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The Man Who Literally Saved the World
99luftballon writes "Today is an important anniversary for Russian hero Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet missile commander who saved the world from nuclear destruction in 1983. Sadly there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing. How long will we keep getting lucky?"
June, 1983 - American teenager David Lightman hacks into NORAD's WOPR computer and begins playing a game of Global Thermonuclear War. WOPR however doesn't believe it to be a game, and begins preparations for missile launch. Fortunately, with the help of WOPR's creator Stephen Falken, they were able to have the computer play itself at Tic-Tac-Toe. As a result of this win-less battle, WOPR learns the only winning move is not to play.
I'm sure there are other countries with nuclear weapons. The current count on nuclear weapons from Wikipedia comes to: Frankly, the India/Pakistan development of a nuclear arsenol worries me more than what happened historically between the U.S. & Russia. And don't even get me started on chemical and biological weapons.
My work here is dung.
If the same thing had happened now do you think people in other countries trust America enough that they would be confident that America hadn't launched a pre-emptive nuclear strike?
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
(sorry)
henry -- the human evolution news relay
The Soviet military did not punish Petrov for his actions, but did not reward or honor him either. His actions had revealed imperfections in the Soviet military system which showed his superiors in a bad light. He was given a reprimand, officially for the improper filing of paperwork, and his once-promising military career came to an end. He was reassigned to a less sensitive post and ultimately retired from the military.
That's gratitude for you.
Thank you Petrov.
I figure, if there are that many examples of OMGARMAGEDDONWTF?!, then it's probably not luck that kicks in every time disaster is averted.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
``How long will we keep getting lucky?''
I couldn't say it better than Sting:
What might save us, me, and you
Is that the Russians love their children too
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
[...]saved the world from nuclear destruction in 1983. Sadly there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing.
Yeah, I get the meta-reference, but isn't there a better way you could have worded that?
We'll stay lucky 'til the end of the world.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Somewhat off-topic, but probably the discussion is going to go to this anyway.
Why doesn't the U.S. completely dismantle all of their nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, if they are going to go on crusades against any other countries that have them? (Or at least use it as an excuse for ones that piss them off; they don't seem to be going after Pakistan the same way they're going after Iran, but for the moment lets pretend they actually are serious in their concern.) I don't think Iran should have nukes. I don't think that the U.S. should have nukes. If there were no nuclear weapons, the world would be a safer place. But one cannot avoid seeing the stinking hypocrisy in the U.S. acting like they have some moral authority to decide who in the world is responsible enough have nukes, when there is only one county in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons... twice... on civilians.
So, why not get rid of them? They're not actually planning to use them some time, are they?
Another reason why ignorance is bliss...
Next time you want to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia, just launch your missles one after another.
I think what kept the USA and the USSR from fighting more openly was mutually assured destruction. I also think Iraq has been invaded and North Korea hasn't been yet is due to North Korea having claimed to posses nuclear weapons and Iraq denying the same.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
How long will we keep getting lucky?
Until about ten minutes before we don't get lucky any more. The answer isn't less nuclear weapons, per se -- we'll always find a new way to kill each other. The answer is in getting people who want to kill others indescriminantly out of power.
6 years!
afterwards, did he take up chess?
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that this didn't turn into nuclear war, but it sounds strange to me that he "saved the world." Technically, he chose not to destroy the world based on information from a known faulty satellite. It's like pointing a gun at someone's head, declining to pull the trigger, and then having them thank you for saving their life. In any case, it's good to hear that level-headed people were chosen for this job for precisely this reason.
He didn't save the world, the summary is misleading. He wasn't the guy were to push the button and lauch the nukes. Petrov was in charge of the warning system and his job was to pass the information to people who make decisions. To his credit, Petrov did a very good job of evaluating the threat level.
He saved the human species. I'm not sure if I should thank him for that.
Google for port chicago explosion ie,
& q=port+chicago+explosion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
Seems to me that the first nuclear explosion did actually happen by accident in 1944.
Very eery if one does a bit of research.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Balance of Power (1986) is the hardest computer strategy game ever.
You think its bad now that a politician uses a war to make his competitors lose face, in the 80's politicians threatened destruction of the entire planet as a political tool to make opponents look bad...
To all the Petrovs out there (accidental and otherwise), a sincere "Spasiba". It's good to know that in a world full of FUBAR, there's a few folks with a decent shovel to help us all out of the creek.
Here's a video of Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's ice cream fame) that puts the size of the US nuclear arsenal in perspective.
Ben's BBs [flash]
Even President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense says [PDF] we could cut some of these nuclear weapons and not harm our national security.
And Robert McNamara (of Vietnam War fame) is now saying that the US should urgently confront the dangers of it's nuclear weapons policies to avoid another Cuban missile crisis scenario.
...and before it started, I was forced to sit through both "Stars are Blind" *and* "London Bridge."
Fuck you, Petrov. This world wasn't worth saving.
Balls of Fucking STEEL!!!! Thank you Petrov. You're a much better man than me, I would have slammed that big red shiney button through the console.( After soiling myself, naturally)
IMO, this kind of threat still continues today. For those of you who may have seen "The Sum of All Fears" http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sum_of_all_fears/ or "By Dawn's Early Light" http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1003334-by_dawns_e arly_light/ , it doesn't take much to think of a moderately plausible scenario where we blow ourselves back into the stone age. Today we can look at a terrorist motivation for possible fissile material to enter via poor port security, for example, or porous borders in the US/Canada US/Mexico.
:)
Actually, what really scares me are biological weapons (think Smallpox's Variola Major or other very nasty bugs) that can be transported with less readily available detection (Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" is a good read, so is Stephen King's The Stand, and then there is the movie 12 Monkeys http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/12_monkeys/). My High school biology teacher (back in the mid 80's), who sevred as an officer in the Army a few years before, said biological weapons concerned her much more than nuclear for several reasons:
* easier to obtain the needed materials
* less technology needed to deploy
* time delay between deployment and noticable effects
* ease and speed by which pathogens can spread
So yes, I can see why the risks are significant and recurrant. There's plenty of Fear, Hate, Ignorance and Mistrust going around for possibilities to crop up. I just hope there are enough people like Stanislav Yefgrafovich Petrov, in the right place, and at the right time, to help save us from ourselves.
Thanks, Stan
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
wasnt this posted a few weeks/months ago?
portfolio
Until the USA conquers all of the world. Our luck will then have run out at the exact time that it is no longer needed.
USA are the only people who've actually fired these things...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
War Games play YOU!
None of them almost lead to nuclear war - in virtually every instance doctrine and procedures produced exactly the result they were supposed to. No launch, no war. Others, like the bear at the Air Force Base fence or the B52 crash near Thule, are extremely overhyped.
I shouldn't feed the troll, BUT....
If the North Koreans have a nuke, and a missile to deliver it to the US (coming very soon, if not already in place), then doesn't it make sense for us to have the same or better technology to combat this sort of weapon?
This would go for any non-rational country, 'Western' or not. If Hitler had nukes, would you suggest that the US should disarm or not even arm at all? Your statements are ludicrous.
Libertas in infinitum
Maybe it was the Russians testing their own guy. Good thing they ran out of money before they could build their own WOPR.
TFA says DEFCON 2 was declared on October 24. Not true, it was on the 22nd, same time as everybody but the SAC went to DEFCON 3.
ResidntGeek
It was the Soviet Union. Referring to the USSR as Russia is like saying Texas when you are talking about the USA.
I think that one thing that might improve conditions is helping the unfortunate people who aren't born in one of the rich, western countries. I guess people will always fight (to greater or lesser degrees of destructiveness), but the fewer reasons we give people to hate us, the lower the chances they will attack us. How many wars have been fought among states in the US? How many wars were being fought in current EU countries before the EU existed, and how many have been fought since? Will China be foolish enough to risk a war with its trade partners?
We're threatening other countries with invasion or forced regime change, poisoning their economies by dumping our products on their markets, exploiting them by buying their natural resources at prices that aren't enough to properly feed people there, and then processing them and selling them at towering profits. People there are grabbing what they can, stealing each other's land, clinging to religion or nationalism, sending us terrorists, or even raising armies to destroy us.
I feel that, if, instead, we extended a helping hand, educated people, moved production facilities and know-how there, helped develop local economies, rather than plundering and poisoning them, the world would be a better place. When you have food in your belly and a future to look forward to, you don't need fanaticism to hide from reality. When your neighbor doesn't have anything you couldn't get, you have no reason to envy him. When the hand feeds you, you don't bite it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Think about it. We're in a cushy position of being able to thank a Russian dude for not losing his cool, recognizing a fake threat as a fake threat, and not starting an action that would have lead to war.
Too bad the present-day Iraqis don't have a similar American hero to thank, you think?
Mrs Petrov: Stanislov saved the world from nuclear annihilation today. What are you doing, you lazy bum?
/me goes back to playing Pacman...
Actually, I recall there was some fund raising to help him out, as he had retired on a typical soviet pension, which is next to useless. If I hit the lottery, I 'll probably send him a nice chunk of change as a special thank you. He at least desrves to live in moderate comfort. and to spread his genes around a bit. Don't wait for the UN to kick anything in.....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Since this is an obvious no-brainer: why aren't we getting rid of nukes?
Consider a few facts:
* The USSR, when it existed, several times suggested getting rid of all nuclear weapons. The US rejected their proposals.
* The nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires that nuclear powers work towards nuclear disarmament. The US rejects all proposals calling for nuclear disarmament.
* Presently, 4 of the Central Asian *stan countries are organizing to declare themselves a "nuclear free zone" forbidding all nuclear weapons from their territory. What country is working diplomatically and is pressuring them to scuttle the nuclear free zone idea? The US.
Considering the US has the most nuclear weapons, engages in the most wars, threatens non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons, other countries have an incentive to develop nukes. The ironic thing is that only the US has hundreds of thousands of Marines that can be deployed and a strong worldwide military deployment capability -- eliminating nukes will not weaken that capability.
But eliminating nukes does not fit into the US Pentagon's publicly stated goal of complete, worldwide military superiority.
Nukes won't be eliminated until the US foreign policy and militarism is changed in a substantial way -- and that is not happening. Until it does, we can expect more "close calls".
That was the standard unlock code for nukes during the Cold War. :-) Sleep well tonight!
Haida Manga
But but... nothing in the article gives us any reason to blame Bush! Oh noes! How are we going to shift the blame onto him and the United States?
Referring to the USSR as Russia is like saying Texas when you are talking about the USA.
A better analogy would be like saying England when you mean the United Kingdom. Which people do frequently in the US.
What I find funny, is the majority of you dumbasses that think you have the first post when you don't. So stop trying and get a life.
Let's say that by some series of events, it actually happened. Somewhere in the world, a nuclear weapon hit a hostile nuclear power. What would happen?
Here is the traditional answer: "There would be a retaliatory strike. Allies of both parties would get in on the act. The two sides would lob nukes at one another until everyone involved were destroyed, with serious, possibly apocalyptic damage to the world at large."
That made perfect sense in the Cold War, when the two largest powers were the US and Russia and nearly every other nuclear power took one side or the other. Nearly the entire world would be bombed outright, and the sheer area of the US and Russia alone would create a shitload of radiation. Nowadays, however, it seems more likely that at least one side of the war will be a small nation or alliance of small nations. It's unlikely that more than a few countries will be drawn in. How much radiation would there actually be at the end?
