But were there discussions like that? I believe so,” he added.

A 1979 study by scientists at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory examined the question of whether a nuclear explosion might trigger a runaway reaction in the atmosphere or oceans. In page after page of mathematical equations, the scientists described a complex set of factors that made atmospheric ignition effectively impossible.

As outlandish as the notion was to many scientists, the nuclear research organization CERN felt obliged to deal with the fear, noting on its website that “some theories suggest that the formation of tiny ‘quantum’ black holes may be possible. The observation of such an event would be thrilling in terms of our understanding of the Universe; and would be perfectly safe.”

Dudley’s essay also recounted a story that on the day of the test, “as zero hour approached” Gen. Groves was annoyed to find Manhattan Project physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi making bets with colleagues about whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, “and, if so, whether it would destroy only New Mexico ― or the entire world.” (Some experts have suggested Fermi’s actions may have been more of a joke, or an example of gallows humor.)

Fascination with this doomsday scenario may stem, at least in part, from a misunderstanding of what physicists mean when they say “near zero.” The branch of physics known as quantum mechanics, which deals with matter and light at the atomic and subatomic scale, does not rule out any possibilities.

For example, if a boy tosses a rubber ball at a brick wall, there is an exceedingly remote — but still valid — possibility that instead of watching the ball bounce back, he could see it pass through the wall.

Aditi Verma, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, put it this way: “What a physicist means by ‘near zero’ would be zero to an engineer.”

In the 2000s, scientists encountered a similar problem of terminology as they prepared to generate high-speed particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Talk surfaced that the activity might generate a black hole that would devour Earth.

Probably the easiest to grasp is the fact that, even under the harshest scenarios, far more energy would be lost in the explosion than gained, wiping out any chance to sustain a chain reaction.

In other words, any black hole created by the collider would be far too small to pose any risk to the planet.Scientists say such disaster scenarios are sometimes the price of crossing new thresholds of discovery.

“You don’t often talk in certainties,” he said. “You talk in probabilities. If you haven’t done the experiment, you are hesitant to say ‘This is impossible. It will never happen.’ … It was good to think it through.”

Rhodes added that he hopes the “Oppenheimer” movie will not lead people to doubt the scientists on the Manhattan Project.“They knew what they were doing,” he said. “They were not feeling around in the dark.”

After Szilard lobbied Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to oppose the use of his terrible creation, he recorded a weird, curiously believable conversation. “Oppie” told the Hungarian enigmatically: “The atomic bomb is shit.” When Szilard asked what he meant by that, Oppenheimer replied: “Well, this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang — a very big bang — but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”

Richard Rhodes, perhaps the best historian of the Bomb project, wrote in 1986: “Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.” Yet its fulfilment became his obsession.

Oppenheimer seemed untroubled by misgivings. He merely drove his team with a brilliance that inspired hero-worship from his colleague Edward Teller. “Oppie knew in detail what was happening in every part of the laboratory. He was incredibly quick and perceptive in analysing human as well as technical problems . . . He knew how to organise, cajole, humour, soothe feelings — how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so.”

it was not him but the brutish Groves who was mandated by the US chiefs of staff to orchestrate the dropping of the two bombs, after the successful Alamogordo test. On August 6 Groves called Oppenheimer from Washington to report the destruction of Hiroshima. The scientist said: “Well, everybody is feeling reasonably good about it and I extend my heartiest congratulations. It’s been a long road.”

The general said: “Yes, it has been a long road and I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.” Oppenheimer responded: “Well, I have my doubts, General Groves.”

. In the weeks that followed, Oppenheimer became prey to spasms of remorse, although his attitude was always ambiguous, confusing to others and perhaps to himself.

When Teller asked him to work on further developments of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer said flatly: “I neither can nor will do so.” He left Los Alamos in October 1945, saying that pride in the laboratory’s achievement must be “tempered with concern . . . The peoples of the world must unite or they will perish.”

