111–120 of 176 posts
"...the American public was regularly frightened by warnings about the dangers of a nuclear attack that was always made to appear imminent" Not much has changed.
Did you even read the article? Such fears may have been totally rational.
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Well, had it been my choice between a nuclear war where 90%-95% of the population of the UK would have died in optimistic scenarios and surrendering to the Soviets (and yes, I am fully aware of how badly they treated people in their own country and the countries they controlled) I know which one I would have chosen.
But that wasn't what the choice was. It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets. For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.
Of course, deterrence based on MAD is the least worst idea - but once shooting actually started, what is the rational thing to do?
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>> suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill... As Schlosser says in his book - because of the lack of coordination between the Air Force, Army, US Navy and Missile Forces, at one point there was something like 400(sorry if I remembered the number wrong,but it was in hundreds) nuclear rockets aimed at Moscow, many of them with multi-megaton payload. If they were…
I don't think anyone knows what would happen to an area after 400 detonations. My (wild) guess is that you'd get a blob of extremely hot rock melting its way down through the crust and enough fallout to sterilise the Northern hemisphere. So kind of a dumb idea from a strategic point of view.
The book's chapters alternate between two narratives. The first is a real-time account of a bomb-gone-haywire scare in Arkansas, and the people called in to deal with it. The second is a history of nuclear arms, escalation, and near-misses during the Cold War.
I could have done without the first narrative. It is awkwardly written, repetitive, and slow. (No doubt Schlosser does this to draw out the scenario across N chapters. The tactic actually makes things worse, sapping the story of its immediacy and urgency). But the main, historical narrative is fantastic.
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But that wasn't what the choice was. It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets. For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.
That pretty much would have been the choice if, for whatever reason, a shooting war had started - which it nearly did on a number of occasions. Of course, deterrence based on MAD is the least worst idea - but once shooting actually started, what is the rational thing to do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone knows what would happen to an area after 400 detonations. My (wild) guess is that you'd get a blob of extremely hot rock melting its way down through the crust and enough fallout to sterilise the Northern hemisphere. So kind of a dumb idea from a strategic point of view.
It is, but that's the problem - Air Force, Army,Navy and SAC controlled their own missiles and apart from the fact that they would all launch theirs if they got an order from the president, they didn't coordinate when it came to which targets each one of them would hit. So the Air Force might have had a plan to hit 100 points around Moscow, and so did the Army,and so did the Navy,and so did the SAC. So at the moment…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_P...
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"I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it." Shark attacks are statistically rare. Lightning strikes (of a human) are statistically rare. Adrenocortical carcinoma is statistically rare. Having to explain this to the family of a victim doesn't change that fact. In 20…
I think comparing 9/11 to events like heart attacks and car accidents is silly. There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks.
Since you obviously don't mean the heart attacks are worse, and we obviously don't agree, please support this rather than just asserting it. If it simplifies matters, first support that losing one person to deliberate attack is significantly worse than losing one person to illness. Then we can look at whether "significant" is significant enough.
One thing we can quickly agree on is that deterrence (or lack thereof) is more relevant in the case of an attack. But deterrence is only one kind of prevention. I don't see that the actual badness is greater in the case of the attack-caused death.
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> Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it. Seriously? There ought to be something analogously to Godwin’s law to declare discussions lost after this class of arguments. To answer in kind: "I'd like to ask how you would explain the proportionality of the…
> Emotional arguments quickly become ridiculous if you leave out the greater effects to society and the relative danger of the threat. No, but numerical arguments quickly become ridiculous when you ignore the fact that the emotional reaction of the nation to 3,000 Americans killed in a terrorist act is itself a physically cognizable phenomenon that must be given due weight in the analysis.
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"I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it." Shark attacks are statistically rare. Lightning strikes (of a human) are statistically rare. Adrenocortical carcinoma is statistically rare. Having to explain this to the family of a victim doesn't change that fact. In 20…
I think comparing 9/11 to events like heart attacks and car accidents is silly. There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks.
This is very true. We've spent over a trillion dollars combatting terrorism with little progress (and more American lives lost than in 9/11, let alone Iraqi/Afghan lives). Spending that trillion on heart attack prevention and treatment would've been far more effective at saving lives.
> In 1960, the computer at... NORAD... warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America... They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia. This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures…