Spencer and Jeff examine nuclear war’s psychological parallels to suicide, tracing Cold War-era MAD deterrence from 1980s arsenals to today’s nine nuclear-armed states, where irrationality risks escalation—especially with Putin’s image-driven threats in Ukraine. Jeff compares Putin’s potential recklessness to self-destructive individuals clinging to identity, citing 1983’s Stanislav Petrov, who averted disaster by defying protocol. Spencer argues both crises stem from convenience: instant retaliation for nukes, easy access for suicide, and lack of humility or open dialogue. Jeff counters that Putin’s unilateral strikes are unlikely due to institutional checks, but the debate underscores how deterrence and prevention hinge on courage over rational restraint. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
Before we start, just a quick note that the email address to let us know what's going on, you don't agree with anything we say, you want to let us know how we're wrong.
That's truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Here today with Jeff again.
Debating.
Yeah.
Not too bad, yourself.
Good.
So today we're going to talk about nuclear war and suicide.
Oh, sweet.
Something light.
It's best to go with something light.
Yeah.
Also want to note at the top that we're going to make heavy reference to the previous episode that I titled The Two Selves.
If you haven't heard that yet, you want to back out, listen to that first, and then listen to this because this might make more sense if you do.
So nuclear war.
We live in a world and for most of us have always lived in a world that has unimaginably powerful weapons.
And they are at the behest of people who themselves see themselves as unimaginably powerful people.
And we have to rely on those people and the other people around them to act rationally so as to avoid ultimate calamity.
And it's been shown that we could suffer ultimate calamity.
At one point in the 80s, the U.S. and the USSR had reached a point where they could literally destroy everything on the planet several times over.
And since then, they have reduced the number of weapons they have.
But also since then, several other nations have themselves become nuclear.
So we have now to rely on even more people to act rationally in this situation.
We call this situation of nuclear stalemate mutually assured destruction.
Now, this is, again, it relies on the rationality of each person who's in charge of this, that they will duly avoid conflict because conflict would result in their own destruction.
But we've seen some behavior in some people, not the people at the top yet, thankfully, but some individuals in our society that don't care about their own life.
They only care about something else and they're okay with themselves dying in order for that certain thing to get across.
That's a dangerous psychological situation.
Humility in our leaders is the absolute true measure of how to reel in their worst tendencies here.
And so I just want to start by bringing that up and we want to talk about this.
Obviously, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is of note right now.
And when everyone talks about nuclear war right now, they talk about Vladimir Putin.
So I don't think it's useful in this discussion to try to disguise that or cloak it with some fictional world leader named Mark or anything like that.
What do you think about this general nuclear stalemate we currently have, Jeff, this mutually assured destruction?
Well, yeah, I mean, like, I think it's important to highlight the fact that by the statement, relying on leadership to act rationally is more specifically relying on leadership to act out of a sense of self-preservation.
Like the idea behind mutually assured destruction is nobody had the technology to nuke the other side before the other side gets missiles in the air, which means we get nuke too, which means everybody dies, which means a straight up nuclear war is a guaranteed loss for all concerned.
And only that threat of everything being wiped out has stayed everyone's hand.
But there's been many times in recent history where less than stable people have had their fingers on the button.
And yeah, like you maybe didn't have that much faith in their capacity to act rationally.
When I look at this, I think about, as I said, what I mentioned in the previous episode, this idea of the two selves, that each of us has an inner self, the inner monologue, and then we have an outer self that is the version of us that we want the world to see.
So when we look at world leaders, world leaders are just like everyone else.
They also have this same psychological situation.
They have a persona that they want everyone around them and indeed the world to see.
It might be useful to look at the personhood of Vladimir Putin to wonder how he wants the world to see him.
Well, I think that's a fairly easy thing to quantify considering the abundance of Russian propaganda literature that shows him like shirtless riding a staff.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that was.
He's definitely a man with a significant amount of small man syndrome.
Russian old spice.
Yeah, that's telegraphed pretty clearly.
And granted that in the Western world, not every nation or pocket sees this the exact same way, but usually in Canada, we expect a certain amount of humility in the people at the top.
And when we see people at the top of other nations that have what appears to be none.
It prompts great cause for concern.
Well, in some places, maybe snickering as well.
I mean, we just kind of wonder about it and shake our heads because we know that they're just human.
We don't have any level of extreme reverence for our own leaders.
Personally, I get most concerned when I hear about anyone who supports a leader of any kind and has that level of reverence for them, that they can't admit any faults in that leader.
