Epidemic Effects and its Affects

I read a short news piece recently remarking on the reemergence of polio. Those of us over seventy who grew up in the fifties remember how terrifying the disease was. Tours of iron lung trailers (trucks pulling trailers containing children who could not breathe without mechanical assistance, only their heads emerging from the edge of the iron lung) were common and reinforced the general fear. Polio, for those born after the development of the miraculous vaccines [1], is a crippling, incurable, very contagious disease that can affect people in a variety of ways. " It can cause acute muscle paralysis, permanent central nervous system damage, and even death. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), death occurs in about 5–10% of patients who become permanently paralyzed due to immobilization of their breathing muscles. [2]  Thanks to routine vaccination now of children, the disease has been wiped out in the United States -- until 2022 when it was confirmed "On July 21, 2022, the USA witnessed the first case of poliomyelitis after nearly 3 decades of its eradication." [2]

The recent outbreaks of measles, another of those insidious diseases that can kill or have long-term effects, thanks to stupid parents who don't get their kids vaccinated, and our recent experience with COVID trypanophobia, not to mention the evidence of long-COVID in the president, I was emboldened to do some digging into the effects of plagues and other diseases on political systems.

One major event was the Antonine Plague, otherwise known as Galen's Plague, which appears to have been either typhoid or a smallpox variant. (Smallpox being another disease wiped out world-wide thanks to vaccinations, it holds no terrors for stupid modern people.)

The Antonine Plague (approx. 165–180 AD) was a devastating pandemic that struck the Roman Empire during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It has been estimated to have killed up to 5 million people (roughly 10% of the population), severely weakened the army, and presaged decline of the Empire. The plague was likely introduced by soldiers returning from campaigns in Seleucia (Mesopotamia). It spread throughout the empire, from the Near East to the Rhine frontier. Galen described the symptoms in detail: fever, diarrhea, sore throat, vomiting, and black-pustule skin eruptions. The mortality rate was estimated at 25%, with up to 3,000 people dying daily at its peak. (Note that the CDC estimates Covid affected 70+% of Americans. [3]) It devastated the army, the aristocracy, and the economy. The emperor himself was affected by the plague in 164–165 AD and died in 180 AD, likely of the same disease, while campaigning. The plague is considered a key factor in the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire.

Epidemics are often remembered for their mortality. Historians and political scientists increasingly argue that they also change politics. Epidemics create labor shortages, which give ordinary people more bargaining power. They weaken trust in rulers who fail to protect their people. Under the right conditions, these pressures have pushed societies toward more inclusive and democratic institutions.

The most direct economic effect of a severe epidemic is a sudden drop in the number of workers. Denemark [5] finds that across history, pandemics have tended to increase class conflict, and that "labour shortages generate wage pressures" in a cycle that can last several generations. When fewer people are available to farm the land or work in towns, surviving workers can demand more, and elites who depend on their labor must either pay more or use force to hold on to them.

Gingerich and Vogler build their argument on this idea. They contend that a pandemic can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough "to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production" . The Black Death of 1347–1351 created exactly this kind of shock. As Gingerich explained in an interview about the research, the plague sharply reduced the agricultural labor force in the hardest-hit parts of German-speaking Europe. Surviving laborers could negotiate higher wages from competing lords or move to areas that paid better, and the resulting rise in wages and living standards helped erode serfdom

The response of elites mattered a great deal. Where mortality was lower, landowners could deal with milder labor shortages by "doubling down on coercion" and keeping serfdom in place longer The size of the shock therefore helped decide whether workers gained real leverage or whether the old system survived.

Epidemics test governments. When rulers cannot protect their people or provide for them during a crisis, their claim to authority can weaken. In other words, people who suffered from disease and hardship became less willing to accept the authority of the state. That loss of trust did not automatically turn into organized resistance. . Pandemics affect states unevenly: "capable political units" grow stronger, while weak ones suffer retrenchment [5]). A government that handles an epidemic poorly may lose both public confidence and real power.

