Yes Vietnam = fiasco, seemingly, because of the belief of it being a Domino Theory, as what happened with Stalin & Hitler's empire building in Europe. The demands of LBJ was to ship 500K troops to South Vietnam, where William Westmoreland just let the troops sit in situ while North Vietnam regular army, and the Viet Cong picked away at them. Not responding to the Soviets placing of SS-20's west into the Warsaw Pact would also have presented a risk. The Fulda Gap awaited a Soviet Invasion since 1945. Brezhnev had a international practice of starting 2 large wars in the middle east, by militarily underwriting any conflict there, plus guerilla warfare (called terrorism) hopefully, to draw the US in, as they did with Vietnam & Cambodia. The Soviet attempt to block Pershing missiles came with a massive political campaign. This was why there were enormous demonstrations against the Pershing's, Margaret Thatcher, and the US, called The Nuclear Freeze movement. It was war on the cheap, with the citizens of NATO countries being volunteers. Sure, nothing was worth a nuclear war, yet an expanding Soviet empire was surely the quickest way to get a nuclear conflict. These included prominent scientists as,Linus C. Pauling, Hans A. Bethe, Konrad E. Bloch, Richard P. Feynman, Edward M. Purcell, Emilio Segre, William N. Lipscomb Jr., George Wald and Steven Weinberg. All greats, and all wrong in this serf's opinion.
The wisest thing to do, rather than stand down, sometimes, is to stand up, and give the 'enemy' a material reason not to attack, expand, pressure. The much faster SS20's, traveling thousands of miles per hour, physically closer because they were, as you pointed out medium ranges ballistics, and were of course cut the response time NATO had in reaction to these missiles striking. Carter's Cruise missiles speed was just over Mach-1, SS20's I believe, did Mach-4 at terminal velocity. My point is that all things should be discussed to analyze if our perceptions are true or not? Most scientists and engineers by their nature employ the capability of self correction. Yet many have been inaccurate or unhelpful, when they go ideological. Just as with anyone else, as with Lysenko, or the eugenicists, Fauci on the amount of people required to be immunized, and the response to AGW, considered opinions differed, and are different enough to impact policy and perception. Is it better to ban fracking (38% of US electricity relies upon gas turbines), as the new administration has mentioned, in order to save the earth, or is it better to experience rising costs and dwindling supplies of methane, as well as rolling blackouts and brownouts? I suspect that if we worked at Warp Speed on say, perovskite solar cells linked to greatly improved batteries, we could reduce natural gas use and release from wells and pipelines by nearly 90-100% in 7 years. Use, gas turbines only for load leveling and emergency power in case of heat waves and polar breakouts. This, I learned from sifting through expert opinions and sorting which had the most detailed information presented. This is all anyone can ask, to look rational at a condition, phenomena, based on the data, and not let authority be the deciding factor alone. -----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> To: Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, Jan 24, 2021 2:53 pm Subject: Re: Q Anon is the tip of the iceberg The problem the US had with strategic parity with the USSR was with conventional forces in Europe and NATO. Why this happened is the United States used an enormous amount to manpower and materiel in Vietnam. The commitment to the Vietnam war involved thousands of aircraft. 2 million men and 500,000 at most times during the war, and close to an equal number of civil servants and contractors. The Vietnam War was a huge effort and in the end a boondoggle. The US commitment to NATO declined with this shift. In the mid to late 70s the USSR had over 2 or nearly 3 times the conventional manpower NATO had. Though US technology was largely more advanced this numerical asymmetry was a problem. The deployment of the SU22 IRBMs was meant to block a fallback NATO had with nuclear weapons. They hoped to checkmate the west. The Pershing system was though not developed under Reagan, but Carter. In fact most of the mainstay weapons, such as the F-teen fighters etc, were Carter programs and if not dated to Nixon. Reagan merely presided over their deployment. The Pershing system though upped the nuclear ante. The game of power and brinksmanship with the USSR went up a notch. After reducing tensions with the SALT treaties, aspects of the cold war began to reemerge. In the end the Soviet economy was stretched too thin and the system began to reel. This was made apparent with Chernobyl, where the Soviet reactor system was an old fashion graphite system that was inherently dangerous. They blinked and the rest is history. LC On Sunday, January 24, 2021 at 4:05:38 AM UTC-6 [email protected] wrote: On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 6:19 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't think we disagree much on the facts, merely that astronomers and > physicists can get out of their depth as other lesser intellects do. Scientists are always out of their depth, that's why their dominant emotion is confusion, and that's why it's a hard job, but at least they know they're out of their depth. Scientists are usually right but never certain; political and religious ideologues are always certain but seldom right. > That Nuke Winter was an irrelevant addition to the anti-nuke argument, How is the extinction of the human race irrelevant? World War III will either cause the extinction of human beings or it won't, the answer can be found with the application of physics and no political ideology, left right or center, will aid in finding that answer one bit. And to the defense department, which controls thousands of H-bombs, the answer to such a question might be rather important. > not that it was ridiculous, but that it was always one sided. One sided? There's a good side to human extinction? > Sagan seemed to think that surrendering was infinitely better than nuclear > extinction. It was never a binary choice, but if it was then yes, surrendering would be better than human extinction. What wouldn't be? > Bart Weinstein agrees with your opinion that the physicists of both camps should have been praised for their weapons work, because it forced leaders to be rational actors. Interesting to note, that Hugh Everett the 3rd was himself a DoD physicist. I wonder if he believed that some of his world's died in a nuclear conflagration? Everett was disappointed at the poor reception his doctoral dissertation received and never published anything on quantum mechanics again for the rest of his life; instead he became a Dr. Strangelove type character making computer nuclear war games and doing grim operational research for the pentagon about armageddon. But he was one of the first to point out that any defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles would be ineffectual and building an anti-ballistic missile system could not be justified except for "political or psychological grounds". In his book "The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett" Peter Byrne makes the case that Everett was the first one to convince high military leaders through mathematics and no nonsense non sentimental reasoning that a nuclear war could not be won, "after an attack by either superpower on the other, the majority of the attacked population that survived the initial blasts would be sterilized and gradually succumb to leukemia. Livestock would die quickly and survivors would be forced to rely on eating grains, potatoes and vegetables. Unfortunately the produce would be seething with radioactive Strontium 90 which seeps into human bone marrow and causes cancer". Linus Pauling credited Evertt by name and quoted from his pessimistic report in his Nobel acceptance speech for receiving the 1962 Nobel Peace prize. Despite his knowledge of the horrors of a nuclear war Everett, like most of his fellow cold warrior colleagues in the 50's and 60's, thought the probability of it happening was very high and would probably happen very soon. Byrne speculates in a footnote that Everett may have privately used anthropic reasoning and thought that the fact we live in a world where such a war has not happened (at least not yet) was more confirmation that his Many Worlds idea was right. Hugh's daughter Liz Everett killed herself a few years after her father's death, in her suicide note she said "Funeral requests: I prefer no church stuff. Please burn me and DON'T FILE ME. Please sprinkle me in some nice body of water or the garbage, maybe that way I'll end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up with Daddy". John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/c3296ca7-58ce-4a67-9f16-530d9feb66adn%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/1885530221.2362953.1611535681655%40mail.yahoo.com.
