Command and Control

[ish mailian]

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the
one hand, we offer … an inexhaustible source of energy … But the price
that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a
vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite
unaccustomed to.

      --Alvin Weinberg
This famous statement is parsed beautifully by Marshall Berman, who
does not tackle the merits or demerits of the statement about the
Faustian bargain but rather takes notes what the statement suggests
about his subject, Faust. Berman notes that the scientists, that is,
"we nuclear people,"  are no longer cast in the role of Faust.
Instead, they cast in the role of the one offers the deal:
Mephistopheles. By this logic, he rest of us are Faust.


On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 10:07 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l