The Black Death study shows how these economic and political shifts could, over time, support democracy. Gingerich and Vogler argue that when labor-repressive systems such as serfdom become untenable, the result is "the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations" [6]. Their evidence is striking. Areas hit hardest by the plague were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and more equal patterns of landownership. Centuries later, voters in those areas showed more independence from landed elites, and in the Weimar Republic's 1930 and July 1932 elections they gave significantly lower vote shares to Hitler's National Socialist Party [6]

As Gingerich put it, workers who gained more freedom in the economic sphere "also found more freedom in the political sphere," because previously disadvantaged groups had gained greater bargaining power. Vogler adds that participatory elections at the town level appeared in heavily affected areas to some extent even before the Protestant Reformation . By contrast, less affected regions kept unequal landownership and elite-dominated politics into the nineteenth century. Those areas also saw more electoral disputes involving fraud or intimidation 8

Studies show that epidemics can reshape political systems by changing who holds power. Labor shortages strengthen workers against elites, and failed government responses erode legitimacy. But the outcomes differ widely. In late medieval Germany, a severe demographic shock helped break serfdom and laid the foundations for more inclusive politics. Denemark's long view helps reconcile these cases: pandemics reward capable states, weaken fragile ones, and intensify class conflict . Whether an epidemic leads toward democracy depends on how severe it is, how elites respond, and whether ordinary people have the leverage and the organizations to turn their grievances into lasting political change.

The United States has not been immune. Yellow fever altered American history through its connection to the transatlantic slave trade, whose ships carried the virus and the mosquitoes that spread it from Africa to the Americas. In Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, the disease devastated the French army sent to crush the revolution and restore slavery, helping Haitian revolutionaries defeat Napoleon’s forces. This defeat undermined Napoleon’s plans for an American empire, in which Louisiana would supply provisions to France’s Caribbean colony, and helped persuade him to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803. The resulting Louisiana Purchase roughly doubled the nation’s size, opening vast territory to U.S. expansion. Thus, a disease spread through the slave trade helped undermine France’s colonial ambitions and reshape the United States. [7]

The Spanish Flu had similar effects. It disrupted the 1918 midterm elections and provoked disputes over government authority. Restrictions on public gatherings curtailed rallies and speeches, while illness and fear of infection complicated voting; turnout was unusually low, although the pandemic’s influence is difficult to separate from that of World War I. Republicans won control of both houses of Congress, weakening President Woodrow Wilson, but historians cannot confidently attribute their victory to influenza rather than wartime controversies and other political issues. Public-health measures also sparked organized opposition, notably San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League, which protested compulsory masking in January 1919 and challenged local officials over individual liberty and government power. The pandemic’s clearest political effects were therefore disrupted campaigning and voting, along with conflict over public-health authority—not a demonstrable nationwide shift toward one party. [9]

Should another major epidemic hit the United States, assuming  widespread fear of vaccination continues and multiple deaths occur, we would see  increased polarization, strained institutions, and continued reshaping of party coalitions. History reveals major effects on five connected areas: partisan identity, state policy, trust in institutions, elections, and democratic stability. The resurgence of measles and the COVID pandemic confirm this.

The first and most immediate effect would be sharper partisan polarization. Attitudes toward vaccination are already closely tied to partisan identity, and Republicans show more distrust of vaccines and public health agencies than Democrats. In a new epidemic, this divide would probably harden. Basic health behaviors such as getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and following school mandates would become visible political markers, and "culture war" conflicts would intensify at every level of government.

A second consequence would be policy fragmentation among the states. States are already moving in opposite directions: some are loosening vaccine requirements, while others are tightening them or forming their own public health coalitions. Another epidemic could produce a patchwork of incompatible rules on vaccination, school entry, and workplace safety. That would weaken national coordination and shift more power and visibility to governors and state legislatures.

Third, an epidemic in this climate would further erode trust in institutions. Trust in federal health agencies and in vaccines has fallen, especially among Republican-leaning voters. Leadership shakeups and politicized interventions have already damaged the CDC's authority. A new crisis amid widespread vaccine fear could speed up this erosion. It could bring more direct political attacks on health agencies and more turnover among expert leaders. People might also rely more on partisan media and influencers than on scientific bodies.