Curtis LeMay, the US air force chief who directed the firebombing of Japanese cities by B-29 Superfortresses that killed 300,000 Japanese before the first atomic bomb was dropped, said impenitently after the war: “Nothing new about death . . . We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo . . . than went up in vapour at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

In 1954, amid McCarthyism sweeping the US, Oppenheimer fell victim to a witch-hunt and was stripped of his security clearance. This was later restored, and in the last years before his death from cancer in 1967, aged only 62, he regained a measure of his 1945 giant’s status.

Yet some liberals never forgave him for having disclosed the names of left-wing sympathisers and colleagues to the FBI. I met one such victim in 1965, his old friend Haakon Chevalier, a pretty broken man who had just published a book describing his intimate relationship with Oppenheimer. It was followed by profound disillusionment when he discovered that in 1942 “Oppie” had passed information to “the Feds” that later cost Chevalier his professorship at Berkeley.

In that mission, it has proved remarkably successful.

Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined.

Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans

The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap

U.S. contributions to NATO and other security assistance programs in Europe account for a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s annual budget — less than 6 percent by a recent estimate.

Surging demand has exacerbated this tendency as buyers rush to acquire tanks, combat aircraft and other weapons systems, locking into costly, multiyear contracts. Europe may be remilitarizing, but America is reaping the rewards.

In Ukraine, the pattern is clear. Washington will provide the military security, and its corporations will benefit from a bonanza of European armament orders, while Europeans will shoulder the cost of postwar reconstruction — something Germany is better poised to accomplish than the buildup of its military

The war also serves as a dress rehearsal for U.S. confrontation with China, in which European support cannot be so easily counted on. Limiting Beijing’s access to strategic technologies and promoting American industry are hardly European priorities, and severing European and Chinese trade is still difficult to imagine. Yet already there are signs that NATO is making headway in getting Europe to follow its lead in the theater

No matter their ascendance, Atlanticists fret over support for the organization being undermined by disinformation and cybermeddling.

Today, dissent is less audible than ever before.

Left parties in Europe, historically critical of militarism and American power, have overwhelmingly enlisted in the defense of the West: The trajectory of the German Greens, from fierce opponents of nuclear weapons to a party seemingly willing to risk atomic war, is a particularly vivid illustration

Is this fair?

That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s an unanswerable question. Because nothing is fair.It’s not fair that one kid is born in a mansion in Bel-Air, another kid is born in row house in Northeast Philly, and another kid is born in a slum in Mumbai.

Because in some ways we all are. Life is not fair.

It’s not fair that Bill Lumberg is an idiot, but he makes so much money that he drives a Porsche. It’s also not fair when people in Porsches get hit by drunk drivers.

There’s only one measure by which fairness exists in our world: That we’re all God’s children, with dignity and worth simply because we were loved into being.

And that is, ultimately, what I wanted to say about this college admissions story. Are you, personally, getting the short end of the stick? Look, I don’t know you. But yes. In some way you are. Even if you’re in that top 0.1 percent.

It’s not fair that some kids can get 1510 on their SATs and some kids struggle to break 900. It’s not fair that some kids are born with genetic disorders that cut their lives short long before they even know what the SATs are.

It’s okay to notice unfairness and it’s wise to try to remedy it where possible. But we shouldn’t dwell on it or let it define our worldview.

Maybe your kid got 1510 on her SATs but didn’t get into Brown. Or maybe your kid struggled to graduate high school. Or maybe you were never able to have kids, even though you desperately wanted them.

I don’t know if they teach gratitude and compassion at the Ivy Plus schools, but those are the two most important lessons for all of us.

This is the same question as “Should we notice and object to Jason Aldean’s not-really-veiled incitement—or should we let it slide so that we don’t give him a bigger audience?”

I can see both sides of the coin. But my tentative answer is that it’s better to push back against agitators (and law breakers), even if doing so elevates them.

The logic of the provocateur is the logic of the bully. They act because they believe they will get away with it. Some of them (like Aldean) will. But also, some of them won’t be able to ride the wave to greater prominence. Deterrence is real.

