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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The point of the story is that it wasn't an academic war plan.

This was a serious proposal, probably made by a sociopath like Gen. LeMay, to execute a specific attack in 1963, before Soviet capability caught up.

Per LeMay:

> Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

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Mao Tse Tung tried to convince the Russians to attack the US in a nuclear war as well. He figured that after a nuclear war there would be 200-300M Chinese left over and they could take over the rest of the world.

No.

See also Bertrand Russell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell%27s_views_on_... .

And Eisenhower wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea.

It's also not the first discussion of a nuclear first strike. That would be with President Truman once prior the their use on Japan and again at the dawn of fusion weapons when deciding not to annihilate the Soviet Union.

Failing to use the foreseeably short period of being the sole nuclear power to prevent any other nuclear powers from rising is probably the biggest blunder in the history of the world. Permanent world peace was at hand and we totally blew it.

How does world peace even remotely follow? We can't even make peace in the countries we're currently occupying, and have little interest in intervening in other conflicts for humanitarian reasons.

This. Asymmetric warfare can never be won. As long as there are imperialist (for lack of a better word) well-equipped armies that invade foreign countries or regions (even righteously), they will inevitably cause civilian casualties, and some relatives of some of the casualties will be prompted into vengeance. Since hi-tech army is hard to hit, go after their softer civilian population instead. Essentially all organised terrorism has originated from a country or region with a supressed people or political group, be it IRA, ETA, ANC's MK wing, Hamas, Al-Qaida or ISIS.

>Asymmetric warfare can never be won

I used to think that too - then I started listening to the Martyr made podcast (which is epic) - and in one of the stories he talks about the Arab revolt in British mandated Palestine, and how the British dealt with that. They didn't give a hoot about civilian casualties, on the contrary they went in as hard as possible in creating them.

No point in tracing down the insurgents who just attacked you, just go to the nearest village, rape, pillage, loot, rape and castrate, then force the inhabitants to blow up their own houses, charge them for the cost of the explosives and the soldiers time. Do so consistently after every attack, and pretty soon the Arabs were blaming themselves for their fate, and hating the insurgents - and that is how you win a counter insurgency.

What you will have trouble doing is winning a counter insurgency while being _nice_. Even then the US army did get a lot of territories from the muj during the battle of Faluja.

Apart from completely defeating the humanitarian aim of world peace, it's not a reliable strategy. Assad brutally cracked down at the first sign of protest and it backfired into a civil war he's barely surviving. Lots of repressive regimes get overthrown.

I agree. I was assuming the state actor would be what you call "nice", i.e. not blatantly commit any war crimes or large scale violations of human rights. Which I believe is true of most state actors today.

Soviets couldn't care less about civilian losses in places like Afghanistan or Chechnya and still got their ass*s kicked badly. your specific example worked, but it might not work even in the same place these days, and is definitely an exception

Total peace wasn't immediately winnable, but establishing sole nuclear dominance was a precondition for it. Fast forward a hundred years and we'd have the capability to defeat asymmetric enemies with no losses of our own. And also the ability to quash any attempt at a build-up of conventional forces.

I know it's tough to swallow, but I think this would have been infinitely better than the world we have now, where war between nuclear states is still a very real possibility, and where the long-term dominance of liberal democracies is not guaranteed.

Right. The Long Peace has been such a buzzkill. It's too bad we didn't instead have The Long Nuclear War.

The relative peace of the last 60 years might not hold up. We are now constantly one mistake away from total devastation. There were several incidents, even simple radar anomalies, that could have caused nuclear war during the Cold War. We have made it this far through dumb luck.

Forget about nations and nuclear powers. Let's talk about families and electricity.

My family has invested for years in electrical research. We use electricity for many purposes, and we've created machinery that can deliver it where we need it, when we need it - as much as we need at any time or place.

We only use this for good purposes, mind you. But never forget: electricity is a powerful thing.

I daresay we are ahead of every other family in our electrical inventions. You'll never catch up! Well, maybe in a year or two.

You've been good neighbors, and those blueberries you grow are great! I hope you've enjoyed our figs too.

But now we have a problem.

Like I said, you've been pretty good neighbors. But we can't count on that. We hear you're experimenting with electricity now. If that goes on, and you develop technology like ours, you could wipe us out!

So we have no choice, our former friends. We don't really enjoy this.

But we must destroy you, now! Before you have a chance to strike against us.

You're trying to apply the logic of interpersonal relationships to those between states. They are not comparable. Individuals have a higher authority to appeal to for justice. States have only the might of their legions.

This bit of eternal wisdom in the Melian Dialogue captures reality well:

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

It's not a moral statement, but a statement of fact. If you want your moral code to mean anything, you'd better be strong enough to establish and defend it.

Cool story, except that it really happened. Few countries developed 'electricity' and now pretend to be wise enough to tell others what they can or cannot do.