Finally, another epidemic could put serious stress on democratic norms and social stability. Past epidemics showed how disputes over mandates and individual rights can lead to protests and civil disobedience. They have also produced claims that public health measures are unconstitutional or "un-American." If fear of vaccination remains strong, another outbreak could bring sharper confrontations over emergency powers and more court challenges to mandates. It could even lead to occasional violence against health officials. Together, these pressures would further strain democratic norms and weaken public confidence that government decisions are legitimate.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/polio/vaccines/index.html

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/

3. In the United States, there have been 103,436,829 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,232,488 confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country's history. By the end of 2022, an estimated 77.5% of Americans had had COVID-19 at least once, according to the CDC (Wikipaedia). COVID Death rates.  A vaccine became available in December 2021

4. Duncan-Jones, R. P. (1996). The impact of the antonine plague. Journal of Roman Archaeology__, 9__, 108-136. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1047759400016524

5. (Denemark, Robert A. "Pandemics in Global and Historical Perspective." Globalizations 19, no. 3 (2022): 380–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2021.1944460

6. Gingerich, Daniel W., and Jan P. Vogler. "Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany." World Politics 73, no. 3 (2021): 393–440. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887121000034

7. Crosby, M. C. (2006). The American plague: The untold story of yellow fever, the epidemic that shaped our history. Berkley Publishing Group.

8. Newman, Caroline. (2020) Interview with Gingerich and Vogler https://archive.news.virginia.edu/content/qa-new-research-reveals-political-changes-wrought-black-death/

9. https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/electing-appointing-senators/world-war-i-mid-term.htm

 

The Swiss cheese model of nuclear annihilation

There are books you read before bed, and there are books that make you wonder whether going to bed is a good idea. Jeffrey Lewis’s The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States and Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario belong  to the latter category. Neither will improve your sleep. Together, however, they make an good argument that we have become much too comfortable with weapons whose continued non-use depends on people behaving sensibly under circumstances almost guaranteed to discourage sensible behavior.

The authors take different approaches. Lewis, a nuclear-policy specialist, writes a speculative novel disguised (thinly, as we will see) as a government investigation into a disaster that has already happened. Jacobsen, the journalist, assembles reporting and expert interviews into a hypothetical disaster unfolding practically before our eyes. Lewis recreates a pseudo-9/11-like Commission that explains how everything went wrong. Jacobsen provides a minute-by-minute countdown during which there is increasingly little left to explain  His book appeared in 2018; hers in 2024. The catastrophe Lewis assigned to 2020 did not happen, thankfully, but I checked many of the events that led up to the nuclear exchange.  They are all real as are Trump, Moon and Un, participants all. Personalities are important.

Flight BX 411, an Airbus 320, was shot down.  The Airbus 320 has had periodic navigational and electrical cockpit issues requiring a reset. [1]  During the blackout period, the plane wandered off course and into North Korean airspace.  They thought it might be a bomber, the radar technicians all terrified they might make a mistake and let a bomber through. Kim Jung Un issued a belligerent statement, one that infuriated South Korean President Moon, and as one of the aftermath's survivors recalled, the meeting shifted from a possible rescue mission to one of getting revenge. The hawks were ascendant. They had been outraged after two previous NK provocations when they had wanted to respond but had been restrained by the U.S. [2] Lewis’s catastrophe begins with a mistake. North Korean air defenses shoot down a South Korean civilian airliner that has strayed into their airspace. South Korean President Moon Jae-in responds with conventional missile strikes, including one against a residence belonging to Kim Jong Un. Kim, isolated and struggling to obtain reliable information, concludes that something considerably larger may be underway: an attempt to remove him permanently from the business of governing. Into the mess tweets Donald Trump (yes, it takes place during his first administration.)

The plan the U.S. developed in 2016 was a massive missile attack intended to "decapitate " the North Korean leadership.  (Sound familiar?) [3] Trump plays a major role, it is after all, 2020, so the historical players are all in the novel with as much verisimilitude as possible, which makes it even scarier.