There may be obvious short-term benefits to not elevating bad actors, but there may also be non-obvious long-term costs. For instance: When the rule of law is set aside in one instance, it weakens the rule of law in all instances. Maybe this weakness has no practical consequences. But also, maybe it does.

Most bad actors can be safely ignored, because they will never become dangerous at scale. Only a handful of them have the potential to metastasize and build subterranean movements. But it’s hard to reliably tell these two groups apart.

Having your actions governed by fixed mores is not infallible. But relying exclusively on judgment calls is more fallible. In the long run, we’re probably better off just calling things as we see them, using objective standards, rather than trying to play bank-shots in order to jump to better outcomes. If someone in a prominent position is making noises about shooting people from groups he doesn’t like, for instance, we should say that this is irresponsible and dangerous. If someone is breaking the law, we should want the legal system to operate with due process rather than turning a blind eye to criminality.

After 2003, Italy became one of the first countries in Europe to put in place a national plan to mitigate the impact of extreme heat, based on the guidelines from the World Health Organization.

“Older people with pre-existing illnesses are more vulnerable,” Andrea Ungar, the president of Italy’s Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics, said in a phone interview. “But poverty and isolation also play a crucial role.”

Europe’s hottest summer on record, in 2003, left more than 70,000 people dead, by some estimates, and since then Italy has only grown older. It has struggled to adapt.

Almost 30 percent of the 61,000 people estimated to have died last summer from extreme heat in Europe were Italians, with age playing a significant factor. The number of Italians over 80 is now about 4.5 million, almost double the number of 20 years ago.

The measures include an alert system to warn people to modify their behavior to safeguard their health

Days like Wednesday, when the heat wave peaked, are marked in red on the daily bulletin that Italy’s Health Ministry issues to warn residents. Television channels periodically broadcast the ministry’s guidelines, advising people to stay indoors during the hottest hours; to wear light clothes and sunscreen; to drink lots of water, eat fresh fruits and avoid coffee and alcoholic beverages; and to be particularly careful when going outside.

The hottest summer on record killed 15,000 in France, the majority of them older people, living alone in city apartments or retirement homes with no air conditioning

Last summer, when successive heat waves hit the country, more than 2,800 French people died, some 80 percent over the age of 75

Even those who don’t need medical aid, assistance remains crucial and, for many vulnerable people, associations like Caritas are still the most reliable weekly help. Ms. Antonelli, the social worker, carried two cases of slightly fizzy water up two flights of stairs for Francesca Azzarita, a 91-year-old who lives alone with nothing to cool herself but a piece of cardboard to use as a fan

Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.

the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.

As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.

Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.

In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).

These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.

adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.

Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.

“Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”

They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.

Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.

they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.

Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.

Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.

Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.

“It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”

— what exactly was the meme?

Cryptocurrency is little more than a decade old, and yet it has passed through several reputational phases: first, as the lawless province of black marketeers and hard-core libertarians obsessed with escaping government oversight; then as a speculative market in which many of those people made an astonishing and enviable amount of money; then as an investment sector for adventurous normies who might previously have turned to simple day-trading; then as an “asset class” eyed by big-money investors and establishment banks

it was very tempting to believe, and nobody was trying to look all that closely, it turns out — not the editors who put him on the covers of Forbes and Fortune; not the traders who trusted him with billions in daily trading volume; not the recipients of his philanthropic pledges, many of which will now go unfulfilled; and most conspicuously, not the investors who handed him millions without seeming to even bother checking the books.

To investors and legislators, he looked like the potential face of a new era for crypto, poised to legitimize through transparency and regulation what had always been an enormously shady, if often quite lucrative, sector.

To progressives, he looked like our kind of oligarch, a sort of boy wonder who seemed capable of conjuring up world-changing billions guiltlessly, effectively out of thin air.

And he had promised to give that magic internet money away just as quickly

It was part of his DGAF brand, like the unkempt hair and cargo shorts he wore onstage alongside Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

As recently as July 2021, FTX raised $900 million from, among others, Sequoia Capital, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and SoftBank Vision Fund, which had previously written down billions of dollars in investments in Uber and WeWork. In January, a Series C round raised an additional $400 million.

