15 ms·

Dr. Seuss’ arms race allegory

104 points by mcone 9y ago

Z1nfandel 9y ago
Ohh man, the memories around this book. Lets just say it was required reading for intel analysts at my base, and we found every way possible to reference it in our reports/briefings. For example, the SA-6 was known as a "three sling jigger"
- fapjacks 9y ago
  Once upon a time we escorted an Air Force convoy whose commander referred to the enemy as "butter-side-down people".
  - Z1nfandel 9y ago
    Yes! I wonder if they happened to come from Eielson AFB. (Not expecting you to know that, but it makes me smile knowing that it stuck)
Quarrelsome 9y ago
I'm amazed that given the depth of Dr Seuss's work its stuff like Cat in the Hat that is the most exposed. Ever since I went through his work to read to a small child I know i've been amazed at how useful and framed in reality the less known stories are (e.g. Sneeches at Beaches, Yrtle the Turtle).
- guskel 9y ago
  The "Voom" in the Cat in The Hat Comes Back is thought to be a metaphor for the bomb.
  - rustoffee 9y ago
    Well I guess when I get done with Dostoevsky, I should loop back around to my 1st grade reading material.
  - korethr 9y ago
    By whom? To me, it was always a fun noise to say as loud and dramatically as possible, so to annoy my younger sister when I read the story to her. I'd always read it as a silly bit of deus ex machina employed to end the story, as we'd run out of letters in the alphabet. Metaphor for a bomb? Maybe. But I doubt Dr. Seuss was trying to put forward the lesson to children that when you're out of ideas, the thing to do is blow it all up. I honestly think he was being silly for the sake of whimsy and amusement.
    - jpfed 9y ago
      By me? As far as I know it's the most powerful object in any Seuss book and it derives that power from something so small it's invisible. It's where my thoughts immediately went on first reading.
  - joemaller1 9y ago
    Not only was the Voom the "sub-atomic" power in the littlest cat's hat, it's eventual purpose was to cleanse the Red (pink) from the snow. The book was published in 1958, the cold war between the US and USSR was ramping up with over 100 combined nuclear tests in 1957 alone. Geisel was a vocal proponent of the US in WWII and eventually served in the US Army (as an animator).
korethr 9y ago
I was surprised to learn that the book had been banned in some libraries, although in hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have been. It would explain why I didn't know about the book until sometime in my late 20s. Reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that it was a cold war allegory, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn't recall Dr. Seuss books having much in the way of sociopolitical commentary, and I still don't, outside stories like Yertle the Turtle or The Lorax. If the politics apparent in Yertle the Turtle went over my head as a child, it's possible that other allegories went over my head as well. I should go back and read those books again.
- doomslice 9y ago
  I happened to read this to my 4 year olds a few weeks ago after finding it at my Mother-in-law's house. I can tell you that at least for 4 year olds, it's just a book about buttered bread. My son asked for butter side down bread at lunch and my daughter asked for butter side up.
  - saagarjha 9y ago
    Yup. Back in kindergarten it was just another Dr. Seuss book. Reread it in high school and the allegory was obvious.
  - korethr 9y ago
    Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i was aware of in the world at the time. I picked up on the environmental message in the Lorax the first time through. But then again, "Save the envrionment, kids!" was very much a part of the zeitgeist from the late 80s into the mid-late 90s. The anti-discrimination message of the Sneetches on Beaches didn't hit me until I was old enough to realize that having different skin color was an intrinsic thing that people cared about only if they wanted to be meanies, and not simply people who'd gotten more sun tanning time than me.
  - allemagne 9y ago
    The idea, I think, is that introducing the concept of tragic arms races between people who are enemies for silly reasons is enough for that child to grow up, read about the cold war, and immediately recognize it for what it was.
beebmam 9y ago
It's absurd to me that chemical and biological weapons are banned, but nuclear weapons are not. There is an international campaign to ban nuclear weapons, and I hope more people learn about it. The organization won the nobel peace prize in 2017. Many nations last year signed on to the ban. Let's encourage the rest to also sign it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abol...
- jandrese 9y ago
  Of course those bans are just words on paper if actual fighting breaks out. Unless they are actually enforced somehow they don't mean anything.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  I've seen this come up a few times and let me explain why this is not a good idea. Excluding MAD theory, if you're the United States, or the UK, or France, or whomever - your nuclear weapons are the great equalizer and keep you safe. Other countries have a lot more people than you and will catch up or surpass you technologically and can invade you. Nuclear weapons immediately stop that. Let's say China (and I'm not a fan of the idiotic relations between the US and China and the foolishness on both sides) decides that Japan just has to go. What stops them? You could say the United States, sure, but what really stops them? It's not the US Army, or the Marines - the air force and navy certainly play a part in "hey we'll come try and blow your stuff up" but what really stops them is that, no matter how much manpower they have, no matter how many airplanes or tanks they build, or how many rockets or missiles they can construct, a nuclear weapons makes all of that pretty much useless. It allows countries with smaller populations to posses weapons such that big countries can't go stomping around and hurting them. Is North Korea really scared of the United States military coming from all the way across the ocean to help South Korea? Or are they scared that the United States will drop nuclear bombs on the country? People forget how easily countries can slip into war, even between great powers. If you live in the UK or something - you better hang on to your nuclear weapons for dear life. It sounds fun and all good to have everybody disarm, until some big country decides to come after you and you're hoping other people want to help you out.
