4 ms·

Nuclear conflict is inherently horrific, but I would hope we were (and are) willing to do appalling things to deter a nuclear attack on the US.

willis936 6y ago
This is assuming the content of the papers is standard MAD. We don’t know what was in them.
- DennisP 6y ago
  The book is mostly about that content, which has been largely declassified now. It goes into quite a bit of detail. It was not just MAD. It included massive retaliation against every city in both the USSR and China in response to minor conventional battles, which they calculated would also kill most people in Europe from fallout. It gave independent launch authority to regional military commanders. First strike was part of the strategy, and was threatened on multiple occasions. The US has still not disavowed first strike.
  - gen220 6y ago
    In response to your last statement, I found this Amazon review [1] (of all sources!) of Ellsberg's book fascinating. It's written by an older gentleman who was apparently involved in Nuclear policy in the late 70s and early 80s. Here is the relevant snippet: > To a degree, my time on nuclear weapons was a decade later than Ellsberg, ironically my first day after my PhD was the day Ellsberg's material hit the NY Times. Coming from MIT, and Ellsberg then being at MIT, I was looked at a bit askance. Yet over the next decade as I became involved in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, especially during the Carter period, it was clear that the only way to use a nuclear weapon was not to use a nuclear weapon. > The RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan, or the US Government's best counterplan, i.e. how the Soviets would retaliate] scenarios showed the annihilation of life on the planet. There was no way to win, first strike or otherwise. A Russian and US nuclear war was the destruction of all. Ironically in my later discussions with my Russian partners after the fall it was clear that they too understood this, positioning or not. So, it seems like NPT [2] states understand that first strike (against one another) is a bankrupt strategy, since it results in MAD [3], if not a global extinction event. A state might not ever externally disavow the first strike strategy for posturing reasons, but it is almost certainly not viewed as an effective winning strategy, internally. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1608196704 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/re... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... Notable non-signatories of the NPT include India, Israel, Pakistan, and DPRK. [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
    - DennisP 6y ago
      That would certainly be reasonable and I hope it's accurate. I'm a little worried though that we're spending a lot of money to make more accurate warheads, which are more useful for first strikes against silos, and arguably less useful for deterrence since the resulting "use them or lose them" dynamic is destabilizing. One improvement we definitely have now is a more flexible strategy. Back in the late '50s and for a while after, they had a detailed plan to keep planes from flying too near each other's mushroom clouds, and since they didn't have decent computers it took a huge amount of work to do all the calculations. The thought of doing it more than once filled nuclear planners with horror, so they just kept to a single plan, which was to launch everything against all targets, regardless of the situation.
      - mjevans 6y ago
        We need to survive to 'phasers and photon torpedoes' somehow. Retaining the skills and active devices to use against inbound rocks and balls of ice in intersecting orbits is the silver lining to these military policies.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    "Minor" conventional battles that would have constituted effective declarations of war by a major nuclear power? If two nuclear powers declare war on each other, that's it. Game Over. It feels redundant to be horrified by the possibility that warring nuclear powers would consider a first strike. Of course they would. That's... how war works.
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Before going full nuclear it's always possible to deescalate, and when a first strike means the end of civilization, deescalation is the only rational option.
      - WillPostForFood 6y ago
        deescalation is the only rational option Probably true, but you don't need to actually use first strike capability, you just need to convince the other side that you are willing to use it.
        pbronez 6y ago
        “The Three Body Problem” series has some masterful exploration of this concept.
    - curiousllama 6y ago
      War != total war. War is an extension of diplomacy. It’s a negotiation. If increasing costs on my adversary increases costs on me, it may make sense not to do so.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    This is just disgusting. And this is why having nukes to defend yourself, are so important.
  - WillPostForFood 6y ago
    The goal of not disavowing a first strike was to deter a conventional attack. If your explicit policy is "we will only use nukes if you use nukes" then the implicit policy is: you can invade Europe without fear of nuclear escalation. Instead of being upset at hypothetical nuclear fallout that never happened, we should look at the policy as a massive success at preventing war from happening.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      Or we could look at the internal policy discussions that took place among Soviet leadership back in the day, since now much of that is unclassified. And it turns out there was no serious threat of a large-scale conventional war in Europe initiated by the USSR - at least not since 1960s or so. If anything, the Soviets were scared that NATO would do it.
      - eitland 6y ago
        Well well. That's one way to look at it and it is an interesting way to look at it Another way to look at is that is equally important IMO is to realize they not only planned to but actually had occupied most of eastern Europe before that time. Stopping this planning during the 1960ies might be related to - Stalins death a decade before or - to realizing NATO was getting too strong or - to the enthusiasm for global communism waning - or something else. I certainly wouldn't subscribe it to some inherent peaceful nature of USSR though. For all the flak that the Americans (often rightfully) get we must not pretend that there was an obvious, readily available better alternative in trying to deescalate in the 60ies.
        int_19h 6y ago
        I didn't claim anything about the "inherent peaceful nature" of the USSR. It was an empire; empires are generally not peaceful. However, there's a very simple and obvious reason as to why this mode of thinking prevailed after Stalin's death. The leaders who subsequently took power were those who saw the devastation of WW2 very close up, and knew full well of the true economic and social cost (to remind, Soviet losses were 20 million officially, but the real numbers were quite a bit higher). The result was a firm commitment to "never again!" - that is, regardless of ideology and politics of the day, the axiom was that there shouldn't be another devastating war like that in the Russian heartland. And it was obvious that any major war with NATO carried a significant risk of such devastation - Soviets simply didn't have enough resources to guarantee the upper hand in a conventional engagement against the combined forces of US and Europe. (Stalin didn't care about any of this - to his mode of thinking, sacrificing 20 million to grow his power was perfectly acceptable. That's why, as you correctly noted, the change didn't happen until some time after his death, once his political legacy waned.) Note also that this explains some other things, such as the occupation of eastern Europe - its primary purpose was to serve as a buffer zone in any conflict with NATO, so that any territorial losses and devastation accompanied by large-scale warfare would be concentrated in those areas, as opposed to Russia proper.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Standard MAD* was insane already. The governments of nation states were willing to toast the human race to preserve control by the elites of pieces of land and the illusion of a nation. They still are. Even if you are taken over by a dictatorship, you can struggle against it afterwards. Some dictatorships were even somewhat positive (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) even though I would have sided with the pro-republican movement. There's no future if everyone is dead. * The funny thing about MAD is that even though it's standard terminology today, that was the name coined by its detractors.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    > to preserve control by the elites Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens. Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      > Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though. MAD works until it doesn't. Even small escalations can rapidly ramp up into a worst case scenario. There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties with comprehensive monitoring. Unfortunately, that was not the path taken as nation states that managed to accrue small advantages decided to press them instead. Today, the US is modernizing the nuclear arsenal to the tune of over a trillion dollars and is investing in tactical nuclear weapons. > Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens. The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism, which was in fact class war... However, in this case you can also see it as the ruling class is defending itself against control by another nation's ruling class. The people at the bottom are forced to deal with whatever the ruling class decides with little input.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        > There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties I sleep better with a big deterrence arsenal than with a treaty that gets ignored the moment it becomes inconvenient. > The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism The soviets didn't buck elite exploitation. Not for long and not by much. If you think native elites are exploitative, I have news about foreign elites who have conquered you.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  It might be stuff like that he mentioned in his book like projections of the number of deaths from fallout in Western Europe if a first strike attack on the USSR went off perfectly with no effective response.

