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Comment by roca | Hacker News Reader

Awww, I was hoping they'd mention how Neumann was keen on launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.

"“If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”

Hardly surprising that he was one of the influences on the character of Dr Strangelove. Was he a remarkable genius, absolutely - was he right about everything, definitely not.

Context is crucial when reading this quote now rather than the 1950s. JVN said this before a nuclear war would have been 'world ending'.

Consider that several nations had avoided war as hard as possible prior to WW2. Standing by as entire countries we absorbed by a hostile power. In the end it only resulted in much greater destruction. Many people like JVN saw the same theme playing out with the iron curtain, and the destructiveness of the weapons only increasing over time.

The thought process was:

"We need to have a destructive war now to avoid having an earth shattering war later."

There had just been two world spanning wars in their lifetime. They considered a third inevitable. If it was going to happen at some point, better that it occurs before world ending arsenals were constructed.

I am aware of the context - doesn't make it any less terrifying.

Edit: I'm going to ask you the same question I asked another commenter - do you think it would have been better for the US to have attacked the Soviets as Von Neumann and others wanted?

Of course not, but only because we already know how the story ends. If they had been correct, we wouldn't be here to say that we should have listened.

Their predictions on nuclear arsenals were correct. A nuclear war in 1965 would have been vastly worse than one in 1950.

What they got wrong is that great powers would successfully avoid war over the long term. Which at the time was a bet with very poor odds.

I seem to remember that von Neumann was also responsible for what later came to be known as "Mutually Assured Destruction", the idea through game theory that ensuring that both nations would be prevented from acting preemptively because the results would carry too great a cost.

While you were aware of the context, many others reading your quote (like me) were not. I definitely appreciated having more of the full story.

...one of the influences on the character of Dr Strangelove...

Herman Kahn being another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Kahn

Paul Boyer's assessment of the pastiche here omits von Neumann, though the environment was target-rich:

While exposing the dangers and dilemmas of deterrence theory, Kubrick also satirized contemporary military figures and strategists, probably including Henry Kissinger, the author of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957); physicist Edward Teller, the “father” of the H-bomb; the ex-Nazi space scientist Wernher Von Braun; and the bombastic, cigar-chomping SAC commander Curtis LeMay, who in 1957 had told a government commission assessing U.S. nuclear policy that, if a Soviet attack ever seemed likely, he planned to “knock the shit out of them before they got off the ground.” Reminded that U.S. policy rejected preemptive war, LeMay had retorted, “No, it’s not national policy, but it’s my policy.” Much of the strategic thinking that Kubrick critiques, and even some of the dialogue in “Dr. Strangelove,” came from the work of Herman Kahn of the RAND Corp., an Air Force-funded California think tank. Kubrick read Kahn’s work carefully, especially his influential On Thermonuclear War (1960). General Turgidson’s upbeat assessment of the outcome of an all-out nuclear exchange directly paraphrases Kahn’s analysis.

https://www.armscontrol.org/print/1715

(Apparently he does mention von Neumann elsewhere.)

This quote perfectly illustrates the unparalleled absurdity of contemplating nuclear warfare.

He was hardly alone if favouring a "preventative war" - Curtis LeMay was another advocate - they thought it was the rational thing to do.

How someone can rationally advocate the cold blooded killing of millions is, frankly, completely beyond me.

That's because we're lucky to live in a world where the cold war stayed cold, and LeMay and von Neumann were coming from half a century of the worst slaughter the world had ever seen.

We can be thankful that the likes of Eisenhower and later Kennedy, who lived through the very same times, recoiled from the prospect of initiating a greater slaughter than WW2.

you can't attribute staying out of nuclear conflict to any head of state, morality, or even logic ( there was plenty of luck involved ).

For example, after Kennedy resigned himself to striking the sites in Cuba during the missile crisis it was someone else who told him he was wrong and reconsider. (see the documentary Fog of War)

To put a fine point on it, even after all the brinksmanship, analysis, diplomacy to resolve the Cuban missile crisis it was a long Soviet officer objecting to launch a nuclear armed torpedo in response to sounding depth charges (interpreted as an attack) from US ships. Pulling the trigger would have started a global thermonuclear war but it wasn't pulled, one officer decided that against a 2/3 vote in favor.

