Dune

WARNING:  There will be spoilers

Dune, the novel, was published in 1965. I read it a few years later, and liked it enough to hunt down and read other things Frank Herbert, the author, had written.  Some of it was pretty bad.  Dune represented Herbert at his best.  It was an immediate hit with Science Fiction readers like me.  The level of popularity within that community was high enough to cause the more mainstream part of the reading market to become interested.  There too, it was well received.

This popularity had the inevitable result, a sequel called Dune Messiah.  In spite of the fact that it was a sequel to a novel that wasn't supposed to have one, it was pretty decent.  As night follows day, a second sequel soon followed. It wasn't as good.  And that became the pattern.

With each subsequent book the quality diminished a little more.  It eventually reached the point where Herbert's son was cranking out additional books after his father died.  They were not very good.  But they achieved enough commercial success to justify keeping the sequel machine humming along well past it's "sell by" date.

One of the things that attracted many readers to the books were their imputed ecological message.  But Herbert got the science wrong.  And that caused me to be concerned that eco-readers would take away the wrong message.  Since the first book was published the earth's ecology, now generally referred to as its climate, has deteriorated substantially.  It is going to take good science rather than fantasy to get us back on track.

So, what science did Herbert get wrong?  First, I am going to ignore the space ships and other standard components of a Science Fiction yarn.  I am instead going to focus on the elements that are unique to Herbert's books.  The first, biggest, and most obvious one, is the sand worms.  Their physiology is impossible, but I am going to ignore even that.  Instead, I am going to focus on their locomotion.

They travel underground through sand at great speed.  To understand the problem try punching a sandpile, hard.  This will likely result in several broken bones.  But more importantly, your fist will penetrate the sand by, at most, and inch or so.  Sand doesn't flow the way water does.

What Herbert had in mind was the way large whales like Humpbacks swim through the ocean.  In spite of the fact that they are very large they can swim at high speed.  And they sometimes breech, leap out of the water and crash back, spectacularly.  But water is a fluid and sand isn't.

Small creatures like moles and prairie dogs can live in sandy soils.  But they do so by digging tunnels at a rate measured in feet per day.  Inch worms do a little better a the whole underground living thing.  But they are even smaller.  No large creature even tries to live under dry sand.

Next, consider how worm riders control the worm.  They use hooks to raise the leading edge of the large scales that cover the worm.  But a real scale opens at the back.  The Herbert design guarantees that sand would get jammed under its scales every time a worm tried to move forward.  So forget giant worms traveling through sand with people on their backs.

Then there is that technological marvel, the stillsuit.  Supposedly, it keeps you cool while trapping and recycling all of your sweat.  The design is thermodynamically impossible.  Your sweat is a cooling mechanism.  It depends on the fact that it takes a lot of energy to turn water from a liquid to a gas.  The energy that goes into that transformation is taken from your body, thus cooling it.  But a stillsuit prevents that from happening.  In a stillsuit 99.9% of your sweat is captured and recycled, all while keeping it in a liquid state.

It is possible that this capture-and-recycle process could be done efficiently.  But that leads to a different problem.  Your body also uses sweat to get rid of salts that would otherwise build up in your body.  It would take a lot of energy to remove those salts from your salty sweat so that potable water would be produced.  The modest amount of energy generated as you walk is not nearly enough.

Wearing a stillsuit in the desert would be like wearing a full-body wetsuit in the desert.  It would turn you into a well-done piece of meat within a short period of time.  If you look at the kinds of clothing desert people actually wear, it is either very loose, thus allowing them to sweat.  Or it is almost non-existent, again allowing them to sweat.

And that brings me to the ecological dream.  The Fremen ("free men" - get it)  dream of turning their desert planet into a green paradise.  To further that dream they have been collecting water in large secret underground cisterns for generations.  Supposedly, they are close to collecting enough water to flood the planet and turn it green.  But the math doesn't work out.

How big are the cisterns?  Perhaps a thousand feet by a thousand feet and a hundred feet deep.  How many of them are there?  Perhaps ten thousand.  Collectively, that much water amounts to less than a drop in the bucket when spread across an entire planet.

For reference, the earth's oceans cover 70% of its surface and are over ten thousand feet deep on average.  Even if the job could be done with 10% of the water in our oceans, that's many thousands of times more than the Fremen have been able to collect.

If we mark the extent of their cisterns on a map planet Dune, we would see a series of pin pricks.  99+% of the surface would have no cistern underneath it.  In actuality, cisterns of the necessary size would be so large and so deep that they could not be hidden.

Then there is the plot itself.  It is a direct steal from "Lawrence of Arabia".  During World War I, the British sent T. E. Lawrence to Arabia to stir up trouble behind enemy lines.  At that time all the land that we now refer to as The Arab World was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, essentially Turkey.  And the Turks were on the other side of the War from the Brits.  Lawrence succeeded beyond anyone's expectation.

But he went off script.  If political control of the area were to be shifted, it was supposed to shift to the British and the French.  That was the plan that Lawrence's superiors were working to.  But Lawrence on his own decided that political control should instead shift to the Arabs themselves.  He was an early de-colonialist.  And, after a few fits and starts, he was largely successful.

This will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has read the book.  Paul, the book's hero, is supposed to wrench control of the planet Dune away from the Harkonnen family and return it to his family, the Atreides.  Instead, he decides to give control of the planet to the Fremen.  He succeeds, but in the process he becomes a messiah and the Emperor of the entire space culture that is extant at the time.

"Messiah" is an Arab word.  Herbert stole liberally from Arab language and culture.  At the time the book was first published people were generally ignorant of cultures outside of North America and Europe.  So, all this Arab-speak sounded new, different, and interesting.

And if we substitute oil in our world for the "spice" of the book, the parallels between our world and the world of Dune become inescapable.   In our world, oil is the vital commodity that makes our modern society possible.  In the Dune world spice performs the exact same role.  The oil pumped by Arab countries are not quite as critical to our modern world as spice is to the world of Dune.  But then oil is less important now than it was back in 1965.

And, since Herbert wanted to tell what was essentially a medieval tale, he had to invent a reason why the non-Freman culture was a mix of high-tech (space ships) and low tech (people fighting hand-to-hand rather than using modern weapons).  The reason he came up with was barely serviceable.

One trick he used for squaring that particular circle was to substitute specially trained humans called "Mentats" for computers.  But, as is far too often the case when it comes to fictional people who are supposed to be super-smart, his Mentats do not seem to me to be any smarter or more gifted than any of the other characters.

So, that's a shallow dive into the original book.  What I really want to talk about is the movies (and TV show) that were spawned by the book.  And I specifically want to talk about Dune Part One and Dune Part Two, the two very recent efforts along this line.  It is the availability of Dune Part Two on Max that provided the impetus behind this post.  And as an aside, if the name of a particular streaming service needed to be shortened, which it didn't, then HBO would have been a far better choice.

But this current cycle of Dune movies is not the first time a page to screen translation has been attempted.  It is, in fact, the third attempt.  David Lynch, the well respected director, took a shot in 1984 with Dune.  Unfortunately, the project was sabotaged by none other than Frank Herbert himself.  He insisted that the entire plot from the book be included.  Even with a running time of 137 minutes, it didn't fit.

The result is best described as "highlights from Dune".  The movie jumped from event to event so quickly that even Dune afficionados like myself couldn't keep track of what was going on.  Motivation and characterization were jettisoned completely in the rush to include all of the critical plot points.  The distributors even tried providing a syllabus in pamphlet form to movie goers.  But it wasn't enough.  The movie flopped.

Herbert died in 1986.  That eliminated his ability to sabotage subsequent attempts.  And, though deeply flawed, Dune led several Hollywood types to believe that the translation could be done successfully.  It just needed a different approach.  In any case, a second effort, something called Frank Herbert's Dune, made it onto the small screen in 2000.  It was produced for and aired on what is now called the Syfy cable channel.

Most people have lost track of this version.  I own a 3-DVD set of it that I bought years ago.  That package is now hard to come by.  But you can still find a Blu Ray of it on Amazon.  My point, however, is that when this version was initially released, it was a success.  It got the highest ratings Syfy had ever seen up to that point.  It was so successful that it spawned a sequel called Children of Dune.

Children of Dune was also considered a success at the time.  Since then it has dropped even further out of sight than Frank Herbert's Dune did.  I have seen it, but I can't remember anything from it.  I am going to ignore Children of Dune in the same way I am ignoring the many sequels to the original book.  And, rather than analyze Frank Herbert's Dune on a stand-alone basis, I am going to compare and contrast it to the latest offering.

The latest offering comes in two parts, Dune Part One and Dune Part Two.  There are a number of sequels to these two works in the works, but I am going to ignore them too.  And, for convenience I am going to consider Dune Part One and Dune Part Two as as a single entity.  They were always envisioned as a two-parter, so that's how I am going to treat them.  And I am going to shorthand the combined entity as simply Dune.  Similarly, I am going to shorthand Frank Herbert's Dune as simply FHD.

FHD was championed by Richard P. Rubenstein and Michael Galin.  They brought John Harrison on board to direct.  All three believed that it in order to successfully bring a faithful adaptation of the book to the screen, a longer running time was necessary.

Dune was single handedly championed by Denis Villeneuve.  He produced it (with help), directed it, and wrote the screenplay (also, with help).  Like the FHD team, he thought that a longer running time was an absolute necessity.  He got his wish.  Dune consisted of a two-hour movie followed by a three-hour movie.  FHD also got its wish.  It aired as six one-hour episodes spread over three consecutive days.

Dune has been a success with the movie going public and movie critics in the same way that FHD was a success with television viewers and the TV critics of its time.  But, of the two I prefer FHD.  Modern commentators, on the other hand, mostly ignore FHD.  Those that acknowledge it, dismiss it.  But both are worthy and generally successful attempts.  That puts both of them far ahead of the original attempt.  Without further ado, let me proceed with my comparison.

The first item that needs to be addressed is context.  The two were created in far different environments.  FHD was made for TV.  That necessarily limited its budget.  It was initially an open question as to whether enough money could be found to make it at all.  Expensive special effects would be necessary if it was to have any possible chance at success.  The need to save money wherever possible drove several key decisions.  The show was shot in the Czech Republic for cost reasons.

First of all Sci Fi entered into a co-production agreement with several European partners.  That enabled a substantially bigger budget.  It also resulted in a lot of slots, both in front of the camera and behind, being filled by Europeans.  And Eastern Europeans, who were cheaper than Western Europeans, were used where possible.

Cost considerations also meant that A-List talent was pretty much out of the question.  The only A-Lister in the cast was William Hurt.  And since his character was killed off less than a third of the way through the series, it was probably a smaller paycheck than he would have otherwise gotten.

But the biggest cost driven decision was a surprising one.  The series was shot entirely on sound stages.  Stock footage was used in a few places.  But all the new material was filmed on one of several sound stages.  This included shooting all of the desert scenes on a big pile of sand in a sound stage.  In spite of this, the desert scenes are remarkably effective.  

Shooting a "big budget spectacular" on sound stages was an extremely daring choice.  It could have gone wrong in so many ways.  But I thought they made this choice work for them.  They did what all successful projects operating on a shoe-string budget do, they substituted creativity for money.  Time after time they found creative ways to make a set on a sound stage feel like it was part of a much larger world.

Dune, on the other hand, was an actual big budget Hollywood movie.  That meant that A-List talent was employed, even for smaller parts.  And if you need a telegenic piece of desert, which you do, then you move the entire production to Jordan and shoot outside rather than using some cheap cheat.  You have the money, so why not?  And when it come to special effects and CGI shots, you have the budget to do whatever you want.  The only limit is your imagination.