In a now-legendary profile published on the Sequoia website just weeks before the collapse, almost every paragraph contained what should have been a red flag but was presented instead as a mark of Bankman-Fried’s special genius — and Sequoia’s, for endorsing it

The death of FTX has been called crypto’s “Lehman moment,” but it was not the first such collapse — it follows the implosions of Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Terra and Luna, among many others. But it’s fitting that Bankman-Fried will now always be remembered as this crypto crash’s central figure, because he postured as someone who could rewrite not just the rules of the financial system but its morality as well.

Now the comparisons are less flattering: to Bernie Madoff, of course, and to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, even though Bankman-Fried has not been charged with any crimes; also to Adam Neumann of WeWork, Travis Kalanick of Uber and the other iconic start-up hucksters of this strange venture-capital era.

those founders were, for all their delusions and sociopathy, pitch-deck visionaries — persuasive proselytizers for not just new products but whole new worlds that could be simply invested into being.

In his self-presentation, Bankman-Fried seemed to be pitching something else: an outward indifference approaching disdain. His serious-seeming commitment to effective altruism underlined the impression: If he was earning his billions only to donate them, he represented a very different case study in the morality or moral potential of unregulated markets

he flatly described the crypto markets as pointless speculation bordering on fraud — one of the interviewers paraphrased Bankman-Fried’s summary as “I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good” — it wasn’t a misstep

What stage of capitalism is this?

in the world of big money he was a genuinely new archetype: a smugly superior Gen X slacker and an entitled, world-changing millennial at once

it has also been the source of a lot of reflection and debate, about whether it had been at all reasonable to treat what made him distinct as a basis for lionization.

He said in the Sequoia profile, for instance, that no book was ever really worth reading, and he told the economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that faced with a coin-flip game in which half the time he’d double the value of the world and half the time he’d destroy it, he’d choose to play again and again

he revealed himself to be wasn’t a singular bad actor but a representative one. Blockchain technology may well offer meaningful uses for the wider world in the future, but as of now, it is most significant as the basis for a realm of pure and unregulated speculation.

The volatility was not some deep secret only now revealed. It’s an almost inescapable aspect of a financial subculture erected outside the oversight and control of the law on the principle that they weren’t necessary

The world’s second-largest crypto exchange has gone belly-up, but the crypto market as a whole is down by only about 20 percent. For many speculators, it seems, collapses like these were already priced in.

It wasn’t just major war that seemed passé. So did the need to pay any significant costs for foreign policy choices. Since the Vietnam War roiled American society, leaders moved to insulate the American public from the harms of any conflict, large or small: The creation of an all-volunteer force did away with the draft; air power bombed targets from safe heights; the advent of drones allowed killing by remote control.

The deaths of more than 7,000 service members in the post-Sept. 11 wars — and approximately four times as many by suicide — devastated families and communities but were not enough to produce a Vietnam-style backlash. Likewise, although the wars have cost a whopping $8 trillion and counting, the payments have been spread over decades and passed to the future.

Not having to worry about the effects of wars — unless you enlist to fight in them — has nearly become a birthright of being American.

Today the United States is again assuming the primary burden of countering the ambitions of governments in Moscow and Beijing. When it did so the first time, it lived in the shadow of world war and acted out of a frank and healthy fear of another. This time, lessons will have to be learned without that experience.

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”

Every law embodies a particular hypothesis about how the world works, a hope that if you pull on levers A and B, then outcomes C and D will result

Democrats hope to create an economy where the government doesn’t just help Americans buy green technologies; it also helps nurture the industries that produce that technology.

The idea is this: The era of passive, hands-off government is over. The laws embrace an approach to governing the economy that scholars call “industrial policy,” a catch-all name for a wide array of tools and tactics that all assume the government can help new domestic industries get started, grow, and reach massive scale.

If “this country used to make things,” as the saying goes, and if it wants to make things again, then the government needs to help it. And if the country believes that certain industries bestow a strategic advantage, then it needs to protect them against foreign interference.

