Hacker News Reader

Comment by Miraste | Hacker News Reader

> he French were so demographically destroyed they literally could not raise an army to fight in the second world war.

This isn't true at all. The French army at the start of WWII was over 5 million men, one of the largest in the world. It suffered from bad luck and being led by morons, but it certainly existed.

Per your other point, WWII made the US and the USSR global superpowers for half a century, and the US especially sacrificed far less than anyone else to get it. War is sadly not always a losing proposition, even total war.

View on HN

I don't know about the demographic claim but definitely the French could not imagine _fighting_ another war and so their preparations were poor. They built the Maginot Line as a way of avoiding having to fight again. And I believe the political culture in the country and army all rotated around the idea that they never wanted to fight Germany again. This also extended to the Treat of Versailles were they tried to cripple Germany's ability to raise an army again. I don't know about the demographic claim, but he is sort of right that WW1 wrecked Frances fighting spirit.

I was exaggerating, but the demographic slump that happened as a result of WW1 was a problem for french military planners, which is why a large portion of their army were reservists or badly trained.

Per your other point, you're shifting the terrain of the discussion. WW1 was almost a pure losers war, and yet, most of the same states engaged in WW2. That's the crazy decision. WW2, on the other hand, had relative winners (although I think the US would have done well regardless, and the USSR got to be a global superpower (which it was already) at an appalling cost).

Another thing that bothers me about the whole 'MAD prevented the cold war from going hot' is that none of the generals at the time thought like that. People didn't really start thinking about nuclear weapons as anything other than just big bombs until well into the cold war. That's why MacArthur advocated their use in China.

Oh, I actually totally disagree with the original commenter's statement "The cold war didn't go hot because we were lucky, not because MAD changed the basic dynamics of total war." Erm. No. MAD definitely did change the basic dynamics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com