- 9y ago
Theodores 9y ago
What I find amazing is how that it was so hard for people to just say no to nuclear weapons. So we have literature that aludes to the topic rather than speak about things directly. It is cowardly to write some allegorical tale about how wicked the rulers are, setting everything in a fanciful animal kingdom. Authors should write up rather than down for children, most ten year olds may not have adult reading ability but plenty do. They can be told the truth about the world.
- jandrese 9y ago
  You can't put the cat back in the bag again. Geopolitically making your own nukes is a huge win for a country. Sure every other country is angry with you and may even impose sanctions, but chances are you are already under sanctions anyway and now their rage is mostly impotent because you have the bomb. You can have a big agreement for everybody to dismantle their weapons and live in peace, but it only takes one cheater to run it for everybody and it's very very difficult to verify that they are complying and/or don't have a secret facility hidden somewhere to make new ones.
- brians 9y ago
  Rather than? Surely we have lots of direct literature. And, since this is so important, a portfolio addressing the issue in many ways.
- cortesoft 9y ago
  If I am given the choice between 'A world with nuclear weapons' and 'A world without nuclear weapons', I would choose the latter every time. However, no person or nation is ever given THAT choice. The choice is always between 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, and yours does, too' and 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, but not yours'. Given that choice, I would probably pick the former. It doesn't make you immoral to not want to be the country without nuclear weapons when others have them.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Ten year olds is outside the range for this book, the recommended ages are 5 to 9. Also, allegories have nothing to do with "talking down". There's plenty of artwork for adults with allegories. Plato wasn't writing for toddlers.
lsc 9y ago
I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human nature. I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother, but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that humans aren't completely self-destructive.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  This time period also coincided with a huge amount of war weariness. WW2 was long and horrible.
  - lsc 9y ago
    That is the terrifying way of looking at it... what if we only exercised such restraint because our parents and grandparents lived the horrible experience of a major power war? What if the next generation in power doesn't have that same experience and restraint?
- Brendinooo 9y ago
  > it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality It's probably more of an affirmation that humans behave better when accountable for their actions. Two nukes were dropped when the enemy of the bomber had no way to retaliate in kind, and no more have been dropped since that stopped being true.
  - paulddraper 9y ago
    US was the only nuclear power for several years though.
    - Brendinooo 9y ago
      About four years from Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the USSR's first successful test. Soviets had the bomb before the Korean War.
larrik 9y ago
Wait, is this book not well known? My kid dressed up as one of the lab guys for his "literacy day" character (since we can't just have Halloween costumes...).
SCHiM 9y ago
I agree with the premise halfway in the article. My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. When someone of my generation is behind the buttons, I wonder if somewhere in the back of their minds there isn't a part of them that says 'perhaps in this and this situation it'd be okay to press the big red button?'. I think the horror that war/these weapons cause will slowly drift from collective memory in mainstream western society. The warnings of the previous generation will be an endorsement of the destructive power of these weapons, instead of a deterrent of their usage.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  The same thing can be said about war in general, not just nuclear war.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  With nuclear war there isn't just one worst case scenario but two. On the one hand even a small scale nuclear exchange with modern thermonuclear weapons could be so incredibly devastating that it would set back human civilization substantially, disrupting the entire global economy and technological/industrial/agricultural infrastructure, perhaps even leading to a cascading collapse of civilization. On the other hand, it might not. In which case people might be encouraged to think (as was common during too much of the Cold War) that nuclear weapons could just be shuffled into the military toolkit, for occasional use in "ordinary" warfare. I grew up in the '80s, and I well remember the omnipresent feeling of dread that I'm sure most people from that generation experienced on a regular basis. Everyone knew that global catastrophe was a moment away, that any moment of any day a missile could be launched and only minutes later nuclear annihilation would rain down. You can see that in the popular media at the time, of course, the Terminator movies being a particular example, but countless others expressing that feeling (some more direct than others). It's difficult to explain what that feeling and that deep-seated knowledge is like without having experienced it. At the end of the Cold War it felt like a great weight was lifted from the world. But since then, especially most recently, it's felt that that weight has been incrementally coming back.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  > My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. Before Trump, I would've agreed with you. But "fortunately" he's bringing that fear to a whole new generation, now that-- for the first time in about two decades-- we're back in a situation where there's at least a single-digit annual probability of a nuclear exchange. Hooray?
