Small countries like Crimea are going to get invaded from time to time. It sucks, but nukes won’t stop that from happening. Due to globalization, big countries won’t get invaded at all because the invader would immediately lose all the customers in the invaded country. Its bad for business so it can’t happen.
When I was a kid there were already at least two of them. My mom did some things related to the one near Catoctin, MD when she worked for Control Data, but wasn’t on The List.
True story: For that movie there was a scene at a railway station which was filmed in the Melbourne suburb of Frankston. Being a local, my mother (then about 13) hung out with some friends near the station (they knew where to hide) and watched Gregory Peck getting on and off the train.
loved the racing scenes in that movie, but for some reason what really stuck with me (I was about six when I saw it) was the pop bottle/curtain operating the morse key
When I was young every small town in my part of the world had or aspired to having one. The was British Columbia, in the sixties. A friend of my Mom was the Civil Defense coordinator for B.C., so as a teen I was a little involved. Our shelter had an air filtration system, beds with no mattresses, pantry shelves with no food, carboys with no water and a radio room with no radios(my job ) Other than that, we were ready!
Yeah. “Cheap” is part of my point. The hair trigger is also why we give the President the nuclear football instead of having congressional input, which only now people are thankfully questioning the value of. The ability to detect and launch before the site is hit isn’t 100% and there are lots of stories about close calls.
The quick response time was built in because of the inherit limitations of fixed locations. With air and sea it’s not really relevant. MAD is ensured as long as the chain of command and ability to retaliate is in place. The speed isn’t a big concern.
Ultimately MAD is a case of our subs being able to say - “sure most of are dead but now the rest of you are, too, so fck off”.
Perhaps, like in a previous comment on having a MT-nuke in every embassy, that’s your answer. The “yeah you killed us but now you die too…” card might just work.
I’m in the industry, but am just a simple country metallurgist. Policy is a few floors above me…
From a fascinating review of Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s “The Worlds of Herman Kahn”
There were a number of possible models for the character of Strangelove (who at one point tells the President about a report on Doomsday Machines prepared by the Bland Corporation): Wernher von Braun, Teller, even Henry Kissinger, who was an admirer of “On Thermonuclear War,” and whose book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” (1957) pondered the possibility of tactical nuclear wars. Peter Sellers picked up the accent from the photographer Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, when he was visiting the studio to advise Kubrick on cinematographic matters. But one source was Kahn. Strangelove’s rhapsodic monologue about preserving specimens of the race in deep mineshafts is an only slightly parodic version of Kahn. There were so many lines from “On Thermonuclear War” in the movie, in fact, that Kahn complained that he should get royalties. (“It doesn’t work that way,” Kubrick told him.) Kahn received something more lasting than money, of course. He got himself pinned in people’s minds to the figure of Dr. Strangelove, and he bore the mark of that association forever.
In the 1960s IIRC, Dick Gregory riffed on Western concerns about China going nuclear. Pollyannas scoffed, citing China’s lack of delivery systems. Gregory said that with a billion-plus population, the Chinese could hand-carry warheads to USA targets.
I don’t think anyone could have predicted how fast China industrialized. In the 1960s it was a serfdom of peasant farmers that couldn’t even feed itself. It did in 30 years what took Western countries 200 years to do.
The real change that nuclear weapons (in combination with effective delivery systems) brought is that, for the first time in military history, there was no “safe behind lines”, no remote Feldherrenhügel anymore.
Stockpiling enough nukes to annihilate an enemy nation ten times over is posturing, a pissing contest. Getting the leaders of an enemy nation to realize that they, personally, will be toast in the event is why nuclear deterrence works.
…which is only necessary if you plan a first strike.
In a deterrence scenario, the enemy silos are already empty. You only “need” enough bombs to trash a few cities, deterring an attack by making the retaliation unacceptably costly.
) Other than that, we were ready!