Kim’s circle interprets the South Korean strikes as further evidence that a decapitation attack is in progress. Kim orders nuclear strikes against targets in South Korea and Japan. When the United States subsequently begins a conventional campaign to destroy North Korea’s remaining missiles, the effort fails to prevent launches against American cities. In Lewis’s fictional accounting, the attacks immediately kill 1.4 million Americans, with further deaths from injuries and radiation in the weeks that follow.

If that mistake sounds familiar. On September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 traveling from New York to Seoul via Anchorage, strayed far off its intended route into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet fighter, killing all 269 passengers and crew aboard. Soviet officials claimed the aircraft was conducting espionage, but subsequent assessments indicated that the airliner had inadvertently gone off course and that Soviet forces may not have correctly identified it as a civilian aircraft before attacking. The destruction of the plane provoked international outrage; President Ronald Reagan strongly condemned the attack, and the tragedy further intensified already severe Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. But it might have had a different outcome. 

The U.S. is not immune from error. On July 3, 1988, the US Navy guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down Iran Air Flight 655, over the Strait of Hormuz . The Iran–Iraq War was ongoing at the time and tensions were running high. All 290 aboard, including 66 children, were killed. During a battle on the surface with Iranian gunboats, the ship’s crew tragically mistook a civilian Airbus A300 flying a normal route for an attacking Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter jet.  There was a lot of combat stress, time pressure and a misinterpretation of data from the ship's advanced Aegis combat system when the cruiser fired two surface-to-air missiles into Iranian airspace. It was one of the deadliest civilian aviation disasters caused by military action, and it left a deep and lasting scar on U.S.-Iran relations. The U.S. never apologized for which the Iranians have never forgiven nor forgotten.

What makes Lewis’s premise persuasive is that the participants do not have to share the same understanding of events. Indeed, the disaster requires that they don’t. One government sees punishment. Another sees preparations for invasion. A threat meant to intimidate becomes confirmation that an attack has already begun. Each side reacts to what it thinks the other side is doing, and the distance between those interpretations fills up with bodies.

This is Lewis’s strongest insight. Nuclear war need not require an irrational leader who simply wants to burn down the world. It can arise from leaders pursuing recognizable goals—survival, retaliation, credibility—while working from bad information. (More holes in the Swiss cheese lining up.) Their decisions may have an internal logic without being remotely sensible in the larger picture. As one comparative critic has observed, Lewis’s story is frightening precisely because governments concerned with their own survival misread one another and escalate beyond recovery.

My chief reservation concerns Trump. Lewis sometimes pushes his characterization toward caricature. The behavior may be consistent with recognizable traits, but the satirical edge occasionally competes with the broader argument. Readers who dislike Trump will enjoy the recognition; readers who support him may decide the whole book is a partisan exercise and stop paying attention. Admittedly, as Trump becomes more and more a parody of himself, it’s difficult to avoid.

That would be a shame, because Lewis’s central warning is much larger than one president. Personality matters, but so do broken communications, military signaling, political pressure, and fear. Making the president look ridiculous is less unsettling than showing how a system might fail even with people who consider themselves quite serious.

So these are the holes that line up:

1. Bad weather obscuring events on the ground from satellite coverage.

2. Concurrent activities that are misinterpreted, e.g. airline off course, provocative activities (bombers flying close to enemy radar sites to track their efficiency,)

3. Assumptions that sensors will work perfectly.

-Dark period. Satellites see the initial firing of missiles but after the initial burn they go dark and can no longer be tracked except by ground radar.  satellite data alone cannot confirm warhead separation or precise target destination. Ends at burnout and warhead separation (typically at an altitude between 500 and 700 miles).

-Midcourse Phase (20 Minutes): The warhead coasts through space along an exoatmospheric trajectory toward its target. 

-Terminal Phase (1.6 Minutes / 100 Seconds): The warhead reenters the Earth's atmosphere and descends to target detonation.   

4. Problems inherent in ground-based radar. Ground-based radar systems—such as the 5-story Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) at Clear Space Force Station near Fairbanks, Alaska—are physically constrained by the radar horizon. Ground radars cannot transmit through the Earth's curvature to detect an ascending missile immediately following launch.