That's a sign that they aren't seeing them clearly.
That's cult of personality.
Yeah.
And that's to me, that's a sign of a delusional person.
You should be able to support a person as a leader and then also understand where their faults lie.
And if you can't, it's because you're either delusional or you're in a situation where the propaganda prevents you from seeing the faults.
And even the propaganda being one of the only things we see about Vladimir Putin, we still see many of his faults.
I remember actually seeing a collection of short videos that someone had strung together, which was basically a string of circumstances caught on camera where Putin had been snubbed by other world leaders.
You know, like organized meetings of several world leaders, cameras flashing, lots of audience, everybody shaking hands.
Putin sticks his hand out and the other leader just pretends he doesn't exist and turns away.
And Putin does this kind of awkward, like hand behind the head, adjust his hair thing or, oh, okay.
That kind of stuff, like you said, I think flies directly in the face of the image he's wanting to craft for himself.
Right.
Or more specifically, threatens that image that he wants to craft for himself.
Okay.
Well, you're starting to hit the nail more on the head here.
I mean, we can see clearly what Putin wants to be seen as.
He wants to be seen as powerful.
He wants Mr. Russian Oldspice.
Yes.
Who knows what kind of rumors he would want to spread about himself?
I mean, everyone who has this situation would want people to whisper certain things about them.
And if they could control what those things are, they would, right?
Maybe the whispers are that he beds multiple women every night or whatever it is, right?
He's extremely virile.
He's all the powerful things that men should be and he has no weaknesses, right?
To be clear, this isn't a Russian bashing session.
Like, no, this has been evidenced in other world leaders recently, Trump being a shining example.
I think even to a lesser degree, oh, his name escapes me, but the British prime minister who was recently ousted.
I want to say Toronto.
Boris Johnson.
Yeah.
And that, I think, was sort of a Johnson, I think, might be a bit of a divergence from the thrust of the argument here, because I don't think he was as concerned about maintaining his own image as he was about, I think, just show the British people anyway, have a sort of a ceiling of the limit of foolishness they will accept from their politicians.
And we haven't seen that yet in the US or Russia or someone, say, Canada, but that's a conversation for another day.
Yeah, our own prime minister is a conversation for another day.
There's been an awful large number of talking heads in the past six months that have said a lot of bordering on very nice and supportive things about Vladimir Putin.
And there's been an awful large number of talking heads and critics of those people that have attempted to point this out and highlight it.
This situation is very strange.
I mean, the most cynical take is that they are paid propagandists for the Russian oligarchy.
And I'm not sure how much I believe that myself, but I think that many of them fall essentially in this situation where they worry about what happens if the outcome in Ukraine isn't satisfying for Putin and that they worry that if it's not satisfying for Putin, he will do something worse.
He will go to some more extreme length to show that he is powerful.
And that's more or less what they say.
They say, we want peace, so we shouldn't support Ukraine as much or we shouldn't.
And this has been happening in a lot of corners, like things like the Irish parliament and in some places in the EU and certainly all over.
Yeah, and this happened in the late 30s in Europe too.
Sure.
It's different because Hitler didn't have the bomb.
He wasn't indestructible.
He didn't have any level of button he could push to assure mutual destruction.
Yeah, but he did have a significantly ramped up German war machine that was leagues ahead of any of the neighboring nations.
Sure.
And there was a very real fear, not necessarily of total nuclear annihilation, but of costly military confrontation that the rest of the world was wanting to avoid because they just fairly recently come out of a major conflict that took hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives.
Yeah.
So perhaps the scale was not the same, but I think that the sort of base, the core situation of like appeasement of a bully, appeasement of an international bully was still there.
I think that we need to stay strong in this situation.
There's a lot of people that talk about Ukraine and Russia and that, oh, you know, Ukraine has terrible people and these terrible people need to be stopped and all of this, and that Russia is saving the world from Nazis.
And this is the Russian line that they're opposing Nazis in Ukraine.
And the counter to this is extremely simple.
There are borders.
There were borders between the Ukraine and Russia.
Those borders were agreed upon by previous Russian governments.
There were Russian-speaking people on the inside of the border and the information campaigns, disinformation campaigns really, from Russia have encouraged those populations to push back.
And they've created unrest and then they've pretended to come in swooping in to save the day.
And that's, it's obvious.
It's the new imperialism playbook, man.
Like every major national power, including the U.S. and Britain, has been doing it for decades.
But one of these powers crossed the border of the other.
