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Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

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Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#41

Post by cycomanic »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #31
vkou wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of who exploits whom under which regime, you'd have to have the mindset of a suicide bomber to prefer being dead than red - when you also unilaterally make that choice for hundreds of millions of people, many of whom entirely uninvolved in your conflict. If they've reached the point where they actually have to use nuclear weapons in a MAD scenario, that political leader in question has failed at doing thei…

If they've reached the point where they actually have to use nuclear weapons in a MAD scenario, that political leader in question has failed at doing their job utterly, and completely irredeemably. It's a complete and utter betrayal of both their constituents, and the responsibility the world entrusted in them. Why preface this with an "if" like it is a hypothetical where we don't know what happened? It is history no…

That we did not have a world war does not imply that MAD works.

Moreover the world came incredibly close to total destruction a number of times, and in part it is just look that we are still alive. For example, imagine a different president than Kennedy in power during the Cuban missile crisis.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#42

Post by rafael09ed »

tehjoker wrote: post #37
smegger001 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem from game theoretical prospective is if you disarm and the other side doesn't your screwed. If the other side disarms it and you don't you win. Neither of you disarm and you maintain the status quo. And as you cant compel the other side to disarm there is no way to get to the mutual disarmament mutual win condition. Disarmament is just a prisoner's dilemma with WMD's and thanks to John Nash we all know ma…

Well there's a reason there are safeguards agreements and inspections. The idea is a slow mutual drawdown and then eventually a rapid final disarmament once a critical low threshold is reached. You can maintain the safeguards and inspections indefinitely via the IAEA. https://www.ctbto.org/verification-regime/

But then it becomes a race to create the technology that can build nuclear weapons the fastest creating a more volatile equilibrium.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#43

Post by int_19h »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #30
DennisP wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book is mostly about that content, which has been largely declassified now. It goes into quite a bit of detail. It was not just MAD. It included massive retaliation against every city in both the USSR and China in response to minor conventional battles, which they calculated would also kill most people in Europe from fallout. It gave independent launch authority to regional military commanders. First strike was p…

The goal of not disavowing a first strike was to deter a conventional attack. If your explicit policy is "we will only use nukes if you use nukes" then the implicit policy is: you can invade Europe without fear of nuclear escalation. Instead of being upset at hypothetical nuclear fallout that never happened, we should look at the policy as a massive success at preventing war from happening.

Or we could look at the internal policy discussions that took place among Soviet leadership back in the day, since now much of that is unclassified. And it turns out there was no serious threat of a large-scale conventional war in Europe initiated by the USSR - at least not since 1960s or so. If anything, the Soviets were scared that NATO would do it.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#44

Post by giantDinosaur »

donarb wrote: post #11
hindsightbias wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some stories are bigger than sources. The 'victim', Ellsberg, would seem to agree. As far as I remember, Ellsberg was a true believer for a long time and originally wanted the information (not all of the papers) out so America would double down on VN. He thought it was still winnable. He moderated at some point in the process. Sheehan wasn't going to wait for his navel gazing and made him a progressive hero.

This is the problem I have about people who leak documents. They have an agenda and so only release the parts favorable to their bias rather than the whole archive. What was held back from the story that there were documents that showed that the US government was actively trying to get out of the war via back channel negotiations.

So if someone leaked info about a killbot program, your protest wouldn't be that it's bad, but it's likely there's other work going on that'll hopefully make such killbots irrelevant, and why weren't those documents leaked? That doesn't sound very reassuring at all.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#45

Post by godmode2019 »

wombatmobile wrote: post #32
DennisP wrote: post #4

Ellsberg's recent book The Doomsday Machine says the Pentagon Papers were his less-important material. His job at the Pentagon was nuclear policy, and he also had thousands of pages detailing that policy, which at the time was horrific. (The book goes into detail on just how horrific; much of it has been declassified now so he can source his claims.) He decided to release the Vietnam papers first because he felt that…

What a masterstroke, hiding the documents in black plastic bags on the outskirts of the town dump.