5. Communication failures. For example North Korea’s cell phone network had no backup systems because of sanctions preventing normal installation, so Kim Jong Un lost communication with his military resources and assumed the worst. Loss of WiFi reduced informational resources in the U.S.

6. Ill considered comments by leaders.  Trumps tweets suggesting a decapitation attack on NK predisposed Kim Jong Un to fear the worst. President Moon’s reluctance to check with the U.S. was because he didn’t not want to be considered as being under U.S. control or being viewed as “soft” hence his response to the attack on the airliner. These added to command pressure.

7. Command pressure. System glitches, computer chip failures, atmospheric phenomena, or solar activity can generate false indications of an attack, initiating a launch sequence under severe time pressure. Leaders have just a few minutes to make decisions to launch or not. Under "Launch on Warning" policies, combining space-based sensor alerts with an 8-minute ground-radar blindspot creates structural pressure to order a retaliatory launch before secondary radar tracking can fully confirm the threat.

Annie Jacobsen's approach is more matter-of-fact. She starts the machinery and then explains how it runs. Lewis provides more explanation on why decisions might be made.

Her scenario begins with a surprise North Korean nuclear attack against Washington, D.C., and California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. I did not know that NK has several diesel subs carrying nuclear warheads in ballistic missiles, that could easily be parked off the coast.  When those missiles are launched the response time is considerably diminished . The United States retaliates against North Korea with 82 nuclear warheads. American land-based missiles travel on trajectories over Russia, where their launch is interpreted as an attack on Russia itself. Russia responds with a massive nuclear strike; the United States then launches its own all-out retaliation. The central sequence unfolds in 72 minutes.

Seventy-two minutes. There are meetings about lunch arrangements that take longer.

Jacobsen’s minute-by-minute structure is extraordinarily effective. Detection, assessment, briefing, interception, evacuation, retaliation: each stage consumes time that cannot be replenished. Technical capability does not necessarily produce understanding. A system may identify a missile launch with remarkable speed while the humans operating it remain uncertain about intention, destination, and what else may be coming.

Drawing on numerous expert interviews, she takes readers through warning systems, command arrangements, missile defense, and presidential decision-making. These are not abstract boxes on an organizational chart. In her narrative, they are systems that must function while the country is being attacked and the people responsible for decisions are being rushed out of harm’s way.

The book is particularly good at stripping the euphemisms from nuclear warfare. Terms such as “exchange” and “response” make the subject sound almost contractual. Jacobsen restores the physical meaning: blast, fire, collapsing infrastructure, catastrophic injuries, and the longer consequences of smoke entering the atmosphere and disrupting food production. Her account of Washington’s destruction is difficult to read, as it ought to be.

My larger difficulty is the initiating attack. Lewis gives us a crisis in which Kim comes to believe his survival is threatened. Jacobsen begins with a surprise strike whose motivation is much less developed. Once the missiles are flying, she excels at describing consequences. Why someone would begin this particular sequence is less convincing. Her catastrophe is technically elaborate but psychologically thinner.

Lewis shows us that we died because the Wi-Fi dropped and the President was mad on Twitter, framing our doom around institutional incompetence, flaws in materiel, and fragile egos. Jacobsen shows us that we died because Mach 24 physics does not leave time to ask questions, blaming automated machinery and hair-trigger doctrine. Lewis forces us to realize our leaders are far too foolish to be trusted with the apocalypse, while Jacobsen proves that even if our leaders were towering moral geniuses, the system we built does not give them enough time to think anyway.

Optimists would argue her book’s narrative momentum creates its principal weakness. Almost every turn takes the reader toward the worst available outcome. Opportunities for delay, restraint, clarification, or an alternative response receive much less weight than the forces driving escalation. An Air University review similarly notes that the book’s worst-case framing leaves little room for de-escalation and simplifies the institutional complexity of nuclear decision-making. Pessimist counter the short time frame leaves no room for any clarification or restraint.  Optimists assume humans will always make good decisions.  We know that’s not true particularly when one religious group is looking forward to Armageddon.

Lewis’s book is obviously pre-Hegseth, the “testosterone man.” Hegseth, in his book American Crusade make no bones that an attack on Islam is a Christian doctrine and worthy cause. His tattoos support it as do his recent comments. “We’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon,” Hegseth said of Iranian leaders. “But from my perspective, I mean, obviously I’m a man of faith who encourages our troops to lean into their faith, rely on God.”

The radical religious beliefs of both Islamists and American Christian Nationalists represent just another hole in the Swiss cheese.

 

Notes:

[1] On certain Airbus A320 and A319 aircraft, electrical transients or software anomalies can occasionally cause a loss of the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS) or main Electronic Instrument System (EIS) display units. To resolve these uncommanded blackouts or transient glitches, maintenance personnel and flight crews follow strict QRH (Quick Reference Handbook) protocols to cycle power or reset designated circuit breakers, allowing the avionics computers to safely reinitialize.

[2] Fact: In 2010, the Korean Peninsula experienced its most severe military escalation since the armistice through two consecutive North Korean attacks near the disputed Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea. On March 26, the South Korean Navy corvette ROKS Cheonon was torpedoed by a North Korean midget submarine, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors. This was followed on November 23 by a sudden artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korean forces, which killed two marines and two civilians and prompted immediate South Korean artillery retaliation. Together, these crises shattered remaining illusions of inter-Korean detente and fundamentally hardened Seoul's defense posture.

[3] Fact: You can read an in-depth analysis of South Korea's "Three-Axis" defense framework—which includes the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) doctrine alongside the Kill Chain and KAMD systems—in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Analysis on South Korea's Revitalized Three-Axis System.

For more brain-numbing fear regarding its origins and conventional second-strike logic, you can also review the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Report on South Korea's Offensive Military Strategy.  This 2024 report is particularly interesting in light of Trump pulling the aircraft carrier task-force away from Taiwan and South Korean where they had been ostensibly there to protect South Korea. It's the foundation in fact that makes this book so frightening.

N.B.  

I used AI to check events in the book against real events.  Then I double checked the AI.  This is what it found.

 

* Technical and command-and-control flaws: North Korea’s actual nuclear and missile arsenals, alert postures, and communications vulnerabilities (such as reliance on fragile or unsecure command links) reflect real intelligence assessments.  

* Historical risk of miscalculation: The danger of mistaking a civilian or commercial/neutral object for a military threat mirrors historical close-calls and shootdowns (like past airliner incidents).  KAL and Iranian airliners shot down spring immediately to mind.

* Psychological and political friction: The book mirrors real-world crisis dynamics—how political posturing, social media/brinkmanship (such as Donald Trump's actual past rhetoric), and institutional miscommunication can compound errors.

* The author’s expertise: Jeffrey Lewis is a real arms-control and nonproliferation scholar; the footnotes and operational constraints in the text are anchored in how real military and intelligence bureaucracies operate.

 

Bibliographic essay

Wit, J. S., Poneman, D. B., & Gallucci, R. L. (2004). Going critical: The first North Korean nuclear crisis. Rowman & Littlefield.   See how it was handled under the Clinton administration

https://lareviewofbooks.org](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-terrifying-truth-in-jeffrey-lewiss-novel-on-nuclear-war/)

    This review was particularly useful in providing additional background on what was real in Lewis’s book.  Far too much, really. Here’s a quote: “And of course, there is death by Twitter. How plausible would it be for Kim Jong Un, in a certain context, to misread Trump’s tweet, carelessly sent one morning from Mar-a-Lago: “LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER!” This is Lewis’s fictional side, but disturbingly, it hardly feels like much artistic license.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/books/jeffrey-lewis-2020-commission-report-north-korean-nuclear-attacks-interview.html)

Interview with the author in the NY Times.

 

https://nonproliferation.org](https://nonproliferation.org/the-2020-commission-report-on-the-north-korean-nuclear-attacks-against-the-united-states/)

Genesis of the book.

https://slate.com](https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/jeffrey-lewis-interview-about-nuclear-war-with-north-korea.html

Another interview with the author. When asked if there was something he wished he could have put in the book, but didn’t. “Definitely the thing about Trump not understanding time zones. I would have made so much hay with that, but if I had invented it, no one would have believed it. I would have had that be a consequential plot point, that he literally couldn’t understand that the Earth was round and that it was warm and sunny here and the middle of the night there.”  When I read that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  The interview is worth reading.