That part is not in question.
Like no one, this isn't even like a flat earth situation where flat earth could say, yeah, yeah, but yeah, but the roof is really is flat, right?
I mean, you know, everyone knows that Russia moved into Ukraine.
Ukraine didn't move into Russia and Russia is not defending itself from Ukraine.
Like we have these talking heads who are essentially proclaiming themselves as wanting to push for peace, but the peace that they're pushing for essentially is asking for Ukraine to fold, to merely accept that it should give up and just allow itself to become part of Russia.
And that's give up its autonomy.
And in doing so, save the rest of us from a nuclear war that could happen if Putin is sufficiently embarrassed by the performance of what he sees as.
It's like the argument that colonial Britain gave to the wives of British soldiers.
Like, just lay back and think of the good of the nation and take in.
Okay.
Another dark turn from the side of the table.
And to me, this is to do this, to turn our backs on this, to encourage Ukraine to fold so that the rest of us can go on living in peace with an aggressive nuclear nation is a failure of courage.
You know, in the West, we like to see ourselves as the most courageous.
Every nation likes to see itself as the most courageous.
But we have had failures of courage in the past in Canada, in the U.S.
The one that comes to mind immediately is the way both of those nations, Canada and the U.S., treated Japanese people in World War II.
We couldn't see, it's racist, of course, but we couldn't see the difference between enemy combatants and citizens.
To escape the possibility that some of them might be spies that are looking to sabotage us or something, we put them into camps.
Actually, I saw there's a social media page that occasionally throws out interesting historical shots of our hometown.
And one of them was like the backfield of a well-known local high school around World War II, because we did have an army camp in town here where there's now soccer and football fields where high school kids play.
It was actually a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.
In the middle of town.
In the middle of the town.
In like, you know, super.
At the time, what would have been almost rural British Columbia.
Exactly.
And it would be additionally, to me, a failure of courage to not be willing to talk about this, about the fact that our grandparents, essentially, you know, not them individually, but them as an institution, their generation as an institution, failed to be courageous enough in the face of that danger.
And it turned out, and what's really remarkable about that is that even though it would have been, it would have been some level of propagandist mitigation if they had found that any of those prisoners were actually spies, they never found that any of them were.
Not a single one in all the investigative work that they did.
And they conquered Japan and they looked through all the records there and they found no record that any one of the people that was on this continent and was put in those camps was working in a clandestine fashion for Japanese.
They were or were descended from people who moved to North America because they wanted to live here.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And really that the point is, is that, you know, we have to stand up to these things.
We have to stand for our principles.
If we say we're a free society and that we have these innate freedoms for people, they have to be innate freedoms for people.
They can't be innate freedoms for people except.
And that's where our courage must last.
Yeah.
So I think it's time to move into the second half of this and wind it around the first half.
I paired this up with, strangely, nuclear war up with suicide.
To me, these are related.
Suicide is a strange thing.
The mere fact it exists for humans is, I mean, we have a very powerful instinct to continue, to continue to live.
Each human really does have this.
And there is in some of us sometimes a force that can overcome what really should be our most powerful instinct.
Of survival.
Of just momentary survival, moment to moment survival.
Some of us volunteer in those moments to cease to continue.
One wonders how this is even possible to exist in us as creatures, that any one of us could ever make that choice.
But of course, we absolutely know that it has.
And undoubtedly, you live long enough, you've met people, you knew people who did or who made serious attempts at it.
And it's, it's something that we need to be able to talk about.
And often it's something we ignore.
It's something we look over.
To accuse a person of ever having attempted it is some kind of extreme breach of privacy and protocol.
And that's, that's a difficult thing.
Well, I think it's, I think it's because we as a species, or at least as a society, recognize the sort of aberration that suicide represents.
So it's generally a source of great shame for anyone who has attempted and failed.
They don't wish to discuss it.
Or anyone who has known someone who fell victim to it, they don't really wish to discuss it.
And I think part of the other problem with it is I think suicidal thoughts are far more common than many people would admit.
I think we're very complex intellectual and emotional creatures, and we're capable of entertaining all kinds of thoughts at all kinds of levels, depending on what our stimulus is on a given day.
And I think if you really drill down, there's few people out there who could admit with a straight face that they have never thought about doing it, even fleetingly.
Right.
The issue becomes when the desire is strong enough to take uncomfortable steps to make it happen, or you have convenience of means at your disposal to take one of those fleeting moments of weakness and turn it into a very permanent decision.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
It's one of the greatest arguments for gun control, which is not what we're going to get into here, but I think it's worth mentioning.
