No, I just think making authoritative statements based upon unfavorable “What if?” comparisons to actual history are frivolous and pointless. Perhaps more have been saved by the existence of nuclear weapons than may have been killed; we can’t know. But many, many more might have died had a strategic exchange of nuclear weapons had occurred, and we came close to this possibility on several well-documented occasions. And saying that Assured Destruction worked merely because nobody actually got just quite scared enough to hit the button is like saying that its wisest to drive as fast as possible on an icy highway because you happened to make it to your destination without incident.
Beats me, seems like a non sequitur. Alex_Dubinsky claims that it’s all the “Bloody america couldn’t wait to invade the soviet union and suppress its dangerous revolutionary ideology for the benefit of all moneyed gentlemen,” and that all the Commies want is peace and love, man, so I illustrated (in admittedly sarcastic fashion) that in fact the Soviet Union and the Peoples’ Republic of China participated in numerous acts of invasion and suppression in Asia and Europe. Listing a group of repressive autocrats propped up by the United States doesn’t mitigate that.
So, you posted in response to what you regarded as a one-sided argument that ignores factors that mitigate against it. To that end, you presented a one-sided argument that ignored factors that mitigate against it. So I reminded you that America did not, in truth, consistently support the advance of truth and justice. Quite the opposite on most occasions, more’s the pity.
Your use of such phrases as " all the Commies want is peace and love, man" leads me to suspect that you want to present yourself as a hard-headed realist who scorns fuzzy-thinking hippy peaceniks. We are offered to believe how smart we were to pour trillions of dollars into the coffers of Lockheed, General Dynamics, and Boeing. Rather than frittering it away on education, infrastructure and social programs.
With all due awe, I think this is probably nonsense, but the truth is we don’t know, and cannot, there being no possible experiment we can perform to reveal hard fact. Did we escape our fate (thus far!) because of sheer luck, or because sensible men on both sides behaved sensibly? I favor the latter, but cannot prove anything more than you can, which is to say, diddly-squat.
Pick another strawman to stick your pitchfork in. I said nothing of the kind. Certainly the United States has unjustly supported dictatorial regimes, and waving the spectre of Communism doesn’t excuse that. But Alex_Dubinsky didn’t address that; he just stated that the United States was the unilateral aggressor and that all the Soviets and other Communist regimes were innocent victims of “the West’s paranoia.”
Have your occulist check your reading prescription; it seems to be out-of-date.
Then why didn’t you say so? If that moral equivalence is part of your argument, why didn’t you include some acknowledgement? Would have been easy enough to do, I should think,and would have precluded any unfortunate misinterpretation by the aged and infirm.
I don’t think anyone was making authoritative statements. The proposal considers what would have happened if there were no nukes at all. Given that there were, whether MAD or some other strategy was the best is definitely debatable, but not the point of the article referred to in the OP. Like I said, I have my doubts about MAD working without the example of the effects of an atomic bomb used in war on a real city.
It is interesting because there is something odd to explain - the longest period of peace in Europe since pax Romana.
The author of the original article makes an authoritative (if hyperbolic) statement, to wit that we should award the Nobel Prize for Peace to nuclear weapons. No doubt the exaltation is a reflexive reaction to the absurd endowment of the same prize on Barack Obama, but his reasoning is tenuous at best.
One might as the Armenians and the native Britons what they thought of Pax Romana. A goodly amount of the fighting–especially ethnic strife–that occurred in Europe prior to WWII was within the boundaries of the East Bloc (or inside Yugoslavia, which became an independent socialist–Titoist–nation), so if you want to credit peace in Europe you could credit it to the oppressive authoritarian governments. You could also point to the exhaustion of European nations of their suitable-age-for-soldiering men, and the influx of money into Western Europe from the Marshall Plan.
Considering they don’t even qualify (and John can nominate them to Time if he wishes) hyperbolic is putting it mildly. I think it was an excellent hook - would we be debating a dry and properly academic statement?
You have me - since the invention of weapons, then. It is true that the were tired in 1945 - not too tired for guerrilla war in Greece, though - but they were pretty tired in 1918 also, and the peace did not last long.
I’ll agree that the Soviet Empire helped to keep a lid on things, but they maintained it partially due to the nuclear deterrent. Wars often begin in support of a breakaway faction or new government wishing to get out of an alliance. Would have our reaction to the Hungarian uprising been different without nukes? Might we have bet that the Russians wouldn’t considered keeping it important enough for a full war? Who knows, but there were plenty of flashpoints which got damped down because of fear that a conflict would get out of control.