 

https://mwi.westpoint.edu](https://mwi.westpoint.edu/inside-frighteningly-plausible-nuclear-attack-scenario/

Comment from the military side: Plausible

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gQ1SxT-ges

Excellent interview with Jeffrey Lewis.

 

Melancholic aphorisms

I am beginning to understand the word "melancholy," a sense of overwhelming sadness, if not despair. Now I suppose the standard solution recommended by experts and others is a therapist or drugs. I prefer books. 

One of the more intriguing and highly recommended is The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connelly. It’s rated by the Greatest Books website as #1429. War and Peace is #12, the Bible (#21). I did not check to see which one was #1428.

“Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) was one of mid-twentieth-century Britain's most influential literary critics, essayists, and cultural commentators, best remembered as the brilliant and exacting co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Horizon. Throughout his career, Connolly maintained a formidable reputation for his refined aestheticism, piercing wit, and uncompromising standards of literary style, establishing himself as a central tastemaker in English letters. Despite his vast erudition and critical acclaim, he was plagued by a lifelong sense of unfulfilled creative potential—famously diagnosing his own perfectionism and professional dispersion in The Unquiet Grave—which cemented his enduring status as a brilliant, self-lacerating connoisseur of literature whose intellectual legacy endures through his unique blend of personal confession and classical scholarship.” [AI generated]

 That plague of “unfulfilled creative potential" is so accurate. The feeling that if one had only worked harder at whatever skill one might have had, be it music, language, knowledge, or whatever, and gotten much better than mediocre at each is a constant nag and sense of failure that induces the melancholy. Given Connolly’s reputation, one wonders whether his melancholy is deserved. For the rest of us it certainly is.

 Where I think Connolly goes wrong is in his insistence that those Christians who have lost their faith retain a sense of guilt from original sin, a rather silly form of nonsense. Sin is by definition a religious concept. "Those of us who were brought up as Christians and who have lost our faith have retained the Christian sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action." It would seem from this passage that Connolly hasn’t fallen as far as he thought.  Connolly finds a positive value in sadness: despite the pain, Connolly eventually recognizes melancholia not just as a malady but as a necessary instrument for confronting reality:

 "Now that I seem to have attained a temporary calm, I understand how valuable unhappiness can be; melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel that enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed pleasure-lovers, but we venture out in weather that would sink them, and we choose our direction." 

A nice metaphor but totally wrong. Melancholy is paralyzing. It’s caused by reality rather than being “an instrument” for confronting it. Much better is his remark “TOUT EST DÉGOÛT ET MISÈRE." (His emphasis.) The phrase appears in Part I (Ecce Gubernator) during a reflection on the suffocating fog of anxiety and the paralyzing weight of existential despair: 

 "And like a fog it overlays all I do, and my days are muffled with anguish. TOUT EST DÉGOÛT ET MISÈRE. When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide." That makes far more sense but certainly seems to contradict how melancholy provides the stability that “enables us to sail into the wind of reality.” 

What makes the book a classic are his pithy observations on the world, youth, old age, writing, and all his aphorisms, even if the principles expounded by the aphorisms are wrong.

 While it’s a fascinating and enjoyable journey into someone’s mind, I was left unsatisfied and would echo Evelyn Waugh’s comment to Nancy Mitford, “viewing Palinurus as the ultimate upper-class epicurean wallowing in luxurious despair while a world war raged outside his window.”

Regretfully, the book provides no help whatsoever in alleviating melancholy nor offer a permanent "cure"; instead, it treats melancholia as the constant state of a lucid mind. I suppose that when therapy and drugs are involved, they diminish the clarity of the mind, which in turn alleviates the problem. His solution: when past pleasures and nostalgia are successfully converted into art, the guilt attached to them is washed away. In my observation, this approach may actually increase the guilt associated with failure.
 Ultimately, his "help" involves instructing the reader on how to confront despair directly, embrace the tragic nature of existence, and discover moments of serene grace amidst the wreckage. Yeah, right.