The dumps in my country are not static, they have bulldosers and diggers constantly moving things around and burying them deep underground. Interesting cultural difference

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#46

Post by mhh__ »

redis_mlc wrote: post #34
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot!

You can just watch the movie "Dr. Strangelove." People thought it was SciFi, but it was actually a documentary. The nuclear silo launch code for decades was "000000" to save time to launch. Also, Reagan and Russia didn't care about some goofy MAD doctrine - they wanted actual ABM defenses. That's why there's an ABM ring allowed by treaty around Moscow, and why Reagan funded SDI (lasers weren't implemented, but anti-m…

That was only one step in many many codes - you couldn't just get a job in a launch silo and press boom

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#47

Post by boomboomsubban »

godmode2019 wrote: post #45
wombatmobile wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a masterstroke, hiding the documents in black plastic bags on the outskirts of the town dump.

The dumps in my country are not static, they have bulldosers and diggers constantly moving things around and burying them deep underground. Interesting cultural difference

No, that's likely true wherever he buried them. Outskirts probably means a fair distance from where the actual dumping happened, so if someone stumbled upon it they'd think it fell out of a truck or something and ignore it.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#48

Post by eitland »

int_19h wrote: post #43
WillPostForFood wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of not disavowing a first strike was to deter a conventional attack. If your explicit policy is "we will only use nukes if you use nukes" then the implicit policy is: you can invade Europe without fear of nuclear escalation. Instead of being upset at hypothetical nuclear fallout that never happened, we should look at the policy as a massive success at preventing war from happening.

Or we could look at the internal policy discussions that took place among Soviet leadership back in the day, since now much of that is unclassified. And it turns out there was no serious threat of a large-scale conventional war in Europe initiated by the USSR - at least not since 1960s or so. If anything, the Soviets were scared that NATO would do it.

Well well. That's one way to look at it and it is an interesting way to look at it

Another way to look at is that is equally important IMO is to realize they not only planned to but actually had occupied most of eastern Europe before that time.

Stopping this planning during the 1960ies might be related to

- Stalins death a decade before or

- to realizing NATO was getting too strong or

- to the enthusiasm for global communism waning

- or something else.

I certainly wouldn't subscribe it to some inherent peaceful nature of USSR though. For all the flak that the Americans (often rightfully) get we must not pretend that there was an obvious, readily available better alternative in trying to deescalate in the 60ies.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#49

Post by nabla9 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #5
DennisP wrote: post #4

Ellsberg's recent book The Doomsday Machine says the Pentagon Papers were his less-important material. His job at the Pentagon was nuclear policy, and he also had thousands of pages detailing that policy, which at the time was horrific. (The book goes into detail on just how horrific; much of it has been declassified now so he can source his claims.) He decided to release the Vietnam papers first because he felt that…

So, is anything from the nuclear documents in the book you mentioned? Or is it really all lost forever?

The US nuclear strategy at time was called massive retaliation.

'massive retaliation' was strategy where the US committed itself to response in much greater nuclear strike in the event of an attack, even conventional attack by Soviets. Kennedy abandoned that strategy during Cuban crisis when he saw that it didn't really work and was insane. It was simply not credible that US would commit losing 80-100 million people after single event.

The US and NATO nuclear deterrence moved to what is now known as flexible response. The response to attack will be proportional.

Re: Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light

#50

Post by lr1970 »

redis_mlc wrote: post #34
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot!

You can just watch the movie "Dr. Strangelove." People thought it was SciFi, but it was actually a documentary. The nuclear silo launch code for decades was "000000" to save time to launch. Also, Reagan and Russia didn't care about some goofy MAD doctrine - they wanted actual ABM defenses. That's why there's an ABM ring allowed by treaty around Moscow, and why Reagan funded SDI (lasers weren't implemented, but anti-m…

IIRC, during the Korea war there were people at Pentagon proposing to nuke China over their support for the North.
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