Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Let us just hope that we can act sooner than Chamberlain did.

Chamberlain tried appeasement once, in 1938 -- and given the attitudes of his Cabinet, and the French government, he probably didn't have any other choice. When Hitler violated his part of the Munich agreement in March 1939, he determined that the next time Hitler threatened, he would go to war. That happened in September 1939, of course, and he did keep his resolution. So, he was fooled once, and six months later he acted decisively.

I only hope that today's leaders can be as resolute as Chamberlain. Frankly, I'm not sure they will match his standard.

Posted by at February 11, 2006 08:20 PM

Perhaps other's can fill in the details, but wasn't the Shah of Iran, a pro west friend of the U.S. replaced by khomini during the Carter admin?

Posted by ken anthony at February 11, 2006 08:38 PM

Yes Ken.

We are paying for Carters mess today. With interest.

Posted by Mike Puckett at February 11, 2006 09:03 PM

Its even more ironic if you track back a pile of A.Q. Khan's work back to their main source. Manhattan Project documents declassified under the Carter administration. The interest rate starts to approach the actual interest rates of the Carter years.

Posted by Al at February 11, 2006 10:04 PM

Rand,
When the "F" did anybody believe
"I've lived through most of the Cold War, when we grew up thinking that our nuclear incineration was almost inevitable, with duck and cover drills in elementary school, but in many ways, I fear the future now more than I have at any previous time in my life of half a century."
Unless you're a lot older than your postings would lead one to believe, (1/2 Century, birth in 1955) you've never done a school "duck & cover". I did a lot of them, but all were in the late 40's and a few in the very early 50's, and all of us thought they were a cool way of getting out the next quiz!
Ordinary people, as opposed to the intellectual elite, never really worried about nuclear, incineration or whatever, even during the much overhyped "Cuban Missle Crisis". I lived through this as an adult, and, even in Progressive Democrat stronghold Sacto., CA, no-one was particularly agonizing over their soon to be "killed" by Russian attack.
Would seem the entire history of the times is either in the protest music, there's a real history, or, the factual or not, and it's really not, histories of the far left commenters on those days.
Your playing your readers with this one Rand.
Mike

Posted by MikeD at February 11, 2006 10:47 PM

I don't know about Rand or Sacto, CA but in East Tennessee we still did those stupid drills in the early 80's. Doesn't really matter, since the point he was making is still valid. At least with the "Evil Empire" you could count on their self preservation. Iran's mullahs are just nuts.

Posted by Dan Schrimpsher at February 12, 2006 03:18 AM

We still had "duck and cover drill" in upstate SC in the late 60's / early 70's as well.

Posted by Cecil Trotter at February 12, 2006 05:14 AM

I've been thinking that one of the more farsighted people in this affair has been Mu'ammar Gadhafi. I'm guessing he realized nuclear war was a real possibility, and that if an anonymous nuclear explosion occured in the US or one of its allies, any of the small nuclear adversaries would be a countertarget. Having a few bombs would not help in that situation.

One thing the US could do right now is exercise our option under the Partial Test Ban Treaty and announce our withdrawal with three months warning. The message would be that we see the situation as extremely serious, and see the need to use nuclear weapons, in the atmosphere, in anger, as a real possiblity, and don't want to violate a treaty to do so.

Another thing would be to announce the development of very high yield clean weapons. Using lower yield nukes against Iran would cause a lot of fallout, which would be a problem for neighboring countries, but very high yield (50 MT or larger) fusion bombs can be almost entirely 'clean' (in the sense of having 97% or more of their yield from fusion). They'd be exploded at high altitude to further reduce regional fallout. The purpose here would be to threaten devastating area attack against Iran as a whole. The US has already tested a nuclear device with 5 MT yield, 4.5 MT of which was from fusion.

I'd speculate the US government is holding off on steps such as these to gain support from Europe and the other major powers. Iran's actions would be helping greatly here.

Posted by Paul Dietz at February 12, 2006 05:35 AM

Correction: the US tested a 5 MT bomb, 95% of the yield of which was fusion (or about 250 kT of fission).

Posted by Paul Dietz at February 12, 2006 06:20 AM

It was my understanding from open sources and engineering discussion that fallout is predicated not on fission v. fusion, but on how much of the earth is scooped out by the blast. If a small weapon is airburst, it creates little fallout (basically, radioactive particles of already suspended dust) and what it does produce is lightweight. However, digging up, vaporizing and irradiating large amounts of dirt creates heavy fallout that is much more dangerous and more difficult to clean up.