The budget for FHD was $20 million.  The combined budget for Dune was more than $350 million, almost eighteen times as much.  I thought that the budget for FHD was well spent.  The budget for Dune, not so much.  The problem with having a Dune sized budget is that you have no excuse for producing second rate work.  And I thought too much of Dune was second rate work.

Side note:  FHD suffered from the same problem that plagued the original Star Trek TV show.  Many people, William Shatner most prominently, complained that the Star Trek sets were cheesy.  He was right, and for the same reason that applied to FHD.  The hand-done, film-based, special effects used in Star Trek were fantastically expensive.  That meant that every possible corner had to be cut elsewhere.  If episodes of Star Trek had cost the same as other shows of the period, NBC would never have cancelled it.

The fact that that FHD was shot on sound stages affected its look and feel.  But the producers compensated in several ways.  They employing over-the-top set decoration and costume design.  I particularly recommend to viewers that hats employed.  They are worth the price of admission all by themselves.

They also adopted an operatic look and feel for the show.  Opera is not about strict realism.  It is about drama and spectacle.  The fact that there were a lot of Italians in front of and behind the camera helped.  FHD employed dramatic "stage" color and lighting extensively.  For instance, some "special effects" were done simply by diming some areas and brightening others.  And each key group of players had its own color palate.  The Atreides were rendered in brown, the Harkonenns in red, and the imperial palace in blue. 

Dune had lots of money for costumes, set decoration, etc.  They went overboard in the other direction, bland, bland, bland.  Bland, unmemorable costumes.  Bland, boring space ships.  (The FHD space ships were much more imaginative and interesting.)  And the interior spaces - what were they thinking?  A theme of both implementations is "space is big".  So, with FHD we have really big, but interesting, space ships.  With Dune we have spectacularly big, but spectacularly boring, space ships.

The same thing carries over to interior spaces.  With FHD we have large interior spaces.  But they are interesting to look at.  And they look practical and lived in.  With Dune we have spectacularly big interior spaces.  But they are all bland beyond belief.

Who wants to hike what seems like a quarter of a mile to get from one side of a cold and boring room to the other.  Especially if you know that the next room you enter will be just as large, boring, and cold as the one you are leaving.  I can't imagine anyone actually living in any of the "living" spaces in Dune.

The same thing carries over to the people themselves.  FHD spends enough time with the principle characters that you get to know them and to understand what motivates them.  Their actions are understandable because we can follow their motivations.

Dune does not spend enough quality time with its characters.  Key scenes which would make the characters relatable and understandable are missing.  As FHD demonstrates, often all that is needed to fix this are a few short scenes.  Maybe they are being saved for the director's cut.

This is even true of the main character, Paul.  He is the character the whole enterprise pivots around.  He needs to have conflicts to wrestle with.  In FHD what he is thinking and why is clear.  And that means that his conflicts are clear.

He starts out as a bratty kid trying to impress his dad.  He is then thrown without any warning into the desert and the Fremen culture.  He needs to learn to become one of them and eventually to lead them.  Finally, he tries to figure out how he can stave off a war that will kill billions.

His motivations in Dune are far less clear.  Dune avoids the bratty kid stage.  But that restricts his ability to grow and mature before our very eyes.  Key events in his time with the Fremen are omitted or brushed over.  So, an opportunity for the audience to bond with Paul and his journey of discovery is not taken full advantage of.  Finally, Villeneuve tries to shift Paul's final dilemma, but it was never clear to me what the new dilemma was supposed to be.

And what applies to Paul, applies to the secondary characters to an even greater extent.  The character of Irulan, the Emperor's daughter, is given extensive screen time in FHD.  We learn that she is first intrigued by Paul, then impressed, and finally comes to love him.  She is the person from the outside world who comes to understand him best.  That makes her a tragic figure when Paul eventually commits to a loveless (and presumably sexless) marriage with her for political and diplomatic reasons.

In FHD, she is played well by the beautiful Julie Cox.  Florence Pugh, another beauty and a capable actress, plays her in Dune.  But Pugh is given nothing to do, so she remains a cypher.  Her only role is to be there at the end so she can marry Paul.  What does she think of that?  We have no idea.

Even the villains are treated badly in Dune.  In FHD Duke Harkonnen is played in a wonderful over-the-top performance by Ian McNeice.  For instance, he tends to end his speeches, and he has several memorable ones, with a rhyming couplet.  Stellan Scarsgard plays him in Dune.  Given nothing interesting to do, he blends into the background.

In FHD as part of the color scheme all the Harkonnens have bright red hair.  They are given lots of curtains to chew, so they stand out.  In Dune all the Harkonnens are pasty and bald.  Villeneuve planned for this to stand out the way the red hair did in FHD, but he fails.  They are some of the blandest villains I have ever come across.

Another big contrast is with the Emperor.   Given sufficient screen time, and being someone who knows how to play this kind of part, Giancarlo Giannini does a great job with him in FHD.  His character is trying his best to retain control as he is buffeted from all sides.  In the end his only true ally turn out to be his daughter.  So, he ends up a broken man.

Christopher Walken was brought in to play the part of the Emperor in Dune.  He has no clue as to how to play the part because there is nothing there to play.  It is probably for the best that he has little screen time.  And when he is on screen he looks acutely uncomfortable.  I can't blame him.

In another missed opportunity, an unknown child actor named Laura Burton plays Alia, a key figure in the climax of FHD.  She is terrifying.  But by that time we know her back story.  So, we get to go along for the ride as she leaves various villains literally trembling in their boots.

In Dune, Alia is played by Anya Taylor-Joy.  She is an excellent actor and, given a chance, could have delivered a memorable performance.  But why is an adult playing a character that should be a child?  We don't know.  Supposedly, Villeneuve came up with a justification for this change.  But, if it was there, I missed it.  And, if you blink you will miss Taylor-Joy's entire (and uncredited) performance.  Needless to say, another missed opportunity.

One of the few places where Dune does the better job than FHD does is with Chani, Paul's love interest.  In FHD, she is played by Barbaroa Kodelova.  As far as I can tell she was picked because she could speak passable English and was willing to bare her ample breasts in a short, and completely unnecessary, topless scene.  I never connected with her.

Zendaya plays the same character in Dune, and plays her well.  The part is not written as well as it could have been.  But there is enough there for Zendaya to have something to work with.  She acquits herself well.

Here is a list of some of the other characters, and who played them in each version:

• Paul - Alec Newman and Timothee Chalamet
• Jessica (Paul's mother) - Saskia Reeves and Rebecca Fergusson
• Stilgar (lead Fremen) - Uwe Ochsenknecht and Javiar Bardem
• Leto (Paul's father) - William Hurt and Oscar Isaac 

As far as the relative quality of the respective performances.  Chalamet is by the better actor, but he is too skinny to be credible as an action hero.  I think both Reeves and Fergusson both did good work.  Uwe was good but Bardem was better.  Neither Hurt nor Isaac had much to do.  Both did it well.

One final observation - FHD was made for TV in an era when many people were still using picture-tube-type TVs.  These are low resolution and low contrast devices.  That affected how shots were framed and lit.  To the modern eye this translates to a too-brightly-lit and Technicolor look to the production.

Dune was made for theater exhibition, or home viewing using modern flat screen technology.  To the modern eye this translates to what we have been trained to expect, more muted colors and a lot of dimly lit scenes.  We are now used to how Dune is shot and framed rather than how FHD was.

This puts some people off as it is not what they are used to.  But they should not be put off by it.  They should instead embrace it as part of the experience.  It is akin to watching an old black-and-white movie.  The fact that it isn't done any more doesn't detract from just how effectively those old movies turn a seeming disadvantage into an advantage.

In summary, Dune represents a missed opportunity.  My two main complaints are with the script and with the special effects.  Minor changes to the script which would not have significantly affected its running time could have sharpened and clarified the characters and their motivations.

And although well done from a technical perspective, the special effects were a missed opportunity from an artistic perspective.  The design of the space ships and interior spaces, many of which used CGI "extensions" so that only part of the set needed to be built and filmed, were dull and uninteresting.  Making more interesting artistic choices would not have increased the cost or the difficulty.  But it would have made both movies more interesting.

I blame both of these shortcomings on Villeneuve.  He was the one with the artistic vision that determined how the finished script came together, and the look and feel of the finished films.  All he had to do was to watch FHD over and over to understand how his script could have been made much better without changing it in any essential way.

Modern effects houses are capable of producing truly magical visuals. All you have to do is ask them to do so.  That's what the FHD people did.  And their effects people were able to deliver striking results in spite of the budget constraint.  All Villeneuve had to do was give the effects houses more interesting things to do and they would have done them.  But apparently, he didn't.

Now don't get me wrong.  Dune is well worth a watch.  It is just far from as good as it could have been, and should have been.  And, of course, I recommend that people who liked Dune to seek out and take a look at FHD.  If you give it a chance to charm you on its own terms, I think you will find your time and effort well be rewarded.

BONUS CONTENT:  A standard feature of the action genre is the climactic mano-a-mano fight between the good-guy champion and the bad-guy champion.  Dune, in all of it's various forms includes just such a fight.  In Dune's case, it is between Paul and Feyd Harkonnen.  (Note:  In Lynch's Dune, Feyd was memorably played by Sting, the singer.  This bit of stunt casting resulted in Sting having a modest but successful career as an actor.)  The part was played well by Matt Keslar in FHD, and played under so much makeup and prosthetics that he is unrecognizable by Austin Butler in Dune.

A required attribute of these fights is that the participants seem evenly matched.  To do otherwise would diminish the drama by delivering a one-sided fight.  But is that realistic in the context of Dune?  As in the medieval tradition, both Paul and Feyd have been trained in hand-to-hand combat from an early age.  That should make them evenly matched.

But we are told that Feyd loves fighting and has done a lot of it.  Paul, on the other hand, dislikes fighting and only goes through the training out of a sense of obligation.  Advantage, Feyd.  But most of Feyd's opponents have been drugged or injured before the fight starts, so that Feyd is guaranteed an easy win.  Advantage back to near even.

But Paul has been trained by his mother in a special technique called the "Weirding Way".  Advantage, Paul.  And Paul spends years fighting with the Fremen and learning from them.  And the Fremen, we are told, are some of the best fighters of that age.  So, Paul should have an even greater advantage.

Then Paul acquires super-powers by "drinking the waters of the Maker".  (It's a Fremen thing - and it's what allows Paul to become powerful enough to unilaterally declare himself Emperor.)  This should convey an overpowering advantage upon Paul.

Paul should wipe the floor with this guy without even breaking a sweat.  Instead, all of the fights in all the various versions conform to the much beloved and wildly overused "bad-guy gains an early advantage but good-guy keeps fighting and ultimately triumphs" formula.  There is a fix for this problem that would work within the context of Dune.

In FHD we are shown that the bad-guy cheats.  It turns out that he has a poisoned needle concealed in his belt buckle.  Paul learns this but the crowd viewing the fight (the genre often demands that a handy crowd be available to function as an on-site stand-in for the audience) doesn't.  But what if Paul fights the early rounds with one metaphoric hand tied behind his back so that the fight appears to be even.

Then at the critical moment he exposes the bad-guy's cheat to the crowd.  Then he can then proceed to wipe the floor with him without diminishing the dramatic release the fight is supposed to provide.  FHD comes the closest to doing this, but it too chickens out in the end.  The other versions don't even try.

Nukeelor Power

People used to mispronounce the word "nuclear", all the time.  It's an easy word to pronounce correctly because it is pronounced exactly the way its spelling indicates that it should be.  But a lot of people used to muck it up.  For reasons that I never understood the "cle" part would throw them.  They acted as if it was actually spelled "cel".  Many of those people where public figures who should have known better.  And many of them continued to mispronounce the word for years.  Where were their aides and assistants?

