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“You must tell no one outside of this suite what Secretary McNamara has told you.”
credible first-strike threat, we had to be prepared to show that we would survive a retaliatory strike with our fallout shelters,
They saw the Army and Navy as willing to jeopardize national security by espousing fairy tales, with no other reason than to minimize the Air Force budget requests for missiles.
And no indication came to us at the Pentagon that that proposal was delaying our preparations for a U.S. attack two days away. On the contrary.
Or even—Generals Power and LeMay could be counted on to recommend this—full-scale attack on the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev was just as outgunned in strategic nuclear forces as he was, obviously, in conventional terms in the Caribbean.
That meant to me that he had to back down.
Harry Rowen had shared my confidence that the chance of nuclear war erupting from this confrontation was extremely low.
Paul Nitze, had just told him that he had put the chance of some form of nuclear war, if we had struck the missiles in Cuba, as “fairly high.”
But to be willing to take an estimated 10 percent chance of nuclear war?!
The fact is that on Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come close to ending civilization.
how its dangers could have been (as I steadily discovered) so much greater than I believed at the time.
After much debate, it was decided that Kennedy should ignore this second letter and simply respond to the earlier message, agreeing to settle the crisis on the basis of a pledge not to invade Cuba.
the missiles must begin to be removed within forty-eight hours or the United States would remove them by force.
Since then, it has been widely assumed that this secret offer was critical to ending the confrontation.
along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.
But more was happening that neither leader knew that Saturday afternoon, while they were both still postponing agreement, haggling for better terms.
So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs.
They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?
first, the belief by some militarists that airpower was the key to victory; and second, the increasing willingness by civilian leadership and air commanders to regard cities—which is to say, civilian populations—as legitimate military targets.
The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians139 in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities
has sickened the hearts of civilized men and women and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.
forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the
understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.
This was shortly followed by a similar agreement from Germany.
Roosevelt’s message
reaffirming the importance of what was regarded as an international norm, part of the common law of international relations,
“During the last fifteen months I saw murder done in Spain by the Fascist invaders. Murder is different from war.”
The restrictions on war—above all, against deliberate killing of noncombatants—were contrasted to the wars of the barbarians,
just-war doctrine established conditions under which war could be legitimately undertaken
just means of waging war (jus in bello)—in other words, restrictions on the
Even a legitimate authority acting in self-defense could not do simply anything in the way of violence to an enemy. Such forces were obliged to respect an absolute distinction between combatants and noncombatants, with noncombatants—essentially, civilians—to be absolutely immune from deliberate attack.
These developments worked together to make the whole nation become a participant
strategic bombing: the notion that nearly every citizen of the opponent’s country was a legitimate target,
“War is hell,” and this was not just an observation. His theory of war was
that it should be made as close to hell as possible for one’s opponents so they would end it quicker.
Such aircraft would offer the possibility of moving over that barbed wire and even beyond the stalemated battle lines to attack the vulnerable civilian economy that supported the troops.
vision of so-called strategic bombing—overflying
Douhet’s recommendations clearly breached the principles of just-war doctrine embodied in international law—specifically, the unconditional proscription against any deliberate killing of noncombatants.
Airmen felt infantry and artillery staffs didn’t understand the potentiality of airpower.
word “strategic” as
independent role for the air force beyond what were described as
battlefield t...
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Freeman Dyson was a physicist and later a nuclear bomb designer who in World War II was a young mathematician doing operations research on the British bombing campaign.
TO THE BOMBER COMMAND: The primary object of your operations151 should now be focused on the morale of the enemy’s civil population, and in particular of the industrial
Of course in those days high explosives couldn’t destroy a whole city. It took hundreds of planes on many return missions to do that.
I suppose it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories.…
that the notion of destroying a specific industry was not only infeasible but also would not have the desired effect.
annihilate urban populations by fire had emerged from turning some specialized peacetime knowledge on its head. Fire insurance executives, who were experts in averting the spread of fires (to keep rates down), proved inventive in advising how to reverse that process.
Hansell opposed firebombing as morally repugnant and militarily unnecessary.