Also, how willing would other nations be to go into this? There's not a clear-cut capitalist/communist distinction anymore. It doesn't seem unlikely that only two nations would fight the war, especially if one of them were the US. To enter into a nuclear war would be certain death for every man, woman, and child in your country. Treaties be damned, I can't imagine many countries jumping at the chance.
Finally, what guarantee is there that it would become a nuclear war at all? The last thing a sane leader would want after a nuclear strike would be for the situation to escalate. Obviously, they couldn't just sit there, but I'd imagine that the retaliation would be primarily conventional, or one or two surgical blasts.
I just want to say that a nuclear war doesn't need to turn into Dr. Strangelove. It is quite possible for it to end with a whimper.
I'm making up a conspiracy theory. It would make a decent political thriller to find out that Those in charge and in the know in the Soviet Union -- wanting to provoke a war with the west, intentionally "injected" ghost launches to provoke the internal politicos into a full launch to the U.S only to be thwarted by somebody afraid to launch. Humans make poor failsafes and I think back to the opening sequence of the original movie http://imdb.com/title/tt0086567/ Wargames.
I for one am scared as shit to learn that a mere computer glitch could have set off the end of the world. At what point is the human element removed from the equation? If we left it to the machines, there might be no humans right now.
As a programmer, I tip my hat to this gentleman for knowing a bug when he sees one. Perhaps a story like this will make realize just how dangerous the nukes are, and how even more dangerous it is to rely on computers to handle them. Skynet anyone?
he never said first post
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
This is the common lie/myth, as is the western belief that the Japanese would "fight to the death to protect the emperor." It's all a bunch of crap. YES, the emperor was advised that his 'house' was in danger if he continued the war...but the Japanese leadership was worried about a coup or revolt, NOT setting up plans for farmers with pitchforks to fight off GI Joe to the death.
The Japanese were on the verge of surrendering already. Go study WW2 history- it's patently obvious Japan was already losing AND that they knew it. The atomic bombs were almost completely unnecessary, except to establish US dominance in the world theater by demonstrating god-like firepower.
Try this google search on for size.
Incidentally, does the political division and the emperor's "stay the course" position sound familiar to you? Those who do not study history, blah blah.
Please help metamoderate.
Furthermore...it's not like a Lieutenant Colonel has authority to launch weapons anyways.
While it may not require as high level authorization as it does in the US (I don't know, I'm sure their procedure is pretty secretive), I'd be willing to seriously bet that no one man in the USSR had authority to initiate a launch. Even Kruschev or Gorbachov or whoever would've had to have support from his generals to relay the order.
So this Lt. Col. is having a bad day and decides "Gee, the timing patterns and numbers of these launches are nothing like they told us to expect, but I'm not gonna be the guy who didn't finish destroying the world if the US starts it," and he escalates the warning. From there, some really important general goes "Oh crap! Are you sure?" to which our hero says "Umm...not really, there's only five and they were launched at weird intervals." At this point all the generals have a 2 minute pow-wow (The missiles take 20-30 minutes to reach their targets...they have something like 15 minutes to decide in order for launch to take place before missiles targeted against their own silos reach them). They choose to wait and see if there's more launch signatures and if anything appears on radar before making a decision that will guarantee missiles are heading their way. If there are more launch signatures, they have plenty of time to launch. If there aren't but the missiles are real, there will be plenty of infrastructure left over from so few warheads to authorize further launches. The order goes out for the missile crews to go on standby, all ready bombers to launch, and for the president to get in his bunker, but no launches take place.
Don't get me wrong, this guy did good, but it sounds like we were way closer back in 1962 over Cuba than in this case.
you have gone too far this time vlad
And how exactly would eliminating _all_ nuclear weapons help things?
What really keeps most nations from building and using nuclear weapons is neither that UN disagree (hah) nor that it's too hard technically, It's the fact that most of their territory would turn to glass soon after.
If now every nation would get rid of nuclear weapons do you know what would happen? They'd all stard building them right back and the first to finish would win. Only they'd probably have to use them to make the point.
Don't you agree?
I'd regard the information at the Nuclear Files website with a bit of skepticism. Some of the tales sound more than a little bit dubious, particularly the fighters equiped with nukes. I suspect they have a bit too much of a fetish with things nuclear.
I hate this position on the argument. You cannot abolish something from existing, the basic knowledge of how an atom bomb works and even some of the engineering details are taught in undergraduate physics courses across the world. Given sufficient motivation and resources the simple knowledge that something is physically possible is all that is needed to do it.
See this graph.
End transmission.
You'll have to forgive us. Most Americans think the Japanese bombed America at Pearl Harbor. I'm nowhere near old enough to remember that, but I predate Hawaiian statehood.
At the time, of course, Hawaii was simply an American territory, like Puerto Rico and the UK are now.
KFG
Nuclear missles fly single file to hide their numbers. ;)
Salient points, sure. But you've got to acknowledge the psychological effect that a horde of nuclear weapons has as a deterrent against military attacks against the U.S., and as leverage in negotiating conventions with other nations. Who would want to give that up? Nuclear non-proliferation treaties only favor you if you have nothing to lose anyway. So no, the U.S. will not be jumping on the peacenik bandwagon any time soon.
Consider the case of Richard Gatling, the inventor of the famous Gatling gun. You may have seen the gun in old Western movies. Once the design was tweaked, the Gatling gun became the most devastating weapon on the planet in the latter part of the 19th century. Its inventor believed it to be a peacetime weapon, too, just as nuclear weapons are today. He reasoned that the weapon was so powerful, and the loss of life resulting from its use so great, that anyone would submit rather than see it used them. Of course, the irony was that the gun was indeed put into action shortly after its inception--by Americans against other Americans in the Civil War.
And there you have it in a nutshell. We essentially used a weapon of mass destructions against our own people--the only thing that has changed is the technology--and you have this unrealistic expectation that we will now get rid of weapons intended for use against people in other nations? It's not happening. At least not in our lifetimes.
Back then it was, despite Regan's foaming at the mouth at the behest of the New World Order folks, still "unthinkable". Now? If this happened present day even the most sensible of highly trained military specialists would likely shoot and ask questions later. So, we're "safer"? I guess the logic now must be, "You'll be safest if you're dead".
who added PAL (Permissive Action Link) to nuclear warheads, so if an unauthorized person tried to use one, they would fizzle and explode the non-nuclear components. That probably saved us from WWIII in the case of K-129.
... we will stay lucky until we either get rid of all the nukes, or have something that can prevent accidents. And given that a decade of unprecedented peace and goodwill mong the nuclear-armed nations have not produced any will to eliminate nuclear weapons, I know which side I'm supporting.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
One would hope that anyone in Petrov's position would have made the same decision, clinging to hope even if it looked like it could be a genuine attack. In a nuclear war, no one wins.
Until we get someone more interested in appearances than substance. That's why GWB&Co worry me so.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
When we have WWIII I'm sure you will be happy to see the trend line increasing at the same logarithmic rate. We haven't had a war in 50 years largely because of economic prosperity due to increasing oil consumption but as that runs out I am sure the nuclear weapons will be back online and likely used.
If any of even the little ones are targeted on existing nuclear facilities you would have a downwind chernobyl effect, a bad one most likely. That's one of the things about the possible upcoming iranian fun - n - games that we will be facing. They will *specificially* target existing nuclear research and production facilities.
problem is that would only work for twenty five minutes or so, then you've only released a few and after the first one hits the USSR you'd get thousands in return. Preemptive first strike has to be very massive and totally debilitating.
Wow, the US only has 10,000 nukes. I feel much safer. google's info on nuclear bombs
According to this page, the lethal fallout range of a 1 megaton bomb is 90 miles (1 direction, 7 days, 15kph winds). The diameter of the earth is 12,753 km (7926.4 miles). So if they were spaced out correctly, we could cause lethal radiation to occur in a ring around the earth 11 times.
Sheesh, someone is passing on pure emotional propaganda. I don't think they even read the links they pointed at.
The 4th website on that search result uses the tag! How can anyone take what they have to say seriously?
Foreign policy should change, perhaps.
The Pentagon's goals should NEVER change.
There is precisely one way to prevent a sovereign nation from being written into the history books prematurely; that way is through force of arms. The ideals of diplomacy and peace are all wonderful in utopia land. The fact of the matter is, the world will always have Hitlers and Stalins and Mussolinis, and from time to time, they will seize power and make war upon the rest of mankind.
What'll happen if the US gets rid of nukes?
Absolutely no one else will. It's great propaganda to point at the US and say, "Mommy, the big bad imperialists won't give up their nukes! So, uh, we need to keep ours! Waah, we're the good guys!" It's either an absolute line of horse shit, or the leaders of those countries have lost their marbles entirely.
Foreign policy is a great thing to change. The world could use fewer pointless wars. But sooner or later, mankind will be threatened once again (It tends to happen every few centuries, y'know?) and god help us if the nations who will stand against the foes of man are waving white flags and crying about peace when that time comes.
For sources, all it takes is a Google search; is that too difficult:
USSR's call for disarmament
Non-proliferation treaty's requirement for nuclear powers to disarm
*stan nuclear free zone (and US hypocrisy)
Jesus. What a mind job. So he was there to save the world. What do you say to something like that?
"The USSR, when it existed, several times suggested getting rid of all nuclear weapons. The US rejected their proposals."
This never happened. I don't even have to cite a source on this one. I would like to point out that at least as current as Yeltsin, Russia still had a first strike nuclear doctrine. Russia's nuclear arsenal has dwindled rapidly, however due to economic issues and the hard work of Senator Lugar and his Nunn-Lugar Cooperative which has been using US tax dollars to PAY the Russians to disarm (on fo the few use of my tax dollars I approve of). Russia's current nuclear arsenal is used as deterrant towards China, North Korea, and Iran (cited from Jane's and CDI)
" The nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires that nuclear powers work towards nuclear disarmament. The US rejects all proposals calling for nuclear disarmament."
The NNP Treaty actually has three parts: non-proliferation, disarmament, and the right to peacefully use nuclear tech. Part one allows for all of the then current nuclear powers to remain so. Those nations just happen to be the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council. The rule states that those nations will not give the technology to any other nation and will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation (although France, the US, and Britain have recently said "rogue states" are fair game.). Part two deals with disarmament. The US has decreased it's stockpile considerably and continues to do so. The Bush administration was the first to try and reverse this although they seem to have had that idea squashed in Congress. The NNP specifically states that disarmament is voluntary and any nation may opt out for a time if they have a perceived threat that necessitates it. I, and a hell of a lot of my fellow citizens, think we do. The idea of the treaty was to reduce pressure on other nations to develop their own weapons in response to perceived "pressure" from nuclear powers to do so. It has worked so far but more needs to be done. To say the US has not reduced it's stockpile is bull, however.
" Presently, 4 of the Central Asian *stan countries are organizing to declare themselves a "nuclear free zone" forbidding all nuclear weapons from their territory. What country is working diplomatically and is pressuring them to scuttle the nuclear free zone idea? The US."
