4 ms·

Nukes. Putting your best and your brightest and your know-how all in the same place--efficient... but not smart. The corporate welfare was just a "bonus".

eesmith 8y ago
Ahh, I came across that argument in an old Heinlein essay. I've never come across anything which demonstrates that there's a real connection between the two. If that argument had any strong influence, I would have expected something different than what we got. To start, the suburbanization movement started before the atomic bomb was development. The FHA started in the Depression, and it had a strong role in shaping suburbia. Levittown - as representative of the post-war suburban boom - started before the Soviets had their first atomic bomb, back when we thought it would take them 10-20 years. Nor did the US suburbanization movement change once we developed H-bombs, which are massively more destructive than atomic bombs. Nor did it change because of Soviet arms build-up, either the boogey-man "missile gap" which didn't exist, or the eventual buildup afterward to thousands of Soviet ICBMs. For scale, the contiguous United States is 8M km² but most of it is unpopulated or rural. The US census at https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.html https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm... (column UAAREALAND from "Changes in urbanized areas from 2000 to 2010") says that 88K mile² of the US live in urban or urban clusters with at least 2,500 people. This includes suburbs. That's 226K km² across 500 distinct places. The Soviets had 45,000 warheads, not all of which were on ICBMs. Each R-36M2 warhead has a yield of over 500KTons. Earlier models were in the megaton range. But lets say it was only 100 KTon like the W-76. The air blast radius for 100kTons is 33km². That's 7,000 nukes to destroy all non-hardened buildings in all urban and suburban location in the US. The USSR clearly had the capability of destroying all urban and suburban regions of the US. Furthermore, the suburbanization plan we put into place decentralized people, but not industry. (Heinlein pointed out the need to decentralize industry if we are to use decentralization as an effective counter to nuclear war, so this isn't a new observation.) On top of that, zoning made the US less robust towards nuclear war. Once the oil refineries are destroyed, the car infrastructure will break down because the price of gas becomes exorbitant. If there were grocery stores, schools, and medical care centers in walking distance of most suburban areas (as promoted by the new urbanist movement) then those would help with the transition to a post-war car-less life. For that matter, how would the suburbs in the NE US get its food once the transport hubs were destroyed? Why push people to the edges of the largest cities rather than really distribute them around the country? IMO, if nuclear war survival were the real plan, a better strategy would have been to support small towns - really decentralize the country, and put people closer to where the food is grown. Instead, we got a mass migration to the cities (and suburbs), depopulating rural America. Finally, the suburbanization plan was explicitly constructed to favor white people, not the best and brightest. If the expectation was that the Soviets would destroy the cities, but not the suburban populations who fled the urban core ("white flight"), then it would not only have been a racist policy, but a policy leaning towards of race genocide. So, why do you think the US policy of subsidizing suburbia had any substantial connection to a defensive strategy against nuclear war?
- jstewartmobile 8y ago
  > I've never come across anything which demonstrates that there's a real connection between the two. If that argument had any strong influence, I would have expected something different than what we got. Since when has our government taken the most efficient path? And who would even know what that path should be without the benefit of hindsight? What subsidy would be large enough to get the typical urbanite to abruptly go rural? It's not like a guy working at a bank is going to mount his horse, ride over rugged terrain to a clearing, settle in, and start making soap out of lard and ashes. There has to be a de-urbanization pipeline to gradually diffuse people out of the major population centers. The nuke stats are beside the point. Just looking back at the devastation wrought in Europe (with conventional weapons) was reason enough to de-concentrate. Industry is also beside the point. If we stumbled into a reality where the US and the USSR were lobbing nukes at each other, gas and groceries would be in the same bucket as netflix or nintendo. Keeping enough people around to say that you still have a country would be the new gold standard. "suburbanization plan... to favor white people" is your phrase, not mine. If I had to label it, it would be a lure-people-out-of-the-cities-with-subsidies plan. As for the racial aspect, probably just another nth-order effect. Those happen when you start throwing free money around. All I had to say about the "best and brightest" was that concentrating them in the big cities like New York and Seattle is not a smart move. As for why I think this was driven by defense goals, I am not a sci-fi guy. WWII militarized us, and we never de-militarized. Most of what happens here (especially in tech, but also in finance) is seeded by one defense goal or another. Whether those goals are desirable/sound/morally defensible/etc is another story.
  - eesmith 8y ago
    You wrote "The government subsidized the shit out of suburbia in the cold war days for a reason" and implied that it was to decentralize the US population as a defensive strategy for survival after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Given the absence of any evidence for your hypothesis, and the mountain of evidence which shows other reasons for the US subsidization of suburbanization, why should I believe you? You ask "What subsidy would be large enough to get the typical urbanite to abruptly go rural?" If there was a post-war goal to encourage the US population to decentralize, as a defensive mechanism against a thermonuclear exchange, then that question is irrelevant. The question should have been "how do we prevent rural flight?", that is, "how do we keep rural and small town residents from moving to likely targets?". Instead, your question seems to concern how to get someone now to go rural. But I'm asking about the Cold War days. You wrote: "gas and groceries would be in the same bucket as netflix or nintendo. Keeping enough people around to say that you still have a country would be the new gold standard." Yes, that is my point. If you want people to survive a nuclear exchange, the you should set up the infrastructure so it has a dual-purpose use once things like gas and groceries are more dreams than anything else. You want to encourage people to live in small rural towns? Have health centers within walking distance. These are useful now, because people leave if they don't have health care, and they would become critical once there is no more gas to go to regional hospitals. Make sure there are schools, make sure there are local social centers. These help keep towns alive, and will be the nucleus of the new life post-war, because kids will still need an education (during the winter months when there's nothing else to do), and a place to handle local politics and courts. Did this happen? No. Instead of subsidizing the existing distributed population, we subsidized living in more centralized target zones that were less robust to even pre-nuclear fire bombing. You wrote ""... to favor white people" is your phrase, not mine". I don't follow your comment. It's not just my phrase. It's the standard view of government and private housing industry practices during that time. Levittown, for example, was a whites-only suburb. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York : > William Levitt attempted to justify their decision to only sell homes to white families by saying that it was in the best interest for business.[12] He claimed their actions were not discriminatory but intended to maintain the value of their properties. The company explained that it was not possible to reduce racial segregation while they were attempting to reduce the housing shortage. .. They believed that potential white buyers would not want to buy a house in Levittown if they were aware that they would have black neighbors. While Shelley v. Kraemer decided that those covenants were unconstitutional, it took another 20 years for the Fair Housing Act to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In the meanwhile, practices like redlining, and the creation of interstates through traditionally black neighborhoods, prevented the buildup of black wealth that white neighborhoods got. This isn't some "nth-order effect" but deliberate policy (that is, n == 1). You write: "seeded by one defense goal or another" We have a longer history of US goals - military and otherwise - being directed by the interests of large capital owners, starting with the slave-holding Founding Fathers.