From its founding to the 1970s, the country had an economic doctrine that was defined by its pragmatism and the willingness of its government to find new areas of growth.

It’s more like a toolbox of different approaches that act in concert to help push technologies to grow and reach commercial scale. The IRA and the two other new laws prefer four tools in particular.

“Yes, there was an ‘invisible hand,’” Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong write in their history of the topic, Concrete Economics. “But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.”

That pragmatism faded in the 1980s, when industrial policy became scorned as one more instance of Big Government coming in to pick so-called winners and losers.

The two other large bills passed by this Congress—the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law and the CHIPS and Science Act—make down payments on the future as well; both laws, notably, were passed by bipartisan majorities.

it is in the IRA that these general commitments become specific, and therefore transformative.

Since the 1980s, when Congress has wanted to spur technological progress, it has usually thrown money exclusively at R&D. We have had a science policy, not an industrial policy

inextricable from that turn is Washington’s consuming anxiety over China’s rise—and China has embraced industrial policy.

although not a single Republican voted for the IRA, its wager is not especially partisan or even ideological.

the demonstration project. A demonstration project helps a technology that has previously existed only in the lab get out in the real world for the first time

supply-push policies. As the name suggests, these tools “push” on the supply side of an industry by underwriting new factories or assuring that those factories have access to cheap inputs to make things.

demand-pull policies, which create a market for whatever is coming out of those new factories. The government can “pull” on demand by buying those products itself or by subsidizing them for consumers.

protective policies, meant to insulate industries—especially new ones that are still growing—from foreign interference

Although both parties have moved to embrace industrial policy, Democrats are clearly ahead of their Republican colleagues. You can see it in their policy: While the bipartisan infrastructure law sets up lots of demonstration projects, and the CHIPS Act adopts some supply-push and protectionist theory, only the IRA uses all four tools.

In order to stop climate change, experts believe, the United States must do three things: clean up its power grid, replacing coal and gas power plants with zero-carbon sources; electrify everything it can, swapping fossil-fueled vehicles and boilers with electric vehicles and heat pumps; and mop up the rest, mitigating carbon pollution from impossible-to-electrify industrial activities. The IRA aims to nurture every industry needed to realize that vision.

Hydrogen and carbon removal are going to benefit from nearly every tool the government has. The bipartisan infrastructure law will spend more than $11 billion on hydrogen and carbon-removal “hubs,” huge demonstration projects

These hubs will also foster geographic concentration, the economic idea that when you put lots of people working on the same problem near one another, they solve it faster. You can see such clustering at work in San Francisco’s tech industry, and also in China, which now creates hubs for virtually every activity that it wants to dominate globally—even soccer.

Then the IRA will take over and deploy some good ol’ supply push and demand pull. It includes new programs to underwrite new hydrogen factories; on the demand side, a powerful new tax credit will pay companies for every kilogram of low-carbon hydrogen that they produce

Another tax credit will boost the demand of carbon removal by paying firms a $180 bounty for trapping a ton of carbon dioxide and pumping it undergroun

Today, not only does China make most batteries worldwide; it alone makes the tools that make the batteries, Nathan Iyer, an analyst at RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank, told me. This extreme geographic concentration—which afflicts not only the battery industry but also the solar-panel industry—could slow down the energy transition and make it more expensive

the new tax credit is also supply-minded, arguably even protectionist. Under the new scheme, very few electric cars and trucks will immediately qualify for that full $7,500 subsidy; it will go only toward vehicles whose batteries are primarily made in North America and where a certain percentage of minerals are mined and processed in the U.S. or one of its allies. Will these policies accelerate the shift to EVs? Well, no, not immediately. But the idea is that by boosting domestic production of EVs, batteries will become cheaper and more abundant—and the U.S. will avoid subsidizing one of China’s growth industries.