The Central Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (CANNWFZ) is being opposed by the US, France, and the UK on grounds that four of the nations are part of the 1992 Tashkent Collective Security Treaty with Russia which requires Russian nuclear weapons to be used in the event of ANY hostilities as aid to those nations. The CANWFZ specifically allows that treay to stay put. So even though those nations agree to not develop or deploy nuclear on their soil, they are, by proxy, armed with nuclear weapons. It's a have "your cake and eat it, too" situation. The nations involved with the treay are in the lousy position of possibly pissing off both Russia and the US which are both working partners in the region. I do believe this will be resolved as some concessions where made just this year with the treaty and that the US will sign on, but only after tensions with Iran, a neighboring nation, subside a little. The US has signed three other NWFZ treaties and is, at least in spirit, for the idea.
"Considering the US has the most nuclear weapons, engages in the most wars, threatens non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons, other countries have an incentive to develop nukes. The ironic thing is that only the US has hundreds of thousands of Marines that can be deployed and a strong worldwide military deployment capability -- eliminating nukes will not weaken that capability."
You are mostly correct in the beginning of that statement. By most estimates, Russia still has the most nuclear weapons. The US has more ICBM's. Russia lacks delivery methods for most of it's arsenal, though. There is a real effort and pressure to reduce our stockpile not only of nuclear but of chemical weapons as well. I
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Glad you brought that up, I was reading the thread to see if anyone would. Study of history is slowly going away.
Another factor in the decision to use nukes was japan's regular use of biologicals and their known interest and evidence of stockpiling, the US was afraid that they might just unleash them on their own islands if there was an outright invasion (perhaps a rogue military commander, etc), not caring and following the kamikaze spirit and so forth. If they had, the US would have blockaded and continued hitting them as they made more, just to stop the spread, burnt the islands down completely. And to this day, there is some credible evidence that brucelosis derived biological weapons have been released since ww2 (starting in new guinea) and have been slowly creeping around the globe. It is one of those deep secrets from the war that will probably never be fully revealed.
Or so "they" say..
But you've got to acknowledge the psychological effect that a horde of nuclear weapons has as a deterrent against military attacks against the U.S.,
Did that prevent 9/11?
The reality is that without nuclear weapons, no country has the ability to launch an attack on the US. No Navy of any nation could launch any significant attack -- and that's assuming that the US Navy would fail to detect the enemy's approach. Ditto for any nation's air force.
The 700+ overseas military bases that the US maintains could be subject to attack, sure, but that would raise 2 points: (1) are they needed for "defense"? and (2) even nukes don't prevent attacks on overseas US military bases (e.g. base attacks in Saudi Arabia or Lebanon).
and as leverage in negotiating conventions with other nations.
That's a valid point. The US does use those nukes to threaten other countries. No wonder why the US is so hated around the world.
But did our recently disclosed threats to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age actually result in the US winning a real friend and ally? You create enemies by threatening, and with some in the US accusing Pakistan of aiding the Afghani resistance, we've proven the point.
Written back in 1983, as a matter of fact
"Russians & Americans"
-Al Stewart-
"So here we stand at the edge of 1984
Bracing ourselves once again
For the storm approaching as those
Who long before huddled in caves from the rain
The enemy's face is so hard to see
Sometimes it seems that I see him in you
Sometimes in me
Who can he be?
No use consulting the prophets and leaders they all disagree
"Russians and Americans, here's a song for you
Who carry the weight of the world on your heads
Russians and Americans, tell me if it's true
You really believe all the things that you've said
The red-white-and-blue running into the red
"From the wars of Europe, the pilgrim fathers
Set off with their hopes and their bond
Some settled down by the coast, others crossed
The mountains and into the flatlands beyond
From scramble and dust of Muscovite streets
Merchants develop the trade routes,
And open the door to the East.
Pioneer waves
Choked by the cold breath of winter,
Or baked by the heat of the day
"Russians and Americans
Passing through the fire of revolution and coming of age
Russians and Americans
Driven by desire, two players push to the front of the stage
The whole world now watches each move that you make
"Two runners caught in the thrill of the race,
The finishing line is as far as the stars that the satellites chase
Why quicken the pace?
Why does it seem that you choose to lose reason before losing face?
"Russians and Americans
Driven by the past, the third world moves in the shadows you cast
Russians and Americans
Could turn the world to dust, so much to live for, so much undiscussed
So much in common and so little trust
"From the streets of Athens and Rome the voices still echo to crumbling walls
Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall
Forever the changes we still have to face
Some people say that a country is more and idea than a place
Though nothing is safe
We still choose the mark that we leave on the open canvas of space
"Russians and Americans
Maybe you should see into the heart of the world, not its head
Russians and Americans
If you want to be the feet of the world, better mind where you tread,
The footsteps of history are left where you step
"So here we stand at the edge of 1984"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And how exactly would eliminating _all_ nuclear weapons help things?
This seems to imply that the world is safer with nuclear weapons that without.
The US gov't signed and Congress approved a treaty whose goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons. They, and many others, obviously disagree.
If now every nation would get rid of nuclear weapons do you know what would happen? They'd all stard building them right back and the first to finish would win. Only they'd probably have to use them to make the point.
Ludicrous. It would take many nuclear weapons and a massive building program to "win". But this ignores the critical point.
Nuclear inspections work. They worked to enforce the US and USSR's treaties, and they've worked to prevent other countries from building nukes (e.g. Iraq, Iran). The only countries that have built nuclear weapons have done so outside of the non-proliferation treaty's inspection system.
With that said, some have proposed that any global nuclear disarmament treaty have "teeth". Things suggested have included unlimited unannounced inspections of any facility on earth, with an automatic, pre-approved UN mandate for the use of force and economic sanctions on any country refusing the inspections.
But it's all a moot point -- the globe's most militarily aggressive and most heavily armed nuclear power even refuses to discuss nuclear disarmament.
Nothing to say about the graph I supplied which shows a steady decline in the US's nuclear stockpile? Ok then, lets talk about another of your points.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Doesn't sound like much of a nuclear-free zone to me if Russia can still keep their nukes there "under certain circumstances." Hell, even France agrees with us on this one!
End transmission.
And you would trust the soviets to get rid of all their nukes? Could they have gotten rid of them? It has taken years and years and billions to dismantle the tens of thousands of nukes, both in the US and in Russia.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Wasn't it some guy named James T. Kirk?
My big concern is that the current US Administration thinks it's their duty to actually bring about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. If not the current administration, then at least some of the people who vote for them. After all, the main reason for supporting Israel is due to the belief that if the "Holy Land" is not controlled by the Jews at the time of Rapture, all humans will go to hell or Christ won't return or some other nonsense.
3 582,1.html
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/086669.htm
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0420,perlstein,5
Shitdrummer.
We survived the cold war for one reason you'd have to be totally insane to launch, even in retaliation. The Russians saved our asses, someday there will be two America's facing off, then it'll be over.
They're nuts enough to do it.
And you would trust the soviets to get rid of all their nukes? Could they have gotten rid of them?
Sure they could've gotten rid of them! Several US presidents and Congresses approved arms agreements with the USSR (though these weren't complete elimination of nukes) and they worked fairly well.
As to the claim that the USSR never did propose complete nuclear disarmament, they did. Offers were made in the 50s and the US -- which held a large advantage in nukes then -- used the excuse that a regime of inspections needed to be developed before the US would agree. The USSR, given the US aggression, spying, funding of dissidents (etc.), was leery of any inspection system.
But Gorbachev reversed the USSR's position on inspections. On "Jan 15, 1986 In an address to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Premier Gorbachev announces a plan for total nuclear disarmament of the superpowers by the year 2000." (Source) Like other Soviet proposals, the US found another excuse to kill that move toward nuclear disarmament.
All the bombs, buried in your cities... blow up at once.
No one claims responsibility.
Have a nice day.
What it comes down to is that when those first missiles strike, you know it's for real and then the USSR would launch their entire counterstrike. It wasn't just that he knew that the US would never launch so few missiles as a first strike, but that he knew that even if he was wrong, it wouldn't matter: The strike wasn't enough to take out any significant portion of the USSR's arsenal so they could then counterstrike.
The Economist did an excellent article earlier this year (one of their best efforts for a long time in an increasingly mediocre magazine) about the practical difficulties of nuclear disarmament. It's behind their subscription wall, but if you're interested I thoroughly recommend you go get a copy from your local library.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I find it slightly unsettling that this sentiment is so widespread. On the one hand, I do accept that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are exaggerated (the firebombings of cities like Dresden and Tokyo were similarly devasting) and that by their very nature, very large-scale wars must be fought ruthlessly. On the otherhand, I hate the false dichotomy of "Well, obviously we HAD to conquor the Japanese, so it was either nuke 'em or invade 'em." Well no... no, those were not the only two choices. We had already bombed out a great deal of their infrastructure, and their navy was fairly decimated so we could have just surrounded the entire nation with a naval blockade and called it a day. Or, I'm sure they would have agreed to something less than a full surrender--perhaps an agreement that they'll pull out of the most of rest of Asia (might have had to give them a territory or two for appeasement) and then sign a cease-fire.
I'm not being an apologist for Japanese WWII aggression, but it's not like the kingdom of Hawaii peacefully decided to join the USA without any American coersion whatsoever... and as much as people nowadays like to compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, the two are NOTHING alike--the Japanese limited their attack strictly to military targets.
They weren't saints, not by a long shot (see: Rape of Nanking), but they weren't bloodthirsty psychopaths who absolutely needed to be eliminated at all costs. They fought much more viciously than we did (though I would argue perhaps that they only gave official sanction for what usually happened all the time in most Western armies anyway), they were more pragmatic and they didn't respect prisoners of war who didn't have the decency of committing suicide to avoid enemy capture, but don't confuse them with the Nazis--they weren't trying to exterminate anyone. The invasion of Germany was needed to stop the death camps, but where was it written that we MUST invade Japan, other than our sense of outrage at a single attack directed at a military target on an island that we all but conquored ourselves?
If you think the nukes were justified fine; hell, you may very well be right... just stop trying to pretend that we were presented with only two options, both of which involved driving Japan to an unconditional surrender.
The rest of your sentiment I generally agree with--nukes prevented World War III, and possibly World War IV and V as well. On the other hand, if many thousands of ICBMs/SLBMs were exchanged it could easily mean more deaths than all three of those hypothetical wars combined, so I don't think the benefits were so great as to render all hindsight risk analysis pointless--just because it worked for us once doesn't mean we should roll the dice again if, e.g. Iran gets nukes.
I'm still more worried about that than about what a state with citizens and territory might do with nuclear weapons.
Actually you should worry about some states too, not all states are rational. As much of the US, Soviets, and Chinese disagreed, argued, postured, threatened, and occasionally engaged in conventional combat with each other they were basically rational states. No one was suicidal. No one was expecting divine intervention. You can not say that for some states today, Iran for instance. Some of the current leadership believes that a great apocalyptic holy war is coming, and that God will protect the faithful from the weapons of the infidel. They may only support and encourage some of the crazier terrorists you rightfully worry about, but they share many of the same beliefs. The fact that they act on these beliefs primarily through proxies does not make them much less of a danger.
Stanislav Petrov, thank you for saving our llives.
How long will we keep getting lucky
If I kept getting lucky, I wouldn't be reading Slashdot...
"Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives."
Thank you for pointing out something that revisionist historians, from the comfort and safety of a decades-long separation from the events of 1945, have glossed over or ignored in their rush to tar and feather the people who made the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes, as terrible as those attacks were, they did perhaps eventually save millions of American and Japanese lives.
