The problem with the entire Nuclear War Industrial Complex is that its foundational cornerstone is a lie.
That lie is that use of the A-bomb was what ended World War II.
The second bomb was dropped at Nagasaki, the most anti-imperial city in Japan over the previous 300 years, and mistakenly on the Urakami Catholic Church, the largest Christian church in Asia, built by the contributions of the members, descendants of the Christians suppressed in the 17th Century by the Shogunate who remained secretly Christian all through the Shogunate, which the bombardier mistook for the Mitsubishi factory that was the "target" (they had to bomb on radar or drop it in the ocean, if they were going to get back, and they ran out of gas on the runway at Kadena as it was, the entire mission was FUBAR from takeoff to landing).
That day, the Imperial War Council met all day. The Nagasaki bombing was never mentioned. That's because they were completely absorbed by the USSR's attack that morning, which was completely unexpected. The vaunted Kwantung Army no longer really existed, since the best units had been withdrawn to Kyushu for he final confrontation with the Americans. That day the Red Army moved 110 miles into Manchuria, like a knife through hot butter. The Japanese knew the Soviets would have it all by the end of the month. The Russians expected to invade Hokkaido in late September. There was no defense in the north; they would have been in Tokyo by mid-October and by the time the US landed on Kyushu on beaches no one would have gotten off of (I have spoken to Marines who visited the invasion beaches in September 1945, when all the defenses were there to see; it was their considered opinion they couldn't have broken them).
The Japanese knew what the Soviets had done in Germany after the surrender, and they knew the Soviets would be equally hard on them. That's why they surrendered to us. And of course they told us the bomb was the reason why (Japanese history of the Pacific War is "We went to war to liberate Asia from the White Man and we won every battle but had to make strategic retreats and then - Atom Bombs!"), which allowed them to play Nuclear Victim for the past 80 years, which got them let off the Japanese version of "de-Nazification" that was forced on Germany; the (un)Liberal(not)Democratic Party was founded by the former leaders in the war - which never happened in Germany.
We founded our post war military and diplomatic strategy on a lie, since no sane person will ever use these weapons. Which is why we have lost every war we've fought since 1945.
Nuclear weapons are, and always have been, bullshit. But they're nice and pretty and so several generations of over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies have made nice careers (Ladies and gentlemen, Henry the K) as nuclear bullshit artists.
When I set out to write "Tidal Wave", I was still a believer in the nuclear bullshit, but the facts are now available to anyone who knows how to ask Google the right questions to get PDFs of the de-classified reports and such that open the door to Reality.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but not the part about the U.S. losing every war since 1945. I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, although I get where you’re coming from.
Dropping atomic bombs on Japan wasn’t fundamentally different from firebombing Dresden, except for the delayed onset of radiation sickness, and the irradiated area. There was an implied “we can keep this up as long as you want” kind of message to Japan, even though it wasn’t true, because the U.S. didn’t have more atomic bombs ready.
I’ve always had a concern that Japan didn’t seem to own up to its history the way that Germany has.
By the time the A-bombs were used, 75 Japanese cities had been burned out. When I was in the Navy and visited Kobe-Osaka 18 years after the firebombing, my buddy and I got lost and ended up confronting the last 1,000 acres that hadn't been cleared, just at sunset. It was like looking into a black hole - the ground was black, everything was black, twisted girders sticking out of the ground. I had the immediate thought of looking at a cover for a 50s s-f novel about World War III. They lost more people in the fireboming of Tokyo on March9 than at Hiroshima. To them, the bombs were just "more of the same."
Japan has never owned up to its history. I had a Japanese pen pal who I met while I was there, and I once told her the real history of the Pacific War after we had visited the "Mikasa". She was absolutely dumbfounded.
Sadly, after 75 years there is little evidence that focusing on the weapons will ever deliver us from the nuclear threat. Indeed, there is little evidence that ANY of the things we've been doing for 75 years will ever work. Wasn't it Einstein that claimed that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity?
Even if we somehow got rid of all nuclear weapons, that wouldn't really solve the problem for very long. Psychopathic power trippers like Putin would then simply turn their attention to other means of threatening their victims with mass chaos, and an accelerating knowledge explosion will provide them with ever more such options.
If "realistic" and "reasonable" ideas that experts would certify as credible could end the nuclear weapons era, after 75 years wouldn't that era already be over? If that's true, then the most promising area for investigation would seem to be in that collection of ideas which reside outside the status quo group consensus. Let's call them "crackpot ideas".
A key problem I see is that experts, those with credibility and cultural authority, can not afford to publicly explore beyond the failed status quo because doing so would threaten their professional reputations and income. Experts can't afford to be seen as crackpots. They can't afford to do the job which needs doing.
So what then? One paradigm shift that might be explored would be to shift our focus from weapons to those who would use them. The reasoning here is that so long as violent men are running rampant all over the planet, a focus on weapons is a loser's game. It seems more accurate to state that we have a violent men problem than that we have a nuclear weapons problem.
So here's another proposal from outside the box. Anything is worth a try.
Let's give every national security expert in America 100 million dollars from the national treasury so that they can stop worrying about their reputations and incomes, and focus their intelligence and experience instead on the real problem that we face, which is...
Violent men.
We need people with cultural authority who are liberated to think outside the box. Without that, the most likely outcome is that we will keep doing the same failed things over and over again until the day that we run out of luck.
Prigohzin has been adamant and loud about his desire to "fully overtake Ukraine at any cost", so having him in control.of any part of the military or nuclear weapons would be worse than the current. That was his "public" goal, he demanded replacement of top MoD officials, correlation, maybe?
The problem with the entire Nuclear War Industrial Complex is that its foundational cornerstone is a lie.