indubitable 9y ago
One thing I think many people fail to consider is that, contrary to perception, we have entered into one of the most peaceful eras in all of humanity, and nuclear weapons are likely largely responsible for that peace. It's easy to fail to see the peace amongst all the war, and the media anxious to report for weeks on end about any violent event of significant scale. However, look at things in terms of scale. 9/11 was considered an atrocious and unprecedented event. 2,996 lives lost in a matter of hours. Look at something like World War 2. In World War 2 the total death toll was around 75 million with a world population of about 2.3 billion. That's 248 million lives lost scaled up to today's population. Think about that. That would be the equivalent of a 9/11 event happening every single day for 83,555 days. Or a 9/11 event every single day for 229 years. That sort of loss of life is completely unimaginable. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of lives lost. The Mongol Invasions in the 13th century killed off 35 million people. The colonization of America resulted in deaths that are difficult to measure but it was also in the high tens of millions at the minimum. But today even if we look at places we ignore, like Iraq, the high end of the death tolls there are around 1 million. And a big part of the reason for the dramatic decline in war is because of nukes. If not for nuclear weapons we would have long since had a World War 3 as Europe, China, and the US vied to determine whose ideology would become the world ideology. And it's extremely possible we could have seen the first war with a death toll in excess of a billion. Instead we live in an era when a few hundred people being killed in one act is something that shakes the entire western world for months. Mutually assured destruction may be MAD, but it demonstrates quite clearly peace sustained by self interest alone is vastly more effective than any peace built on words and promises.
- iskander 9y ago
  "Not as bad as WWII" isn't much of a standard for world peace. If you total up casualties from the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia then you might be surprised at just how many violent deaths have transpired in the past decade. What's more, many of these conflicts have significantly outlived WWII in duration. Will the humpty dumpty of Syria ever be put together again? Probably not as long as it's the proxy battleground for regional powers. What we might be seeing, rather than real peace, is a disparity of safety from violence. Some countries will be bomb-wrecked hellscapes for decades, while others fund those conflicts but don't think about them too much (except for when terrorists show up to burst our bubbles).
daltonlp 9y ago
Some fun facts and thoughts: - Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor H. Krulak. - Like The Lorax, the story is structured as a tale from an older generation to a modern one, where the younger character is a stand-in for the reader. - As much as Seuss was against transparent moralizing, he delighted in obvious satire, and he wasn't afraid of being too on the nose. The Chief Yookeroo, the back-room boys with their slide rules and spectacles, the butter-up band. The "Your yookery" sign. The slavic-named antagonist VanItch. - This book is interesting to compare with Seuss' editorial cartoons decades earlier, during WWII. At that time, he was producing unabashed anti-axis propaganda. During his lifetime, he had not just observed the kind of wartime fervor the Yooks subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it. http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/ http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/ - Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. The Butter Battle Book is a masterpiece.
jancsika 9y ago
I think this book elucidates something that I miss in most popular discussions, which is fragility. As the two sides escalate, the entire system becomes more fragile. E.g., the dude at the beginning uses a slingshot which has the consequence of breaking one other dude's stick. Not so fragile. But by the end neither dude can use their weapon at all without destroying everything on both sides of the fence. And the capabilities to use the weapon is put directly in the hands of the two dudes and no one else. Extremely fragile. Is this a studied phenomenon? For example, does the auto industry measure fragility wrt putting networked self-driving cars on the highway?
iamwil 9y ago
I wonder if he changed his mind after the war. During the war, he drew a lot of anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda.
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
It was also turned into an animated short, directed by Ralph Bakshi[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Television_special https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Televis...
Taniwha 9y ago
We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more lesser known Seuss books ... His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity .... https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady-godivas/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady... And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts': https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800826/ https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800...