If you are in favor of nuclear power, as I am, things have definitely improved.  At a minimum, the rate at which the word "nuclear" is mispronounced has diminished considerably.  But pronouncing the word incorrectly is of minor importance in the grand scheme of things.  The good news is that there have been improvements in far more important areas too.  But the press has continued to focus what coverage they provide on the less important areas while almost completely ignoring the more important areas.

I dug into this subject in 2020.  I put up two good posts, "Sigma 5: A Brief History of Nuclear Power", and "Sigma 5: Nuclear Waste", in that year.  I recommend both of them.  This post will build on the foundation they lay.  As I noted in those posts, there are two kinds of nuclear processes that can be used to produce power, fusion and fission.  Power generation using nuclear fission has been a commercial reality since the '50s.  It continues in use to this day.  Fusion has been "the future of nuclear power" for almost as long.

In practice, each depends on a single fuel.  With fission it's Uranium.  With fusion it's Hydrogen.  Fission based power is an outgrowth of research done to create the Atomic Bomb.  One main path to fusion-based power generation is based on research done to create the Hydrogen bomb.  The other main path uses a more esoteric approach that is less closely tied to bomb research.

Let's start with the latter.  It takes extreme conditions to make two Hydrogen atoms to fuse together to form a single Helium atom.  Those extreme conditions exist in the center of all stars including our Sun.  Most stars are like our Sun in that the fuel that powers them is Hydrogen.  Stars eventually exhaust their supplies of Hydrogen.  Our Sun will do so in about 5 billion years.  If the star is large enough, and our Sun is, when that happens the star just moves on to using other elements to power the fusion process.

The Sun is gigantic both in terms of its size and in terms of its mass.  All that mass is crushed toward the center by gravity.  As a result, the center of the Sun becomes a location subjected to extreme heat and pressure.  The conditions are extreme enough to cause Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a substantial rate.  That process releases tremendous amounts of energy which, among other things, pushes back against gravity keeping things in balance.

The trick has always been to reproduce those extreme conditions on earth at a much smaller scale and without the need for a star.  For a long time, scientists thought there were three "states" of matter:  solid, liquid, and gas.  Early in the twentieth century a fourth state was discovered, plasma.  At first plasma just appears to be gas.  But it doesn't behave like a normal gas.  That's because the particles of a plasma are electrically charged.

Half of them have a positive charge.  Half of them have a negative charge.  All the positively charged particles repel each other.  All the negatively charged particles repel each other.  That should cause the plasma to immediately fly apart.  It would if it were a normal gas.

But all the positively charged particles are also simultaneously attracted to all the negatively charged particles and vice versa.  That should cause the plasma to smash together, perhaps forming a solid.  But under the right conditions the two effects exactly offset each other and achieve a balance.  When that happens, a plasma is created.

Creating a plasma takes extremely high temperatures.  And various other things must be just right.  But if the right conditions can be created and maintained, then a stable plasma become possible.  Needless to say, a stable plasma is fraught with extremes.  And in this extreme environment high energy collisions are a distinct possibility.  And high energy collisions are just what we need to cause fusion.

It didn't take long for scientists to see plasmas as a possible path to a controlled fusion reaction that could be used to create power.  One thing that helped is the fact that electricity and magnetism are inextricably intertwined.  A moving electric charge creates a magnetic field.  A magnetic field can be used to steer the path of an electrically charged particle.

So, the game became finding just the right set of magnetic and electrical fields to get a plasma to do what we wanted it to do, create conditions that caused Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a fast enough rate to be useful, but at a slow enough rate so that it didn't just blow everything up.

A lot of designs were tried.  They all failed.  The one that came the closest was a Russian design called a Tokamak.  To the untutored eye the part that contains the plasma looks like a donut.  All kinds of powerful magnets are wrapped around the outside.  The idea is for the plasma to occupy the central area.  This is surrounded by a vacuum.  Particles can then zoom around in a rough circle while never touching the walls.

The positive plasma particles consist of the nuclei of various isotopes of Hydrogen.  The negative plasma particles consist of the electrons that have been stripped from the Hydrogen nuclei.    All of these particles are moving at extremely high speed.  It is hoped that a few of the Hydrogen nuclei will smash into each other and fuse to create Helium nuclei.  The problem of how to collect all of the energy generated by this process and turn it into electric power is being left for a future generation of scientists and engineers to solve.

Over the past few decades, a bunch of Tokamaks have been built.  None of them have worked.  The plasma can only be maintained in a stable configuration at low density for short periods of time.  The amount of fusion, and thus the amount of energy produced, is tiny.

But scientists have seen progress in moving to higher densities and in maintaining the plasma for longer periods of time.  Both kinds of progress contribute to more fusion activity and, therefore, more energy production.  That has led them to believe that they are making steady progress toward a design that works.  One thing that seems to help is size.  They hope that a big enough Tokamak can be made to work.  The end result of this is ITER, the largest Tokamak built so far.

The ITER project being run by the Europeans.  (The U.S. has, so far, made only modest contributions.)  The project has consumed billions of dollars and many years so far.  It will consume billions more before it is completed several years from now.

If, that is, it is ever completed.  (Another delay of two or more years was recently announced.)  And, if it works as well as its backers hope it will, it will not be a practical device.  It will only be a "proof of concept", a device that paves the way for one that actually works.

If going from the ITER to an actual working device sounds like a long shot, it's because it is.  A lot of things have to go well.  And, if they do, it will be at least 20 years, and likely considerably longer, before a Tokamak will be used to fuse Hydrogen into Helium in a generating facility that is feeding commercial quantities of electric power to the grid.  Let's move on to the next longshot.

I am older than the laser.  I remember when the first working one was built.  Back then, it's possible uses seemed limitless.  A few years later when I was in college (roughly 1970) I remember bumping into a guy who was talking about using lasers to zap Hydrogen hard enough to cause it to fuse.

Back then such a trick seemed like it would be relatively easy to pull off.  A laser would be focused onto a tiny spot.  If the laser was powerful enough, and if the spot was small enough, both of which sounded possible, then it should be able to feed enough energy into the Hydrogen to initiate fusion.  And fusing a tiny amount of Hydrogen into Helium would be all that was needed to produce a tremendous amount of energy.

As with creating and maintaining a suitable plasma, the problem turned out to be way harder than anyone expected.  The early experiments were a bust.  But technology kept getting better.  More powerful lasers.  Advances in focusing.  For a while it looked like the goal was within reach.  But it gradually became apparent that it was not.  At least not without access to a giant test facility costing billions of dollars.  And the funding for such a facility was just not there.

Until it was.  To its credit, the ITER was built from the ground up for the expressed purpose of using a plasma to make Hydrogen fuse into Helium.  The giant laser test facility that eventually got built was built to address an entirely different need, a military one.  Whereas it is almost impossible to get billion dollar sized chunks of money approved for civilian projects, the military has long since figured out how to pull that off.  And they have done it multiple times.  They've even done it for projects that are complete boondoggles.

The project, called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship, was not the first expensive boondoggle the military has sold the White House and Congress on.  Nor will it be the last.  Let me outline the specifics.  The U.S. signed a treaty outlawing the testing of nuclear weapons.  That was a good thing.  But billions of dollars had been flowing annually into the design, construction, and testing of nuclear weapons.  Not surprisingly, defense contractors (and others) wanted all that money to keep flowing.

So, they started talking up the idea that our stockpile of nuclear weapons would fall apart and stop working if nothing was done.  They do need maintenance.  But their actual needs are modest.  But that's not the story the military, defense contractors, and their buddies in congress pushed.  All kinds of extraordinary (and expensive) measures were desperately needed or terrible, just terrible, things would happen to our nuclear stockpile.

So, a project called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship was added to the Defense budget and billions of dollars started flowing its way every year.  One of the projects funded by this largess was the National Ignition Facility (NIF).  Ginormous lasers would be built and used in clever ways to simulate nuclear explosions.  The facility was situated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, often facetiously referred to as Los Alamos West.

A vast quantity of money was spent, and the facility was built.  It brought together 192 gigantic lasers, individually among the most powerful lasers ever built.  They could all be focused on a tiny target.  Most "shots" would be used to test various aspects of nuclear weapon development and maintenance.  But it is a unique facility, one that has by far the most powerful (and expensive) set of lasers available anywhere.  They could be used to do laser fusion research, so they occasionally were.

The possibility of using the occasional NIF "shot" to do laser fusion research was lost on no one.  So, pretty much from the start it has periodically been used to run various laser fusion experiments.  One of those tests recently made a big splash in the press.  "Scientific breakeven" had been achieved.  It was big news only because the field has had little positive news to report for many years now.

Mostly, what we have heard about has been yet another instance of a project getting delayed (ITER) or going further over budget (pretty much everything in the field including ITER).  Scientific breakeven was a positive achievement for a change, but a modest one.

The fact that they had to add "scientific" in front of the word "breakeven" kind of gives the game away.  Breakeven is easy to understand in this context.  You put a certain amount of energy in, and you get at least as much, and hopefully a lot more, out.  In this case 2.05 something (it doesn't matter what) units was put in and 3.15 of the same units came out.  They achieved a gain of a little more than 50%.

That's not very impressive, but it beats the alternative. A similar experiment run a year earlier had put 1.8 units of the same something units in and gotten only 1.3 units out.  The process went backwards to the tune of about 30%.  To roughly double the output (going from a gain of about 70% to a gain of about 150%) required several tweaks to the setup and about a year of work to pull off.

To get from "scientific" breakeven to actual breakeven will take a lot, because truly impressive accounting tricks had to be employed in order to allow the word "breakeven" to be used at all.  The facility as a whole is less than 1% efficient.  For every one unit of laser energy that hits the target, more than a hundred units of energy is used just to fire the lasers.

But wait.  It's worse.  No energy conversion system is 100% efficient.  Less than a third of the energy in the gas a car burns ends up being used to move the car down the road.  So only a fraction of the fusion energy will eventually end up as electrical energy.  All told, the laser fusion process needs to be made about a thousand times better in order to put the process into the ranger of practicality.    The current result needs to be doubled, then doubled again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again to get us to where we need to be.

Here's another problem.  If a NIF shot had been able to produce the desired amount of output energy it would have destroyed the chamber containing the Hohlraum.  So, NIF can't even be used to get to true breakeven.   Most likely a whole new facility using different and better technology will need to be built.  Such a facility is likely to cost many billions of dollars.  That's bad but let me give you a tiny bit of good news.

The NIF is not designed and optimized for laser fusion purposes, so it is not very good at it.  In laser fusion mode it is a multi-stage process.  The lasers don't actually hit the ultimate target, a tiny bead of frozen Hydrogen.  The bead is contained within a small complex package called a Hohlraum.   It has a hollow, cylindrical shape.  The ends are partially but not completely closed. But wait.  There's more.

The 192 laser beams enter the Hohlraum through holes in the ends and strike its inner wall.  The inner wall material is chosen to produce copious amounts of X-Rays when struck by the NIF's laser beams.  These strike the bead, which actually consists of several different layers.  The Hydrogen at the center of the bead is compressed and flooded with X-Rays.  Only X-Rays have the energy necessary to initiate the fusion process.  And the NIF lasers are not X-Ray lasers.

It is possible that a facility that was designed from the get-go to do laser fusion would not need so many layers and so much indirection.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that the NIF is a "one shot at a time" facility.  And the turn-around time between shots is measured in days.  To be practical as a wholesale source of electric power, many shots per second will be necessary.  Finally, like the current ITER, NIF includes no means for gathering the energy produced and turning it into electricity.  As a result, multiple generations of new facilities will likely be needed.

The reason all this harkens back to Hydrogen bombs is that's how they work too.  An Atomic bomb is exploded.   Its design has been optimized to cause it to produce copious amounts of X-Rays.  The X-Rays are directed at a reservoir of Hydrogen.  Flood a Hydrogen reservoir with enough X-Rays and fusion ensues.