eesmith 8y ago

Ahh, I came across that argument in an old Heinlein essay. I've never come across anything which demonstrates that there's a real connection between the two. If that argument had any strong influence, I would have expected something different than what we got. To start, the suburbanization movement started before the atomic bomb was development. The FHA started in the Depression, and it had a strong role in shaping suburbia. Levittown - as representative of the post-war suburban boom - started before the Soviets had their first atomic bomb, back when we thought it would take them 10-20 years. Nor did the US suburbanization movement change once we developed H-bombs, which are massively more destructive than atomic bombs. Nor did it change because of Soviet arms build-up, either the boogey-man "missile gap" which didn't exist, or the eventual buildup afterward to thousands of Soviet ICBMs. For scale, the contiguous United States is 8M km² but most of it is unpopulated or rural. The US census at https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.html https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm... (column UAAREALAND from "Changes in urbanized areas from 2000 to 2010") says that 88K mile² of the US live in urban or urban clusters with at least 2,500 people. This includes suburbs. That's 226K km² across 500 distinct places. The Soviets had 45,000 warheads, not all of which were on ICBMs. Each R-36M2 warhead has a yield of over 500KTons. Earlier models were in the megaton range. But lets say it was only 100 KTon like the W-76. The air blast radius for 100kTons is 33km². That's 7,000 nukes to destroy all non-hardened buildings in all urban and suburban location in the US. The USSR clearly had the capability of destroying all urban and suburban regions of the US. Furthermore, the suburbanization plan we put into place decentralized people, but not industry. (Heinlein pointed out the need to decentralize industry if we are to use decentralization as an effective counter to nuclear war, so this isn't a new observation.) On top of that, zoning made the US less robust towards nuclear war. Once the oil refineries are destroyed, the car infrastructure will break down because the price of gas becomes exorbitant. If there were grocery stores, schools, and medical care centers in walking distance of most suburban areas (as promoted by the new urbanist movement) then those would help with the transition to a post-war car-less life. For that matter, how would the suburbs in the NE US get its food once the transport hubs were destroyed? Why push people to the edges of the largest cities rather than really distribute them around the country? IMO, if nuclear war survival were the real plan, a better strategy would have been to support small towns - really decentralize the country, and put people closer to where the food is grown. Instead, we got a mass migration to the cities (and suburbs), depopulating rural America. Finally, the suburbanization plan was explicitly constructed to favor white people, not the best and brightest. If the expectation was that the Soviets would destroy the cities, but not the suburban populations who fled the urban core ("white flight"), then it would not only have been a racist policy, but a policy leaning towards of race genocide. So, why do you think the US policy of subsidizing suburbia had any substantial connection to a defensive strategy against nuclear war?