104 points by mcone 9y ago

Ohh man, the memories around this book. Lets just say it was required reading for intel analysts at my base, and we found every way possible to reference it in our reports/briefings. For example, the SA-6 was known as a "three sling jigger"

fapjacks 9y ago
Once upon a time we escorted an Air Force convoy whose commander referred to the enemy as "butter-side-down people".
- Z1nfandel 9y ago
  Yes! I wonder if they happened to come from Eielson AFB. (Not expecting you to know that, but it makes me smile knowing that it stuck)

Quarrelsome 9y ago

I'm amazed that given the depth of Dr Seuss's work its stuff like Cat in the Hat that is the most exposed. Ever since I went through his work to read to a small child I know i've been amazed at how useful and framed in reality the less known stories are (e.g. Sneeches at Beaches, Yrtle the Turtle).

guskel 9y ago
The "Voom" in the Cat in The Hat Comes Back is thought to be a metaphor for the bomb.
- rustoffee 9y ago
  Well I guess when I get done with Dostoevsky, I should loop back around to my 1st grade reading material.
- korethr 9y ago
  By whom? To me, it was always a fun noise to say as loud and dramatically as possible, so to annoy my younger sister when I read the story to her. I'd always read it as a silly bit of deus ex machina employed to end the story, as we'd run out of letters in the alphabet. Metaphor for a bomb? Maybe. But I doubt Dr. Seuss was trying to put forward the lesson to children that when you're out of ideas, the thing to do is blow it all up. I honestly think he was being silly for the sake of whimsy and amusement.
  - jpfed 9y ago
    By me? As far as I know it's the most powerful object in any Seuss book and it derives that power from something so small it's invisible. It's where my thoughts immediately went on first reading.
- joemaller1 9y ago
  Not only was the Voom the "sub-atomic" power in the littlest cat's hat, it's eventual purpose was to cleanse the Red (pink) from the snow. The book was published in 1958, the cold war between the US and USSR was ramping up with over 100 combined nuclear tests in 1957 alone. Geisel was a vocal proponent of the US in WWII and eventually served in the US Army (as an animator).

korethr 9y ago

I was surprised to learn that the book had been banned in some libraries, although in hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have been. It would explain why I didn't know about the book until sometime in my late 20s. Reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that it was a cold war allegory, which was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn't recall Dr. Seuss books having much in the way of sociopolitical commentary, and I still don't, outside stories like Yertle the Turtle or The Lorax. If the politics apparent in Yertle the Turtle went over my head as a child, it's possible that other allegories went over my head as well. I should go back and read those books again.

doomslice 9y ago
I happened to read this to my 4 year olds a few weeks ago after finding it at my Mother-in-law's house. I can tell you that at least for 4 year olds, it's just a book about buttered bread. My son asked for butter side down bread at lunch and my daughter asked for butter side up.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Yup. Back in kindergarten it was just another Dr. Seuss book. Reread it in high school and the allegory was obvious.
- korethr 9y ago
  Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i was aware of in the world at the time. I picked up on the environmental message in the Lorax the first time through. But then again, "Save the envrionment, kids!" was very much a part of the zeitgeist from the late 80s into the mid-late 90s. The anti-discrimination message of the Sneetches on Beaches didn't hit me until I was old enough to realize that having different skin color was an intrinsic thing that people cared about only if they wanted to be meanies, and not simply people who'd gotten more sun tanning time than me.
- allemagne 9y ago
  The idea, I think, is that introducing the concept of tragic arms races between people who are enemies for silly reasons is enough for that child to grow up, read about the cold war, and immediately recognize it for what it was.

beebmam 9y ago

It's absurd to me that chemical and biological weapons are banned, but nuclear weapons are not. There is an international campaign to ban nuclear weapons, and I hope more people learn about it. The organization won the nobel peace prize in 2017. Many nations last year signed on to the ban. Let's encourage the rest to also sign it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abol...