Posted by Jeff Medcalf at February 12, 2006 06:35 AM

Mike D,
allow me to dog pile on you also. We did those drills twice or three times a year in grade school in Louisville, 1960 through 1967. I don't know about Louisville after that because I moved to another state.

Your assumption that we didn't think about nuclear weaponry is just not right. Example.

November 22, 1963.

I was 9, for a whopping 23 days at that point, and we kept hearing adults talk about "the bombs". For several days I remember adults around us talking about just who killed JFK and if it was a prelude to war.

My extended family was together that day, so I had more adults around than was usual. November 22 is my grandmothers birthday. We were supposed to all go out to eat, but many restaurants closed. I am sure all of them were not closed out of respect.

As for the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember my mother buying extra flour, salt and I am sure other things. Come to think of it she did these things again after the assasination.

I am not sure what you remember of your childhood, but it seems to me your discounting the memories and experiences of ours.

So you were settled into your life by the early 1960's, and you were sure of NOT being incinerated, well, whoopdee friggin doo for you sir!

There are those of us who grew up in the midst of the COLD War, and who were later Cold Warriors, who did do drills, did hear and worry over "the bombs", and do remember it that way.

Steve born October 29, 1954, remembers the drills, bombs, and worried parents, I expect those born on the 28th and 30th do also.

Posted by Steve at February 12, 2006 07:09 AM

24 days I miscounted.

Posted by Steve at February 12, 2006 07:12 AM

Same here. Born in 1957, and while we didn't have duck and cover in KC, as a teenager in the 70's, and a young man in the early 80's, I was acutely aware of the cold war and nukes. In 1973 during the Yom Kippur war, my dad took us out of the city, ostensibly to visit the grandparents on their farm. We also had several years of freeze dried food. When I was old enough to drive, I had a route planned to exit the city, and if there wasn't enough time, I'd drive downtown to make it quick and painless.

I am amazed at how little attention from the masses or the MSM this is getting. No one at work talks about it.

Posted by zztop at February 12, 2006 07:41 AM

Jeff: surface vs. airburst does have an important effect, but so does the physics of the bomb itself. If you want to minimize global fallout you need to minimize the fission component of the bomb (and also absorb most of the neutrons before they escape to the atmosphere and create carbon-14.)

Large bombs would cause damage mostly by thermal radiation over large distances, not by blast, which would allow them to be damaging even at high altitude.

Posted by Paul Dietz at February 12, 2006 07:44 AM

I grew up in the 70's and 80's. We did duck and cover drills, but not for nukes; they were tornado drills, tornadoes being a bigger threat in north Texas.

However, they did make that movie "The Day After" in the early 80's, and that made us all worry about the imminency of nuclear war.

What is y'all's opinion that all of this stuff about Iran is "really" related to the Iran Oil Bourse planning to trade oil in euros instead of dollars? Is that a real factor, or is it conspiracy kookiness?

Posted by Astrosmith at February 12, 2006 08:23 AM

Conspiracy kookiness, just as is the bizarro theory that this is the real reason that we removed Saddam.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 12, 2006 08:28 AM

I missed out on the drills.

But I remember, very vividly, the feeling in the 80s that this was "it", that the slowly-crumbling (by mid-80s) Soviet empire would never, ever, go away without throwing the dice into a war first.

I was very happily shocked when it ended without a shot (at us) fired.

Posted by Big D at February 12, 2006 09:05 AM

But Rand, the conspiracy kooks sound so -sincere-!

Posted by astrosmith at February 12, 2006 12:29 PM

1980 worst case: thousands of nukes explode on U.S. and Soviet soil, global death toll in the billions, low but non-zero chance of human extinction (given our limited understanding of the climatic effects), decent chance of a centuries-long dark age.

2010 worst case: one fission bomb goes off in New York (or L.A., or London, or Paris, or Tel Aviv), hundreds of thousands dead in the target country, nuclear retailiation rains down on the source country, millions killed there.

I'd say we're much safer.

Posted by earl at February 12, 2006 01:15 PM

My comment was not so much about the scale of the upcoming catastrophe, but its likelihood. And if you happen to live in the city (or two, or three) that gets nuked, it's pretty damn bad.

Posted by Rand Simberg at February 12, 2006 02:05 PM

I started school in 1963, and never had a duck-and-cover drill. The difference may be due to state, regional or private/public school differences. We did, however, learn the meaning of the air-raid siren, which the city then confusingly blew each day at noon...