willis936 6y ago

This is assuming the content of the papers is standard MAD. We don’t know what was in them.

DennisP 6y ago
The book is mostly about that content, which has been largely declassified now. It goes into quite a bit of detail. It was not just MAD. It included massive retaliation against every city in both the USSR and China in response to minor conventional battles, which they calculated would also kill most people in Europe from fallout. It gave independent launch authority to regional military commanders. First strike was part of the strategy, and was threatened on multiple occasions. The US has still not disavowed first strike.
- gen220 6y ago
  In response to your last statement, I found this Amazon review [1] (of all sources!) of Ellsberg's book fascinating. It's written by an older gentleman who was apparently involved in Nuclear policy in the late 70s and early 80s. Here is the relevant snippet: > To a degree, my time on nuclear weapons was a decade later than Ellsberg, ironically my first day after my PhD was the day Ellsberg's material hit the NY Times. Coming from MIT, and Ellsberg then being at MIT, I was looked at a bit askance. Yet over the next decade as I became involved in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, especially during the Carter period, it was clear that the only way to use a nuclear weapon was not to use a nuclear weapon. > The RISOP [Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan, or the US Government's best counterplan, i.e. how the Soviets would retaliate] scenarios showed the annihilation of life on the planet. There was no way to win, first strike or otherwise. A Russian and US nuclear war was the destruction of all. Ironically in my later discussions with my Russian partners after the fall it was clear that they too understood this, positioning or not. So, it seems like NPT [2] states understand that first strike (against one another) is a bankrupt strategy, since it results in MAD [3], if not a global extinction event. A state might not ever externally disavow the first strike strategy for posturing reasons, but it is almost certainly not viewed as an effective winning strategy, internally. [1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1608196704 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2SL7WCQW1R6KN/re... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio... Notable non-signatories of the NPT include India, Israel, Pakistan, and DPRK. [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
  - DennisP 6y ago
    That would certainly be reasonable and I hope it's accurate. I'm a little worried though that we're spending a lot of money to make more accurate warheads, which are more useful for first strikes against silos, and arguably less useful for deterrence since the resulting "use them or lose them" dynamic is destabilizing. One improvement we definitely have now is a more flexible strategy. Back in the late '50s and for a while after, they had a detailed plan to keep planes from flying too near each other's mushroom clouds, and since they didn't have decent computers it took a huge amount of work to do all the calculations. The thought of doing it more than once filled nuclear planners with horror, so they just kept to a single plan, which was to launch everything against all targets, regardless of the situation.
    - mjevans 6y ago
      We need to survive to 'phasers and photon torpedoes' somehow. Retaining the skills and active devices to use against inbound rocks and balls of ice in intersecting orbits is the silver lining to these military policies.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  "Minor" conventional battles that would have constituted effective declarations of war by a major nuclear power? If two nuclear powers declare war on each other, that's it. Game Over. It feels redundant to be horrified by the possibility that warring nuclear powers would consider a first strike. Of course they would. That's... how war works.
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Before going full nuclear it's always possible to deescalate, and when a first strike means the end of civilization, deescalation is the only rational option.
    - WillPostForFood 6y ago
      deescalation is the only rational option Probably true, but you don't need to actually use first strike capability, you just need to convince the other side that you are willing to use it.
      - pbronez 6y ago
        “The Three Body Problem” series has some masterful exploration of this concept.
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    War != total war. War is an extension of diplomacy. It’s a negotiation. If increasing costs on my adversary increases costs on me, it may make sense not to do so.
- blackrock 6y ago