Although estimates for casualties varied greatly, a study commissioned by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and completed by William Shockley (yes, that William Shockley; his accomplishments go far beyond the invention of the transistor) suggested that Operation Downfall, the conquest of Japan, would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities. After the events on Okinawa, in which the civilian population were used as shock troops by the Japanese Army and suffered horrific casualties, the U.S. realized that there was no chance in hell that the Japanese people would just wave the white flag and turn over their sacred homeland to an invasion fleet. The Joint Chiefs realized that not only would Japanese fatalities range between 5 and 10 million, but they were faced with the prospect of years, perhaps decades, of bitter guerilla resistance.
Think the Japanese wouldn't have carried on forever if they hadn't been nuked? Just ask 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda, who finally surrendered in the Phillipines in 1974, twenty-nine years after the end of WW II. Onoda fought a one-man guerilla campaign against the Filipino authorities the entire time, engaging in numerous shootouts with the police and military, eventually killing about thirty people. He was finally contacted by a Japanese student who had gone in search of him, and he refused to accept that hostilities between Japan and the U.S. had long since ceased. He insisted that he would only lay down his weapons if his commander, Major Taniguchi, personally ordered him to do so. The Japanese government eventually located Taniguchi (fortunately still alive, and operating a bookshop for decades) and flew him to Lubang Island, where the 53 year-old Onoda, in his dress uniform, turned over his katana and rifle, which was still in perfect condition after almost 30 years. Get the picture? Now imagine an entire frigging nation of Onodas, much better armed, operating in a much larger area and much more determined not to surrrender. And we're horrified by the relatively puny extent of the Iraqi resistance. An invasion and occupation of Japan is simply not worth thinking about. In an interesting footnote, Onoda became a national hero in Japan for his refusal to give up in the face of unbelievable hardship, wrote a bestseller about his experience, and eventually settled in Brazil to raise cattle. Despite the deaths he had caused on Lubang, the circumstances were taken into consideration by the Phillipine government and he was pardoned by Ferdinand Marcos. In 1996 he revisited Lubang and donated $10,000 to a school on the island.
As a former member of the military (U.S. Army), I adhere somewhat to the philosophy that a nuclear weapon is just another means of killing more people with less effort, and I've always been baffled that there is so much emotionalism attached to the issue. As a former soldier, my view is that the means don't matter, you end up just as dead if you're incinerated in a high-energy flash or if a commando comes through the wire and slips a knife in your kidney. The weapons of mass destruction in Rwanda in 1995 were machetes and axes, and they accounted for between 800,000 and 1 million fatalities. To my recollection no nuclear weapons were used, but had they been, would the outcome have been more horrific for the choice of weapon?
Even at the time
Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Maralinga Atomic Bomb test in South South Australia. Here is a link to a story by local paper The Advertiser
Unexpect the expected!
Indeed, the first-world democracies should get rid of all of their nuclear weapons so that only the cheating psychotic genocidal third-world dictatorships will have them. Then all of humanity can live in peaceful harmony.
The USSR lied... A LOT.
Remember the treaty between the US and USSR not to develop biological or chemical weapons? Funny thing. The US honored the deal, but the USSR went ahead anyway...
The US engages in the most wars because it has become the police-force of the world... The UN doesn't do *anything* unless the US pushes for it, and offers to supply the vast majority of the combat force (and money).
What non-nuclear country has the US ever threatend to nuke?
The incentives to develop atomic weapons won't disappear if the US gets rid of their own nuclear capabilites.
Detractors quietly ignore the fact that, under the last 50 years of US' stewardship, the number of wars in the world has decreased, aggressors have been contained, borders have stopped being redrawn by wars, and the whole world has been in a better situation than ever in the history of the world.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
lots of cash. I wonder how we could all chip in 20 usd and make sure his retirment is comfortable.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Genius Point if you know the reference.
You've got a friend in Japan: http://www.jlist.com
At the time, of course, Hawaii was simply an American territory, like Puerto Rico...
Go ahead, bomb our military base on Puerto Rico, see how we react.
One very important reason to fear the India - Pakistan conflict is that it's small scale, and suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, compared the following reasoning, all hypothetical of course: You could say that during the cold war the whole world population was bedazzled into believing there was a global conflict, they were given something to fear when in fact it was the same world power hegemony controlling both the US and USSR political systems, and this whole Stanislav Petrov event was just an experiment by these powers that be to test just how far Earth is from a catastrophy. I believe, or secretly hope, that if Petrov had acted as expected of him in carrying out his duties, it would have escalated very high, and at the last minute the hegemony would stop the experiment and say ok, we see what happens, enough now, let's stop this experiment. (Running such experiments is extremely high risk, and very many bases need to be covered to make it all failsafe.) The nice thing is that they were in for a marvelous surprise of humanity and caring in action, and basically life on Earth defending itself. Such instincts are very deep rooted. I don't think most "reasonable" people will go along with the "mutually assured destruction doctrine", as in "here we go, we're assuredly destructed, we can see that on the screen, so now it's our turn, let's destruct our attacker too completely, to live up to the contract and to show that nobody messes with us - if I'm going down, then everybody go down with me, if me and my folks ain't surviving then I'm making sure nobody else will" -this would be a very adolescent and childish stance, though it's present in every human being in the form of revenge instincts. In a sense, if I'm going down, at least somebody else lives on, even if it's the misguided enemy, is the survival instinct of life as a whole defending itself, though you need very mature souls to act like this, and in world history you do end up with crazy leaders such as it often happened in the Roman empire, with rulers such as Caligula, Commodus and Nero, basically mentally ill people without a properly reigned in ego, without a religion that provides ego-control and self-control.
So back to the original topic, as long as there is a single hegemony controlling the actions of the US gov't, USSR gov't, the EU, the World Bank, etc, the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophy is nil, and the makebelieve smoke and mirror conflicts can be stopped in time without getting too much out of hand. True conflicts where there are two independent contesting powers not being under the control of the same group can lead the catastrophies. Unfortunately humans by nature love being free beings, and do not easily bear shackles and total control. No matter how long you explain someone that you were born to be a slave, and these are your commanders and superiors, people don't like the idea of being unequals - in a sense I won't take the you're better than me statement, even though I don't mind striving to prove that I'm better than you, but that's hipocrisy and illogical and unsustainable, so the only stable equilibrium here is that of neither of us is better than the other, as far as intrinsic value as a human being goes, even if some of us are better at singing, at basketball, etc. In this sense the existence of a single global hegemony that assures that mutually assured destruction is never activated, the existence of such an entity is undermined by the desire of people trying to be free and equal to each other in essence, as far as the worth as a human being goes. So how can you have a global single entity overseeing everything that happens, without the feeling of oppression by that entity? Makebelieve democracy is a great thing, it makes you believe you elected the leader, so you're not oppressed, you're in charge, while the actual powers that be acting in the background assure world peace at least as long as they have a hand in local appearing out of nowhere situations, which, by the way do take some effort to subdue in a sense and make be und
There is no point in debunking your "facts", other posters have already done a better job. However, you need to realize and understand the point at which your political philosophy becomes a hate philosophy, devoid of all reason and balance and existing entirely to vilify a single nation or group of people. At a certain point, you are no longer a critic of U.S. foriegn policy and you are treading into Protocals of the Elders of Zion territory.
A hint for you - when you see one country or group of people as the root of all evil in the world, you are wrong. You are bigoted. You are an idiot. Just because yours is an impotent rage, and you will never have the power to act on your hate the same way people like Hitler were able to act on theirs, doesn't mean you aren't evil. It just means you are weak and evil. You aren't so much dangerous, as loathsome.
If you want to make the world a better place, I suggest you develop a deeper understanding of history, and a deeper respect for complex issues, than the mindless "Blame America for Everything" mentality that is fashionable among the 'progressive' petty bourgeoisie nowadays.
Consider just how a U.S. naval base came to be located at Pearl Harbor in the first place.
Hawaii was a nation that was petitioning to join the U.S. for decades and was only accepted because the U.S. wanted a forward naval base in the Pacific.
Tensions were building for years, as the U.S. provided assistance to the Chinese Nationalists (whom the Japanese were fighting), and also instituted crippling embargoes against Japan.
Yes, because the rest of the world was ignoring the fact that Japan invaded Manchuria/China/Indochina. But thats not important. We all know WWII only started when Germany invaded Poland right? /sarcasm
the Spanish-American War, and other U.S. aggression in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
The Spanish-American war was due to (somewhat) humanitarian reasons (this was near the end of the Imperial Age) and massive public opinion ("Remember the Maine!"). As for 'other U.S. aggression', theres only been 3 wars between 1800 and WW1. The War of 1812 (which was justified, illegal imprisonment and drafting of U.S. sailors), the Mexican-American War (illegal intrusion into U.S. soil including attacking and killing U.S. soldiers and officers prior to a declaration of war) and the Civil War (which was not a war of 'aggression').
The Japanese were beginning preparations to sure for peace before the U.S. used nuclear weapons.
Uhh... the standing order given by the Japanese military and even the emperor was to fight to death, every last man, woman and child. There are hundreds of documents from U.S. soldiers who were shown suicide boats, weapon caches and tunnel systems during the occupation of Japan.
The American use of the new weapons of mass destruction had more to do with intimidating the Soviet Union than with ending the war with Japan.
Yes, never mind the military statistics AT THE TIME that estimated that over 1 million U.S. casualities would've been incurred to successfully conquer Japan. The Japanese soldiers of WWII make the suicide bombers of today's Middle East look like cowards. Japanese soldiers didn't dress themselves like civilians, there were (very specific) cases of Japanese officers ordering their men to abandon certain areas to avoid civilian casualities and its no secret that nearly every order given to a Japanese soldier was to be considered as a "dead man's mission". ('In the event that you don't recieve new orders, follow your last known orders to the death be it attack, defend, scout or hide.')
They're cheating now? Why can't they just play fair like the rest of us?
There is no USSR call for disarmament in any on the links returned in this search.
Let me get this straight... the USSR makes faulty equipment, then prevents that faulty equipment from making them destroy us. And we're supposed to celebrate this act as heroic??
I thought Slashdot was supposed to be ruthless against companies that make faulty equipment. If Michael Dell ran into your office and unplugged your laptop just before the battery exploded, you think you'd give him a break?
Surely you can't mean humans aren't 'machines'? Why sould we be not be able to build intuition into a machine? How do you think our intuition and common sense work? Magic?
Great film! Fits this subject well
American radar wrongly detects a russian attack and sends off the planes with the nukes to russia, problem comes up and the planes cannot be stopped even after the realization it was a mistake..
Bombs dropped on Moscow, the president of the USA tries to convince Russians that it was an accident, he decides the only way to convince russia (and stop a total nuclear war) was to bomb America itself.. film ends with New York being nuked.. crisis avoided..
23 years ago, parts of the Western LEFT reviled Reagan, and Thatcher and... pretty much any right wing ruler. The protests against the US military and the deployment of nukes in western Europe were limited to a fringe of extreme leftists. President Mitterrand of France, a socialist, supported the US and famously said "protesters are in the West, but warheads are in the East". In short, a large majority supported and trusted the US, a (very vocal) minority protested.
Today, the Iraq venture, the torture memos, the Guantanamo circus etc... are making lots of people, left AND right, very nervous about where the US is going as a nation.
You are right to compare Reagan and Clinton. Each was (undeservedly) hated and reviled by the opposing party. Bush is a completely different matter. Even people from his side distrust him : Colin Powell, Richard Clarke, Gen. Shoomaker...
