To be fair to Von Neumann, you’re displaying hindsight bias. It is possible that with the knowledge they had at the time, a preventative or pre-emptive attack would have been rational, maybe even with the best ‘expected outcome’.
If a film director, albeit a very gifted one, could already see in 1964 how absurd that line of reasoning really was, no hindsight was really necessary.
Intellectuals of the time loved to make fun of and satirize MAD. But the fact is it worked.
'It worked' only in the sense that cooler heads prevailed to prevent accidental holocaust[0] and that humanity was incredibly lucky[1]. That this occurred is more than a minor miracle.
[0] https://www.wjperryproject.org/books [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00963402156111...
At which they failed, but perhaps they spread enough fear of nuclear war to make MAD work better, which certainly wasn't the plan but is a kind of win on its own.
Even if the US bombed the USSR and prevented a counterstrike the US would have been worse off.
You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B , the 2nd country in GDP and expect things to remain as they were before.
Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating that they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did something which would have even remotely alerted paranoid Uncle Sam.
He lost lots of family and friends due to the nazis. He saw his people get slaughtered due to a nation with crazy ideology being technically superior. He never wanted to be put in that situation again and worked on the Manhattan project because he believed in the USA.
He viewed the USSR as another threat just like the nazis. For many it seemed like a guarantee that war would happen. Many also claimed that early attack could save lives.
I’m not here to claim what he felt was right, but given the environment and conditions he lived through, I don’t pretend that I wouldn’t hold similar views given the circumstances.
No we don't know what would happens if the US did that, because thank God they did not do it.
We saw that 2 cities in Japan was bombed with no retaliation (I'm aware the bombing itself was a pretend retaliation). If anything is to be learnt from that it would be the US can get away with killing people.
Von Neumann may have been advocating for a strike before the Soviets had operational nuclear capabilities.
>"You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B , the 2nd country in GDP and expect things to remain as they were before."
It is unlikely that an American nuclear strike would have wiped out the entire population of the Soviet Union; one would expect a targeted strike on critical government and army facilities, or something like what happened against the Japanese.
>"Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating that they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did something which would have even remotely alerted paranoid Uncle Sam. "
The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all of Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people in large numbers.
By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing (Kyoto was famously spared largely because of the sympathies of a single officer). When Tokyo was firebombed over 100k civilians were burned alive in a single night, the overwhelming majority of them women, children, and old men.
Justified as it may have been, we shouldn't promote a mythology that WW2 was a clean and narrowly targeted campaign by the allies.
There's an excellent documentary by Errol Morris named The Fog of War that has McNamara's very frank commentary on these issues. You also can find some letters Churchill wrote where he was engaging with these questions, such as asking himself if the fire bombing was morally much different from the use of chemical agents during WW1.
Any sort of pre-emptive strike by the US vs the USSR would have been similarly ugly, with very real human cost to ordinary people with no agency in the situation.
USSR lion share of the population is/was in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A decapitation strike would have killed many in those 2 cities for sure. Add the fires, the confusion, the famine and the fact that you must followup with an invasion because nukes radiations dissipate fast and other countries around would see it as a huge opportunity to expand. It's easy to imagine the countries of the Marshall plan abandon said plan and saying "screw it! We'll get the eastward land instead"
100M is not far fetched.
> The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all of Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people in large numbers.
The US is magnanimous . Meaning like some guy who got out of the hood and lets it slide when somebody dents his Ferrari. Had that person missed on a lucky break and still be in the hood, his reaction would be very different and much more violent , and it doesn't even need to be a Ferrari, just a light fender bender on a Civic will cause trouble.
The US is magnanimous because of its standards of living , not the other way around.
Hard no. No one "reacted" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were glassed.
With spies inside Project Manhattan. Both the UK and USSR reacted with what they could, meaning their intelligence and espionage.
It's kind of a selection bias considering that the only country capable of building the Atomic Bomb was the US.
I don't think anyone doubts the contributions our British friends made to the success of the project.
Stopping the Soviets early on, in the pre-MAD era, might actually have been worth the cost. We'll never know... and that's probably a good thing because we'd unquestionably be the bad guys in that timeline. People arguing on the Internet would accuse each other of being von Neumann instead of Hitler.
(Well, OK, maybe don't let him create a DMZ at the Chinese border and poison it permanently with radioactive cobalt, as some accounts say he wanted to do.)
Of course, the ends don’t justify the means, lest one uses this reasoning to destroy everyone you feel is about to do great harm, we are only gifted with hindsight.
My guess is that the same reasoning that led von Neumann to advocate a decisive blow against the pre-H bomb Soviet Union would have led him to oppose MacArthur's ambition towards Manchuria. His position on the Korean conflict may be on record somewhere, but I haven't run across it.
"Over twelve battalions of the 11th Landwehr Division, making up more than 7000 men, advanced after the bombardment expecting little resistance. They were met at the first defense line by a counter-charge made up of the surviving soldiers of the 13th Company of the 226th Infantry Regiment. The Germans became panicked by the appearance of the Russians, who were coughing up blood and bits of their own lungs, as the hydrochloric acid formed by the mix of the chlorine gas and the moisture in their lungs had begun to dissolve their flesh. The Germans retreated, running so fast they were caught up in their own c-wire traps.[1]"