jstewartmobile 8y ago
> I've never come across anything which demonstrates that there's a real connection between the two. If that argument had any strong influence, I would have expected something different than what we got. Since when has our government taken the most efficient path? And who would even know what that path should be without the benefit of hindsight? What subsidy would be large enough to get the typical urbanite to abruptly go rural? It's not like a guy working at a bank is going to mount his horse, ride over rugged terrain to a clearing, settle in, and start making soap out of lard and ashes. There has to be a de-urbanization pipeline to gradually diffuse people out of the major population centers. The nuke stats are beside the point. Just looking back at the devastation wrought in Europe (with conventional weapons) was reason enough to de-concentrate. Industry is also beside the point. If we stumbled into a reality where the US and the USSR were lobbing nukes at each other, gas and groceries would be in the same bucket as netflix or nintendo. Keeping enough people around to say that you still have a country would be the new gold standard. "suburbanization plan... to favor white people" is your phrase, not mine. If I had to label it, it would be a lure-people-out-of-the-cities-with-subsidies plan. As for the racial aspect, probably just another nth-order effect. Those happen when you start throwing free money around. All I had to say about the "best and brightest" was that concentrating them in the big cities like New York and Seattle is not a smart move. As for why I think this was driven by defense goals, I am not a sci-fi guy. WWII militarized us, and we never de-militarized. Most of what happens here (especially in tech, but also in finance) is seeded by one defense goal or another. Whether those goals are desirable/sound/morally defensible/etc is another story.
- eesmith 8y ago
  You wrote "The government subsidized the shit out of suburbia in the cold war days for a reason" and implied that it was to decentralize the US population as a defensive strategy for survival after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Given the absence of any evidence for your hypothesis, and the mountain of evidence which shows other reasons for the US subsidization of suburbanization, why should I believe you? You ask "What subsidy would be large enough to get the typical urbanite to abruptly go rural?" If there was a post-war goal to encourage the US population to decentralize, as a defensive mechanism against a thermonuclear exchange, then that question is irrelevant. The question should have been "how do we prevent rural flight?", that is, "how do we keep rural and small town residents from moving to likely targets?". Instead, your question seems to concern how to get someone now to go rural. But I'm asking about the Cold War days. You wrote: "gas and groceries would be in the same bucket as netflix or nintendo. Keeping enough people around to say that you still have a country would be the new gold standard." Yes, that is my point. If you want people to survive a nuclear exchange, the you should set up the infrastructure so it has a dual-purpose use once things like gas and groceries are more dreams than anything else. You want to encourage people to live in small rural towns? Have health centers within walking distance. These are useful now, because people leave if they don't have health care, and they would become critical once there is no more gas to go to regional hospitals. Make sure there are schools, make sure there are local social centers. These help keep towns alive, and will be the nucleus of the new life post-war, because kids will still need an education (during the winter months when there's nothing else to do), and a place to handle local politics and courts. Did this happen? No. Instead of subsidizing the existing distributed population, we subsidized living in more centralized target zones that were less robust to even pre-nuclear fire bombing. You wrote ""... to favor white people" is your phrase, not mine". I don't follow your comment. It's not just my phrase. It's the standard view of government and private housing industry practices during that time. Levittown, for example, was a whites-only suburb. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York : > William Levitt attempted to justify their decision to only sell homes to white families by saying that it was in the best interest for business.[12] He claimed their actions were not discriminatory but intended to maintain the value of their properties. The company explained that it was not possible to reduce racial segregation while they were attempting to reduce the housing shortage. .. They believed that potential white buyers would not want to buy a house in Levittown if they were aware that they would have black neighbors. While Shelley v. Kraemer decided that those covenants were unconstitutional, it took another 20 years for the Fair Housing Act to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. In the meanwhile, practices like redlining, and the creation of interstates through traditionally black neighborhoods, prevented the buildup of black wealth that white neighborhoods got. This isn't some "nth-order effect" but deliberate policy (that is, n == 1). You write: "seeded by one defense goal or another" We have a longer history of US goals - military and otherwise - being directed by the interests of large capital owners, starting with the slave-holding Founding Fathers.