That lie is that use of the A-bomb was what ended World War II.
The second bomb was dropped at Nagasaki, the most anti-imperial city in Japan over the previous 300 years, and mistakenly on the Urakami Catholic Church, the largest Christian church in Asia, built by the contributions of the members, descendants of the Christians suppressed in the 17th Century by the Shogunate who remained secretly Christian all through the Shogunate, which the bombardier mistook for the Mitsubishi factory that was the "target" (they had to bomb on radar or drop it in the ocean, if they were going to get back, and they ran out of gas on the runway at Kadena as it was, the entire mission was FUBAR from takeoff to landing).
That day, the Imperial War Council met all day. The Nagasaki bombing was never mentioned. That's because they were completely absorbed by the USSR's attack that morning, which was completely unexpected. The vaunted Kwantung Army no longer really existed, since the best units had been withdrawn to Kyushu for he final confrontation with the Americans. That day the Red Army moved 110 miles into Manchuria, like a knife through hot butter. The Japanese knew the Soviets would have it all by the end of the month. The Russians expected to invade Hokkaido in late September. There was no defense in the north; they would have been in Tokyo by mid-October and by the time the US landed on Kyushu on beaches no one would have gotten off of (I have spoken to Marines who visited the invasion beaches in September 1945, when all the defenses were there to see; it was their considered opinion they couldn't have broken them).
The Japanese knew what the Soviets had done in Germany after the surrender, and they knew the Soviets would be equally hard on them. That's why they surrendered to us. And of course they told us the bomb was the reason why (Japanese history of the Pacific War is "We went to war to liberate Asia from the White Man and we won every battle but had to make strategic retreats and then - Atom Bombs!"), which allowed them to play Nuclear Victim for the past 80 years, which got them let off the Japanese version of "de-Nazification" that was forced on Germany; the (un)Liberal(not)Democratic Party was founded by the former leaders in the war - which never happened in Germany.
We founded our post war military and diplomatic strategy on a lie, since no sane person will ever use these weapons. Which is why we have lost every war we've fought since 1945.
Nuclear weapons are, and always have been, bullshit. But they're nice and pretty and so several generations of over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable trust fund babies have made nice careers (Ladies and gentlemen, Henry the K) as nuclear bullshit artists.
When I set out to write "Tidal Wave", I was still a believer in the nuclear bullshit, but the facts are now available to anyone who knows how to ask Google the right questions to get PDFs of the de-classified reports and such that open the door to Reality.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but not the part about the U.S. losing every war since 1945. I don’t think that’s a fair assessment, although I get where you’re coming from.
Dropping atomic bombs on Japan wasn’t fundamentally different from firebombing Dresden, except for the delayed onset of radiation sickness, and the irradiated area. There was an implied “we can keep this up as long as you want” kind of message to Japan, even though it wasn’t true, because the U.S. didn’t have more atomic bombs ready.
I’ve always had a concern that Japan didn’t seem to own up to its history the way that Germany has.
By the time the A-bombs were used, 75 Japanese cities had been burned out. When I was in the Navy and visited Kobe-Osaka 18 years after the firebombing, my buddy and I got lost and ended up confronting the last 1,000 acres that hadn't been cleared, just at sunset. It was like looking into a black hole - the ground was black, everything was black, twisted girders sticking out of the ground. I had the immediate thought of looking at a cover for a 50s s-f novel about World War III. They lost more people in the fireboming of Tokyo on March9 than at Hiroshima. To them, the bombs were just "more of the same."
Japan has never owned up to its history. I had a Japanese pen pal who I met while I was there, and I once told her the real history of the Pacific War after we had visited the "Mikasa". She was absolutely dumbfounded.
Sadly, after 75 years there is little evidence that focusing on the weapons will ever deliver us from the nuclear threat. Indeed, there is little evidence that ANY of the things we've been doing for 75 years will ever work. Wasn't it Einstein that claimed that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity?
Even if we somehow got rid of all nuclear weapons, that wouldn't really solve the problem for very long. Psychopathic power trippers like Putin would then simply turn their attention to other means of threatening their victims with mass chaos, and an accelerating knowledge explosion will provide them with ever more such options.
If "realistic" and "reasonable" ideas that experts would certify as credible could end the nuclear weapons era, after 75 years wouldn't that era already be over? If that's true, then the most promising area for investigation would seem to be in that collection of ideas which reside outside the status quo group consensus. Let's call them "crackpot ideas".
A key problem I see is that experts, those with credibility and cultural authority, can not afford to publicly explore beyond the failed status quo because doing so would threaten their professional reputations and income. Experts can't afford to be seen as crackpots. They can't afford to do the job which needs doing.
So what then? One paradigm shift that might be explored would be to shift our focus from weapons to those who would use them. The reasoning here is that so long as violent men are running rampant all over the planet, a focus on weapons is a loser's game. It seems more accurate to state that we have a violent men problem than that we have a nuclear weapons problem.
So here's another proposal from outside the box. Anything is worth a try.
Let's give every national security expert in America 100 million dollars from the national treasury so that they can stop worrying about their reputations and incomes, and focus their intelligence and experience instead on the real problem that we face, which is...
Violent men.
We need people with cultural authority who are liberated to think outside the box. Without that, the most likely outcome is that we will keep doing the same failed things over and over again until the day that we run out of luck.
Prigohzin has been adamant and loud about his desire to "fully overtake Ukraine at any cost", so having him in control.of any part of the military or nuclear weapons would be worse than the current. That was his "public" goal, he demanded replacement of top MoD officials, correlation, maybe?
Could AI thwart the safeguards? That brings up visions of Skynet.