5 ms·
MAD was a dumb idea in the first place. Everybody has known, since the first world war, that a major power confrontation is very likely to end your nation, even
by pasabagi 5y ago
MAD was a dumb idea in the first place. Everybody has known, since the first world war, that a major power confrontation is very likely to end your nation, even if you win. The French were so demographically destroyed they literally could not raise an army to fight in the second world war. The British were so broke their empire collapsed. The Russian empire, the Austrian empire, the Ottoman empires all collapsed into splinters.
Rational people would not want to be on either side of such a conflict. Except, international relations is fraught with pathological incentives, so peer conflicts happen nonetheless, and less than twenty years after the first world war ended, everybody was gearing up for a second.
The cold war didn't go hot because we were lucky, not because MAD changed the basic dynamics of total war.
- dexwiz 5y agoRational people aren’t the ones who start wars. People who grab and claw for power and climbed their way into leadership start wars. I wish the world was lead by rational people, but I don’t think it is.
- hanoz 5y agoThe difference being that with nuclear mutually assured destruction, the actual leaders are assured of their own personal destruction.
- quickthrower2 5y agoAre they? Who has the best bunkers? Who has dedicated aircraft you can live in permanently?
- gruez 5y ago>Who has dedicated aircraft you can live in permanently? permanently? Probably impossible with current technology. Your best bet is still an underground bunker. If it has to be moving you'll need something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer_(TV_series)#Premise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer_(TV_series)#Premis...
- quickthrower2 5y agoI am assuming landing and refueling is allowed, you can choose a non nuked place for that.
- vkou 5y agoThey aren't, that's why they have shelters and contingency plans for themselves and their families. If life were fair, they shouldn't be allowed to survive a nuclear war that they start, but life is rarely fair.
- FredPret 5y agoThe universe is a collection of chemical and physical reactions. Fairness is a value judgement that is sometimes passed from inside our heads over the rest of the universe.
- Miraste 5y ago> he French were so demographically destroyed they literally could not raise an army to fight in the second world war. This isn't true at all. The French army at the start of WWII was over 5 million men, one of the largest in the world. It suffered from bad luck and being led by morons, but it certainly existed. Per your other point, WWII made the US and the USSR global superpowers for half a century, and the US especially sacrificed far less than anyone else to get it. War is sadly not always a losing proposition, even total war.
- morelish 5y agoI don't know about the demographic claim but definitely the French could not imagine _fighting_ another war and so their preparations were poor. They built the Maginot Line as a way of avoiding having to fight again. And I believe the political culture in the country and army all rotated around the idea that they never wanted to fight Germany again. This also extended to the Treat of Versailles were they tried to cripple Germany's ability to raise an army again. I don't know about the demographic claim, but he is sort of right that WW1 wrecked Frances fighting spirit.
- morelish 5y agoOh, I actually totally disagree with the original commenter's statement "The cold war didn't go hot because we were lucky, not because MAD changed the basic dynamics of total war." Erm. No. MAD definitely did change the basic dynamics.
- pasabagi 5y agoI was exaggerating, but the demographic slump that happened as a result of WW1 was a problem for french military planners, which is why a large portion of their army were reservists or badly trained. Per your other point, you're shifting the terrain of the discussion. WW1 was almost a pure losers war, and yet, most of the same states engaged in WW2. That's the crazy decision. WW2, on the other hand, had relative winners (although I think the US would have done well regardless, and the USSR got to be a global superpower (which it was already) at an appalling cost). Another thing that bothers me about the whole 'MAD prevented the cold war from going hot' is that none of the generals at the time thought like that. People didn't really start thinking about nuclear weapons as anything other than just big bombs until well into the cold war. That's why MacArthur advocated their use in China.