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It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear att
by anovikov 9y ago
It was done for a very rational reason: making country more immune to a nuclear attack, especially the retaliation to its own nuclear attack (i.e. a nuclear attack that is coming in convenient time of day and week because you chose the time). It works perfectly to that purpose: it is whole lot better to keep all relevant population in separate houses with basements, with little combustible material around, than in multimillion cities with no way out of them.
If U.S. launched its missiles while all these people just came home from jobs say at 11pm ET/8pm PT, and people in the Soviet Union were on the way or at their factory jobs during Moscow morning on Siberia mid-day, it would be a slaughter for the Soviet Union and an easy win for the U.S.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoAh, that's a good point. Still, it seems the design pattern has outlasted the attitude that created it.
- deanCommie 9y agoHave a source for any of that? Sounds like a completely made-up justification after the fact. Surely someone would have raised the point that the soviet union could just launch it's missiles in the middle of the work day. Also, Moscow is tremendously sprawled out.
- maxerickson 9y agoTo me the simpler theory is that the US has been quite wealthy since World War 2 and has lots and lots of space. Which doesn't mean that building sprawling subdivisions is a great idea, but space is a pretty easy thing to sell.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoThose things enable sprawl, but they don't force it.
- equalunique 9y agoFederal Highways in the US are designed to increase national security. The best example is certain bridges are in certain places so that their destruction would cut off the easy path for mobilized enemy armor. They're designed to be easily blown up on purpose.
- wfunction 9y ago> The best example is certain bridges are in certain places And you cannot utter their names or locations because?
- CydeWeys 9y agoYou got any credible sources on that? It sounds like one of those urban legends that people like to repeat. The Eisenhower interstate system was built in a post-nuclear world, and in a post-nuclear world it's hard to imagine there ever being a mainland invasion of the United States. The bombs would be flying before that, and there wouldn't be anything left worth invading (on any side in the conflict). Being able to utterly destroy the other nation and its military forces within minutes by launching thousands of ICBMs is a much more credible plan of war than blowing up some random bridges on your own turf, and indeed that is the logical course of action that we did go down.
- rangibaby 9y agoThe military purpose of the interstate is moving friendly troops around (logistics).
- CydeWeys 9y agoNow this is a lot more true, and the military value of having good transportation within the boundaries of your own land has been known since at least Roman times, and likely much farther back. It doesn't explain the bridge blowing up thing, however.
- int_19h 9y agoI don't know about the bridges specifically, but that the interstate system had an explicit national security purpose is not just well-documented, it's literally right there in the name of the law that created it: National Interstate and Defense Highways Act.
- tooltalk 9y agoAh, I just did Google on it, and lo and behold: "... While it is true that various factors contributed to phenomenal growth of the suburbs between 1945 and 1960, historians have thus far paid little attention to policymakers' fears of atomic attack as a significant factor in population dispersal. ..." The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence K. Tobin, Pages 1-32 | Published online: 06 Sep 2010 I work in tech/finance. I am old enough to remember that, after the 9/11 attack in 2001, banks were required to set up their datacenter/DR sites at least 50 miles away from their main offices to avoid a complete wipe-out in case of nuke attack.
- ianai 9y agoI'm going to recount this in person someday and get the "he's a nutter" response.
- int_19h 9y agoMoscow is also tremendously dense. It's sprawled out because it has so many people in it, but the vast majority of those people are packed into apartment buildings. The same goes for all other major urban centers. A typical Russian (or rather, ex-Soviet) cityscape looks like this, and can go for miles: http://images.e-flux-systems.com/2014_04_Bric-III-Yugo-Zapadniy-Okryg-Moscow-2008.jpg,2000x550 http://images.e-flux-systems.com/2014_04_Bric-III-Yugo-Zapad... Now imagine an airburst nuclear explosion over this, just low enough to maximize the blast wave. There's a reason why Soviets heavily invested into protecting the populace from such attacks - the entire Moscow Metro system doubles as a nuclear bomb shelter, complete with blast doors.
- LordKano 9y agoI had never considered this and something else about it makes perfect sense to me. It also explains the "white flight" of the time. What we now call the "inner city" was allowed to remain black and brown with the expectation that the country would be alright if they were incinerated while the more -valuable- people had been relocated to the suburbs. The Soviets would be able to get their retaliatory body count while eliminating people that the US didn't really value in the first place.
- Animats 9y agoThere was a serious attempt to do that in the 1950s, although it didn't have great impact. It is, however, why IBM corporate headquarters moved from Manhattan to Armonk, NY.
- vacri 9y ago'easy win' = the people in the area die more slowly rather than in the initial blast? Apart from the now-radioactive work centers (that are the wealth of your country), take out your city centers and industry, and you also take out your transportation network. Hello, famine.
- chrischen 9y agoSeems like Japan didn't get that memo having been bombed twice.