  This is just disgusting. And this is why having nukes to defend yourself, are so important.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  The goal of not disavowing a first strike was to deter a conventional attack. If your explicit policy is "we will only use nukes if you use nukes" then the implicit policy is: you can invade Europe without fear of nuclear escalation. Instead of being upset at hypothetical nuclear fallout that never happened, we should look at the policy as a massive success at preventing war from happening.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Or we could look at the internal policy discussions that took place among Soviet leadership back in the day, since now much of that is unclassified. And it turns out there was no serious threat of a large-scale conventional war in Europe initiated by the USSR - at least not since 1960s or so. If anything, the Soviets were scared that NATO would do it.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Well well. That's one way to look at it and it is an interesting way to look at it Another way to look at is that is equally important IMO is to realize they not only planned to but actually had occupied most of eastern Europe before that time. Stopping this planning during the 1960ies might be related to - Stalins death a decade before or - to realizing NATO was getting too strong or - to the enthusiasm for global communism waning - or something else. I certainly wouldn't subscribe it to some inherent peaceful nature of USSR though. For all the flak that the Americans (often rightfully) get we must not pretend that there was an obvious, readily available better alternative in trying to deescalate in the 60ies.
      - int_19h 6y ago
        I didn't claim anything about the "inherent peaceful nature" of the USSR. It was an empire; empires are generally not peaceful. However, there's a very simple and obvious reason as to why this mode of thinking prevailed after Stalin's death. The leaders who subsequently took power were those who saw the devastation of WW2 very close up, and knew full well of the true economic and social cost (to remind, Soviet losses were 20 million officially, but the real numbers were quite a bit higher). The result was a firm commitment to "never again!" - that is, regardless of ideology and politics of the day, the axiom was that there shouldn't be another devastating war like that in the Russian heartland. And it was obvious that any major war with NATO carried a significant risk of such devastation - Soviets simply didn't have enough resources to guarantee the upper hand in a conventional engagement against the combined forces of US and Europe. (Stalin didn't care about any of this - to his mode of thinking, sacrificing 20 million to grow his power was perfectly acceptable. That's why, as you correctly noted, the change didn't happen until some time after his death, once his political legacy waned.) Note also that this explains some other things, such as the occupation of eastern Europe - its primary purpose was to serve as a buffer zone in any conflict with NATO, so that any territorial losses and devastation accompanied by large-scale warfare would be concentrated in those areas, as opposed to Russia proper.
tehjoker 6y ago
Standard MAD* was insane already. The governments of nation states were willing to toast the human race to preserve control by the elites of pieces of land and the illusion of a nation. They still are. Even if you are taken over by a dictatorship, you can struggle against it afterwards. Some dictatorships were even somewhat positive (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte) even though I would have sided with the pro-republican movement. There's no future if everyone is dead. * The funny thing about MAD is that even though it's standard terminology today, that was the name coined by its detractors.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > to preserve control by the elites Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens. Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    > Nukes don't stop a rebellion. They do make other nations think twice about launching nukes at us, though. MAD works until it doesn't. Even small escalations can rapidly ramp up into a worst case scenario. There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties with comprehensive monitoring. Unfortunately, that was not the path taken as nation states that managed to accrue small advantages decided to press them instead. Today, the US is modernizing the nuclear arsenal to the tune of over a trillion dollars and is investing in tactical nuclear weapons. > Stretch Armstrong would be impressed, this one is not easy to frame through the class war lens. The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism, which was in fact class war... However, in this case you can also see it as the ruling class is defending itself against control by another nation's ruling class. The people at the bottom are forced to deal with whatever the ruling class decides with little input.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      > There is another path though: Disarmament though international treaties I sleep better with a big deterrence arsenal than with a treaty that gets ignored the moment it becomes inconvenient. > The cold war was about (some form of) capitalism vs (some form of) communism The soviets didn't buck elite exploitation. Not for long and not by much. If you think native elites are exploitative, I have news about foreign elites who have conquered you.
Symmetry 6y ago
It might be stuff like that he mentioned in his book like projections of the number of deaths from fallout in Western Europe if a first strike attack on the USSR went off perfectly with no effective response.