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anthonypasq

another famous piece of Von Neumann lore is that he constantly advocated nuking the Soviets.

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I was wondering if someone would mention this.

It's interesting how much worse off the world would be if the smartest people were in charge of it.

What ultimately blocked his nuke proposals? (Why didn't anyone listen?) I'm curious about whatever failsafe that was.

1. Big assumption that the world would be worse off in that alternative future, no?

2. Probably what blocked his proposals is that most people are loath to murder millions of other people (especially if they have ~any other option, including "do nothing")

It's all psychological inertia. For example even if they knew that Communism would cause tens of millions of deaths they would not nuke USSR.

How is nuking some other country a better future. How are you going to argue for that I wonder. You're going to cause millions of deaths even without retaliation. How are you going to justify that, simply because "they're not us"?

He described himself a "violently anti-communist", and he saw nuclear war as an eventual necessity in a civilisational conflict between democracy and totalitarianism. If you view a nuclear war as unavoidable, it's easy to conclude that it's better to get it over with sooner rather than later, since a later war will be even more destructive. Especially since von Neumann was active in the 1940s and 50s, when the west had a slight edge in weapons technology, and before the development of the giant H-bombs. He and a few other pro-nuclear scientists argued there was a brief window where the USA could fight and win a nuclear war against the USSR, and they should take it.

While it's easy to dismiss that view in hindsight, it's worth considering that von Neumann had personally witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had to flee along with many of his friends and family. And he had seen that regime defeated only by military strength of the USA. And while the USSR and USA never did end up in a nuclear war, it really was only by a series of miracles that it was avoided. I think most historians of the 20th century would agree we got very, very lucky.

Von Neumann family was affected also by the communist "red terror" in Hungary in 1919, and by the subsequent "white terror" of the militant anti-communist authoritarian government after 1919.

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

I didn’t argue for any of those points. I just said the future is hard to predict (and the counterfactual past hard to trust), so a confident assertion that his preferred strategy would’ve been worse or better is pretty silly.

Not sure that it would be worse than letting the other end of the spectrum be in charge of it, as we've seen..

We can't know.

As an extreme example, antisemitism was so commonly palatable that an open admirer of Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, was a very serious candidate for the presidency.

Today, open antisemitism can get one's career derailed in much of the world. Would that be true without the eye-opening shock that the news of the concentration camps produced?

IN NOW WAY was the Holocaust forgivable, but we simply cannot say if the world today would be "more moral on average" or "less moral on average". Maybe Jews would feel and be far less safe today in predominantly Christian countries. Maybe not.

All we can say for certain is that the horrors enacted upon the Holocaust victims were evil. As we can surely say that murdering many millions of people living in the USSR would be.

Nazism had lot of supporters in the US in the 1930s, before WW II.

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

And even after WW II

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

Even Bertrand Russell briefly advocated this. "Better dead than Red."

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