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The capabilities actually used were and are a real overkill, for many orders of magnitude. The whole think tanks and whole branches of military from the start
by acqq 7y ago
The capabilities actually used were and are a real overkill, for many orders of magnitude.
The whole think tanks and whole branches of military from the start worked on many order of magnitudes multiplied assumptions of the military capability of the opponents. Only now you can read their acknowledgment that the estimates were hugely overblown (1). So they did produce overkill from the start as they produced "enough" rockets and planes. Then they replaced the plain nuclear warheads with the thermonuclear warheads, again many orders of magnitude overkill. And the "victory" is defined as destroying more than the opponent, no matter if anybody would be able to live in the world afterwards. Against the fact that the world was never so interdependent as it is now -- if you would remove all the stuff from your possession where at least some parts were produced in e.g. Asia, you would not have almost anything useful.
We're still in the world that can lose the form as we know it in just one erroneous decision, even if some humans in some caves/shelters manage to survive, what's left will be worse than the most pessimistic movies. And in that world, just the cost of a single type of the plane (F-35) is projected (that means lower than what will be) to 1.508 trillion dollars. And the US just exited one nuclear arm control treaty.
1) E.g. in my favorite book: "The Doomsday Machine -- Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" written by a former strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation.
- manigandham 7y agoYes, it's rather cynical. And yet it's this very tension that keeps the peace. The world is now in the longest stretch of world-wide peacetime ever in history.
- acqq 7y ago> The world is now in the longest stretch of world-wide peacetime ever in history. Peacetime where? There was constant war since WW II mostly directly or indirectly waged by the US.
- ufmace 7y agoPeacetime everywhere. The post-WWII wars are all tiny by comparison. The nuclear era is historically unprecedented in the total lack of direct warfare between major industrial powers.
- acqq 7y agoCheck your history books about the time before WW I and between WW I and WW II. Both periods are completely comparable with this now. It was the “common knowledge” that the big war “can’t happen”. “Everywhere” in your answer means for you. Ask the families of dead soldiers about “everywhere” or the millions of people outside the of the US whose relatives died in wars or even only due to the US sanctions which are how the US prepares for its next war (like in Iraq).
- acqq 7y agoCompare: the most recent war before WW I between the "major powers" (if Spain was "industrial" is another question, and also how major is also) was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War 1898, lasted for 4 months, less then 4000 wounded and killed. Compare that just with the US sanctions against Venezuela (again, not too major, but the US definitely is the only remaining superpower) at this very moment: http://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela http://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-c... "the sanctions have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018; and that these sanctions would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory." Just in one year.