With only the cold logic of old cold war numbers.
You probably aren't going to believe this, but I read a good portion of that book when I couldn't have been more than a very young teenager. I did this because I became necessarily fascinated with nuclear war as my father had decided he could make a living selling basement bomb shelter, refit kits (yes folks, I am that odd. And I have lived one of the oddest lives even for someone like me to try to imagine).
These were put out by the
Kelsey-Hayes company in the early sixties. And my old man thought he was going to make, you'll pardon the expression, a killing selling them. And for year or so there we went to all sorts of "home product" shows to hand out brochures, and try to make the pitch.
The funny part here (and it was sad funny because he just didn't have even the simple imaginative ability of putting himself -- with his own 4 or five, currently resident brood, and oh so agreeable wife -- into the same living situation), where reality set in, at least as far as my old man was concerned, was watching a young couple, usually with one kid still in diapers, on mom's hip, and another looking totally mystified at things from the protection of dad's firmly held hand, and seeing the horror on both parents faces when told that the idea was to live in your basement for at least a week or two. A new basement mind you made smaller because you had set up these prefab steel panels (to be filled with sand as I recall) so as to offer a semblance of radiation protection. Living there, of course, with your wonderfully well behaved children, who wouldn't ever even dream of driving you crazy, all cooped up like that. Any more than wife and husband would, after spending the considerable amount of money the company was charging at the time, just to have this amazing opportunity for family quality time.
Needless to say, he never sold a one of them and it was as devastating to him as you'd expect for someone always looking for that big score, sales opportunity. A defeat the old lady never wasted any opportunity she could find to remind him of either.
As a result, with my always questioning curiosity, I became morbidly fascinated with all things related to throw weights. Overpressures. Blast radius'. Air bursts as opposed to ground bursts. Immediate radiant energy damage. Pressure wave damage. The possibility of firestorms way bigger than Dresden ever created. And the always popular down wind, particle fallout probabilities given the different burst options, warhead size, and target material composition. Not to mention, of course, the effects of ionizing, particle radiation itself; which was of particular un turnawayable horror to me. Way better, unfortunately, than the Sci Fi movies of the time, though I still loved them as well. It also didn't help that I was continuing my addiction to reading the old man's Aviation Week magazines, which just served to fuel the gee whiz, cool hardware aspect of things.
And in this, unfortunately as well, were a lot of other impressionable young men, and women, who never gave up on the gee whiz thing, and have always kept faith with the idea that for every avenue of attack there is a counter (all notions of practicality, or down stream collateral effects aside of course). Also made more understandable by the fact that there is a considerable amount of history to back up the fact of this relationship; even as a great number of people have been slaughtered proving it.
The problem as I see it is more complicated than arguing whether doing a particular thing is within engineering possibility. This is especially true now that our extensions of faculties have been pushed out so far; with means of instrumentality we are still fumbling with to understand. We also tend to forget just how clever we can stumble into being, at times, in coming up with novel new solutions that the previous "conventional wisdom" said couldn't be done. And in that vein you do have to admit that it would be "possible" (putting it in quotes to designate how difficult it is to know the true relative probabilities) to defend against ballistic missiles; with the kicker being the full aspect of what you might have to commit yourself to do to achieve this; a kicker that would likely be another matter altogether of possible pain in the ass. And of course, a few detonations would always get through in any event, but probably not so much as you couldn't rebuild.
What is reay scary here, beyond the cold calculations that even limiting the incinerating to only a few million entails (and the callousness of calling that a great success), is that the pace of technological change is making things even more unstable than the days when we first learned how little decision time there would be in deciding to "use or lose," in the context of shorter range, ballistic missile submarines.
We have, in fact, a new version of that. A new "what do you build at all" when things keep changing so fast. And in this context can you afford not to use something if you fear that a counter could be made? Even before anybody has launched anything? And can you afford to build any alternative if the anticipation of alternatives already in the works has everybody thinking about the future counters to the future threats beyond even that?
Thus then do we go into new realms of absurdity in thinking to anticipate the moves of our adversaries.
This is folks, at its base, another aspect of seeing what happens when trying to conduct business as usual within a completely new operating environment; rapidly accelerating flights of fancy into new areas of complete, insane, absurdity. Which is why, in case you haven't noticed, armed conflict itself makes absolutely no sense whatsoever anymore now that we have the kinds of instrumentality we have. None. Zero. And I can assure you that the planet itself will do whatever it takes to underline that conclusion.
This is why the seed pod we are all sitting on down here, beneath this lovely, still mostly functioning blanket of atmosphere, must be declared a no conflict zone. It simply can't be done anymore in any sense of human enterprise that we use to think most everything could be conducted with by social cooperation. Not only has effect gotten too big, and events happen too fast, we now realize, to a core in our being we ignore at our peril, that everything is far too interdependent, and interconnected, to be blasting away, to any degree, such that you can think you can defeat a supposed foe without the blowback coming home, eventually, so as to make the winner just as dead, as the purported looser.
And the sooner we realize this the sooner we can get on with the real need of finding an alternative to allow us to make the pivot all sentient species must make if they are to have a chance to begin the next stage of sentient evolution. The choice is, as always, ours to make.
On Thermonuclear War
See Also:
The strange story of how an appendix to an obscure report helped launch a blockbuster and push back the possibility of atomic war.
MUTUALLY ASSURED RECONSTRUCTION
The Delusions Of Missile Defense
Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.
NAVY ENGINEERS NEW LETHAL, SUPER HIGH-TECH MK 48 TORPEDO || WARTHOG 2017