As with ITER, don't expect anything practical to emerge from laser fusion research in less than twenty years.  As the old saying goes, "fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be".  I hope fusion power production eventually makes the transition from Science Fiction to reality, but I'm not holding my breath.  Fortunately, there is an atomic energy source of the present.  All we have to do is find the will to take better advantage of it.

Let me start my tour of the current state of nuclear fission as a source of electric power with a recap of the big-three accidents.  The Three Mile Accident happened in 1979.  No one was killed.  The public was never put into danger because the radioactivity that was released was confined to the containment building.

As I noted previously, other than the accident itself, everything worked exactly as it was supposed to.  And over the subsequent years the containment building has been cleaned up and all the highly radioactive components hauled off to "disposal" sites like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.  A little more about the accident itself.

The design used for the reactor generates Hydrogen gas.  Normally, this is easily and safely vented off.  But the valve that malfunctioned and failed to open was the one that was supposed to vent the gas.  This failure trapped the Hydrogen gas in the reactor vessel.  Hydrogen is light so a bubble formed at the top.  The bubble eventually grew big enough to push the cooling water down to below the top of the Uranium/Zirconium rods.  They overheated and things went south from there.

Three Mile Island sparked a change in instrumentation.  The '50s-style "diagram on the wall" system was supplemented by computer assist.  That should eliminate the possibility of a repeat.  Similar reactors have all been upgraded to include computer assist.  They have operated safely in the decades since.  So, as I noted previously, this was only a financial disaster.

The second of the big-three is Chernobyl.  It happened in 1986.  The atomic "pile" in a squash court at the University of Chicago that played an important role in the development of the original Atomic Bomb was the basis for the design.  The reactor vessel was a large cylinder.  It had a strong floor and was covered by a lid that weighted thousands of tons.  Blocks of a couple of different types of material were stacked inside in a carefully designed pattern.

One type of block used was made of graphite, a kind of carbon, so essentially coal.  When the idiot operators performed their experiment things heated up and some of the graphite blocks caught fire.  Soon there was a giant bonfire going on in the reactor vessel.  At various points the Uranium blocks got rearranged in patterns that caused the chain reaction to speed up.

It is unclear how much was caused by the burning graphite versus the chain-reacting Uranium.  But early on the lid was blown clean off.  This gave the graphite access to lots of oxygen, and it burned furiously.  Eventually, things cooled down, likely after the graphite had all burned off.

But while the fire was going the Venturi effect had thrown large amounts of highly radioactive material into the air.  Large amounts of radioactive material settled on the ground close to the reactor.  Tiny amounts of radioactive material eventually spread as far as Sweeden.  This is not surprising because radioactive material is detectable at extremely low concentrations.  Sweeden and its population were put in no danger by this tiny amount of radioactivity.

A containment structure was hastily built.  It proved to be no match for the weather. Several years later a larger, more elaborate, and more expensive structure was put in place.  It secured the reactor building and all the radioactive material it still contained.  That was most of it.  But far too much radioactive material had drifted away.  The material that had settled in the immediate vicinity had done so in a high enough concentration to be actively dangerous.  The new containment building did nothing to mitigate that danger.

At the time of the accident a large "exclusion zone" was put into place to deal with the areas of high radiation.  Everybody was evacuated.  It is still there.  Its boundaries have changed little since 1986.  There are still no people living there.  But this has let plant and animal life thrive in every part of the exclusion zone.  It turns out that people are more of a threat to plants and animals than even high levels of radioactivity.

I am going to skip over the modern history of Chernobyl other than to note that it is now in Ukraine, an active war zone, and move on to the third big disaster, Fukushima.  It took place in 2011.  There the reactor design was similar to Three Mile Island, but for various reasons it did not include a super-strong Three Mile Island style containment vessel.  And in some ways Fukushima was a repeat of Three Mile Island.

In both cases Hydrogen built up.  In the case of Fukushima things went on long enough for far more Hydrogen to build up.  Eventually, this caused explosions.  Without the super-strong containment vessel, the explosions were strong enough to blow the roof off of reactor buildings.  There was no Hydrogen explosion that large at Three Mile Island.  There the roof remained intact.

The Fukushima facility included several nuclear reactors. The operators of that facility were well aware of the possibility of Hydrogen explosions and what the likely result would be.  The plan covering such a possibility was to vent the Hydrogen off well before it reached dangerous levels.

It's just that the damage caused by the earthquake and Tsunami was so extensive that they couldn't do that.  Had Hydrogen venting been possible, then little or no radioactivity would have spread to the civilian areas that surrounded the facility.

At Three Mile Island the reactor was never successfully SCRAMmed.  If it had been, then nothing bad would have happened.  All the reactors at Fukushima were successfully SCRAMmed.  (This happened after the earthquake hit but before the Tsunami struck the facility.)  But there was no power to circulate cooling water in the days that followed.

Eventually the Hydrogen built up (there was no power to run the valve that controlled venting) and things heated up.  Explosions ensued.  They were insignificant by nuclear standards.  But they were powerful enough to further damage the plant and to throw a considerable amount of radioactive material into the air.

The Japanese immediately implemented a large exclusion zone.  As the people on the receiving end of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bombs, the Japanese were hypersensitive to any possible exposure of the general population to heightened levels of radioactivity.  As a result, there were no civilian casualties associated with Fukushima.

It is possible that one or more plant employees were exposed to enough radiation to kill them or damage their health.  But I know of none.  It is safe to say that radiation fatalities associated with Fukushima were likely confined to single digits.  And it is possible that the single digit was zero.

Japan is a capable nation.  But they were hampered by the widespread death and destruction that was caused by the earthquake and tsunami and which had nothing to do with Fukushima.  20,000 people were killed by these twin disasters.  Many billions of dollars' worth of damage was inflicted.  The damage included critical infrastructure like power lines.

All things considered it is remarkable that they were able to get the site under control within only a few months.  But by that time, it was in terrible shape.  For instance, they were forced to resort to flooding some areas of the plant with water.  That was the only way to cool the reactors and keep things under control.

As a result, they ended up with a tremendous amount of contaminated water.  Their short-term solution was to store this water in tanks on site.  But as time has passed, they have literally run out of space.  They are solving this latest problem by resorting to "solution by dilution".

They plan to slowly pour the contaminated water into the ocean.  Various people have objected to this.  But they tend to be the types that believe in the fantasy that there is a zero risk/cost option out there.  But there isn't.  The nay sayers also have no idea just how big the ocean is.

There are 1.3 million tons of contaminated water currently being stored on site.  That sounds like a lot.  But if it is poured into the ocean at the rate of only one cubic meter per second it will take less than three years to dispose of all of it. And ocean water is never completely still.  It is always moving.

 Let's say it is poured into a part of the ocean with a current traveling at a walking pace.  That's three kilometers per hour, not very fast.  But even at that slow rate the radioactive water will travel about 500 KM per week.  After only a week it should have been diluted to a ratio of a billion to one.  The ocean is large.  Much of it is miles deep.  500 KM is only a short distance when it comes to traversing the ocean.

The farther the radioactive water travels, the more dilute it will become.  And that's why I am confident that no harm will come from depositing that amount of radioactive material in the ocean.  Experience with the current methods used to store nuclear waste tell us that something needs to be done, and sooner rather than later.

Back to Chernobyl for a moment.  It is impossible to say how many casualties there were there.  Then as now the Russians are not a reliable source of this kind of information.  Plant personnel were killed.  A small team of experts purposely risked their lives to explore and monitor what was going on inside the building.  That was critical information that could be gotten in no other way.  Some of them died.  Others suffered serious health effects.

Soldiers were brought in during the first few days and deliberately put into extreme danger as part of the effort to get things under control.  It is likely that some of them died, and others suffered serious health effects.  And the evacuation was slow.  So, it is possible that some civilians suffered serious health effects.

The highest estimate I have seen that comes from a credible source puts likely Chernobyl related deaths at a few thousand.  Other estimates are lower.  These estimates include both short term and long-term fatalities.  Of course, many times the number who die will suffer mild to severe health effects.  But even for people who lived in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl at the time of the disaster, a list of the top 100 health hazards they should be concerned with would not include the disaster. 

All three of these disasters, but particularly Fukushima, had a large impact on society as a whole.  At the time of the Fukushima disaster, Japan had about 80 nuclear power plants.  Japan is resource constrained.  Those nuclear plants allowed Japan to reduce by a large amount the quantity of fossil the fuels they needed to import and consume.  But Japan decided to shutter all its nuclear plants after Fukushima anyhow.

And it wasn't just Japan.  France and Germany, two other countries that had decided for reasons similar to Japan's to depend heavily on nuclear for power generation, announced plans to also drastically reduce or shutter their nuclear power plants.

Soon, the only place where new nuclear power plants were being built was China.  By this time China had terrible air pollution problems.  A major contributor were the many coal-fired electric power plants they had built.  China is still building nuclear power plants.  Unfortunately, they are still building coal plants too.

I was pretty depressed by the general situation when I wrote the posts I linked to above.  Fortunately, things have since changed for the better.  Why?  War and pestilence.  But before moving on, a final observation.  As noted above the Chernobyl design was abandoned as a result of the disaster.  Fukushima highlighted the fact that SCRAMming a reactor of that type was not enough.  It was important that the reactor cooled down completely come hell or high water.

The need for a "passive cooldown" capability was well known.  It's just that before Fukushima the need didn't seem that great and the expected cost, once legal wrangling was factored in, seemed too high.  Fukushima might have driven the industry in the direction of producing new nuclear power plants that included passive cooldown.  Instead, things went in another direction.  They built no new plants and started shutting down the old ones.

Incorporating passive cooldown into the design of a nuclear power plant is simply an engineering problem.  It doesn't matter whether the design is an old one or a new one.  Either way, there are no great technical challenges.  It is simply a matter of deciding to do so.

On the other hand, retrofitting the feature into an already built facility would be fantastically expensive, if it was even possible to do at all.  But for a new plant the design and increase in construction costs are relatively modest.  In spite of this no commercial reactor that incorporated this feature was built.  Why?  The anti-nuclear movement.

A new design, or a significant modification to a current design, automatically triggers a review.  And a review opens the process up to litigation.  The anti-nuclear people are past masters at engineering long, drawn out, and expensive cycles of litigation whenever they get a chance.  The certainty of being tied up in a decade of expensive litigation had to be balanced against the perceived benefit by the industry.

The industry perceived that the benefit was small.  Neither Three Mile Island nor Chernobyl had had any cooldown problems.  In both cases the infrastructure surrounding these plants had remained intact and in good operating condition.  The power necessary to complete the cooldown process had been readily available.  At Fukushima it was a different story.  But remember, Fukushima would not have happened absent a record-breaking earthquake coupled with a record-breaking Tsunami.

Back when I wrote the two posts I referenced above, the situation was tightly locked in.  The anti-nuclear forces were strong and well organized.  The opposition was weak and disorganized.  Under their relentless barrage of attacks nuclear power plant designs were frozen.  Construction ground slowly to a halt everywhere but in China, a country where the government was powerful enough to suppress the anti-nuclear movement.

But things were changing, even if it wasn't apparent at first.  Global Warming started out as a concern limited to certain circles of the scientific community.  Word slowly spread from there.  Then Al Gore hit the lecture circuit with an excellent presentation on the subject.  He turned his presentation into a compelling movie in 2006.  The movie garnered enough buzz to attract the interest of the general public.  They went to see it in droves.

The public interest the movie created soon led to a backlash.  The backlash was initially led by various groups of science deniers.  Then the fossil fuel industry, most notably Exxon Mobile, started secretly funding various disinformation initiatives.  Conservatives started thinking "if liberals like Gore are for it, then we are against it".

