Command and Control

[Monte Davis]

Thanks - Wellerstein really is the best now working in this area. He
doesn't mention other factors, maybe thinking them too obvious:

Whatever the eggheads at Los Alamos might say, it was just assumed that
"more is better" as if nukes were like conventional bombs, shells or
bullets. Most wars since the mid-19th century had quickly consumed much
more materiel than planners had anticipated.

More specifically, having first avoided and then come "late" to both world
wars, the US had had to ramp up production, significantly delaying
operations. Americans in WWI needed a lot of French and British materiel to
go into battle, and as late as 1944 the landing craft for D-Day were a
bottleneck. So when  -- after the Berlin blockade in 1948, the "fall" of
China to Mao's forces in 1949, and the North Korean attack in 1950 -- we
re-armed with a vengeance, the  "let's not be caught short this time"
psychology extended to nuclear arms along with everything else.

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 7:24 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why build so many nukes?
> http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/235/wallslides.pdf
>
> Did you see them, did you see them?
> Did you see them in the river?
> They were there to wave to you.
> Could you tell that the empty-quivered
> Brown-skinned Indian on the banks
> That were crowded and narrow,
> Held a broken arrow?
>
> On Mon, May 1, 2017 at 9:16 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > no disagreement from me on that, man.
> >
> >
> > On Mon, May 1, 2017 at 4:38 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> It's plausible that nukes did discourage a direct US/USSR conflict
> >> (although counterfactuals are always tricky). My question is *how many*
> were
> >> ever needed to do so. 100 or 200 could cause more death and ruin than
> WWI.
> >> Did our peak of 31,000 in 1967, or the USSR's.peak of 45,000 in 1987,
> make
> >> us safer? The fucking things can't be uninvented, and I don't foresee
> enough
> >> trust for any nation to believe an adversary has gone to zero -- but
> we've
> >> dropped by nearly 90% since those peaks. We should do so again.
> >>
> >> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 2:42 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> tangentially, nukes did prevent a hot war between the US-USSR yet that
> >>> division metastasized globally to destabilize just about every theatre,
> >>> conventionally--asia, latin and south america, africa, the middle east,
> >>> repercussions of which we are still coming to terms with. so much
> waste,
> >>> corruption and death. ww3 did happen, by proxy
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 2:21 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> History is a Step-Function and often trips....
> >>>>
> >>>> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 11:37 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> INTRODUCING THE MUSEUM OF FAILURE, A REMINDER THAT WITH INNOVATION
> >>>>> COMES COLOSSAL FLOPS
> >>>>>
> >>>>> https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current
> >>>>> -
> >>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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