jandrese 9y ago
Of course those bans are just words on paper if actual fighting breaks out. Unless they are actually enforced somehow they don't mean anything.
muninn_ 9y ago
I've seen this come up a few times and let me explain why this is not a good idea. Excluding MAD theory, if you're the United States, or the UK, or France, or whomever - your nuclear weapons are the great equalizer and keep you safe. Other countries have a lot more people than you and will catch up or surpass you technologically and can invade you. Nuclear weapons immediately stop that. Let's say China (and I'm not a fan of the idiotic relations between the US and China and the foolishness on both sides) decides that Japan just has to go. What stops them? You could say the United States, sure, but what really stops them? It's not the US Army, or the Marines - the air force and navy certainly play a part in "hey we'll come try and blow your stuff up" but what really stops them is that, no matter how much manpower they have, no matter how many airplanes or tanks they build, or how many rockets or missiles they can construct, a nuclear weapons makes all of that pretty much useless. It allows countries with smaller populations to posses weapons such that big countries can't go stomping around and hurting them. Is North Korea really scared of the United States military coming from all the way across the ocean to help South Korea? Or are they scared that the United States will drop nuclear bombs on the country? People forget how easily countries can slip into war, even between great powers. If you live in the UK or something - you better hang on to your nuclear weapons for dear life. It sounds fun and all good to have everybody disarm, until some big country decides to come after you and you're hoping other people want to help you out.
9y ago

Theodores 9y ago

What I find amazing is how that it was so hard for people to just say no to nuclear weapons. So we have literature that aludes to the topic rather than speak about things directly. It is cowardly to write some allegorical tale about how wicked the rulers are, setting everything in a fanciful animal kingdom. Authors should write up rather than down for children, most ten year olds may not have adult reading ability but plenty do. They can be told the truth about the world.

jandrese 9y ago
You can't put the cat back in the bag again. Geopolitically making your own nukes is a huge win for a country. Sure every other country is angry with you and may even impose sanctions, but chances are you are already under sanctions anyway and now their rage is mostly impotent because you have the bomb. You can have a big agreement for everybody to dismantle their weapons and live in peace, but it only takes one cheater to run it for everybody and it's very very difficult to verify that they are complying and/or don't have a secret facility hidden somewhere to make new ones.
brians 9y ago
Rather than? Surely we have lots of direct literature. And, since this is so important, a portfolio addressing the issue in many ways.
cortesoft 9y ago
If I am given the choice between 'A world with nuclear weapons' and 'A world without nuclear weapons', I would choose the latter every time. However, no person or nation is ever given THAT choice. The choice is always between 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, and yours does, too' and 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, but not yours'. Given that choice, I would probably pick the former. It doesn't make you immoral to not want to be the country without nuclear weapons when others have them.
icebraining 9y ago
Ten year olds is outside the range for this book, the recommended ages are 5 to 9. Also, allegories have nothing to do with "talking down". There's plenty of artwork for adults with allegories. Plato wasn't writing for toddlers.

lsc 9y ago

I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human nature. I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother, but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that humans aren't completely self-destructive.

pnutjam 9y ago
This time period also coincided with a huge amount of war weariness. WW2 was long and horrible.
- lsc 9y ago
  That is the terrifying way of looking at it... what if we only exercised such restraint because our parents and grandparents lived the horrible experience of a major power war? What if the next generation in power doesn't have that same experience and restraint?
Brendinooo 9y ago
> it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality It's probably more of an affirmation that humans behave better when accountable for their actions. Two nukes were dropped when the enemy of the bomber had no way to retaliate in kind, and no more have been dropped since that stopped being true.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  US was the only nuclear power for several years though.
  - Brendinooo 9y ago
    About four years from Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the USSR's first successful test. Soviets had the bomb before the Korean War.

larrik 9y ago

Wait, is this book not well known? My kid dressed up as one of the lab guys for his "literacy day" character (since we can't just have Halloween costumes...).

SCHiM 9y ago

I agree with the premise halfway in the article. My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. When someone of my generation is behind the buttons, I wonder if somewhere in the back of their minds there isn't a part of them that says 'perhaps in this and this situation it'd be okay to press the big red button?'. I think the horror that war/these weapons cause will slowly drift from collective memory in mainstream western society. The warnings of the previous generation will be an endorsement of the destructive power of these weapons, instead of a deterrent of their usage.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago
The same thing can be said about war in general, not just nuclear war.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
With nuclear war there isn't just one worst case scenario but two. On the one hand even a small scale nuclear exchange with modern thermonuclear weapons could be so incredibly devastating that it would set back human civilization substantially, disrupting the entire global economy and technological/industrial/agricultural infrastructure, perhaps even leading to a cascading collapse of civilization. On the other hand, it might not. In which case people might be encouraged to think (as was common during too much of the Cold War) that nuclear weapons could just be shuffled into the military toolkit, for occasional use in "ordinary" warfare. I grew up in the '80s, and I well remember the omnipresent feeling of dread that I'm sure most people from that generation experienced on a regular basis. Everyone knew that global catastrophe was a moment away, that any moment of any day a missile could be launched and only minutes later nuclear annihilation would rain down. You can see that in the popular media at the time, of course, the Terminator movies being a particular example, but countless others expressing that feeling (some more direct than others). It's difficult to explain what that feeling and that deep-seated knowledge is like without having experienced it. At the end of the Cold War it felt like a great weight was lifted from the world. But since then, especially most recently, it's felt that that weight has been incrementally coming back.
Analemma_ 9y ago
> My generation has not grown to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. Before Trump, I would've agreed with you. But "fortunately" he's bringing that fear to a whole new generation, now that-- for the first time in about two decades-- we're back in a situation where there's at least a single-digit annual probability of a nuclear exchange. Hooray?