But the evidence kept piling up.  The impacts caused by Global Warming kept getting larger and more noticeable.  More and more people were impacted.  Severe weather events got not only more severe but more frequent.  Glaciers, some of which were near built-up areas in Europe and elsewhere, shrank noticeably or even disappeared completely.  There was push back from doubters and deniers.  But it soon became nearly impossible to find a glacier that was growing.

Large population areas began routinely suffering from severe floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme snowfalls, fires, etc.  Bad weather caused power blackouts, massive disruptions to transportation systems, and other activities that added up to far more than just the occasional inconvenience.  "Hundred year" extreme weather events became an annual occurrence.  All the stuff that Gore had warned about started happening.

Eventually, a turning point was reached.  It became nearly impossible to deny that Global Warming was real and that it was having a large negative impact on people.  People still didn't want to do anything because they rightly believed that "the fix" would be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive.

People imagined that "the fix" would a larger and more intrusive version of what happened the two times in the past century when OPEC cut the U.S. off from their oil wells.  People had to suffer through blocks long gas lines.  They were expected to dump their big, cheap, gas guzzler car that was fun to drive for a small, more expensive model that was supposedly more practical, but was also not nearly as fun to drive.  And when things returned to normal, somehow gas was a lot more expensive.

But the Global Warming problem could no longer be ignored.  That led to a search for mitigations that were cheap and pleasant.  Elon Musk came out with an electric car that was cool and fun to drive.  It was too expensive for most people, but it introduced the idea of electric cars as a positive experience rather than a negative one.

Solar Panels and Wind Turbines kept getting cheaper.  They have been the cheapest way to generate electricity for several years now.  They have made it possible to shut down dirty coal fired power plants while saving money.  Switching from getting our electricity from burning fossil fuels to green solutions might actually save money rather than costing it.

That started giving people hope.  Hope that it was possible to fix the problem.  Hope that the problem could be fixed at reasonable cost.  Hope is not the same thing as reality.  But having a reason for hope that is based in reality and not fantasy took away a lot of the negative pressure.

And the cost of doing nothing keeps getting higher and higher.  Floods, Hurricanes, and other weather extremes were literally wiping out people's homes, livelihoods, their whole way of life.  There were real, large, and highly visible costs associated with doing nothing.  That has led to an increase in positive pressure, pressure to do something about the problem.

COVID put everything on hold for a couple of years.  To put it mildly, it was a major disruptor.  After COVID the amount of change people were comfortable with increased tremendously.  COVID was not caused by Global Warming.  COVID didn't even made Global Warming worse or more likely.  But it was a sharp reminder of how interconnected everything is and how change is sometimes forced on us whether we like it or not.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine.  More accurately, they resumed the invasion they had begun in 2014.  It's been a long time since the world has seen a major War.  Ukraine is not a World War, at least not yet.  But it was also not an Iraq or Afghanistan sized war.  In those wars the primary weapons were the AK-47 and the IEDs.

Ukraine is a war involving real armies using state-of-the-art weapons with tremendously greater range and destructive power.  One of them can take out a whole building, not just a few people or a single vehicle.  The amount of havoc being wrought, and the swiftness with which it is being dealt out, have been shocking to many.

And the Ukraine war is not being fought in some less developed corner of the world.  It is being fought in a modern country on the edge of Europe.  And it is a "good guys (Ukraine) versus bad guys (Russia)" type of war.  People often lose track of how often in the postwar period Americans and Europeans have supported some corrupt autocracy against a group of "freedom fighters". 

Whether they actually were or weren't freedom fighters was often unclear.  But they were almost always the indigenous population of the area in dispute.  In the case of the war in Ukraine it is the Ukrainian people who are the indigenous population in the area under dispute.  And they are opposing the Russians, who are indisputably the foreign invaders.

In 2014 the Russians tried to make a case that there was significant support for Russia's actions among the local population in the areas they took control of.  But there was no local faction that had risen up and invited them in.  On the other hand, a lot of people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 had strong cultural ties to Russia and saw the Ukranian government of the time as corrupt and suspect.  So, the case the Russians were trying to make at that time was dubious but not completely lacking in merit.

The extent to which the people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 still feel positively toward Russia is now an open question.  The Russian occupation makes it impossible to learn the true feelings of those people.  But there is no dispute that when Russia resumed military operations in 2022, they were trying to gain control of areas where they had little or no local support.  It was a land grab, pure and simple.

Wars take place in a geopolitical context.  Europe saw Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a serious threat.  There wasn't much they could do in 2014 due to the precarious nature of the Ukrainian government at the time.  But by 2022 Ukraine had a different government, one that was willing and able to effectively oppose Russia.  This gave the Europeans actual options.  Not everything became possible, but a lot did.  For instance, the Europeans did not want to go to war with Russia.  But they were happy to supply Ukraine with all kinds of assistance, including military assistance.

One of the geopolitical considerations was that in early 2022 when the war started Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for oil and gas.  Theoretically, Russia could close the valve on either or both at any time.  Russia, of course, depended heavily on the money these sales brought in.  So, an important question became "how much damage was Russia willing to inflict on its own economy?"  In any case, it now seemed to be in Europe's interest to move away from Russian oil and gas.

But the whole reason the Europe had gotten into bed with the Russians in the first place was because there were few alternatives to Russia given the amount of fossil fuels that Europe wanted to consume.  As soon as the war started Europe started scrambling to find alternative sources.  That effort has only been partially successful.  That made it obvious that what they really needed to do was to substantially reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.  They needed to go green.

Not that long ago there seemed to be little or no reason to stick with nuclear power plants.  But nuclear plants produce no greenhouse gases.  And they don't depend on what Russia is up to.  As the Ukraine war ground on European countries started shelving their plans for shutting down nuclear power plants.  In fact, it seemed like a good idea to get some of the mothballed plants back online.

A similar thing happened in Japan.  The environmental cost of burning fossil fuels was becoming more apparent.  And Japan was not spared from extreme weather events.  So, the economic case for going green kept getting stronger and stronger.  Plans to mothball Japanese nuclear power plants are now on hold.  Whether they will restart any mothballed units, or build new ones, are still open questions.  But both of options are no longer off the table.

And then there's the U.S.  We are energy independent.  But we don't want to see the Russians succeed in Ukraine.  We have poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine's war effort.  We, and the Europeans, have now gone through several cycles of "we can't provide Ukraine with 'X' because it will cross a red line", only to reverse ourselves as the war drags on and start providing 'X'.

At the same time extreme weather events in the U.S. have become routine.  So, here too the anti-nuclear side of the argument is no longer seen as being the zero cost one.  That has drastically changed the calculus that surrounds the construction of nuclear power plants.  It hasn't changed completely yet, but it is moving the U.S. away from an anti-nuclear position.

For instance, for the first time in decades there are two new nuclear power plants under construction.  They are Georgia Power Plant Vogtle unit #3 and unit #4.  Both units are scheduled to come online this year (2023).  One (#3) should be online by the spring.  It only has a couple of hoops left to jump through so that is likely to happen.  The other (#4) has more hoops left to jump through, so it is still several months (and several possible delays) away from coming online.

These plants are the large, multibillion dollar projects we are used to when it comes to nuclear power plant construction.  There have been the usual delays and cost overruns.  Assuming lessons have been learned, similar plants should be cheaper and quicker to build.

But the result will still be large and very expensive projects similar to what we have seen in the past.  They are not game changers, except in the sense that they are actually getting built.  They managed to defeat the anti-nuclear forces in the courts.

A more interesting project is NuScale.  It is the furthest along of several projects that are taking similar approaches.  It has managed to jump through some but not all of the regulatory hoops necessary to actually construct a nuclear power plant.  It is currently scheduled to go online in 2029.  I expect that schedule to slip, possibly substantially.

NuScale is not business as usual in the nuclear power business.    It is one of several efforts to build small modular nuclear plants that differ substantially from the traditional design.  The new designs all aim to have modest siting requirements.  The idea is to eliminate the customization inherent in the current process.  That should save money.  A NuScale power plant would be modular.  As would the others.  A plant would consist of several small, standardized modules that could be produced assembly line fashion.  That too is supposed to save money.

Each effort uses a different, more efficient, process to convert the energy released by nuclear fission into electric power.  Several approaches are being put forward.  All are quite different from the current approach.  All are also supposed to produce less nuclear waste.

If successful, the NuScale approach would be a game changer.  If it fails, then maybe one of the alternatives will succeed.  It will be several years and several billion dollars before we know if NuScale will succeed in delivering on its many promises.  It will be even longer before we know how the others will fare.

But the need for green electric power becomes more urgent every year.  And, for a change, nuclear power is looking better and better every year rather than worse and worse.

The Lie Detector Isn't

The "Lie Detector Machine" was popularized by William Moulton Marsden, who styled himself "the father of the polygraph".  "Polygraph" is the formal name for the device.  "Poly" means "many" and "graph" means "to draw a line".  So a polygraph is literally any device that simultaneously draws several lines.

But we are going to restrict ourselves to the common usage of the word "polygraph".  In common usage, a polygraph is a device that makes several simultaneous physiological measurements of a "subject" and charts the results with the intent of separating true statements from lies.

The polygraph has featured prominently in countless movies and TV episodes.  There, a serious person, the "operator",  hunches over a "chart recorder", on which several squiggly lines spool out onto a long sheet of paper.  Various gadgets are connected to the subject.  The output of each gadget drives the activity displayed by one of the lines.

The operator asks the subject a series of questions and periodically makes makes cryptic marks along the edge of the chart.  When the session ends, he declares either "he's lying" or "he's telling the truth".  He does this by interpreting the squiggles on the chart.  So, what's going on?

Let's start with what's being measured.  One line tracks heart rate.  Another tracks blood pressure.  Still another tracks the rate of respiration.  Another common measurement is skin conductivity.  In this latter case, the idea is that perspiration increases skin conductivity.  So the intent of the measurement is to determine whether the subject is sweating or not.  The operator's cryptic marks are used to indicate when various questions were asked.

Marsden didn't invent the polygraph.  The invention is generally credited to James Mackenzie, a cardiologist.  But many people, including Marsden, contributed to the design that eventually moved into widespread use.  In 1938, for instance, he published a book called The Lie Detector Test.  And it is Marsden who deserves the bulk of the credit for the device becoming a tool used commonly by law enforcement and allied disciplines.

It helped that he was a credentialed scientist.  He received both a Law degree and a PhD in Psychiatry from Harvard.  He went on from there to teach and do research at the college level for many years.  All this preceded his efforts to introduce and popularize the Lie Detector.

So when Professor Marsden later opined on the Lie Detector, it is not surprising that people listened.  Finally, he was a born showman.  He had something to say and a way of saying it that attracted attention while also sounding completely credible.

All in all, he was a fascinating character.  There is a very interesting movie called Professor Marsden and the Wonder Woman that is an easy way to learn more about him.  Yes!  He's also the guy who invented the Wonder Woman of comic book and now movie fame.  And he spent most of his adult life living under the same roof with two women and their children.  Like I said, fascinating.

But back to the device itself.  Marsden succeeded in convincing large segments of law enforcement and the public that the polygraph was an accurate way to determine whether a person was lying or telling the truth.

But the actual device is more wish fulfilment than reality.  We wish that there is an infallible way of determining whether a person is being truthful or not.  So, if "experts" tell us that the polygraph can perform that feat, we want to believe them.  But does it?

The potential effectiveness of the device depends on an assumption.  The assumption is that your level of stress is higher when you are lying than when you are telling the truth.  Telling the truth is easy, so the assumption goes, so that you will remain calm while doing so.  Lying leads to agitation.  Agitation leads to stress.  If this assumption of a correlation between lying and stress is true then the device should work as advertised.

The device does do a pretty good job of measuring stress.  And that led to a considerable amount of early success.  Back then, few people knew much about the machine or what it actually did.  Marsden and other proponents would spit out a bunch of authoritative sounding mumbo jumbo.  Both members of law enforcement community and people suspected of a crime had every reason to believe what they were saying.  And that led to a self fulfilling prophesy.