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
An Invasion Not Found in the History Books
by James Martin Davis
Deep in the recesses of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., hidden for nearly four decades lie thousands of pages of yellowing and dusty documents stamped "Top Secret". These documents, now declassified, are the plans for Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan during World War II. Only a few Americans in 1945 were aware of the elaborate plans that had been prepared for the Allied Invasion of the Japanese home islands. Even fewer today are aware of the defenses the Japanese had prepared to counter the invasion had it been launched. Operation Downfall was finalized during the spring and summer of 1945. It called for two massive military undertakings to be carried out in succession and aimed at the heart of the Japanese Empire.
In the first invasion - code named Operation Olympic - American combat troops would land on Japan by amphibious assault during the early morning hours of November 1, 1945 - 50 years ago. Fourteen combat divisions of soldiers and Marines would land on heavily fortified and defended Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese home islands, after an unprecedented naval and aerial bombardment.
The second invasion on March 1, 1946 - code named Operation Coronet - would send at least 22 divisions against 1 million Japanese defenders on the main island of Honshu and the Tokyo Plain. It's goal: the unconditional surrender of Japan. With the exception of a part of the British Pacific Fleet, Operation Downfall was to be a strictly American operation. It called for using the entire Marine Corps, the entire Pacific Navy, elements of the 7th Army Air Force, the 8 Air Force (recently redeployed from Europe), 10th Air Force and the American Far Eastern Air Force. More than 1.5 million combat soldiers, with 3 million more in support or more than 40% of all servicemen still in uniform in 1945 - would be directly involved in the two amphibious assaults. Casualties were expected to be extremely heavy.
Admiral William Leahy estimated that there would be more than 250,000 Americans killed or wounded on Kyushu alone. General Charles Willoughby, chief of intelligence for General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific, estimated American casualties would be one million men by the fall of 1946. Willoughby's own intelligence staff considered this to be a conservative estimate.
During the summer of 1945, America had little time to prepare for such an endeavor, but top military leaders were in almost unanimous agreement that an invasion was necessary.
While naval blockade and strategic bombing of Japan was considered to be useful, General MacArthur, for instance, did not believe a blockade would bring about an unconditional surrender. The advocates for invasion agreed that while a naval blockade chokes, it does not kill; and though strategic bombing might destroy cities, it leaves whole armies intact.
So on May 25, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after extensive deliberation, issued to General MacArthur, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and Army Air Force General Henry Arnold, the top secret directive to proceed with the invasion of Kyushu. The target date was after the typhoon season.
President Truman approved the plans for the invasions July 24. Two days later, the United Nations issued the Potsdam Proclamation, which called upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or face total destruction. Three days later, the Japanese governmental news agency broadcast to the world that Japan would ignore the proclamation and would refuse to surrender. During this sane period it was learned -- via monitoring Japanese radio broadcasts -- that Japan had closed all schools and mobilized its schoolchildren, was arming its civilian population and was fortifying caves and building underground defenses.
Operation Olympic called for a four pronged assault on Kyushu. Its purpose was to seize and control the southern one-third of that island and establish naval and air bases, to tighten the nava
It wasn't just folks who were funded by the KGB that were scared of Ronnie Reagan. Remember President Reagan's joke broadcast on radio when he thought the mike was turned off?
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (August 1984).
This got re-broadcast in the mainstream media around the world (I heard it on the BBC) and heck it scared lots of people. This guy was insane, he really really wanted to bring down nuclear war on us all. Parent poster is right there was a lot of negative feeling in Europe about Reagan and the US postioning in the 80s. Probably the other posters are right - the anti-American feelings were (and still are) probably a lot to do with the fact that people desperately *want* to believe in the USA and are so disappointed when their leaders come out with nothing better than the corrupt and hypocritical rubbish spouted by other tin pot dictators round the world.
There are two myths in the above, one obvious and one less so.
Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I was under the impression that the above has been debunked pretty heavily, but I guess there are people who still need to believe.
If the number of deaths by war were plotted over the course of human history you would see a a line that increased every year and each year the increase grew steeper.
No, you would see definite fluctuations, with high 'plateaus', spikes, and quiet periods. For example, the latter half of the 1800s contains a massive sustained high -- the Taiping war, with a bit of help from the American Civil War and some others. The first few decades of the 1800s are very high too, whereas the 18th century, despite some decorative European wars, is very very quiet -- no Mongols, no Jihads, and most importantly no major wars in China (which is the main driver of war deaths).
What Heinlein said about 'always looking for the facts'.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Your post is nothing but illogical ranting and raving.
Clever signature text goes here.
The US and Russia set off 100's if not 1000's?
Ok, one who wants to try and prove their point. Why don't you have an EXACT number of above ground tests VS some handwaving number?
To give a range of 200 to 9999 tells me you don't actual know.
In the quest of man to convert material into energy, some boffins used genetic modifications on klebsiella planticola so it would produce alcohol. Because Elaine Ingham actually tested the damn GMed bacteria she determined it was toxic to the biosphere.
Dr Ingham said she had independently tested the bacteria on plants, which the regulatory
authority had failed to do.
"After seven days, all wheat plants turned into slime."
Google search on the bacteria
Nuclear disarmament is a joke. Both the USSR and the US only decommissioned their old, outdated weapons. Ones they would have had to get rid of anyway due to warhead and propelant shelf-life. Sure, we many have less by volume today, but the actual warhead power and modern "distribution" systems more than make up for the deficiency.
Bipartisan legislation funded securing weapons in the ex-Soviet Union.
That was smart national security thinking and did more to keep us safe from terrorists with WMD than, well, pick your favorite example.
Various people keep getting in the way: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_03/Lugar.asp .
Because both the United States and Russia blew up hundreds, if not thousands of atomic and hydrogen bombs during testing?
The thing to remember is that from a human point of view, not all places are equal. A temperate site near a river with regular and moderate rainfalls is greatly more useful than a ice-scorched plain of arctic permafrost or a sun blasted desert. Humans, who are adaptable and clever can live in those places, so there is no danger of species extinction. But clearly, we have colonized the most useful places on the planet, and have mixed our labor with them to create vast pools of civilization capital.
What I'm trying to say is this: place matters.
Those bombs, used in a nuclear war, wouldn't be targetted at places deliberately chosen to have the minimum impact. Leaving aside "counter-force" strikes, they are targetted to achieve the greatest damage possible to that part of human society occupying the "enemy" country. I put "enemy" in quotes because looked at from the post-war side, residents of the countries engaged in nuclear war will feelgreater kinship with each other than there former leaders.
Another thing to remember is that the Earth is full of dynamic processes, many of which release energy into the environment, and a few of which even release radiation (radon spurs). A typical thunderstorm is equal to a Hiroshima sized bomb in its energy output. However, it releases that energy over thousands of square miles and several days, not in milliseconds in the space of a cubic yard or so. Even so, if you had the knack of being at just the point where individual bolts of lightning strike, you probably wouldn't survive long. It's the fact that we mostly deal with those strikes averaged over a huge area and long time, not in the split second at the poitn of contact, that makes human life adaptable to the fact of thunderstorms. We adapt to energy and radiation that is released at moderate rates when averaged over the places that are significant to us.
So, what I'm saying is not only place, but rates, and the geographic concentration of events that fall in those places, that matter.
Putting this together, it's quite probable that a thousand nuclear bombs detonated in the course of war that lasts a few hours could destroy civilization, even if those same warheads detonated in remote places over the course of decades did not.
Yet even so, there is no danger of human extinction. Between pardise and an environment so poisoned by nuclear fallout that human life is simply not possible, there are infinite gradations, although many of them can fairly be described as "living hells". But living they would remain. It is possible that a future chronicler of our species would have seen the war averted by Col Petrov as a signficant, but not cataclysmic event in the history of our species. Perhaps our population and technology levels would be set back one or two thousand years, put in the context of a civilization that is about 5000-6000 years old, and a species that is 200,000 years old. In other words, losing about 40% of the temporal gains of our civilization, and about 1% of the gains of our species.
This kind of thinking used to be known as "thinking the unthinkable". It is possible to construct scenarios under which we recoup much of the losses in a relatively short time, given adequate preparation. Some of these scenarios are even plausible, if not likely, given adequate preparation. From the point of view of our species, we would suffer a misfortune, but not a cataclysm.
The problem with the "thinking the unthinkable" mode of thought is that it ignores the fact none of us as individuals experience the fate of our species. We only experience our own fates. A nuclear war that is a bearable setback for the species is comprised of billions of individual cataclysms.
We must not forget that when remember what the Colonel has done for us, if not our species.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
"Thus, on 2 November 1983, as Soviet intelligence services were attempting to detect the signs of a nuclear strike, NATO began to simulate one. The exercise, codenamed Able Archer, spanned Europe and simulated European command and communications procedures during a nuclear war."
Or hows about Cuba? As American moved nukes into Turkey, the Soviets moved missles into Cuba. Seems the only people who wanted to turn the cold war hot was the Americans.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Sure, WOPR could retaliate with a full nuclear strike against the Soviets, but what would that accomplish? Nobody would 'Win' in any sense of the word. Both nations would be devastated. The point of the line 'The only winning move is not to play' is that a nuclear war can not be won. If nobody plays, then nobody loses.
Abdul Kalam India missile man has led his country to be a Nuclear Weapon State after Pokharan 2. It's all happen when he tested the explosions on 11th and 13th May 1998 at Pokhran,India.He turns to be an ideal for the people of India and make the world to admire him.
Yeah, about that... Funny thing, but the US ALSO lies. A lot. Hate to burst your bubble there, kiddo.
Remember that weaponised Anthrax that was mailed to Congress? Courtesy of Fort Detrick.
Don't forget to thank them.
Oooooh ooooh!! I can't wait to get the glowing green "My Little Pony Fallout Edition!"
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
I could make the point that it's easier to keep a few atomic weapons then build new ones, and inspections wouldn't find them. But that doesn't leave room for debate
I can't say if atomic weapons can be build in secret. My gut feeling tells me they can. Think about China, or US, or even Japan. All are big enough so that a large well funded, distributed project could go undetected. Not every country is Irak.
Anyways, I wanted to say something else. Someone before us mentiones something about how conflicts grew in number of casualties all over our history, until the end of WW2, the likely reason beeing big powers avoided was for fear of a nuclear conflict. Now, imagine trying to enforce a no-nuclear pact against China. 1 bilion people, a quarter of a _BILION_ potential army. If they wanted to build anything, they could. Trying to stop them, succesful or not, would be the most bloody affair since WW2. Same with US, Russia, India, Japan, etc.
How about if Germany made a few nukes? US would try to invade, but who do you think the rest of Europe would side with? WW3?
This "disarmament with teeth" sounds ok on paper, but it's nor enforceable except against Irak and (we'll see) Iran.
The US gov't signed and Congress approved a treaty whose goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons. They, and many others, obviously disagree.
I don't know the text or the context, but i'll go on a limb and say they didn't mean to get rid of _all_ nukes. The big problem with the cold war was not the mere danger of using nuclear weapons: we used them before and with arguably good results. The real problem was that the number and the power of existing weapons could destroy all life on Earth a few times over. That is what all those treaties are trying to fix.
Plus, it's too expensive to keep 20.000 nukes when you can keep 1000 and sleep just as well.
