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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Carlin
Read between
December 21, 2023 - December 24, 2024
What human being or collective group of people is capable of responsibly handling power like this?
“Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear—with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”
“The End of the World” became a popular trope, a fantasy. It didn’t even matter if you lived in a so-called neutral country, because no region would escape the fallout—literally—if a third world war happened.
Idealism had become realism (or else).
“If with such destructive weapons men are to survive, they must grow rapidly in human greatness.
we as a species must become more enlightened or die.
This is one fork in the intellectual road. It is the one that says humanity must change profoundly or be destroyed by its own creations. Even the proponents of this viewpoint acknowledge how difficult it will be for humankind to stop acting as it always has,* but they also maintain that we don’t have a choice. In essence, this view of the world represents a true test of our vaunted adaptability as a species. We either succeed or face nuclear Armageddon at some point in our collective future. The other intellectual fork in the road says that humankind will likely act as it always has, and that
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If we fail, then we’ve damned every man to be the slave of fear.”
The military historian Gwynne Dyer doesn’t find the fact that the two superpowers soured toward each other surprising at all. He likens it to earlier geopolitical rivalries and argues that the democracy-versus-communism Cold War dynamic was a lot like the role religion played in the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Each side has an ideologically watertight explanation for why the adversary behaves with such persistent wickedness and aggression,” Dyer writes. “None of the post-1945 developments would seem surprising to a 17th century Spanish or Ottoman diplomat. Neither
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such pessimism colored its decision making.
If the premise that war was inevitably going to happen was accepted, more than five thousand years of political and military history said it would be best if such a war happened at a time and place of one’s choosing, and when one’s strengths were maximized. Since the end of the Second World War, no greater disparity in weapons technology has ever existed than when the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons right after it. How many leaders in world history would have taken advantage of such circumstances?
People understood that war could break out with little or no warning, too—the leading nations on both sides of the Cold War had entered the Second World War as a result of being on the receiving end of devastating surprise attacks: Operation Barbarossa, the massive German surprise invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 (in violation of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939); and Pearl Harbor, the Japanese surprise bombing raid on the US territory of Hawaii in December of the same year.
in just a few years a series of new policies and laws such as the Truman Doctrine,* the National Security Act of 1947, and the Marshall Plan* created a new national security state at home and reoriented US foreign policy abroad, making the containment of communism its top concern. This was also the era when the CIA, the NSA, and the National Security Council were born, all part of a massive redesign of the US government, one intended to protect secrets, spy on our enemies, and run an increasingly globally focused military command.
over the next couple of years, the United States focused on developing a system to deliver Armageddon on command, if that was deemed necessary.
in the space of less than two years we had gone from discussions about crafting legislation to rid the world of the scourge of atomic weaponry to the president being asked to approve air force plans for a strategy commonly referred to as the “atomic blitzkrieg.”
Instead, the reality of normal life and pedestrian concerns intervened. Politics was an obvious element that affected decision making, but matters like budgetary concerns and interservice rivalries within the military also influenced the outcomes.
he was faced with cutting funding by 70 percent, while still maintaining the capability to fight a third world war should it come
Is there an ethical way to fight a nuclear war?
if you kill tens of millions of civilians to thwart the perceived evils of a totalitarian superpower, how much evil do you get splashed onto you in the process?*
‘We have been spending 98 percent of all the money for atomic energy for weapons. Now if we aren’t going to use them, that doesn’t make any sense.’”
1949 may have been the most dangerous year of the Cold War.* That was the year that Chinese Communists (the “Red Chinese”) finally gained victory in their long-running civil war over the Nationalists and took over all of mainland China. The Soviet Union—already the largest land power in the world geographically—had now added to its ideological ranks a country roughly the size of the United States, and which contained a full quarter of the world’s population. That year, in order to begin to cobble together a united defense strategy among countries still trying to recover from the damage of the
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this was a single victory in an endless struggle.
That said, if it’s possible to argue that we’re adapting the ancient playbook to account for the power of atomic weapons, we nevertheless continue to follow other patterns that have always made logical military sense, but which now greatly increase the chances we will kill ourselves.
But if you haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the power of the weapons you have recently developed, does it make sense to pursue even more powerful ones?
Could humanity, if faced with potential extinction, decide to cap weapons research and development?
The world was already akin to a clueless toddler playing with a pistol, and now it was being asked if it favored replacing the pistol with a machine gun.
A weapon like the “Super” is only an advantage when its energy release is from 100–1000 times greater than that of ordinary atomic bombs. The area of destruction therefore would run from 150 to approximately 1000 square miles or more. Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.
The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present.
We keep saying we have no other course. What we should say is we’re not bright enough to see any other course.”
the court of public opinion was still strong—and are we comfortable with such decisions being made by the average Joe and Jane?
To gauge how unusual any other choice would have been, you have to imagine humankind declining to research and develop more powerful weapons systems.
Growing into greatness isn’t easy.
It was at this point that it became apparent that, to keep the Korean War from becoming World War III, all the major powers had to create some plausible deniability so that nobody had to admit this was World War III.
anything that could be done to limit the length of the war was humanitarian by its very nature—even if what it took to do that was a shocking amount of violence in a very short time.
Thermonuclear weapons are so powerful that they effectively work against the idea that you can use them as a deterrent, because the bigger they get, the less likely your adversary is to think you’ll use them.
“Tactical” nuclear weapons are those which are small enough to be used in situations that have a potential battlefield utility.
“defense intellectuals” were supergeniuses. John von Neumann was one of the most prominent of these early figures.
Von Neumann is credited with inventing something we today call game theory.
a ‘game’ is a conflict situation where one must make a choice knowing that others are making choices too, and the outcome of the conflict will be determined in some prescribed way by the choices made.
the enemy’s people were more valuable as hostages than as corpses.
It upset the paradigm on a regular basis and increased the complexity and number of variables enormously.
The effective abandonment of international control efforts and the race to build a numerical and then a qualitative nuclear advantage resulted in the American nuclear arsenal mushrooming from just under 400 weapons in 1950 to over 20,000 by 1960. The Soviet arsenal, likewise, jumped from 5 warheads in 1950 to roughly 1,600 in 1960.
quotidian issues
as superficial as it might sound when deciding who should be vested with the most awesome power in global history, personal charisma and likability would also factor into this decision. From an outsider’s point of view—here comes our Martian again—this could appear to be a very strange reality. In a game of geopolitical multideck atomic poker, with the stakes as high as they were, humans would potentially pick the guy with the best hair?
no president takes office with a completely clean slate,
Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War,
“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”
The end of our world was almost televised.
The audience for this live event in 1962—regardless of where they lived—was watching to find out whether or not they would wake up the next morning, and whether or not their children would get to grow up.
Under the nuclear cloud, the meaning of human existence grew murkier than ever.