Right now, next to no solar panels are made in the U.S., even though the technology was invented here. The IRA endeavors to change that by—you guessed it—a mix of supply-push, demand-pull, and protectionist policies. Under the law, the government will underwrite new factories to make every subcomponent of the solar supply chain; then it will pay those factories for every item that they produce

“It’s realistic that within four to five years, [U.S. solar manufacturers] could completely meet domestic demand for solar,” Scott Moskowitz, the head of public affairs for the solar manufacturer Q CELLS, told me.

In each of these industries, you’ll notice that the government isn’t only subsidizing factories; it is actually paying them to operate. That choice, which is central to the IRA’s approach, is “really defending against the mistakes of the 2009 bill,” Iyer told me. In its stimulus bill passed during the Great Recession, the Obama administration tried to do green industrial policy, underwriting new solar-panel factories across the country. But then Chinese firms began exporting cheap solar panels by the millions, saturating domestic demand and leaving those sparkly new factories idle

So many other industries will also be touched by these laws. There’s a new program to nurture a low-carbon aviation-fuel industry in the U.S. (Long-distance jet travel is one of those climate problems that nobody knows how to solve yet.)

the revelation of the IRA is that decarbonizing the United States may require re-industrializing it. A net-zero America may have more refineries, more factories, and more goods production than a fossil-fueled America—while also having cheaper cars, healthier air, and fewer natural disasters. And once the U.S. gets there, then it can keep going: It can set an example for the world that a populous, affluent country can reduce its emissions while enjoying all the trappings of modernity,

There are a slew of policies meant to grow and decarbonize the U.S. industrial sector; every tax credit pays out a bonus if you use U.S.-made steel, cement, or concrete. “You would need thousands and thousands of words to capture the industries that will be transformed by this,” Josh Freed, the climate and energy leader at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me.

Five EVs were sold in China last year for every one EV sold in the United States; that larger domestic market will provide a significant economy of scale when Chinese EV makers begin exporting their cars abroad. For that reason and others, many people in China are “deeply skeptical” that the U.S. can catch up with its lead,

We are about to have a huge new set of vested interests who want the economy to be clean and benefit from that. We’ve literally never had that before,” Freed told me.

“This is going to change everything,” he said

that is the IRA’s biggest idea, its biggest hypothesis: that America can improve its standard of living and preserve its global preeminence while ruthlessly eliminating carbon pollution; that climate change, actually, doesn’t change everything, and that in fact it can be addressed by changing as little as possible.

This hypothesis has already proved itself out in one important way, which is that the IRA passed, and the previous 30 years of climate proposals did not. Now comes the real test.

A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options.

Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept.

NATO promoted the policy of flexible response rhetorically, but the idea was always shaky strategically. The actual contingency plans it generated never commanded consensus simply because initiating the use of nuclear weapons risked tit-for-tat exchanges that could culminate in an apocalyptic unlimited war.

the group could not reach agreement on specific follow-on options beyond an initial symbolic “demonstration shot” for psychological effect, for fear that Moscow could always match them or up the ante.

NATO policymakers should not bank on Moscow’s restraint. Putin has more at stake in the war than Ukraine’s nuclear-armed supporters outside the country do, and he could bet that in a pinch, Washington would be less willing to play Russian roulette than he is

As NATO confronts the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons, the first question it needs to answer is whether that eventuality should constitute a real redline for the West

As dishonorable as submission sounds to hawks in advance, if the time actually comes, it will have the strong appeal to Americans, because it would avoid the ultimate risk of national suicide.

That immediate appeal has to be balanced by the longer-term risks that would balloon from setting the epochal precedent that initiating a nuclear attack pays off

This dilemma underlines the obvious imperative of maximizing Moscow’s disincentives to go nuclear in the first place.

if it wants to deter Putin from the nuclear gambit in the first place—governments need to indicate as credibly as possible that Russian nuclear use would provoke NATO, not cow it.

If NATO decides it would strike back on Ukraine’s behalf, then more questions arise: whether to also fire nuclear weapons and, if so, how. The most prevalent notion is an eye-for-an-eye nuclear counterattack destroying Russian targets comparable to the ones the original Russian attack had hit.

it invites slow-motion exchanges in which neither side gives up and both ultimately end up devastated.

both the tit-for-tat and the disproportionate retaliatory options pose dauntingly high risks.