If a suspect believed that the Lie Detector worked, and why wouldn't he, then all of a sudden it becomes very dangerous to lie while hooked up to the machine.  And danger is closely associated with elevated levels of stress.  If follows that an attempt to lie is likely to increase the suspect's pulse rate, quicken his breathing, cause him to start sweating, etc.

Not all the indicators changed significantly every time.  But enough of them did for a skilled operator to detect the changes that signaled a lie.  The polygraph's ability to detects changes in the level of stress a suspect was experiencing actually did correlate reasonably well with whether he was lying or telling the truth.

But all this depends on the subject not knowing much about the machine or how it works.  The widely held belief of the time that the machine performed as advertised completed the chain of causation that made the machine work much of the time.

But the device has now been around for a hundred years.  Far more is now known about the machine by anyone who has looked into it.  But also and more importantly far more is now known by criminals and others who have a vested interest in learning how to reliably "beat" the machine by lying without the machine catching them at it.

They now know that the machine can be beaten, and it can be beaten fairly easily.  How often is it actually beaten?  We don't know because the people who are in a position to keep track don't.  They have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that Lie Detectors work and are highly accurate.  So they go out of their way to avoid keeping track of how often and by whom the machine has been beaten.

The basic way to beat the machine is to break the correlation between lying and stress.  Even in the early days some people were able to beat the machine.  Back then nobody understood how they were able to do so.

We now know that anyone who doesn't find lying stressful can easily beat the machine.  Many con artists fall into this category.  The very attributes that contribute to fooling potential victims contribute to fooling the machine.

Early on, the mechanism didn't matter.  What mattered was that in criminal circles the news got out that some people were able to successfully and repeatedly beat the machine.  That led to a general decrease in fear of the machine by the criminal element.  And that led to a decline in the machine's effectiveness.

And over time the mechanisms that allowed the machine to be beat became clearer.  That led people who were not natural con men to wonder if there were methods they could use to beat the machine.  And it turned out that there are several.

Various forms of meditation aimed at calmness can be used.  Alternatively, techniques used by actors can be used.  One technique actors use is to inhabit their character.  If the mind can be fooled (or trained) into believing that the actor is actually the character being portrayed then the body takes its queues from the mind and responds accordingly.

If the character believes something is true then the physical responses of the body will react accordingly.  Pulse and respiration will be low and steady.  Palms will be dry so skin resistance will be high.  The Lie Detector will indicate that the response is true.

Early on it was hard to determine which group should be believed, the "it works" group, or the "it doesn't work" group.  But since then the "it works" case has gotten progressively weaker and the "it doesn't work" case has gotten progressively stronger.  In fact, no evidence to support the "it works" position has emerged since those early days.  However, the evidence that it doesn't work keeps piling up higher and higher.

In fact, a quick web search will turn up numerous "how to beat a Lie Detector" courses.  Trust me, if these courses didn't deliver results, they would have long since been hounded out of existence by unhappy students.  And the fact that many of these courses are run by people who have retired from the communities that routinely use the machines tells you everything you need to know.

But by now the people who have long championed the routine use of Lie Detectors are heavily invested in their continued use.  They really didn't want to the general public to know how often they fail.  The early failure rate was low.  But it kept increasing and increasing and increasing.  And that just made it more and more important for the Lie Detector's supporters to keep the myth alive.

Distressingly, another group that has become heavily invested in the Lie Detector is the intelligence community.  They have a desperate need to know which of their employees can be trusted and which can't.  Decades ago they pinned their hopes on the Lie Detector.

Yet it is routine for people who turn out to be untrustworthy to pass multiple routine Lie Detector tests.  Pretty much all of the high profile espionage cases you can think of fall into this category.  But efforts to do away with it's use within the intelligence community keep failing.  It still remains in routine part of employee screening.

If I was teaching a "how to beat the Lie Detector" course I would have a Lie Detector on hand.  That way I could keep testing students until it became apparent to them that they could reliably beat the machine.  That would be the best way to show them that they were getting value for their money.  It would also have the additional benefit of making the taking of "real world" Lie Detector tests far less stressful.  (If they couldn't become proficient in beating the machine I would refund their money.)

Lie Detectors are inexpensive and easy to get hold of.  They consist entirely of standard electronic/medical components.  You can find one that substitutes your computer for the chart recorder on Amazon for from $100 to $200, depending on how fancy you want.  For instance, the "Police" version will set you back $140 plus tax and shipping.

It's bad that anyone can easily get their hands on one so that they can play around with it.  It's even worse is that pretty much anybody can become a "Polygraph Examiner".  All you need to do is get a job administering polygraph tests.

Many organizations that use polygraphs require no training or accreditation for the people that they hire to operate them.  After all, it's not very hard.  You can figure out most of what you need to know by watching a few movies or TV shows.

Oh, there is an organization, the American Polygraph Association, that provides a certification service.  And many organizations do require their operators to graduate from an APA certified course.  Doing so allows you to be able to call yourself a "Certified Polygraph Examiner".

But it is harder to get a license to sell real Estate than it is get your APA certification.  This seems like the sort of thing a Community Collee would want to provide.  But there are no colleges, community or otherwise on the APA list.  The whole thing is so sketchy that even for profit colleges won't touch it.

And this is a big problem because it is relatively easy for the examiner to cook the results so that the guilty look innocent and the innocent look guilty.  To make an innocent person look guilty, for instance, all the examiner has to do is to use various techniques to bias the results in that direction.

He can change his tone of voice.  He can vary the timing of his questioning.  He can emphasize or de-emphasize various words or phrases.  Or he can just crank up the sensitivity of the machine whenever the subject is asked a key question.  That will make the needles swing wildly even though the subject is completely calm.  The possibilities for mischief are endless.

This sort of manipulation is forbidden by the APA guidelines.  But the enforcement of the guidelines is completely ineffective.  And there are often incentives present for biasing results in the direction of the outcome preferred by whoever is paying for the examination.  Is conscious manipulation rampant?  No one knows.  I suspect the big problems are incompetence and overreliance on ambiguous results.  But I don't know.

It should be no surprise that there is no scientific validation for the idea that a polygraph examination functions as an effective test for the honesty of the subject.  In fact, to the extent that careful studies have been undertaken,  they confirm the unreliability of the method.  James "the Amazing" Randy, the late noted magician and debunker, has beat a Lie Detector under controlled circumstances.  It's just not that hard to do.

So why are they still in widespread use?  Follow the money.  There is no money in admitting that they are bunk.  There is, however, lots of money in pretending that they work.  This is one of the many situations where money talks.  And what it has to say makes things worse, not better.

Afghanistan - A Geopolitical Perspective

This column became an inevitability when it became clear that President Biden was serious about exiting Afghanistan.  Well, the post 9/11 Afghani government that the U.S. backed is out and the Taliban is in.  The press is doing its usual thing.  Republicans are doing their usual thing.  Even Democrats are, to a great extent, doing their usual thing.  Most of what is out there at the moment is hot air.  President Biden is being criticized.  He deserves some of it.  But he doesn't deserve most of it.

Rather than piling on, I am going to take a longer and wider perspective.  My interest in Afghanistan goes way back.  I started writing this blog in 2010.  In 2011 I posted this:  Sigma 5: Pakistan.  It was my first foray into a subject I would often return to.  One line in that post summarizes it nicely:  "Lots of countries have an army.  Pakistan is an army that has a country".

Understanding Pakistan is key to understanding Afghanistan.  And Pakistan is not a real country.  It's motivating concept is "we are not India".  That's not enough.  So, what Pakistan has done is work the foreign aid grift for its entire history.  One way or another, it gets billions from various countries.  This is the only thing that keeps the country afloat.

But unfortunately, most foreign aid these days is of the military kind.  As a result, the military, and it's closely associated Spy Service, the ISI are not under the control of Pakistan's civilian government.  Nor are large swaths of what is labeled "Pakistan" on maps.  These swaths are euphemistically called "autonomous regions".  In reality, the central government of Pakistan exerts little or no control over these regions.

In spite of the fact that it is not a country, Pakistan has imperial aspirations.  Specifically, it aspires to make Afghanistan a vassal state.  Their vehicle of choice is the Taliban.  Pakistan, through the ISI, has provided material, financial, logistical, and other kinds of support to the Taliban since its formation decades ago.

Pakistan has also provided safe havens for both the senior leadership and the rank and file of the Taliban.  These safe havens have mostly been located in the autonomous regions.  But a lot of Taliban infrastructure is located in the parts of Pakistan that the government does control.  Bin-Laden lived peacefully for years in such a place.  The Taliban is Pakistan's cat's paw, or so the Pakistanis hope.

I discussed a related topic, counterinsurgency, here:  Sigma 5: Counterinsurgency.  The occasion for the post was the end of U.S. military activity in Iraq.  Unfortunately for all of us, that got reversed not long afterward.  The mission in Afghanistan was counterinsurgency.  Go in.  Root the bad guys out.  Leave.  That's the idea.  But it is very hard to do.  The post includes my thoughts on how it should be done.

The very next post (Sigma 5: Iraq) includes a link to how an "expert" says it should be done.  General David Patraeus was, for a time, a wunderkind who was an expert on Counterinsurgency.  He was responsible for the U.S. Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual, the "how to" manual that guided the U.S. military's approach to counterinsurgency missions.  I included a link to the manual in that post but it no longer works.  Here's an updated link:  The U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (freeinfosociety.com).

Patraeus got into trouble a few years later and fell out of favor.  One reason for this was that his vaunted "expertise" did not produce results in Afghanistan.  For whatever reason, it looks like the military has since replaced Patraeus's document with something else.  I haven't read the new version.

Anyhow, I had some good things and some bad things to say about the manual Patraeus produced.  They are included in the post.  And I followed this post up with another post:  Sigma 5: Afghanistan.  In that post I promised that it would be the last one on counterinsurgency.  It was my last post in my "Counterinsurgency" series, but not my last post on Afghanistan.

I think my analysis of the situation as it was back then (2012 - 11 years into the war) was good.  I said this:  "Progress under Obama seems limited to me".  So far so good.  But I also said:  "I think politics in Afghanistan will combine with politics in the U.S. to result in a nearly complete U.S. withdrawal in 2014, if not sooner".  That, of course, turned out to be completely wrong.  U.S. political conditions made exiting Afghanistan impossible.  As a result. politics in Afghanistan turned out to be irrelevant.

I did, however, demolish the "ten more years" argument.  I said:  "There is very little evidence that we could fix Afghanistan in those ten years given the situation both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan."  And it turns out that we didn't.  We didn't even seriously try.

The next post that is relevant to this discussion was:  Sigma 5: Vietnam - Lessons Learned.  Unlike pretty much everybody else, I felt it was important to review the U.S. experience in Vietnam to see what could be learned from it.  Unfortunately, few others bothered to do the same.  And, unfortunately, Vietnam should have taught us the lessons we needed to learn in order to get Afghanistan right.  Here is the bottom line.

For complicated reasons Vietnam got partitioned into a North and a South.  We got deeply involved in South Vietnam, from its creation to its ultimate demise.  We felt that it was important to stand up an anti-communist government there.

Unfortunately, even though we tried several times, we were never able to stand up an honest, competent government there.  As a result, it never garnered significant support from the people it governed.  The opposition, operating out of North Vietnam, was honest and competent.  The North Vietnamese government was also seen as being run by native Vietnamese.  Our government, the one running South Vietnam, was seen as the puppet of foreign interests.  Never underestimate the power of nationalism.

Things actually ended up moving at about the same speed in Vietnam and in Afghanistan.  We got seriously involved in Vietnam in about 1955 and the U.S. backed South Vietnamese government fell twenty years later in 1975.  The military rout played out a little more slowly in Vietnam (months rather than weeks) but it was equally decisive.