Nuclear inspections work. They worked to enforce the US and USSR's treaties, and they've worked to prevent other countries from building nukes (e.g. Iraq, Iran).
If i were you I wouldn't mention Irak, considering it was invaded while the head of UN inspectors was saying on CNN they didn't find anything. This is a big example of how the inspections didn't work, not in the sense they didn't find what they were supposed, but that they weren't trusted enough to prevent war - which is ultimately their job.
And finaly:
This seems to imply that the world is safer with nuclear weapons that without.
Hell yes, i meant it. I'm pretty sure Eastern Europe where I live would have seen war the past 50 years if it weren't for the cold war. Which means my parent may have already died, and I wouldn't write this. So yes, I feel quite safe with nuclear weapons.
I wonder, where do you live? US maybe? That would explain a lot. I just thought a US citisen is really threatened only by a nuclear attak. Right now (and for the past 50 years) they were quite safe from anything else. The rest of us, on the other hand, know that war on home ground is a possibility.
Also, without nuclear weapons there would be no balance - US would clearly be the best military power.
Well, I think ever since George Bush instated the Pre-emptive Nuclear First Strike Doctrine, the rest of the world is more than a little bit on edge about americans and trusting them with nuclear weapons. Especially since US Congress decided to finance the development of new ones, and USA is openly advocating for their use in "environmentally friendly" bunker busters.
_ 8022.html
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3221conplan
US Nuclear First Strike Doctrine Is Operational
Iraq was flattened for not having WMDs, Iran is going to be flattened if they don't have any. North Korea is being pussyfooted for having them. US is threatening first strike with Nuclear Weapons on non-nuclear armed countries, thereby making public ridicule of Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, not to mention selling nuclear tech to India, which NPT denies.
All in all: the writing on the wall is clear. You are not safe from US unless you have nuclear weapons, because USA is prepared to use them first against even you if you don't have any. NPT will not protect you, nor will it guard your rights to use nuclear technology, nor will USA respect it by disarming it's own nuclear weapons, on the contrary USA is breaking the treaty by threatening others with their use and building more.
The world is going to be nuclear armed to the teeth in a decade or two.
"A Nuke in Every Nation" is just the logical progression from "A Gun in Every Home". Which doesn't work very well at preventing much -- people still break into other people's homes and don't get shot, and people still get shot by intruders in their own homes. Why should we expect the bigger version be any more successful?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The Association of World Citizens presented a special World Citizen Award to Colonel Stanislav Petrov on May 21, 2004. The award ceremony was held at the headquarters of the Moscow News, Russia's leading liberal newspaper.Thank You, Douglas Mattern by recognising back the person who save the world. Thank You Petrov once again.
Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov is the person to be grateful on his act during September 26, 1983. Thank You.
By all accounts based on this testimony there's one person we probably can't depend on helping "save the world."
Journalists must stop claiming that any and every story which occured between 1945 and 1990 "was the height of the cold war".
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Kudos to the Crazy Ivan in question but doesn't the "20" article have anything more recent? The first dozen are from the 1960's. And there's nothing like an article on nukes to bring out the conspiracy theorists and CND (hey, remember them?!) fruitcakes. But I guess no one wants to discuss redundancy, failsafes, nuclear strategy when you sit in an armchair and quote "the sum of all fears". It was on TeeVee, it's PROOF!! lol
Yeah the US has funded and executed the dismantling of the USSR warheads. Not a likely scenario in the 60s.
History has favored 'baby steps'
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
like he didn't "Save the World" so much as "Not act like a nut and destroy the world".
Not that I don't appreciate him NOT launching nukes against the US and vaporizing me, but I think we could easily point out dozens if not hundreds of examples of cool heads prevailing in tense situations that might have lead to Global Thermonuclear War. I'm very glad he reacted the way he reacted, but he didn't "Save the World". To say he did is a bit of a misnomer, and tends to devalue the concept of saving the entire planet. (Something which can be said to have not been done yet, as no Planet-wide catastrophe has yet been imminent.)
So, Thank you for not starting a Nuclear war, now get back to work.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Why is he a hero? Because he "averted a potential nuclear war by refusing to believe that the United States had launched missiles against the USSR, despite the indications given by his computerized early warning systems." Given this, how many among us are heroic enough to not believe what information the computer is feeding us?
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What is commonly forgotten about that joke is that it was part of a MIC TEST. Reagan had been asked to speak into the mic so that the broadcasters could check thier mic levels so he would sound OK. Reagan pretended to start his speech for the mic test and made that ridiculous statement. It got a fair amount of laughter from the people present.
Of course, many of the liberals in the main stream media are quite humorless, and a few decided to broadcast the mic test as an actual statement by Reagan to try and make him look like a nut. It got plenty of air play at the time, and since there was no Fox News (IE: Alternate Viewpoint News Media) or Internet to allow the public to get at the truth, many people thought it WAS real. It caused real panic for some people until it was revealed as a Mic test and a joke.
It stands out as a fine example of irresponsible journalists putting politics before simply reporting facts.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Go ahead, bomb our military base on Puerto Rico, see how we react.
We only recently gave up bombing Puerto Rico ourselves. Having someone else do it would be redundant.
KFG
You're a freaking moron and, probably, a traitor. If you like to think that the threat CREATED BY THE SOVIET UNION because of the inadaquacy they felt after WWII (you know, where we kicked the German's ass all over the world while they barely stopped that at the gates to Moscow) was our fault why not go live the country formerly known as the Soviet Union. I'm sure they'd love to have you comrade.
It's this type of knee jerk America hate by liberal idiots that has put us in the situation we're in right now. Some commie show's he has 1/2 a brain and managed to show up to work only moderately hung over and you want to worship him. You're free to do as you like (because of America not in spite of it) but I'll stick with apple pie and America.
from SLASHDOT, fbartho:
fbartho! I award you this gift "baskette" and a 50-dollar gift-certificate for Best Buy. Best Buy! Woof!
From the article:
Australian Democrat MP Sandra Kanck said the Maralinga tests took an appalling toll on the local Maralinga people and poisoned a large chunk of Australian bush for the next 250,000 years.
This kind of ignorant political pandering to the cult of doomsday environmentalists is sickening. Hiroshima, a city hit directly by a nuclear weapon, has no residual radiation, "no genetic damage was detected in children conceived after the blasts", and "American scientists sweeping Hiroshima with Geiger counters a month after the explosion to see if the area was safe for occupation troops found a devastated city but little radioactivity". Within three months of the bomb the city was being rebuilt.
Even Chernobyl, a land-level disaster, killed fewer than 100 people, and despite the claimed massive amounts of radiation in the area and hundreds of thousands of years worth of radioactive pollution, wildlife there is thriving better than ever. Human population in a particular area does far more damage to the health of an ecosystem than ANY nuclear weaponry ever has.
Nuclear weapons and accidents are bad, no doubt about it, but the evidence in the wild completely contradicts the ignorant statements that areas are "poisoned for 250,000 years".
RST
almost, it means attack first
During a Cold War and a huge nuclear arms buildup, do you really think it's wise and appropriate to joke about bombing Russia? Especially coming from the person who actually has the ability to initiate it? It would be like making bomb jokes while on a plane flight today.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Further, your argument which attempts to dress up the made-in-China Walmart phenomenon into a formulated act of benevolent mercy rather than a display of rampant greed is faulty for exactly that reason.
As well, to say that the nations the U.S. has made into enemies du jour are engaged in a world-wide propaganda campaign but that the West, with its billion televisions, news papers and movie screens is not. . , this is a viewpoint resulting from severe tunnel vision.
The basic notion that "There Are Bad Guys We Need To Defend Ourselves Against" is a very well promoted concept which is reinforced with false-flag maneuvers. Now that is propaganda. Police do appear to be necessary in our day-to-day lives, but deliberately creating criminals and crimes in order to divert unnecessary wealth and power to those enforcers is foolish.
No, not all Americans are evil. But the ones in charge of dispensing the marching orders and writing checks on the public purse are.
The notion that problems can be solved by bombing cities and killing civilians is broken.
-FL
You are obviously not from Texas.
It would be like saying Washington when talking about the US. It may be a subset of the whole, but it was the controlling subset.
Learn to love Alaska
Thanks to Stanli.
BTW, there are countries who had developed anti-nuclear weapon in secret already.
If it is an American territory, it's America.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There is no economic gain in doing so.
Everything happening in the mid-east points to economic gain for the war industry.
IRAQ is not a war, it is a business. A business where someon else pays your employees, many of which die on the job.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the same manner that if I own a home and a van my van is my home. . .oh, wait.
It's a very pretty river though. People come from all over the world to see it.
KFG
Sure he made a joke, maybe an innapropriate one. I swear to logic though, you need to put down the Rube Goldberg device for shifting responsibility. Realize that if that was unwise and inappropriate to say that in the first place (I am not saying that it is, only that you say that it is), then it was unbelievably even more moronic to publicise it to the world. Compound that with the fact that the people who heard it in the studio knew without a doubt that it was a joke and specifically not meant for broadcast, and yet had the malicious forethought to make sure that everyone who heard it broadcast had no such assurances.
I will surmise that doing that is so stupid that no stupid person would be caught dead doing it. The only other answer is malice. And the malice associated with that kind of action (orders of magnitude more serious than cracking a joke) speaks volumes about the mental state of people who would broadcast such a thing.
As for your analogy, it would be more like the pilot of the plane telling a joke to his copilot about a bomb. Then a flight attendant records the punchline plays it over the intercom completely out of context.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Just imagine: no Microsoft Windows(tm) at all! And probably no (tm), too!
*Sigh* Yes, we had to give them our dead hand system. We had to give them computers and nukes and jets and rockets, too.
Thanks to us the Soviets got to space and the Japanese make reliable gear.
Soon we will be finished with teaching the Middle East how to live, and the world will be perfect.
Google for "American early warning system" and "false nuke alarm due to the rising moon" for one of a thousand hilarious systems we must have imported from the Soviets for some inexplicable reason.
Lies about crimes
There's a ton of material out there about Reagan's links to Pat Robertson and the Millennial Dispensationalist movement. Do some research. The joke (which we knew was a joke) just unintentionally illustrated his mindset and got a lot of memorable mainstream media airplay.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It's one thing to think your national leaders are incompetent and wish to revolt against them. It's quite another to have a foreign power invade your country. All your leadership analysis aside, individual Japanese had (and still have) very strong national pride and would have fought extremely hard to resist an invasion. We learned this lesson in Korea, we learned it in Vietnam, and we're learning it in Iraq--even if a populace hates their government, they will hate an invading army even more. I can't stand our president in the U.S., I voted against him and I wish he were out of office tomorrow. But if a foreign power invaded I would pick up a rifle and die wielding it rather than allow the U.S. to be invaded. Regardless of any ongoing diplomatic negotiations.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If the only missles in first wave target command and control and are EMS-pulse based, it will wipe out the most of response capability without enemy's expecting it.
Meanwhile in reality, the message is quite different.
North Korea announce they're building nuclear weapons. Nothing happens, the USA makes some saber-rattling noises but doesn't act.
Pakistan announce they're building nuclear weapons, and carry out tests. Nothing happens.
India announce they're building nuclear weapons too, and carry out tests. Nothing happens.
China announce they're building nuclear weapons, and carry out tests. Nothing happens.
