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Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

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Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#151

Post by philwelch »

judk wrote: post #136
cstross wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you might be doing it for religious reasons: https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng (Devout Mormons are supposed to maintain a stockpile of food. I suspect Costco get much of their custom for this preparedness pack from members of the LDS ...)

Religious reasons are just insanity reasons proxies through family and friends.

Most successful religions have a small dose of insanity and identity carrying a payload of genuinely good moral and practical advice. Stockpiling food is a rational, practical thing to do. The "insanity" in LDS has more to do with things like transdimensional space gods or dodgy, ahistoric ideas about where the American Indians came from.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#152

Post by acqq »

a3n wrote: post #65
acqq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too long after Hiroshima some US decision makers actually proposed "pre-emptively" bombing the USSR with the nuclear bombs. Why? Well, the communists are dangerous, that's enough, better earlier than later(!) The idea was rejected with the apparent main argument that the US didn't have enough nuclear bombs to annihilate the whole USSR: too many soldiers would continue to fight! US eventually produced enough nucle…

John von Neumann, one of a handful of people most responsible for the existence of your job, proposed a pre-emptive strike. He needed fast digital computers to calculate bomb parameters and effects, so he helped invent them. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1179883.ece quote: This unsettling scenario might be pre-empted by a more apocalyptic one: nuclear Armageddon. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral [1] rev…

Still, Von Neumann was certainly not the only one advocating this, the most recent discovery is: Winston Churchill, 1947:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826980/Winston-Chur...

"A previously unseen memorandum from the FBI’s archives revealed that Winston Churchill urged the US to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union to win the Cold War"

"The memo is published for the first time in a book called When Lions Roar: The Churchills And The Kennedys, by award-winning investigative journalist Thomas Maier. It is due to be published in Britain next month."

That insanity obviously wasn't in only one person's mind.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#153

Post by jacquesm »

steveax wrote: post #150
jacquesm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the bigger dick foreign policy at work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CghWWWXSUUU

God I miss Carlin.

Yep. My fix is that I play his stuff with some regularity. Check out Billy Connolly as well if you haven't discovered him yet.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#154

Post by jacquesm »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #103
philwelch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a little troubling that the Turkish military was supposed to be the pivotal factor in World War III. Was there any particular reason for that, other than Turkey being right next to Russia and the Crimea? What if the Soviets went after Turkey first?

To this day Turkey has the largest standing army after the US of NATO members, it's not been a pushover for some decades now. Its also got a rather large number of armored units with few rivaling NATO members with the US as exception. It lacks Nuclear weapons (although it has the capacity to build and deliver, and participates in Nuclear sharing treaties, a bit like the Netherlands) and it's not better funded than sa…

That's very much incorrect. China, India, North Korea and the Russian Federation precede Turkey as well. South Korea and Pakistan are close (and so is Iran but not so well equipped).

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#155

Post by Luc »

jacquesm wrote: post #154
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this day Turkey has the largest standing army after the US of NATO members, it's not been a pushover for some decades now. Its also got a rather large number of armored units with few rivaling NATO members with the US as exception. It lacks Nuclear weapons (although it has the capacity to build and deliver, and participates in Nuclear sharing treaties, a bit like the Netherlands) and it's not better funded than sa…

That's very much incorrect. China, India, North Korea and the Russian Federation precede Turkey as well. South Korea and Pakistan are close (and so is Iran but not so well equipped).

I don't know if the comment was amended, but they're talking about NATO members exclusively. Turkey has a 'deployable military' of 495k according to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#Military_...

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#156

Post by jacquesm »

Luc wrote: post #155
jacquesm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very much incorrect. China, India, North Korea and the Russian Federation precede Turkey as well. South Korea and Pakistan are close (and so is Iran but not so well equipped).

I don't know if the comment was amended, but they're talking about NATO members exclusively. Turkey has a 'deployable military' of 495k according to this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#Military_...

No, my mistake, thanks for spotting that.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#157

Post by Graham24 »

mcguire wrote: post #54
simonsarris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wars would be a lot better if guys would say to themselves sometimes "Jesus, I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much." -Kurt Vonnegut

A large chunk of modern military training is explicitly to prevent guys from saying that reflexively.

it's always been like that, step one is to de-humanise your enemy so your soldiers do not feel guilty for killing them.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#158

Post by cstross »

stan_rogers wrote: post #61
bane wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up right at the tail-end of it, the 1984 Red Dawn was a perfectly reasonable scenario. Whenever I think the hysteria was completely insane I think back to my parents and grandparents and some of the truly bizarre notions that happened during their youth: duck and cover, public bomb shelter drills, etc. People actually paid significant parts of their yearly salary to build, stock and maintain nuclear bomb shelt…

I remember when the monthly air-raid drills — first Wednesday of the month, 1:00PM — stopped, not because the Cold War had gotten any colder, but because the missile threat made the "I've got plenty of time to get to the shelter" bomber scenario almost laughable. I also remember the panic I felt, several years later, when the damned local siren went off (on the wrong day and at the wrong time of the day) because some…

I never lived more than ten miles away from a strategic target (in the UK -- which was going to be toast in that "limited tactical exchange") until the end of the cold war, in my mid-twenties.

Memories of that existential state make a really good wellspring for writers of horror fiction.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#159

Post by pavel_lishin »

dmckeon wrote: post #74
pavel_lishin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me realize that there is probably a lot more that I missed in "Stranger in a Strange Land", just by virtue of my age and not having been born in the USA.

"Stranger" was published in 1961, 20 years before Reagan, but still has many good insights on social and political patterns in the US. For a more dated, but more detailed and insightful view by a stranger, try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America

Huh, I didn't realize that. That's oddly prescient, then.

Re: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was Based on Fact

#160

Post by digi_owl »

a3n wrote: post #65
acqq wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too long after Hiroshima some US decision makers actually proposed "pre-emptively" bombing the USSR with the nuclear bombs. Why? Well, the communists are dangerous, that's enough, better earlier than later(!) The idea was rejected with the apparent main argument that the US didn't have enough nuclear bombs to annihilate the whole USSR: too many soldiers would continue to fight! US eventually produced enough nucle…

John von Neumann, one of a handful of people most responsible for the existence of your job, proposed a pre-emptive strike. He needed fast digital computers to calculate bomb parameters and effects, so he helped invent them. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1179883.ece quote: This unsettling scenario might be pre-empted by a more apocalyptic one: nuclear Armageddon. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral [1] rev…

>He acknowledged that atomic weaponry was a “monster” but perceived it as the lesser of two evils,

Backing Hitler, preemptive nuclear strike, what is it with communism that drive people to such extremes against it?

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