It would be a fairly horrible kind of peace, the kind that comes when you are the sole living occupant of a graveyard.

In any case, they lacked the materials at the time to make enough bombs.

Holy shit man.

It seems this is not a popular sentiment or way of expressing it. thret's comment is also downvoted, which perplexes me. Honestly though, when someone is seriously advocating, in 2016, "shoulda nuked them when we had the chance", logical arguments rather fail me. I am truly shocked that not a single comment notes that it would have been the single largest act of mass murder in the history of mankind.

I propose that even in the context of a civil discussion, there's a time for expressing moral outrage. Failing to do so compromises an important signalling mechanism. If something I say flabbergasts people to the extent that words fail them, I take note.

I'm not suggesting that we should have just jumped to nuking Moscow... As it is now, the threat would have been sufficient. Preventing the expansion of the totalitarian Soviet empire was a moral imperative.

Downvote the parent and this if you must, but consider that at several points during the cold war, the scales _almost_ tipped. How bad is the result of a few 1940is bombs on Moscow (absolutely horrific) versus a world-scale nuclear catastrophe? Heck the Soviet union was super evil, what if it hadn't taken 70 years to die, but only 30? Heck the soviet-afghan war killed between 800000 and 1500000 civilian Afghans.

High numbers for the casualties in Nagasaki are 150000, ie ten times fewer.

Sometimes your choices in life are not white and black, but black and black. This is one of the times, Marcoperaza may advocate a viewpoint you strongly disagree with, but that has never been an acceptable reason for downvoting on HN.

Well, we neither nuked Russia pre-emptively nor had a nuclear war. Hardly "black and black".

I don't really want to address this suggestion on its merits - there's too much moral hazard. It reminds me of the Mitchell and Webb sketch "Kill the poor". But apparently simply expressing incredulous horror that one would even suggest such a thing isn't done around here. So, with difficulty, here I go:

So you make these "calculations" (though they couldn't have at the time) and pay the moral cost - you "nuke Moscow". Population at the time, about 6 million. Congratulations, America is now regarded as the most evil country that ever existed, its reputation eclipsing even Nazi Germany. The heinous act can't even be blamed on a demagogue, or economic strife after losing a world war - it's a cold institutional decision. And then what? World peace? Really? America is the only country with nukes, and doesn't abuse them because you know, apart from nuking a few cities unprovoked it's basically good-hearted, hah, and everyone lives happily ever after? Fat chance! Probably Russia will get nukes anyway and instantly use them on America - it's not like you've destroyed the whole country. Or perhaps you do somehow manage that, with more than just nuking the capital. Now you're an incalculably bigger mass-murderer, and the entire Eurasian continent is flooded with starving and bitterly angry refugees. Everyone in the entire world is angry at America. World peace? Hah. I won't go on.

Violence begets violence.

I would even agree that the Soviet Union was super evil, but I don't think it's worth the casualties of a major nuclear exchange to try to end it 40 years sooner. And there's no way to be sure that a major nuclear attack would actually end the Soviet regime. Wouldn't the surviving Russians now think that America is not just a worrying rival, but a catastrophically dangerous enemy? Why wouldn't they unite behind the strongest regime they can make to defend themselves and strike back? AFAIK, quite a few Russians are still sympathetic to Stalin even today based on the idea that nobody else could have industrialized Russia fast enough and led with enough determination to resist the Nazi invasion. They lost millions of casualties and had huge swaths of territory occupied and destroyed and still went on to win the war. Do you really think they're just gonna give up after a few nukes?

Also, try making a list of the biggest mass murders in history. Hitler and Stalin would be on the list. Also Mao Tse-Tsung. Possibly a few leaders of Communist regimes in SE Asia, depending on whether you look at the proportion of population killed instead of raw deaths. Do you want to see America at the top of that list? Based on a vague theory that the world would be better off somehow?

Uhhh, exactly what does this "world peace" you're talking about look like? Preventing any other nuclear powers from rising by, what, nuking them? What if we can't tell that they're building it until it's done, which is exactly what we did during WWII? Not like there's any shortage of incentive to hide it. And nukes don't kill everyone. What do you expect the survivors of these attacks to think and do? Clearly in this vision of "world peace", we'd have to be regularly attacking other countries with nuclear weapons, and at some point, somebody else would succeed in building an arsenal of them and have every reason to immediately attack us with them. If that's what world peace looks like, you can keep it.

I'd say what we have now is much closer to world peace than what you propose. All of the big industrial countries have lots of nuclear weapons, and nobody uses them, so they're all too terrified to attack each other. The only wars we have are major powers occasionally invading small, weak countries, rightly or wrongly, and either dominating them or being chased out by insurgents. Even if every one of those invasions was horribly, horribly wrong, it beats the hell out of having another WWII every generation, or everyone constantly nuking each other.

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