Iran announce that they're building nuclear processing facilities. Nothing happens. The US makes saber-rattling noises again, but doesn't act.
Iraq promises not to build any nuclear weapons, and submits to UN inspections to ensure that they don't. The USA bombs the crap out of them, invades and occupies them.
Given recent history, if I were in charge of a country, I'd be working towards getting some nuclear weapons as soon as possible, just to protect against US invasion.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You have a typo there. That should read the UN
The ironic thing is that only the US has hundreds of thousands of Marines that can be deployed and a strong worldwide military deployment capability
More BS. From wikipedia:
the US Pentagon's publicly stated goal of complete, worldwide military superior
Duh!
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires that nuclear powers work towards nuclear disarmament. The US rejects all proposals calling for nuclear disarmament.
Actually, not quite The relevant text is:
The US does reject all "proposals" for the US to unilaterally disarm, and rightfully so. One side disarming is not an effective measure to cessation of the nuclear arms race and disarmament. Despite that there have been several cases where the US did unilaterally make significant reductions in nuclear weapon strength.
In 1981 US President Reagan announced a plan for a negotiated withdrawal of all intermediate range missiles from Europe. The Soviets balked and refused, eventually leading to the end of the concept. Why did the Soviets not want it? They already had some 1100+ missiles in place versus the US' zero. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher (that would be Britain, not the US) openly admitted later that she "had always disliked the original INF 'zero option'" and that she "had gone along with it in the hope that the Soviets would never accept.". West German leaders also were very opposed to it.
Further, in 1986 Gorbachev called for the total elimination of nukes. Reagan agreed, and talks were underway. But as always the devil is in the details. The sticking point was SDI. The Soviets did not want the US to be able to stop missiles, the US did. There is a lot of depth around SDI the public has always been ignorant of, but not through deceit.
A missile defense system (vs. ICBMs) will have a given percentage of success. Let us for sake of discussion say we could eliminate 55% of the existing Soviet warheads. If you are the Soviets that means in order to have the same strike capability you will need to more than double your ICBM count. This was unacceptable for them. Further, if the quantity of threats decreases, most systems will actually increase their effectiveness. So the combination of warhead reduction and a US defense system was entirely unacceptable because it made their nuclear arsenal nearly worthless as a weapons system. If the US system was capable of destroying say 30K of the Soviet 60K of warheads, and you reduce warhead count to less than 30K, the chances are you won't get many warheads through. If the number drops to 15K, chances are you won't get more than one through if you even get one through. Thus, you are not a nuclear threat to the US, and sabre-rattlig (somethign the SU did a *lot* of) is not effective.
Now, if the goal is the elimination of all nuclear weapons, this isn't a problem, is it? By this time, the Soviet Union had already broken nuclear treaties such as SALT-I. The particular bit of near-irony here is that they broke the anti-ballistic missile defense portions of it.
Further, the US, through Reagan, advocated heavily the elimination of short range nuclear weapons. There was much support from Japan, and eventually Eruopean leaders. But not the Soviets. Why? the Soviets had thousands of them (SS-20 missiles, IIRC).
At the peak of the "nuc
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
So you are a conspiracy nut who things the U.S. Govenment is out to kill its own citizens to initiate a failed attempt to start a war?
While the Anthrax may be a strain that originated at Fort Detrick, there is absolutely no proof to suggest that President Bush (or anybody else in the military heirarchy) was deliberately ordering the assassination of members of the U.S. Congress or trying to kill anybody else for that matter.
Had it been something officially ordered, it would have been played up considerably more, and been done much more effectively. At best, it was one lone nut job who merely had access somehow to the Anthrax and decided to take advantage of that access and do something terrible. Just like the Unibomber or Tim McVeigh. Nothing more.
In addition, neither was any real change done to day to day life except a bunch of very expensive machines build and sold to the U.S. Government to be used by the USPO. While it might give a couple of postal workers cancer 20 years from now, it otherwise has not affected day to day life in America. War was not declared on any country or even soldiers sent into a country due to the Anthrax attacks. It still isn't completely clear who even sent the letters in the first place. Had it been a deliberate conspiracy of the Bush administration, it is likely that there would have been considerable follow up to set up blame for some country, like North Korea or Iran. That never happened.
In addition, like all of the garbage that Al Queida does as well, there was no follow through to sustain the effort. 9/11 was in some ways quite effective, but to have the bombings on that scale and nothing else since just shows how utterly inept most of even the "smart ones" are at military matters. Had bombings and anthrax been occuring in the USA on a regular basis for the past five years there might be some justification for even some moderate fear. As it stands, they show themselves to be the true idiots they have demonstrated themselves to be.
Not that I'm ungrateful, but we're honoring him for not causing total anihillation? Usually, we honor heroes for preventing someone else from destroying the world, not just from refraining from doing it ourselves.
I guess it's somewhat related to Jesus "saving" us -- from Hell, I assume? Yeah, thank you Jesus for not letting your Father burn us in the fires of Hell forever. Oh, wait, you are your father? Never mind...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
"The comparison with dictators is therefore not really apt. Hitler and Stalin had no such assurance of destruction hanging over their heads,..."
No matter how far removed from reality either of them were, Stalin had to at least consider the possibility of destruction and annihilation. ...and in Hitler's case that notion was rather
well justified, wasn't it?
"...and it's probable that they discounted any future possibility of punishment for their actions."
Neither of the above had a rational grasp of actions and consequences, which is the same argument we could make about a LOT of people who hold so much power over other people.
No, the gatling gun was invented toward the end of the U.S. Civil War, not before it even started. While it did see some minor action in the Civil War, it was still considered an experimental weapon at the time and didn't see widespread usage by the U.S. Army until well after the war ended.
In fact, it wasn't until the Spanish-American War that it was regularly used in any large scale military action, by which time the Spanish also had similar weapons.
In addition, this gun required an entire squad of soldiers to maintain or even fire, was incredibly prone to break downs, and was incredibly bulky and heavy to transport. That does not make a good offensive weapon for any military organization. It was good to have as a defensive weapon, however, and it was used during the later part of the 19th Century in exactly that manner. Major fortification that had these weapons in the USA, however, never came under attack to see them used.
Where the squad automatic machine gun (the general class of weapons of which the Gatling Gun is a part) really showed its true horror was during World War I, where they were used extensivly due to refinements in their manufacturing process and improvements in metalurgy to make them light enough to be carried to the battle front. And millions of people died from guns like this because it was nearly impossible to overwhelm defenses with multiple machine guns supporting each other by ordinary infantry or calvary. New weapons like chemical artilery shells, tanks, airplanes, and shoulder launched missiles were developed to overcome the advantages of machine guns.
In the case of nukes, the firepower is so overwhelming that the strategy of increasing fire power or even building defenses against the weapons has become something of a joke. And the social taboo against using nuclear weapons has grown so much that it is in a way a sort of religion.
I will admit, however, that I hope they never get used in open warfare again. Unfortunately, as with the example presented here with the Gatling Gun, once it is developed and available for military generals to use, it seems likely that eventually they will be used, even if it isn't used by the country that first developed it to any major degree.
You'll also have to forgive us for forgetting it's the "United Kingdom" since you don't actually have a king (and haven't for longer than most /.'ers have been alive) -- don't get me wrong; I'm sure the Queen's a nice lady and all (probably my personal favorite currently-living monarch) but shouldn't you have, even temporarily, adopted the name "United Queendom" (since you're so concerned with accuracy and all?)
Wow. $1000 for saving the world. It's no wonder nobody else wants that job.
Hmmm, my father was born in Hawaii and predates Hawaiian statehood and even WWII by a couple of years. He was on a Honolulu street corner selling newspapers when Japanese planes flew overhead on their way to Pearl Harbor. I can assure you, he has considered himself American his whole life. He got drafted into the American Army during the Korean Conflict, which predates Hawaiian statehood.
I don't know how the rest of the mainland US felt at the time but the residents of Hawaii considered themselves a part of America in 1941.
I appreciate that you want to contribute to the historical discussion, but you might want to check on the Wikipedia article I linked to, which says that the gun was invented in 1861 (the same year the Civil War started). The weapon was first used in 1862, less than halfway into the war.
As far as I know, there is also significant debate as to whether a Gatling-style weapon could even be classified as a machine gun. The major difference between the two is that a machine gun has just a single barrel that would overheat and break if fired at similar rates as Gatling weaponry. The Gatling weapons, of course, have multiple barrels that allow for better cooling and a greatly increased rate of fire. I believe the Vulcan-class 20 mm Gatlings are still being used on F-16's and on attack helicopters.
One thing I neglected to point out while I was so high on my horse is that, as we all know, the U.S. has actually used nuclear weapons in a time of war, and has the dubious distinction of being the only nation ever to do so. And that happened despite compelling evidence that it was not even necessary:
taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima
At least this kind of stuff is still going on--it does offer hope.
"There is an argument for saying the war was a mistake, but irrational, no."
As others have already pointed out, even at the time of the decision there was no solid information to support this, only veiled hints about incriminating intelligence. But that intelligence could not lead the weapons inspectors to a shred of proof of the existence of those WMD, so even at the time it was not rational to place too much weight on it.
It was universally accepted that he had WMD, he actually used it on the Kurds. The cease fire for the first Gulf War *required* him to get rid of it under UN supervision. He *refused* to do so, all he had to do was let inspectors watch as he disposed of it. Given this the question is not "does he have it", the question is "did he get rid of it". The inspectors could not prove the later, all we had was Saddam's word for it. It was rational to assume he still had it, i.e. err on the side of caution. Which is what you want to do when estimating the capabilities of an enemy, *especially* in a post 9/11 world where you get crucified for underestimating capabilities.
Moreover, it was very suspicious that during the discussion the arguments to go to war changed (WMD, Al Quada, dispose an evil dictator were all used), but the remedy was always the same: war.
Not really. You confuse the motivation for going to war with what to sell the international community. WMD, dictator, terrorist support, ongoing attacks on Amercans, failure to comply with cease fire, etc were all valid motivations. WMD was focused on because that was the easy sell.
The vast majority of U.S. public debt is in the form of Treasury Notes, Bills, and Bonds which do not have call provisions. No Fed paper has been issued with call provisions since 1985 (source). Since to the best of my knowledge, the longest bond issues in 85 were 10-year Bonds, they should have all matured right now (and aren't paying interest, so there's no reason why the Chinese or anyone else would be holding on to them).
If you have un-matured, post-1985 T-Bill, and you want money for it right now, you can try to sell it to somebody else, but you can't just to go the Treasury and demand money for it, if it's not yet mature. At best they're just going to laugh at you.
This "they'll call in their debts" nonsense has to stop; it just doesn't work that way in reality. China could do some nasty things to the U.S. if they decided to manipulate the bond market (by say dumping all the U.S. Federal paper they have), and the U.S. could mess up things terribly by not making interest payments on paper held by the Chinese central bank, or invalidating it completely; either would be the economic equivalent of nuclear war. People might talk about it once in a while when things get diplomatically ugly, but no sane person considers it. Everyone just has too much to lose -- nobody (except perhaps a few terrorists and other fringe groups on each side) wants to be responsible for setting the clock on the world back to October 29, 1929, and that's what would happen if the U.S. didn't service its debt, or if the Chinese started gaming the financial markets by dumping their U.S. paper. No matter how much the governments of China and the U.S. might disagree, the people that matter in both countries really like making money.