"Later that same day, what the White House later called "Black Saturday," the US Navy dropped a series of "signaling depth charges" (practice depth charges the size of hand grenades[114]) on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo with orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was damaged by depth charges or surface fire.[115] As the submarine was too deep to monitor any radio traffic,[116][117] the captain of the B-59, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.[118] The decision to launch these required agreement from all three officers on board, but one of them, Vasily Arkhipov, objected and so the nuclear launch was narrowly averted."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

There are plenty of examples where, basically, a roll of the dice saved civilization during the cold war. The destruction of society during the cold war was prevented by luck as much as anything else.

> There are plenty of examples where, basically, a roll of the dice saved civilization during the cold war. The destruction of society during the cold war was prevented by luck as much as anything else.

The systems are still in place and even today the danger of "accidental" start of the complete destruction of the current civilization is completely real. I always recommend a book subtitled "Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner." I won't write the details so that this doesn't appear as an advertisement. It's worth reading the whole book to get the exact idea how fundamentally flawed the logic of those managing these systems is. Absurdly, they still think they will "win."

As the poet said "We will all go together when we go."

There is a documentary on Prime (Command and Control) that covers three incidents in the US where nuclear bombs almost went off.

It may have been the rational thing to do. That something worse didn't in fact result from avoiding pre-empting MAD build-up with an early first strike doesn't mean this was the likely outcome. They may have been right, and we just got lucky, so now it looks like they were wrong.

To build on what you are saying, let it be known that LeMay's nickname was "The Demon" and he participated in numerous war crimes involving terror bombing and civilian destruction in Japan and Korea.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/21/we-burned-down-every...

Maybe you should study game theory

Their reasoning was based on the idea that a war with the Soviets was inevitable and that the US should attack before it lost the strategic advantage - given that there was no war are you actually arguing that they were correct?

What you are doing is resulting, connecting result with decision under probability. I am not sure what was probability of a war but I don’t think that because war didn’t happen that it was unprobable.

So you think an attack would have been the right thing to do?

Edit: To be fair, in the event of an Able Archer '83 war we might have all have have wished that such an attack had happened (not me though, I'd be dead). So its not impossible to construct a timeline where it was the right thing to do. I'm just curious whether if you had been a decision maker back then whether you would actually choose to do that.

Basically China is an ideological extension of the cold war. It's an oligarchal society where the people don't have a vote for their future. Versus us where there is balanced based off the vote. The two are incompatible and they will come to a head. If we pre-empted this the way Neumann, McArthur, etc wanted... we would avoid the conflict that is coming in 10-20 years.

This is the solution to most of the world's problems... If not all.

Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated for preventive nuclear war with the USSR.

It's easy to construct rational arguments for killing millions in cold blood. Today you could easily construct a rational utilitarian argument for killing billions now to prevent even greater death and suffering later due to climate change.

In fact, it's blanket rejection of the cold-blooded killing of millions that requires (at least for most naturalists/atheists) decidedly non-rational thinking --- i.e., adhering to relevant moral principles while disbelieving in moral realism.

Von Neumann was very smart, but I think he had poor judgement when it comes to politics. Perhaps not. I don't know tbh! When I learned about his political views many years ago it actually deeply changed strongly held opinions that I had about America. He was so smart, and I want so badly to follow in his footsteps, that I said to myself "If Von Neumann believed that only America can save the world from fascism, it is enough for me, I will go on as he begun, he must have had his reasons and knew what he was doing. But I will not abandon my principles! Only change the way I go about trying to achieve them."

You recognize von Neumann's superior intellect, and yet, when it comes to his politics you find his views repulsive (your comment below) and believe that he was the one with poor judgment. Hmm! Perhaps you’re passing judgement selectively and approve only of what caters to your emotions. There's more to the world than what meets the eye, or the heart.

Unlike the commenter below, I believe political reasoning is amenable only to a small degree to first principles, for complex, non-linear systems exhibit emergent behaviors not present when investigating the parts. Instead of analytical reasoning, one ought to practice more holistic thinking.

Here's an intro video on complexity, in case you're ever interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ladOjo1QA

One thing that shouldn't be forgotten is that he judged the world as it looked at that the time he was living in it. He may have made a totally different decision if he was young and in the same stage of life today.

Perhaps base your reasoning on first principles instead of the von Neumann who is in your head.

Well said. I do, fwiw. Im not the kind of person who makes arguments by reference to authority often, I found his political views repulsive and confusing when I first learned about them. Its been a long journey but I believe there is a strong possibility he simply was wrong about many of the beliefs he held about politics and the course of the future of human history.

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