Von Braun

[Dave Monroe]

On 10/11/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:

> Those A-bombs *did* end the war quickly, and I think it almost certain --
> Allied losses  aside -- that more Japanese would have died in (1) an
> invasion, (2) a prolonged blockade, or (3) a continuation of the
> conventional firebombing that had been going on since early 1945.

Well, of course, this is, so far as we--so far as I, at any
rate--know, an untestable, unverifiable assertion, though having gone
through the likes of ...

http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/1995/westheim.htm

... to, just this past week ...

http://www.tor-forge.com/macarthurswar

... and despite, perhaps ...

http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345494795

... though now I gotta look up, e.g., ...

http://uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=coppburni

http://uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=skatinvasi

... I nonetheless tend to agree.  Though I'm also one of those who
tends NOT to believe, however, that it was necessary to use even one
atomic bomb on civilians (if anyone at all), that a (ahem) "simple"
demonstration might well have sufficed ...

[...]

> This is all cerebral stuff -- just like the simple calculations that show
> the Germans spent a lot more (and got even less accuracy) for X pounds of
> high explosive in a V-1 or V-2 warhead than they'd gotten from bombs dropped
> in the Blitz...

See, e.g., ...

Damn.  Can't recall my ref. now ...

> I'm suggesting that Pynchon asks us to look deeper, to take a stroll among
> the bombed ruins -- anybody's ruins -- smelling the rotting bodies, just
> like a Nazi death camp, and say "I don't care who did it, I don't care why:
> this is a crime and a horror, this is a shame to our species. We simply
> can't go on this way." Picasso's Guernica, Hersey's Hiroshima, and
> Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five do that explicitly. I believe GR does it in
> its passing glimpses of the bombed-out acres of London, the bombed-out
> square miles of Berlin, and the mushroom stem over Hiroshima. And I believe
> its hallucinatory last hundred pages or so, on the way to the last picture
> show in 1973 plus some delta, are the most powerful statement ever that
>
> WE (the species) BLEW IT, FOAX: we *did* go on that way.
>
> Only a dozen years after the Zone, the rationalizations of Peenemunde and
> the rationalizations of Los Alamos would be combined in sleek new packages,
> with a Verdun or Stalingrad or Auschwitz worth of death in each.

Amen ...

[...]

> Bottom line: I believe a lot of what strikes me as smugness regarding that
> hypocritical war criminal Wernher von Braun ...

Cf. Harry S Truman?  Et al. ...

> If there's one thing GR is about, it's about not letting us -- any of us --
> off that hook.

"Now everybody--" (GR, Pt. IV, p. 760)