As a defense for gun violence, many of the people who are pro-gun say that, well, you know, most of those gun deaths are suicides.
And I don't even understand that as an argument there because, you know, they're pretending that those suicides would still have happened if they didn't.
Because most of those, like a lot of gun death suicides are acts committed rashly with little thought, where if the person committing the act had access to no other tools than a knife or suffocating themselves in the garage or something infinitely more painful or that would give them a longer period of time to really contemplate what it was they were doing.
Yeah.
A lot of them would back off.
But when all you have to do is pull the trigger.
Yeah.
Right.
I'm going to propose a, I don't know how radical it is, but it's, it's my view of one thing that might in a person cause a person to commit suicide.
And if anyone, obviously, if anyone is having suicidal thoughts, there are suicidal hotlines you can call to talk to a person.
But this is what I have experienced in my life inside myself.
And I think that other people have.
And I think that when I look at some of the people that I know of who have made serious attempts or even succeeded at committing suicide, I think this is a thing that was happening with them, is that this is related to the concept of the two selves in that, you know, you have your inner self and then you have the self that you would like the world to see.
If you are in a situation where you feel that the world will never be able to see you in the way you would like the world to see you, in the same way, relating it back, if Vladimir Putin will never be seen as the powerful, powerful man that he wishes the world sees him, would he push that button?
If you are a person who feels that you will never be seen, like there's just something, something has pushed past that barrier you had for your the version of yourself that would be your second self, the the outer self.
If you feel that no one will see you as that outer self that you would like to be seen, that I think is when a person is most in danger of letting go, of being willing to no longer continue.
And it's really, it's humility that is in those moments the thing that would save you in those moments.
In the same way that humility would be the same thing in our leaders that would prevent them from making terrible decisions because they want to be seen as more powerful than the other leaders.
What do you think of that?
This idea that essentially a failure of your outer self to protect you, the idea that everyone might be seeing past that outer self that you'd like to cultivate.
Yeah, I can see that.
The rich guy that lost all his riches and will never be that rich guy again.
Or like the redwinner who lost his job and can't face life, not being able to take care of his family.
So he takes now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I can see that.
I mean, like, obviously there is very legitimate mental illness that is a contributing factor to suicide as well.
And we're not psychologists here to discuss the points of that.
Also, keeping in mind that there could be more than one single thing that pushes a person to do this.
That idea, like a hopelessness, you will never be able to repair the world's view of you.
Yeah, your image or the version of you that you present to the world.
That rings a bell with me, like, especially within the context of like teen suicide, when like social standing and others' perception of you is like everything to teenagers.
Teenagers are forming that outer self.
They're experimenting with different versions of that other self all the time.
They are what we call finding themselves is them trying to wear different versions of that other self to see which one fits best.
And it morphs all the time and it changes.
And, you know, they don't even know, don't know in any one moment what that other self should be, even if they understood the concept of there being two selves, even if they have enough self-awareness to know.
I think a good parallel to draw would be, and I know we're trying to keep to a minimum the number of times in your series that we mentioned Adolf Hitler.
Yeah.
But like when the war was drawing to a close and he knew all was lost, he killed himself.
Yeah.
Right.
Because he could not face the public shaming that would come from him being paraded around as the leader of the nation that lost the war.
He could not face the complete dissolution of the propagandized image that he had built for himself as the leader of the most powerful Aryan empire the world had ever seen.
Since we're here anyway, it's also worth noting that in the final six months or so of Germany's participation in World War II, Hitler himself didn't care if all of Germany burnt.
He was more concerned about his own image than the health of his own nation that he was saying that he was the leader of.
And if that guy had access to nukes, he would have sent them to all points of the compass.
Yeah.
Right.
Everywhere he could have.
And that's the point we're trying to make today is this is a thing we should work to avoid, right?
This is so for me, suicide is a thing that we need to not shy away from.
We need to not mention.
I mean, it's hard because the idea that it has a social stigma is a thing that some of us feel discourages some others of us from ever trying it.
So to sort of normalize it and talk about it like it's a thing that people should just talk about almost removes that social stigma.
And some of us might be worried that more people would consider it.
More people would consider it.
Which I don't buy that.
Like that's no.
It's functionally no different than the argument of, oh my God, we can't have books in school that talk about gay people because then Jimmy might catch the gag.
Like, I'm sorry.
Having normalizing conversations about suicide and mental health does not lead more people to contemplate suicide.