You can check out Sigma 5: ISIS - Do Something Stupid Now, and Sigma 5: The Art of the Deal, if you want to.  They are at least marginally related.  As, I supposes are Sigma 5: Middle East Update, and Sigma 5: Balance of Power.  But it's okay if you skip them.  Directly on point, however, is this recent post:  Sigma 5: The ISI War.  That is one you want to review.

Looking forward, what now?  Well, as I indicated in my "ISI War" post, things now get interesting.  The gridlock that has constrained U.S. policy in Afghanistan has now been broken.  We  no longer have to tiptoe around the delicate sensibilities of the old Afghan government.  It doesn't exist any more.  One excuse the Biden Administration has put forward for publicly downplaying the rate of advance of Taliban forces is that they didn't want to further undermine a government that was already teetering on the brink.

The U.S. is now moving forward rapidly.  They moved in and seized control of the Kabul (capital of Afghanistan) Airport.  That would have been an unthinkable move a couple of weeks ago.  They have also frozen assets to cut the Taliban off from whatever money was left behind by the old government.  They are also cutting off the money fire hose that has flowed into Afghanistan for twenty years with nary a pause.

Control of Kabul airport has made it possible to start moving refugees and foreign nationals out of Afghanistan at a rapid pace.  The Biden Administration has been rightly chastised for not moving more quickly and more effectively to get Afghanis who have been friendly to our cause out of the country.  They are now doing their best to get on track.

In the mean time the Taliban is now in control of the entire country.  The sixty-four dollar question is:   how are they going to comport themselves?  Are they going to be the bad old Taliban they were when a U.S. led operation staffed almost entirely by Afghans drove them out of the country in six months?  This was possible because the Taliban had managed to make themselves extremely unpopular.

The Taliban claims that it has learned its lesson.  This time around, they say, they will be kinder and gentler.  They will also focus more heavily on governance.  There is some evidence that they are serious.  But the preponderance of the evidence is that this is a pretense they plan to only maintain for a short time in order to make the transition go more smoothly.  I think that it is very likely that it is a pretense.  But let's assume for the moment that it is not.

In the post-Vietnam era I looked into why some governments succeed and others fail.  I am a pro democracy guy.  But sometimes democracies fail and sometimes undemocratic governments succeed.  I have found that the keys to success are not democracy or openness or any of that.  Instead they are honesty and competence.  Is the government reasonably honest and reasonably competent?  If so, then it has a good chance of success.  If not, the only way it can succeed is if there is an outside power propping it up.

A classic example of this is the Castro government in Cuba.  When Fidel took over the country was impoverished.  It is still very poor.  But he put in a good education system, a good medical system, and he has kept the infrastructure operating, if only in the most basic way.  No one starves in Cuba, or lacks for clothes on their backs, or a roof over their heads.  As a result, the Castro regime has remained relatively popular over a period spanning many decades.

"Communist" China is another example.  The economy got an early boost when they first took over due to the ending of the Japanese occupation and a return to peacetime conditions.  Things went backwards during the Cultural Revolution period.  They later bounced back with the ascendency of technocrats primarily interested in boosting the economy.  Over a period of decades China has gone from being an economic basket case to being the second largest economy in the world.  It continues to have a higher economic growth rate than the U.S. does.

All countries feature a certain amount of corruption.  All countries feature a certain amount of incompetence when it comes to their government officials.  But governments that are extremely corrupt are incapable of being competent.  And that means that the economy goes backwards.  And that makes people unhappy.

The Taliban have shown themselves to be both honest and competent.  But the Taliban suffers from ideological problems that may interfere with its ability to boost the economy.  Their adherence to a rigid ideology will make it impossible to make some moves that are good for the economy.

Castro's Cuba faced similar problems to a lesser extent.  But Cuba was very poor when they took power.  It didn't take much economic growth to make things better for their people.  It also helped that they were heavily subsidized by Russia for the first couple of decades of their existence.

The Taliban faced a similar situation when they first came to power.  Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries in the world.  Not much economic improvement would have translated to a lot of public support.  But they hewed closely to their ideology and the already bad economy got worse.  That made them very unpopular.  It didn't help that many of their ideologically driven policies were wildly unpopular.

So, they stand a chance.  Afghanistan is still very poor.  Very little economic improvement would be necessary for the populace to see progress.  But things have changed since the last time around.  When the U.S. first moved in after 9/11 the amount of aid we poured into Afghanistan was greater than the GDP of the country.  Sure, corruption was rampant.  But even if 80% or 90% of the money we poured into Afghanistan was siphoned off, that still left 10% or 20% going in to build the economy up.

Construction jobs abounded.  Security jobs abounded.  A large Afghan army and multiple government police/security organizations were stood up and paid on time.  This led to an increase in retail.  And services like banking, accounting, legal services, and the like, grew.  This put a lot of money into the pockets of ordinary Afghanis.

And a lot of Afghanis found they liked the open society approach of the Americans.  Finally, there are more guns in the hands of Afghani civilians than are in the hands of Americans, if you measure things on a per-capita basis.  That's a lot of guns pre-positioned into the hands of ordinary Afghanis all over the country.  If you can recruit them then you have an instant well armed guerilla force.

So, the Talban could follow the Cuban model, if they chose to.  They could even follow the modern Chinese model, if they chose to.  But will they?  The modern Chinese model is antithetical to their entire ideology.  Even following in the footsteps of the Cuban model would require a radical direction change, ideologically.  That seems unlikely in the extreme.

And they have a much higher hill to climb.  They start with the Afghan economy as it was a few weeks ago.  If everything remains the same then they will get a bump from the cessation of the fighting.  But, if there is anything Americans know how to do, it's juice up an economy.

The Taliban won't have to deal with the incompetence and corruption of the old government gumming things up.  But they lack the natural instincts necessary to promote economic development.  But it gets worse.

The Chines had thousands of years of cultural history as a mercantile society when Chinese leaders turned to boosting the economy as their top priority.  Afghanis have never had anything resembling a decent economy.  And they have long standing cultural norms that stand in the way of developing one.  (They are not as bad as the Taliban norms.  But they are bad.)  Even Cuba had a long capitalist tradition that preceded the Castro takeover.  But it is even worse.

Unlike twenty years ago, the Afghani economy is now an artificial one.  It is almost exclusively organized around the idea of absorbing all of that money flowing in from the U.S. and  other foreign countries. The U.S. is shutting the money spigot off as quickly as it can.  Many countries will do the same.  That will leave only a few countries like India, Russia, and China, that might want to step in to fill the vacuum.

Under the best of circumstances things would look grim for the Taliban on the economic front.  Assuming, for the moment, that they actually intend to focus on economic development.  It is impossible to imagine Russia, China, and India stepping up and replacing most of the money that will be lost.

Neither Russia nor India can afford it.  And I don't see China wanting to make that level of commitment.  Money will continue to flow.  But it will be, at most, 20-30% of what was coming in before.  At worst, the flow of money into the country, other than to buy Opium, could drop to near zero.

On the other hand, the Taliban may soon revert to Taliban 1.0.  This will cause the economy to crash quickly and hard.   And part and parcel of Taliban 1.0 are the harsh (by western standards) social policies that they previously implemented.  Another possible scenario has the Taliban trying Taliban 2.0, having it fail, and then reverting to Taliban 1.0.

All roads, except the Taliban going with Taliban 2.0 and managing to somehow make it work, lead to the same place.  Some roads just takes a little longer to get there than others.  How is the Afghan populace likely to respond to this?  Not well.  But at that point it will not be our problem.

We got into Afghanistan in the late '70s and early '80s in an effort to tweak the Russians.  it worked.  And we got out.  We got into Afghanistan in the post 9/11 era in order to put down Osama bin-Laden.  Then we let him escape into Pakistan.  Then we decided to remake Afghanistan.

The British have described Afghanistan as "the place empires go to die".  The American empire, such as it is, will not be killed by Afghanistan.  But recent American efforts to remake Afghanistan into something it isn't and doesn't want to be, did die.

We did push the people who had designs on doing grievous harm to America out of Afghanistan.  We pushed them into Pakistan.  That's where bin-Laden was when we finally killed him.  That's where the Taliban has been headquartered with the aid and the assistance of the Pakistani Spy Service, the ISI.

The Taliban are busy relocating back to Afghanistan.  That will turn the problem of keeping an eye on them from a hard one to an easy one.  It will be easy to see, for instance, if they keep their promises.  One promise they made was to stay out of the business of harboring terrorists bent on doing harm outside of Afghanistan.

And that leaves Pakistan.  Pakistan has long had a knife to the American jugular.  They arranged things so that anything the U.S. wanted to deliver to Afghanistan (U.S. soldiers, arms, humanitarian aid, both human and material) had to go through Pakistan.  The Pakistanis have been able to extract very high tolls from us year after year after year.  But the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan soon.  That removes the knife from our jugular.

There will no longer be a reason for us to put up with that.  As soon as we are out of Afghanistan we need to completely turn off the money spigot that feeds Pakistan.  Let Russia and China take up the slack.  Based on Pakistan's unblemished track record, a dollar invested in Pakistan is a dollar wasted.  So, let's hope they waste a lot of them.  India has a long standing hate-hate relationship Pakistan, so they can be counted on to have nothing to do with any effort to prop up Pakistan.

And stopping the money flow to Pakistan opens up an opportunity.  At the beginning of the Cold War the U.S. adopted a policy of dividing the world into two camps.  There was camp USA and camp Russia.  Countries were expected to join one of the two camps.  Hopefully, most would join camp USA and few would join camp Russia.

That would make it easy to "contain" Russia.  (The threat of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction stemming from the use of large numbers of nuclear weapons - took the preferred option of wiping them off of the face of the earth, off the table.  So containment was the next best option.)

The problem was that India didn't want to play along.  They decided that they were part of the "third world", neither rich nor poor, but more importantly, neither camp USA nor camp Russia.  That pissed the U.S. foreign policy establishment off.  So, they looked for a way to put pressure on India.

The British had been forced to devest themselves of India in the late '40s.  Portions of what was then India had populations that were, for the most part, Muslim.  But in most of India Muslims constituted at best a small percentage of the population.

So, what became Pakistan decided to split off from India as soon as the British were gone.  (Another heavily Muslim section also split off at the same time.  It eventually became Bangladesh.)  This caused a civil war.

Pakistan was successful enough, given that they only had to contend with India at this point, to win independence from India, both for themselves, and for what eventually became Bangladesh.  This was the foundation of the hate-hate relationship between the two countries.  (India and Bangladesh get along just fine.)

The U.S. saw an opportunity.  The Pakistanis were happy to play along in exchange for a large bribe in the form of foreign aid.  And thus began the Pakistani foreign aid grift.   They have not victimized just the U.S.  They are an equal opportunity victimizer.  They grifted the Chinese out of the technology necessary to create an atomic bomb.  They grifted other countries into making large contributions of one kind or another for one reason or another.

At the beginning they grifted the U.S. our of large quantities of foreign aid by pretending to be team USA.  This annoyed India, which was the point of the U.S. doing it.  Pakistan reliably voted with the U.S. in the U.N. general assembly.  Frankly, I don't know how much else the U.S. got out of the deal.  But they deemed the deal successful enough that they looked the other way when China was turning Pakistan into a nuclear power.  And, after that, Pakistan was a nuclear power, so were due a certain amount of respect and deference.

The successful U.S. effort to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan that happened forty years ago was run out of Pakistan.  That got Pakistan some more brownie points.  By the time Pakistan put the squeeze on the U.S. by temporarily shutting down trade into Afghanistan about fifteen years ago, it was too late.  We were well and truly stuck in Afghanistan.  And that meant we were well and truly stuck putting up with a whole lot of bad behavior from Pakistan.