We bitch constantly here on Slashdot about how our government is run by corporate interests -- do you really think those people would let the country default on its bonds, and collapse the economy overnight? Hello? There could be people starving to death and eating each other on the streets of New York City, and they'd be demanding that the debt be serviced first.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Just a correction: I don't know what I was thinking; of course there are 20 and 30 year Bonds, issued in 1985 and previously, that would thus still be on the market; those would still have call options. However, I think the majority of the current public debt is on more recently issued paper, and thus isn't callable. If you read the source article in my above post, they say that callable T-paper isn't that common.
Anyway, blame that on my brain being asleep.
I suppose it would be possible for the Chinese to slowly trade in all their more recently bought paper for 20 and 30 year Bonds that would have call options, and then exercise the options all at once, but I'm not sure how much optionable paper is out there and what the Treasury has in assets at any given time, and what the response would be. It could just be that the Treasury would refuse to allow them to exercise the options all at once, and the effect would be minimal. Everyone understands that the Treasury (like any bank) doesn't have enough cash on hand to pay all its outstanding debts at once; so if the Chinese tried, and were denied, it wouldn't necessarily make other U.S. paper worthless -- that the Treasury can't pay off a huge quantity of debt at once doesn't really affect its long-term profitability.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> for those of you who were not in high school and college during Reagan's years
In my experience 'high school and college' is not exactly an arbitrary cross-section of society when it comes to politics. To misquote the Simpsons, making teenagers outraged is like shooting fish in a barrel. So you and the GP both rely on a perception of the 70s and early 80s which seems to focus on a period in your lives when you were particularly aware of such things. In reality, anyone politically aware will remember their own high school or college days as somewhat turbulent and in terms of the major controversies of time time.
I acknowledge I probably over-stated the original point in terms of how the USA was viewed in the early 1980s. I accept that Reagan wasn't univerally loved by any stretch of the imagination (to compare him to Bush Jnr and that administration to the present setup is laughable though, Reagan may have been a puppet but at least he was controlled by relatively sane and competent puppet-masters in comparison to the current ones).
My original point, however, was that global perceptions of the US are in decline, and I stand by that assertion. Do some research, there are plenty of statistics about gloabal perceptions which back this up. I note that neither you or the GP addressed the last point of my post, which was about the current US approach to arrest, detention, interrogation and punishment of non-US citizens in connection with the so-called 'war on terror.'
And as others have pointed out, the prevailing view of the US is what I was talking about, and I still strongly disagree with anyone who thinks that the prevailing view of the US is as good now as it was during the Reagan era, Soviet bloc countries excluded.
Read Pynchon.
how can they rely 100% on computer's data analysis..while they do know that the computer may produce bad output data as well as some false alarm(imperfections in the Soviet military system )..thank god petrov do know when to follow his on intuition..which may be impossible to be implemented to any known system and any computer intelligence..if this things goes on....i WOULD see world war III for another 3 years..or maybe tomorrow..who knows!??its best that a system that is guarding such important task be tested a lot of times to make sure it is FOOLPROOF and BUGFREE...by the way..i hope microsoft isn't the one who created those system for the Nuclear Monitoring SYstem..or else..they'd be doomsday for the next day..and it would be TOO late for Bill Gates to find a 'patch' for it!!..:D last words...best of wishes to Stanislav Petrov...May God Bless You...u were the world's hero....and still are THE HERO!!
c o n s p i r a c y n u t
Clever signature text goes here.
First people supporting Bush accussed serious doubters of the WMD nonsense (which included, may I hasten to add, the people in the UN actually tasked to find out about WMDs in Iraq, whose task was harshely cut short byt the eagerness of Mrs Bush and Blair) of unpatriotic, appeasers and all unkind epithets.
Now you use the term revisionist. Frankly you people have no shame.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In the first Gulf War, the one Iraq actually fought, they could not manage to hit any targets of any military importance (hint, a few Israeli defenseless civilians are not military important).
Any thinking person that could be bothered to inform himslef about the state of Iraq *knew* that they did not have any WMDs, which is why the UK foreign minister had to use a bad student's PHD thesis as the best argument he could find, after hevy editing to make it look the way they wanted to make it look.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
1 The effects of a nuclear war that cannot be calculated are at least as important as those for which calculations are attempted.Moreover, even these Iimited calculations are subject to very large uncertainties Conservative military planners tend to base their calculations on factors that can be either control led or predicted, and to make pessimistic assumptions where control or prediction are impossible. For example, planning for strategic nuclear warfare looks at the extent to which civilian targets will be destroyed by blast, and discounts the additional damage which may be caused by fires that the blast could ignite. This is not because fires are unlikely to cause damage, but because the extent of fire damage depends on factors such as weather and details is of building construction that makes it much more difficult to predict than blast damage. While it is proper for a military plan to provide for the destruction of key targets by the surest means even in unfavorable circumstances, the nonmiIitary observer should remember that actual damage is likely to be greater than that reflected in the military calculations.
2. The impact of even a "small" or "limited" nuclear attack would be enormous.OTA examined the impact of a small attack on economic targets (an attack on oil refineries limited to 10 missiles), and found that while economic recovery would be possible, the economic damage and social dislocation could be immense. A review of calculations of the effects on civilian populations and economies of major counterforce attacks found that while the cones quences might be endurable (since they would be on a scale with wars and epidemics that nations have endured in the past), the number of deaths might be as high as 20 million.
3. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the extreme uncertainties about the effects of a nuclear attack, as well as the certainty that the minimum consequences would be enormous, both play a role in the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons.
4. There are major differences between the United States and the Soviet Union that affect the nature of their vulnerability to nuclear attacks, despite the fact that both are large and diversified industrial countries.
5. Although it is true that effective sheltering and/or evacuation could save lives, it is not clear that a civil defense program based on providing shelters or planning evacuation would necessarily be effective.To save Iives, it is not only necessary to provide shelter in, or evacuation to, it is also necessary to provide food, water, medical supplies, sanitation, security against other people, possibly filtered air, etc. After fallout diminishes, there must be enough supplies and enough organization to keep people alive while production is being restored. The effectiveness of civil defense measures depends, among other things, on the events leading up to the attack, the enemy's targeting policy, and sheer luck.
6. The situation in which the survivors of a nuclear attack find themselves will be quite unprecedented.The surviving nation would be far weaker--economically, socially, and politically -- than one would calculate by adding up the surviving economic assets and the numbers and skills of the surviving people. Natural resources would be destroyed; surviving equipment would be designed to use materials and skills that might no longer exist; and indeed some regions might be almost uninhabitable. Furthermore, prewar patterns of behavior would surely change, though in unpredictable ways. Finally, the entire society would suffer from the enormous psychological shock of having discovered the extent of its vulnerability.
7. From an economic point of view, and possibly from a political and social viewpoint as well, conditions after an attack would get worse before they started to get better.or a period of time, people could live off supplies (and, in a sense, off habits) left over from before the war. But shortages and uncertainties would get worse. The survivors wouId find themselves in a race to a
..I'll follow your advice and try to "keep up" better than I have been. Here's a hint: I knew about the cuban missile crisis a few weeks before the bulk of the US public (and military) did.
The Soviet Union's should thank and honoured Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov earlier for what he has done.Petrov decided to trust his intuition and declare the system's indications a false alarm.He did not put all the trust to the system.He is genius.He is still be able to think logically that United States was not likely to launch just one missile if it were attacking the Soviet Union,it would launch many simultaneously. Also, the satellite system's reliability had in the past been questioned.It might be question how did he bravely follow his heart even there was no other source of information with which to confirm his suspicions.Luckily his instincts were right.There were no approaching missiles.If we analyze this very deeply this could be dangerous.If he was disregarding a real attack, then the Soviet Union would be devastated by nuclear weapons without any warning or chance to retaliate. With just a little computer error can cause to world war.It really show how important to keep the system in control and free from error.He might be label as a hero but yet if things were the other way round he would be recognize as person who cause million of death for trusting the system.
Although these were a very solid twenty mishaps that almost lead to nuclear war, why are they all tied to the U.S. & Russia?
because US and Russia has a big power in the world
but not all because china has on its own
'Protection' is a general term for all the mechanisms that control the access of a program to other things in the system. There is an immense variety of such mechanisms. so how can someone can be a hero??? by protect or avoid or prevent?
This is certainly something that is up to debate by historians, about the effectiveness of the Gatling guns in the Civil War. Those guns were so incredibly crude that they often proved to be worthless in battle or even dangerous to the fire team that was supporting and running one of these guns from backfire and jammed ammunition.
This gun really wasn't perfected until well after the Civil War, which was my point. Apparently (and mentioned in the Wikipedia article) there was one particular campaign where the guns were used by front line troops, but it certainly wasn't a significant deciding factor in the outcome of that war, and it would be debatable that the soldiers using the weapon could not have been more effective simply using conventional artillery instead. But it did become a significant weapon and encouraged the development of true single-barrel machine guns, as well as foreshadowing what infantry units would be looking like less than 50 years later during WWI.
As far as the military and political need to use nukes in 1945, I agree that it is something that will be endlessly debated. President Truman only had the experience of Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, as well as previous battles in the Pacific to compare against. It was thought at the time that a battle on the main Japanese Islands would have been even more gruesome and hard won, with U.S. casualties estimated to be as high as several million U.S. soldiers to completely conquor Japan (a stated U.S. goal). Had that occured, the death toll for Japanese citizens would also have been incredibly high, even for the civilian population. This was a serious consideration, and U.S. Marines were trained and even sent to the coast of Japan to conduct that invasion. The attack didn't occur because the surrender took place first instead, but it would have been a naval invasion of a scale to dwarf even that of Okinawa, and certainly the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
It seems unlikely that the Japanese, without the use and threat of nuclear bombs, would have surrendered as quickly. That said, the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki was probably not strictly necessary and a peaceful end to the war against Japan was even implied by the Japanese Emperor before that bomb was dropped.
err .. well .. actually we have to check again how the incident was happened. we can't extremely delighted blame to eachother ... what past is past .. our life must go on
As long as there are heroes born with clean underwear like Stanislav Petrov, we have no reason to worry of being unlucky. With that being said, I am off to clean my dirty underwear
As long as there are heroes born with clean underwear like Stanislav Petrov, we have no reason to worry of being unlucky. with that being said, I am off to clean my dirty underwear
People getting forget about the old story about nuclear...but, new policies of US will make people remember that the only things that have nuclear weapon are the Islamic countries such as Iraq, Libya, ,Iran and others. Then make a rumors that these countries related with terrorist network and launch "War againts terrorist" which is by attack the certain country systematically. Example; Afganistan, Iraq, and the next of the list is Iran. But what about the Israel ?? Because Israel is Islam's enemy...this will goint to the end...
that man, Stanislav Petrov is my IDOL.
Russian hero Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet missile commander who saved the world from nuclear destruction in 1983
if he does not saved this world, i think there will no slashdot.org..
if he does not saved this world, i think i might not be able to post this comment..
thank God, because God has created and sent us someone who very brave to save this world
Stanislav Petrov in memories
Trust me, I've lived here (in the US) for about eight years now. Still, my Brother used to say "Miami" when he meant "Florida" so you can't just blame the Americans for these kinds of slips.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Hold your horses there Nelly, I never said anything to do with your rambling post there. Just pointed out that the US makes weaponised biomaterials, treaties to the contrary be damned.