Posted by lmg at February 12, 2006 03:47 PM

I think anyone who grew up in the 60's and later who wasn't worried about nuclear war clearly did not understand the problem. I grew up in Perth, Western Australia and was worried about it then.

I also remember spending a week in San Diego in early 1985 and looking at the large grey boats and wondering how many Soviet warheads were aimed at them. This was reinforced by poor choice of reading material at Sydney Airport for the long plane ride - William Prochnow's "Trinity's Child"(later made into a movie which actually followed the book closely, or at least the portion of the book they use for the movie script)

Mike

Posted by Mike Borgelt at February 12, 2006 04:14 PM

Given the name and general theme of this blog, maybe it's time to mention one more reason why it's a good idea for the West to have a presence in space.

With apologies to Dr. Pournelle and Mr. Niven, the threat of a Hammer landing on one of their cities if they misbehave may keep the Saracens in line. May.

Posted by Ian Campbell at February 13, 2006 01:45 AM

Nah, we've got perfectly good stealth bombers, cruise missiles and ICBM's for that.

Posted by Chris Mann at February 13, 2006 02:33 AM

The way I see it is that if any unfriendly state gains nukes, they cannot use them or otherwise they'd be dust 20 minutes later.

So there remains the threat of their use, but judging by the existing nuclear powers, having nukes doesn't make other countries more compliant to your wishes. Economic clout rather than nuclear clout seems to be the important factor in being heard - it works very well for the US, Japan and China.

Perhaps Iran's nukes will weaken their economy to the point where they are just a sad little country whose desperate threats others pretend to take seriously, like North Korea.

Posted by Kevin P. at February 13, 2006 05:32 AM

Two things:

First, if a terrorist detonates a nuke in New York, who seriously thinks that we would nuke Iran? We would have no proof where it came from, and most of the Iranians would be relatively innocent. The fact is, we wouldn't retaliate with nukes, they know it, and they will probably light one off if they get one.

Second, I can't help but wonder why somebody doesn't hire the world's largest army and go take the oil fields from the Arabs. If the organized crime families got together and hired all available men, they could easily kill pretty much the entire army of most of those countries. Then they would be in charge of the oil - and most countries would thank them privately while pretending to be annoyed publicly...

Posted by David Summers at February 13, 2006 08:47 AM

Grew up in the '80's in North Texas and we had duck and cover drills. They were refered to as Tornado drills but one of my teachers had the formal instructions for evacuation on the wall and the Tornado section was actually labelled: 'Tornado/Bomb'.

The horror of the Cuban missle crisis didn't really surface in detail till later when it was realized that back then there was only one nuclear option. The total annihilation of all our enemies, real and perceived. If the President picked up the red phone and said "Launch" that meant every nuclear asset against all targets were employed. That would have meant some poor shmo in China woulda been vaporized just because of some jackass in Cuba wanted to be a big man and point a couple of nukes at America.

Posted by Josh Reiter at February 13, 2006 11:36 AM

"First, if a terrorist detonates a nuke in New York, who seriously thinks that we would nuke Iran? We would have no proof where it came from, and most of the Iranians would be relatively innocent. The fact is, we wouldn't retaliate with nukes, they know it, and they will probably light one off if they get one."

Read "The Sum of all Fears" for how to identofy the source of fissile material.

Iran would be taking a significant risk assuming we could not trace the source back to them and considering the political climate following such an event, resonable suspicion would proabally suffice as justification for a massive retalitory strike. The public would be asking for, nay demanding blood as never witnessed in history.

Posted by Mike Puckett at February 13, 2006 02:05 PM

I was born in 1956. I went to schools in Springfield and Ludlow, Mass., Marietta, Ga., Honolulu and Wiahole, Hi., Bossier City, La. (2nd Air Force HQ!), and Little Rock, Ark. I never did a duck & cover drill. Never ever. Never saw one, and never knew anyone who did.

But I knew all kinds of people who worried about nuclear incineration all the time.

There's a data-set for you. Have fun.

Posted by Billy Beck at February 13, 2006 03:14 PM

Read "The Sum of all Fears" for how to identofy the source of fissile material.

And they say publicly, "A bomb was stolen from us! We are so sorry!" as they deliver the second bomb to the terrorists.

I still say that we wouldn't nuke them. The Democrats/Peace protestors wouldn't allow it.

Posted by David Summers at February 16, 2006 08:24 AM

ive heard the greater danger from a nuclear-armed iran would be that they would feel they could freely invade anyone they wanted. if we tried to interfere, theyd have their nuclear deterrent.

Posted by ujedujik at February 21, 2006 12:40 AM

Post a comment