But that all ends as soon as the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends.  Then the Pottery Barn rule ("If you broke it.  That means that now you own it.") will apply to them, not us.  Pakistan will own Afghanistan.  Whatever happens there will become Pakistan's responsibility.  And they will have to manage Afghanistan without having all that lovely U.S. money and arms flowing their way.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will be in a position to substantially improve their relationship with India.  Looking forward to the middle of the twenty-first century, the smart money sees three great powers:  The U.S., China, and India.  India is far more valuable to the U.S. than Pakistan ever was.  India is a democracy.  It is a bit shaky these days.  Modi is not the greatest believer in democracy that India has ever had.  But he could be tossed out by unfavorable election results at any time.  Still, there is a lot to build on.

In effect, switching Pakistan for India is a big win for the U.S.  And India and China are rivals.  So, a strong relationship with India strengthens our position with respect to China.  That too is a plus for the U.S.  And let China be stuck with the likes of Afghanistan, North Korea, and Pakistan.  It's not a good look for them.

And maybe we can finally do something about the Jihadi pipeline.  Not all terrorist groups are closely tied to a nation state.  But it is a mistake to believe that large and long standing terrorist groups can exist without substantial and consistent backing from a nation state or two.

And this is doubly true for Muslim terrorists.  And the location of the head waters for many of them is no secret.  Everybody who has spent any time seriously studying the problem knows what the story is.  It is just politically inconvenient to say so publicly and directly.

I have gone over this several times before, so I am going to keep it short and sweet.  Another "not a real country" is Saudi Arabia.  The case is not as extreme as it is with Pakistan.  As far as I know, Saudi Arabia controls all of the land that a map says belongs to them.  But in other ways it's all smoke and mirrors.

Saudi Arabia is run by the "House of Saud", a large, extended family of people connected by blood or marriage.  Normally a country like Saudi Arabia would need a nation state sponsor to stay in business.  It turns out that large fields of oil that is cheap to extract are able to stand in for a the support of foreign country.

The Saud family maintains control of the country by using the massive revenues its oil fields throw off to buy off the population.  Luckily for them, the native population of Saudi Arabia is relatively small, so the problem remains manageable.  The gusher of money oil produces also allows the Saud family to import foreign labor to do everything the natives can't do or don't want to do.

They have managed to retain control for close to a hundred years.  But the control the Saud family maintains is tenuous.  Early on they brokered a deal.  The deal was with the religious leaders of the Wahhabi sect of Islam.  Like Christianity, Islam comes in a variety of flavors from moderate to extreme.  The Sunni flavor is relatively moderate.  The Shiite sect is more extreme.  The Wahhabi sect is much more extreme than the Shiite sect.

If what happens in Saudi Arabia stays in Saudi Arabia, none of this would matter.  But it doesn't stay in Saudi Arabia so it does matter.  Money and power unchecked by something like regular and fair democratic elections leads to, among many things, hypocrisy.  The rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia are not religious.  In fact, many of them are libertines.  The way they get away with their bad behavior is through bribery.  They make large donations to Wahhabi institutions.

Not being immune from hypocrisy disease, the religious leaders take the money and look the other way.  "It's for the greater good", they tell themselves.  And, there is something to what they say.  Because they spend the money on missionary work.  Specifically, the fat contributions they rake in enable Wahhabi officials to build and maintain a large number of Madrassas all around the world.  A Madrassa is a compound containing a mosque, a school, and frequently a social services center.

The school teaches the three r's, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic.  But the curriculum also includes mandatory religious instruction.  And the religious instruction is, what else, the extremist Wahhabi form of Islam.  In many parts of the Muslim world, and definitely in Pakistan, the public school system is terrible.  Poor parents end up choosing between sending their children to Wahhabi Madrassas and their children getting no education at all.

Some parents and children are able to resist getting sucked into the extremist aspects of Wahhabi, but many aren't.  If you want to know where all the Islamic extremists come from, the main source is Wahhabi Madrasas spread all across the poorer (either economically poorer, or poorer in terms of good government) Muslim countries.  And it all comes from the internal dynamics of Saudi Arabia.

For many decades the west has been dependent on oil.  And the oil supply has been tight a lot of the time.  This has put Saudi Arabia in the cat bird seat.  That has forced U.S. officials, and officials from all over the developed world, to cast a blind eye at what has been going on.  Muslim extremists are just an unavoidable part of the price we pay to run our economies on oil.

But we are better positioned than we have been in more than a hundred years to break the cycle.  We don't need Saudi Arabia the way we have in the past.  And that means that we have the capability to deal with Saudi Arabia as it is, rather than Saudi Arabi we are forced to pretend exists.

One problem is that even if we were able to get Saudi support for Madrassas to end immediately, the problem will drag on for many years.  Many Madrasas will likely continue in business for some time after Saudi support is cut off.  And they have been turning out crop after crop of extremists for many years now.   It will take twenty to forty years for those extremists to get old enough to age out of their extremism.  But, as they say, step one is to stop digging.

With that let me turn to Iran.  The U.S. and Iran go back to the '50s.  Back then a democratically elected government was going after the British oil concession.  The British turned to the U.S. for help.  The U.S. elbowed the British out of the picture, and engineered a coup d'état that replaced the democratically elected government with the Shah.  This is only one of several examples of the U.S. engineering the downfall of democratic governments for one reason or another.

Anyhow, decades later a home grown revolution kicked the Shah out and put the current religiously based government in control.  Needless to say, there was bad blood on both sides by this point.  Like the Chinese, Iran is based on an ancient and long standing culture, the Persians.  And no culture endures without knowing how to build and nurture an economy.

The largest component of the current Iranian economy is oil.   But, unlike the Saudis, Iran has a large population and a multi-faceted economy.  Iran has supported extremists in many parts of the Middle East.  But here it is in furtherance of a long term goal.  Iran aspires to be a regional power, just as Persia has been at many times in the past.  And these periods of regional dominance sometimes lasted for a century or more.   That's how the Great Game is played, if you are dealt a hand like the one the Iranians have been dealt.

Do I like a lot of the things Iran has done and is doing?  No!  But the right question is:  can we work with them when our areas of interest align?  I think we can.  One reason is that the Iranians know how to govern and they know how to keep corruption within bounds.  The popularity of the current government has waxed and waned, mostly in synchrony with how well the Iranian economy is doing.  They have maintained firm control through it all.

And they did a nuclear deal with the U.S.  They kept to the terms of the deal until Trump unwisely cancelled it.  It may not be possible to put the Humpty Dumpty of the deal back together.  That will likely eventually result in Iran becoming joining  the club of countries that control nuclear weapons.  This possible outcome, and the history of conflict between the U.S. and the current regime, has  supposedly been the reason the U.S. has been unwilling to work with the Iranians on anything outside the nuclear deal.

One consequence of that stand has to do with Afghanistan.  Shortly after 9/11 the Iranians offered to help with the Taliban problem.  We said "no thanks".  Iran shares a border with Afghanistan that is of some length.  And they have been a consistent foe of the Taliban.  They haven't been able to do much.  They keep them out of Iran.  But they also do not operate on Afghani territory.  That was in deference to the large U.S. presence in Afghanistan.  That will soon be gone.

That opens up the possibility of the U.S. moving closer to Iran.  There are many reasons people will object to this.  Let me start with the nuclear objection.  Horrible things are supposed to result if Iran gets the bomb.  But Pakistan has had the bomb for a long time.  Bad things have happened.  But they are the result of non-bomb related activities of the Pakistanis.  Yet we have somehow managed to remain allied with Pakistan.

Then there is North Korea.  They have had the bomb for several years now.  Whatever bad things you can think of to say about the Iranians (or the Pakistanis, for that matter), they apply double or triple to North Korea.  Yet somehow they have the bomb and life goes on.  And the fact that both the Pakistanis and the North Koreans are members of the nuclear club has not really changed the regional balance of power in either of their spheres.

I conclude from this that joining the nuclear club is vastly overrated.  I think that Iran joining the nuclear club will turn out to be far less consequential than any of the "experts" predict.  I think it will be a big nothing.  It used to be that being a nuclear power was a big deal.  I don't think it is any more.

Then there is the much more serious problem, the fact that Iran has been, and continues to be, a supporter of various extremist groups around the Middle East.  I do NOT like this behavior by them.  But I have spent a long time documenting the sins of our "allies" Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at this point.  Are the Iranians really so much worse?

Yes, according to the Israelis.  No, according to me.  And, if we give them a chance to be economically successful by removing sanctions, and by taking other steps, then they might find it worth while to change to tactics we find less problematic.  And they are natural opponents of Saudi Arabia.

Iran aspires to be the leader of the Shiite faction of Islam.  Saudi Arabia aspires to be the leader of the Sunni faction of Islam.  The Sunnis are much more populous, but the Saudis are such poor leaders they haven't been able to gain a definitive advantage.  And, as far as I can tell, Iran is not building and supporting the horrible Madrassas that the Saudis are so fond of.

Just like I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our relations with India, I see the possibility of beneficial improvements in our elations with Iran.  We need to "trust but verify", but I think there are deals to be had.  I think we can trade away opposition to the Iranian bomb for a lot.  And, since we can no longer stop it anyhow, we are trading away something of very limited value.

Finally, let me address the Afghanis, and to a lesser extent, the Pakistanis.  Afghanistan has been governed badly for more than a century, and perhaps far longer.  The Taliban is now in control.  If, as most people expect, they will go back to their bad old ways then they will soon be wildly unpopular in Afghanistan.  And, if we cut off the money spigot to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, this will put Pakistan under tremendous pressure.

What that means in the short run is that they will find it hard to continue to support the Taliban.  That will make it more likely that they will fail at governance, and especially at stewarding the economy forward.

In relatively recent times, the Russians tried to impose change on Afghanistan from the outside, and failed.  The Americans tried to impose change from the outside and succeeded.  But they immediately withdrew.  The Pakistanis tried to impose change from the outside.  They succeeded then failed as the Taliban was driven out of power after 9/11.  Then the Americans tried again.  They again initially succeeded, but this time they stuck around.  That caused them to eventually fail.  The Pakistanis are at it again when it comes to imposing change from the outside.  What do you think their long term prospects are?

How about trying to initiate change in Afghanistan from the inside?  What if a home grown opposition to the Taliban grows up in Afghanistan.  Trying to impose regime change from the outside fails.  But working with and supporting a true indigenous uprising has a good track record of success.

One of the reasons the U.S. succeeded forty years ago was that the Afghans did all the fighting and dying.  If an indigenous opposition comes into being.  And if it is honest and competent.  And if it can find Afghanis who are willing to die (finding Afghanis who are willing and able to fight is easy) then many things become possible.

We will have to wait and see.  If is possible that the Afghanis will decide that they are okay with the Taliban running things.  And if they are not okay with that, no competent and honest opposition movement may arise.  And even if it arises failure is always a possibility.  But this approach provides the best chance for a good outcome for Afghanistan in the long run.  It is important to remember that there are many difficulties ahead.  And one or another of those difficulties may turn out to be insurmountable.

And all of this pertains to Pakistan, although to a lesser extent.  Pakistan is closer to Iran in that it does have a diverse economy.  But the largest component of the Pakistani economy is the one dedicated to the siphoning off of foreign aid/investment and diverting it into the pockets of the rich and powerful.  If the foreign money spigot gets turned off then I don't know how much of a functioning economy will remain.

So, I do feel a sense of long term optimism as a result of the U.S. exiting Afghanistan.  The short term result is truly horrendous for many if not most Afghanis.  But we have been heading toward this day of reckoning for a long time.  I think it has been unavoidable for something like fifteen years.  And I refuse to let the Afghanis dodge blame for much of what is now happening.  They have worked long and hard to avoid standing up an honest and competent government.