by Dan Carlin
* This number is according to the author Donovan Webster. To date more than two thousand nuclear test explosions have taken place in global history.
* Some might go so far as to say “reckless,” and one of the knocks on Khrushchev later was that he was too much of a gambler.
* Part of the reason for the significance is that unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, when both sides could reach virtually anywhere on the planet with their nukes, the Soviets’ capabilities in the early 1960s were such that being able to station missiles in Cuba made much more of the United States vulnerable to a nuclear attack.
* These so-called EXCOMM tapes are some of the most amazing historical primary sources that have ever existed. They recorded the deliberations and decision making of the leadership of one side in what might have been global nuclear Armageddon. They are publicly available to listen to today online. And what’s crazy when you listen to them is that they are a combination of boring, monotonous office meeting–type conversations with a subject matter that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Even during the most stressful periods, nobody’s screaming and yelling. It sounds like a traditional board of directors business meeting. But when you listen to what they’re saying, you realize they’re talking about death totals that reach Second World War levels in an afternoon.
* And that’s just for the United States. The Soviet capital of Moscow alone was to be hit with more than a hundred nuclear warheads in the US war plan. President Eisenhower had once said that you could never have a nuclear war because there wouldn’t be enough bulldozers to clear the corpses off the streets.
* This is where some point to the lessons of the Bay of Pigs and JFK learning to take the hawkish military counsel he’d been getting with a bigger grain of salt.
* The same goes for their counterparts in the Soviet Union.
* Many of the civilian advisers agreed with the military. JFK was going against a ton of advice in this situation. Said JFK to his aide David Powers (as quoted by the historian Sheldon M. Stern), “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
* Bob Dylan supposedly kept working on a song because he wanted to make sure to finish it before he died if nuclear war broke out.
* For example, as crazy as it seems now, while the world was teetering on the edge of nuclear disaster, the two superpowers had no good way to directly communicate with each other. They often did so indirectly through media broadcasts, for example. The famed “hotline” telephone system would be set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis, so that when things got frightening, the two sides could speak directly.
* Imagine how this would be with today’s media. The graphics alone!
* Because of the numbers of weapons on both sides and the modern missile delivery systems.
* One of the weird aspects of history is that it’s likely even a person like Eichmann was hoping that his actions would lead to “better outcomes.” Of course, his conception of better outcomes was a monstrous one.
* The man the modern peace prize is named after.
* And take note of the fact that someday, future people could ask whether a ton of our current lives are worth a single life of theirs.
* “Modern” requires defining, so let’s say after about 1890, when some of the first international conferences were held to discuss such matters.
* Look at the difference in the horrified global reaction to the bombing of cities at the start of the Second World War versus the almost blasé attitude at the end of it.
* Isolated incidents did happen on smaller scales, but this is a generally true statement.
* The equivalent perhaps of atrocity laundering.
* “Limited war” is the opposite of Total War.
* How about a little adrenaline, for example?
* Truman was FDR’s third vice president, and he was, shall we say, not invited to every meeting.
* It’s older if you count zeppelins, but if you’re talking about airplanes, the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was in 1903.
* He would be the last Russian tsar; he stepped down in 1917 at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, and he and his family would be executed in 1918.
* In 1914 a US president harshly condemned a tiny bomb or two dropped by a lone prop plane. That’s a mere twenty-six years before the Luftwaffe was bombing London day and night during the Blitz, and three decades or so before German and Japanese cities were being erased. That’s a long moral chasm crossed in a short span of time. Two world wars can do that.
* Of course, they turned out to be wrong.
* The doctrine wasn’t, either. But before you figure out how to employ the effective planes, you need to have them.
* By the standards of that era.
* Many feel it was overrated.
* Cousin of Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. “the Red Baron,” the renowned First World War flying ace.
* The air war that began between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force after the fall of France in 1940.
* Some claim that German ordnance had been released accidentally and struck London. The British then bombed Berlin in a token retaliation.
* The British would start to do this later, as would the Americans.
* Not by everyone, of course. German attitudes differed markedly and understandably from British ones.
* Or wrong, if you are the nation being bombed.
* The Luftwaffe, which early on in its development had flirted with a doctrine emphasizing strategic bombing, had switched by the war’s outbreak to more of an emphasis on tactical air attacks. Tactical attacks focus more on the battlefield level than a citywide level. When German Stuka dive-bombers attack tanks, that’s an example of tactical bombing.
* It continues into very recent history, as bombings in, say, Iraq damaged ancient Babylonian and Assyrian sites.
* The Germany First policy of the Allies had prioritized attacks on the Third Reich. By early 1945, Germany was in a much more precarious position than the still uninvaded Japan, with multiple enemy armies fighting on German soil and every major German city in ruins.
* Economist Robin Hanson, for example, who is also involved with the fascinating Oxford University Future of Humanity Institute.
* Note, these are also the people to blame, depending on the point-of-view.
* For all intents and purposes. A chain-smoking, drinking, Irish, curly-haired ginger Batman.