It has the opposite effect.
Well, it lets people know that are in that situation, because one of the things that goes hand in hand with hopelessness is a sense of isolation.
Yeah.
The sense that you are the only one.
The only one who feels that way.
The only one who feels marginalized like this, and there is no one out there that can help you.
Right.
Right.
That's hand in hand with hopelessness.
So like open communication and no taboos as far as discussing the topic, I think is nothing but beneficial.
And I think that looking the other way, shying away from the topic of suicide is itself a failure of courage.
Would you agree?
Yeah, it's like appeasement.
Well, it's lying down and hoping it doesn't come to your door.
Well, and any I recently had some work at a local college in the Kootenays, and like there was literature plastered all over the school about mental health, right?
Like it's it's a very common topic in universities.
Young university students struggle a lot with the pressures of school and everything else.
And one of the common themes through a lot of this literature that was around was like checking and talking about it.
Because again, a lot of times people have these thoughts.
And if it's just in a bubble inside your own head and there's no one else around you checking in, hey, how are things going?
Giving you perspective, helping you find some humility, then a lot of people go too far and make that unfortunate and very final decision.
But you're right.
Like it's it's a failure occurs.
Like functionally, it's no different than military appeasement, right?
Yeah.
Like not discussing it because it's a taboo subject and leaving the person off to do their own thing and engage in their own spiral personally and not approaching the subject or bringing it up with them or shining a light on it, no matter how uncomfortable the topic is, is on a personal level equivalent to the international level of, you know, when you're dealing with bully leadership, where we know what they're doing is wrong and we know we should speak out against it.
But we don't because it's really uncomfortable.
It'd just be easier if Ukraine just gave up.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, right.
Because then Putin wouldn't have any reason to use those nuclear weapons.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Well, with that, I think we're done with this episode.
No last thoughts?
On the subject of Putin, I personally am not as concerned as you.
I do have a great deal more hope and faith in the rest of the people involved in the Russian war machine.
While the technology is there and the power is there, it does not boil down to one big red button in his office where there's just one final decision and a push, like an individual suicide pulling the trigger.
He needs to give orders and other people need to take those orders.
So you need on an international level, if we're making the parallel to suicide, one unhinged individual alone does not create nuclear Armageddon.
He needs people under him who will do what he says, even when he tells them to do terrible things.
Well, I mean, in 1983, there was a Russian officer.
I think it might have been a colonel in their Air Force or something.
He was in charge of a radar station somewhere in Russia.
And his orders were to all the monitors, all the people that he was in charge of were monitoring different radar, different directions and watching for an assault.
And there were five radar blips incoming from one direction.
Uh, his orders were to report that up the chain and the technology didn't exist for them themselves to see the screen.
Of course, he just had to say they're coming and then they have roughly 15 minutes to make the call as to whether or not they're gonna return fire.
Return fire yeah, which is a scary small amount of time.
You have to wake people up.
Sometimes you have to review data, you have to get in touch with another person.
I mean it's, it's not, not comfortable.
I I don't think that anybody of the millennial generation and younger can really appreciate the reality of what life was like during the Cold War, especially for people in in those kinds of situations that were manning the silos and the radar stations, the very real fear that at any moment the enemy could launch an attack, where we had a 10 to 12 minute window to return fire and ensure that they also died right.
And that was really our only choice.
Like it didn't save us, we just killed them too.
Yeah, it is a dark time to live, man.
And this guy, mr Stanislav Petrov, he made the choice to not send the data up the chain of command because he surmised correctly that if there really was an assault, they would send more like 500 planes, not five.
And he waited and he made the radar technician confirm and at first it looked like it was again five blips and then, when he looked closer and they looked with their eyeballs, they could see that they were birds that had mistakenly shown up somehow on the radar and it was just a flock of birds that came in as five blips on the radar screen.
And he is credited with saving the world from nuclear disaster.
Many people above him on the chain say, oh well, you know, we would never have been fooled by this.
Blah blah, blah.
But there's no guarantee of that.
They had 15 minutes to make the right call and the only information they would have had is the radar blips are there yeah, and that that sort of that might have, you know, and this man alone negated what would have been a direct order.
That was his order to send that up the chain of command immediately so that the most amount of time.
And he waited.
And it's, it, it speaks to sort of like how nuclear arms are to mutually assure destruction, what firearms are to suicide.
Like it makes a very difficult and weighty decision very convenient.
Yeah.
And generally encourages decisions to be made rashly when that's the last thing that you want.