Nuclear War With USSR Winnable

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Trump’s Acting National Security Adviser Said Nuclear War With USSR Was Winnable
Questioning “mutual assured destruction,” Charles Kupperman called nuclear conflict “in large part a physics problem.”

It's a Huffpost page. I didn't even read beyond the headline. We live in a grade Z movie.

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[+3] - farmerman - 09/21/2019no full scale nuke conflict is'Winnable". Thats idiotic. "On the Beach " could be a prophetic prequel if our simian "leaders" think like this. Its been said that Russia...

@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

Trump’s Acting National Security Adviser Said Nuclear War With USSR Was Winnable
Questioning “mutual assured destruction,” Charles Kupperman called nuclear conflict “in large part a physics problem.”

It's a Huffpost page. I didn't even read beyond the headline. We live in a grade Z movie.

Somehow the principle of mutually-assured destruction rendering war impossible has not culminated in world peace. Why/how?

These shock-provoking 'Trump. . .' headlines help remind people to think about these issues instead of forgetting about them because they assume they've long been solved.

Forgetting history would doom us to repeat it. Better to repeat it in discourse than in practice, no?

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@edgarblythe,

Happy Days

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The main point of nuclear war is to eradicate the opposing side and ensure that they do not recover. We have nukes sufficient enough to achieve this.

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@edgarblythe,

Did anyone tell him that the USSR does not exist any more?

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@izzythepush,

He made that claim in the early 1980s.

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@Walter Hinteler,

In that case he was hardly a visionary.

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@izzythepush,

izzythepush wrote:

Did anyone tell him that the USSR does not exist any more?

What does that matter? The cold war was fundamentally about politics and the relationship between political warfare and mass-governance. Just because governments, institutions, borders, meta-governmental behaviors, etc. all change form doesn't mean the fundamental political conflicts of the cold war don't still exist.

Nuclear war is about reaching a point where you knock the game board off the table because you no longer think the game is worth preserving. Mutually-assured destruction means that no one can launch a nuclear strike on enemies without it automatically being a suicide mission, but that doesn't mean no one will dare to risk/commit suicide in order to destroy their enemy. We live in an age where suicide-bombing has become just another military tactic.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

He made that claim in the early 1980s.

But people don't change much and it helps us understand the man.

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@edgarblythe,

I have my stone hatchet and my bow and arrows stored in my bomb shelter. I am ready.

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@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

But people don't change much and it helps us understand the man.

I've responded to izzy's post that the USSR does not exist any more.

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@Walter Hinteler,

No disrespect intended.

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@edgarblythe,

I’ve got one word: Oy!

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@Ragman,

no full scale nuke conflict is'Winnable". Thats idiotic.
"On the Beach " could be a prophetic prequel if our simian "leaders" think like this. Its been said that Russia has the economy of Connecticut, but an arsenal second onlyto ours.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

edgarblythe wrote:

Trump’s Acting National Security Adviser Said Nuclear War With USSR Was Winnable
Questioning “mutual assured destruction,” Charles Kupperman called nuclear conflict “in large part a physics problem.”

It's a Huffpost page. I didn't even read beyond the headline. We live in a grade Z movie.

Somehow the principle of mutually-assured destruction rendering war impossible has not culminated in world peace. Why/how?

These shock-provoking 'Trump. . .' headlines help remind people to think about these issues instead of forgetting about them because they assume they've long been solved.

Forgetting history would doom us to repeat it. Better to repeat it in discourse than in practice, no?

The history we need not to forget is not involving fighting a WW3 but history dealing with such men as Napoleon, Hitler , Mussolini, Stalin an so on.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

no full scale nuke conflict is 'Winnable". Thats idiotic.

It depends on the definition of victory.

When it comes to nuclear war, I define victory as "ensuring that the other side is completely destroyed and will never recover".

I think that's an achievable goal with our current arsenal.

We'd be better off if we got those 455kt MIRVs on all of our ballistic missiles though. There's really no reason for a lower-yield warhead unless it's a cruise missile.

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@oralloy,

the product of( Lambda cosine theta) approximates what??

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@farmerman,

"What happens to us" does not factor into my definition of victory when it comes to nuclear war. The only thing that matters at that point is ensuring that the enemy is completely destroyed and will never recover.

Needless to say, I'm a big fan of countervalue targeting.

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@oralloy,

oralloy wrote:

"What happens to us" does not factor into my definition of victory when it comes to nuclear war. The only thing that matters at that point is ensuring that the enemy is completely destroyed and will never recover.

Needless to say, I'm a big fan of countervalue targeting.

There's also this sub-war that comes out of nuclear preparations where two or more competing economic systems compete and exploit each other in various ways.

The nuclear bomb shelter industry flourished during the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, as did various other industries stimulated by the Cold War.

That Cold War growth, in turn, made it possible for Europe to invest fruitfully, which made it easier to tax those investments and further invest them in the welfare states of Europe, the US, and beyond. So, in a way the USSR stimulated capitalism by provoking the US, which in turn created liquidity that could be moved around to support Soviet interests as well.

Amazing how the conflict between communism and capitalism can fuel and fund socialism, but maybe that has become the ultimate objective of nuclear war, or the threat thereof anyway.

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