indubitable 9y ago

One thing I think many people fail to consider is that, contrary to perception, we have entered into one of the most peaceful eras in all of humanity, and nuclear weapons are likely largely responsible for that peace. It's easy to fail to see the peace amongst all the war, and the media anxious to report for weeks on end about any violent event of significant scale. However, look at things in terms of scale. 9/11 was considered an atrocious and unprecedented event. 2,996 lives lost in a matter of hours. Look at something like World War 2. In World War 2 the total death toll was around 75 million with a world population of about 2.3 billion. That's 248 million lives lost scaled up to today's population. Think about that. That would be the equivalent of a 9/11 event happening every single day for 83,555 days. Or a 9/11 event every single day for 229 years. That sort of loss of life is completely unimaginable. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of lives lost. The Mongol Invasions in the 13th century killed off 35 million people. The colonization of America resulted in deaths that are difficult to measure but it was also in the high tens of millions at the minimum. But today even if we look at places we ignore, like Iraq, the high end of the death tolls there are around 1 million. And a big part of the reason for the dramatic decline in war is because of nukes. If not for nuclear weapons we would have long since had a World War 3 as Europe, China, and the US vied to determine whose ideology would become the world ideology. And it's extremely possible we could have seen the first war with a death toll in excess of a billion. Instead we live in an era when a few hundred people being killed in one act is something that shakes the entire western world for months. Mutually assured destruction may be MAD, but it demonstrates quite clearly peace sustained by self interest alone is vastly more effective than any peace built on words and promises.

iskander 9y ago
"Not as bad as WWII" isn't much of a standard for world peace. If you total up casualties from the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia then you might be surprised at just how many violent deaths have transpired in the past decade. What's more, many of these conflicts have significantly outlived WWII in duration. Will the humpty dumpty of Syria ever be put together again? Probably not as long as it's the proxy battleground for regional powers. What we might be seeing, rather than real peace, is a disparity of safety from violence. Some countries will be bomb-wrecked hellscapes for decades, while others fund those conflicts but don't think about them too much (except for when terrorists show up to burst our bubbles).

daltonlp 9y ago

Some fun facts and thoughts: - Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor H. Krulak. - Like The Lorax, the story is structured as a tale from an older generation to a modern one, where the younger character is a stand-in for the reader. - As much as Seuss was against transparent moralizing, he delighted in obvious satire, and he wasn't afraid of being too on the nose. The Chief Yookeroo, the back-room boys with their slide rules and spectacles, the butter-up band. The "Your yookery" sign. The slavic-named antagonist VanItch. - This book is interesting to compare with Seuss' editorial cartoons decades earlier, during WWII. At that time, he was producing unabashed anti-axis propaganda. During his lifetime, he had not just observed the kind of wartime fervor the Yooks subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it. http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/ http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/ - Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. The Butter Battle Book is a masterpiece.

jancsika 9y ago

I think this book elucidates something that I miss in most popular discussions, which is fragility. As the two sides escalate, the entire system becomes more fragile. E.g., the dude at the beginning uses a slingshot which has the consequence of breaking one other dude's stick. Not so fragile. But by the end neither dude can use their weapon at all without destroying everything on both sides of the fence. And the capabilities to use the weapon is put directly in the hands of the two dudes and no one else. Extremely fragile. Is this a studied phenomenon? For example, does the auto industry measure fragility wrt putting networked self-driving cars on the highway?

iamwil 9y ago

I wonder if he changed his mind after the war. During the war, he drew a lot of anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda.

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

It was also turned into an animated short, directed by Ralph Bakshi[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Television_special https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Televis...

Taniwha 9y ago

We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more lesser known Seuss books ... His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity .... https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady-godivas/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady... And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts': https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800826/ https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800...