Mark, you have the right to your untestable opinions. No one can ever show whether we would have used nukes other times if we hadn’t that time, or that somebody else would have used nukes if they had them, or that if you were in Truman’s place you’d do the same thing he did.
There’s no way for anybody to know about any of these things, so you have the perfect right to believe whatever you want just as you do about how many Santa Clauses there are in Heaven and whether the Yankees would have won the series in 1947 if they had Joe DiMaggio, and whether the germans could have won WWII if they’d pushed forward to take Moscow and they got their winter uniforms and if they tried hard to make friends with the ukrainians etc.
This idea that the best way to prevent a nuclear war is to persuade the world that we’re crazy enough to kill everybody so they’d better do what we say—there’s something kind of screwy about it.
If we actually want a world where nobody sets off nuclear bombs, we do much better to create a world where nobody builds nuclear bombs. There’s something kind of, well, obvious about that reasoning.
We’ve had less than 62 years when we have avoided nuclear war despite MAD. We have had 5,000 or 15,000 or 1,000,000 years where we avoided nuclear war by not having nukes, depending on how you count. Which looks like a more reliable way to avoid nuclear war?
Mark, you have the right to your untestable opinions. No one can ever show whether we would have used nukes other times if we hadn’t that time, or that somebody else would have used nukes if they had them, or that if you were in Truman’s place you’d do the same thing he did.
There’s no way for anybody to know about any of these things, so you have the perfect right to believe whatever you want just as you do about how many Santa Clauses there are in Heaven and whether the Yankees would have won the series in 1947 if they had Joe DiMaggio, and whether the germans could have won WWII if they’d pushed forward to take Moscow and they got their winter uniforms and if they tried hard to make friends with the ukrainians etc.
This idea that the best way to prevent a nuclear war is to persuade the world that we’re crazy enough to kill everybody so they’d better do what we say—there’s something kind of screwy about it.
If we actually want a world where nobody sets off nuclear bombs, we do much better to create a world where nobody builds nuclear bombs. There’s something kind of, well, obvious about that reasoning.
We’ve had less than 62 years when we have avoided nuclear war despite MAD. We have had 5,000 or 15,000 or 1,000,000 years where we avoided nuclear war by not having nukes, depending on how you count. Which looks like a more reliable way to avoid nuclear war?