A less dangerous option would be to respond to a nuclear attack by launching an air campaign with conventional munitions alone against Russian military targets and mobilizing ground forces for potential deployment into the battle in Ukraine. This would be coupled with two strong public declarations. First, to dampen views of this low-level option as weak, NATO policymakers would emphasize that modern precision technology makes tactical nuclear weapons unnecessary for effectively striking targets that used to be considered vulnerable only to undiscriminating weapons of mass destruction

That would frame Russia’s resort to nuclear strikes as further evidence not only of its barbarism but of its military backwardness.

The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation.

Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons.

The main virtue of the conventional option is simply that it would not be as risky as either the weaker do-nothing or the stronger nuclear options.

If the challenge that is now only hypothetical actually arrives, entering a nuclearized war could easily strike Americans as an experiment they do not want to run. For that reason, there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily.

So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons.

1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.

The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010

For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over

Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.

In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!

May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.

Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.

Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.

Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen

Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.

Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.

For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.

A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.

A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.

May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.

Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.

In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.

Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.

each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.

in its brevity—and its provenance—it offers hints of where this is coming from and where they want it to go. “Risk of extinction” leaps straight to the usual Defcon 1 hysteria that demands immediate action. “Global priority” establishes the proper regulatory geography. Bracketing AI with the familiar nightmares of “pandemics and nuclear war” points to the sorts of authority required.

Many of the signatories also represent something of a giveaway: Oodles of Google execs, Bill Gates, a Democratic politician or two, many of the same people who have breathed the rarefied West Coast air of progressive technocratic orthodoxy for decades.

many of those who share their sentiments, are genuinely concerned about the risks of AI and are simply trying to raise a red flag about a matter of real concern—though we should probably note that techno-hysteria through history has rarely proved to be justified

nuclear annihilation has failed to materialize.

I suspect attempts to impose a world government would have been much more likely to result in an extinction-level nuclear war than the exercise by nations of their right to self-determination to resolve conflicts through the usual combination of diplomacy and force.

Climate change is the ne plus ultra of justifications for global regulation. It probably isn’t a coincidence that climate extremism and the demands for mandatory global controls exploded at exactly the moment old-fashioned Marxism was discredited for good in the 1990

the left suddenly found a climate threat it could use as a golden opportunity to regulate economic activity on a scale larger than anything Karl Marx could have imagined.

As for pandemics, our public-health masters showed by their actions over the past three years that they would like to encase us in a rigid panoply of rules to remediate a supposed extinction-level threat.

None of this is to diminish the challenges posed by AI. Thorough investigation into it, and healthy debate about how to maximize its opportunities and minimize its risks, are essential.

Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.

The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.

Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed

Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”

As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.

Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”

Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.

There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.

Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal

it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.

But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.

Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them

it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like

Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.

given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).

In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?

The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.

Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.

Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state

Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.

In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.

The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.

As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”

None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.

in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.

It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.

Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.

The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends

the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.

Shoggoths are fictional creatures, introduced by the science fiction author H.P. Lovecraft in his 1936 novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” In Lovecraft’s telling, Shoggoths were massive, blob-like monsters made out of iridescent black goo, covered in tentacles and eyes.

In a nutshell, the joke was that in order to prevent A.I. language models from behaving in scary and dangerous ways, A.I. companies have had to train them to act polite and harmless. One popular way to do this is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or R.L.H.F., a process that involves asking humans to score chatbot responses, and feeding those scores back into the A.I. model.

Most A.I. researchers agree that models trained using R.L.H.F. are better behaved than models without it. But some argue that fine-tuning a language model this way doesn’t actually make the underlying model less weird and inscrutable. In their view, it’s just a flimsy, friendly mask that obscures the mysterious beast underneath.

@TetraspaceWest, the meme’s creator, told me in a Twitter message that the Shoggoth “represents something that thinks in a way that humans don’t understand and that’s totally different from the way that humans think.”

@TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

“I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

If it’s an A.I. safety researcher talking about the Shoggoth, maybe that person is passionate about preventing A.I. systems from displaying their true, Shoggoth-like nature.

In any case, the Shoggoth is a potent metaphor that encapsulates one of the most bizarre facts about the A.I. world, which is that many of the people working on this technology are somewhat mystified by their own creations. They don’t fully understand the inner workings of A.I. language models, how they acquire new capabilities or why they behave unpredictably at times. They aren’t totally sure if A.I. is going to be net-good or net-bad for the world.

That some A.I. insiders refer to their creations as Lovecraftian horrors, even as a joke, is unusual by historical standards. (Put it this way: Fifteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t going around comparing Facebook to Cthulhu.)

And it reinforces the notion that what’s happening in A.I. today feels, to some of its participants, more like an act of summoning than a software development process. They are creating the blobby, alien Shoggoths, making them bigger and more powerful, and hoping that there are enough smiley faces to cover the scary parts.

A great many people are dismissive of suggestions that any of these systems are “really” thinking, because they’re “just” doing something banal (like making statistical predictions about the next word in a sentence). What they fail to appreciate is that there is every reason to suspect that human cognition is “just” doing those exact same things. It matters not that birds flap their wings but airliners don’t. Both fly. And these machines think. And, just as airliners fly faster and higher and farther than birds while carrying far more weight, these machines are already outthinking the majority of humans at the majority of tasks. Further, that machines aren’t perfect thinkers is about as relevant as the fact that air travel isn’t instantaneous. Now consider: we’re well past the Wright flyer level of thinking machine, past the early biplanes, somewhere about the first commercial airline level. Not quite the DC-10, I think. Can you imagine what the AI equivalent of a 777 will be like? Fasten your seatbelts.

@BLA. You are incorrect. Everything has nature. Its nature is manifested in making humans react. Sure, no humans, no nature, but here we are. The writer and various sources are not attributing nature to AI so much as admitting that they don’t know what this nature might be, and there are reasons to be scared of it. More concerning to me is the idea that this field is resorting to geek culture reference points to explain and comprehend itself. It’s not so much the algorithm has no soul, but that the souls of the humans making it possible are stupendously and tragically underdeveloped.

@thomas h. You make my point perfectly. You’re observing that the way a plane flies — by using a turbine to generate thrust from combusting kerosene, for example — is nothing like the way that a bird flies, which is by using the energy from eating plant seeds to contract the muscles in its wings to make them flap. You are absolutely correct in that observation, but it’s also almost utterly irrelevant. And it ignores that, to a first approximation, there’s no difference in the physics you would use to describe a hawk riding a thermal and an airliner gliding (essentially) unpowered in its final descent to the runway. Further, you do yourself a grave disservice in being dismissive of the abilities of thinking machines, in exactly the same way that early skeptics have been dismissive of every new technology in all of human history. Writing would make people dumb; automobiles lacked the intelligence of horses; no computer could possibly beat a chess grandmaster because it can’t comprehend strategy; and on and on and on. Humans aren’t nearly as special as we fool ourselves into believing. If you want to have any hope of acting responsibly in the age of intelligent machines, you’ll have to accept that, like it or not, and whether or not it fits with your preconceived notions of what thinking is and how it is or should be done … machines can and do think, many of them better than you in a great many ways. b&

When even tech companies are saying AI is moving too fast, and the articles land on page 1 of the NYT (there's an old reference), I think the greedy will not think twice about exploiting this technology, with no ethical considerations, at all.

@nome sane? The problem is it isn't data as we understand it. We know what the datasets are -- they were used to train the AI's. But once trained, the AI is thinking for itself, with results that have surprised everybody.

The unique feature of a shoggoth is it can become whatever is needed for a particular job. There's no actual shape so it's not a bad metaphor, if an imperfect image. Shoghoths also turned upon and destroyed their creators, so the cautionary metaphor is in there, too. A shame more Asimov wasn't baked into AI. But then the conflict about how to handle AI in relation to people was key to those stories, too.