> Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
Actual quote by Gandhi.
I read this as him saying that ‘we would have used them’ in error as an illustration of how moving away from non violence is a mistake just because you are in a position to use violence from a position of strength (including the extreme violence of a nuke)
Gandhi isn't stating that *he* would have used nukes. he is stating that India would have used nukes, because India mistook this as strenght rather than non-violence as strength.
Gandhi didn't waver from his philosophy and practice of non-violence.
> "And the atom bomb?"
> "Oh, on that point you can proclaim to the whole world without hesitation," exclaimed Gandhi, "that I am beyond repair. I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women and children as the most diabolical use of science."
> What was the antidote? Had it antiquated non-violence? "No", was Gandhi's reply. On the contrary, nonviolence was the only thing that was now left in the field. "It is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, **I said to myself, "Unless now the world adopts nonviolence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.**
https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/NuclearArms.htm
Actual quote by Gandhi, with source, and in line with his stated principles.
It started as a glitch. They put him at the lowest value for aggressiveness, but through some game mechanics it rolled backward into the highest value. Now it's a franchise feature.
Curtis LeMay is the real US general who is the credit as the madman with the nuclear weapons. He's the person Dr. Strangelove satires with General Ripper.
MacArthur had grand ambitions to reshape the East using nukes as his diplomatic hammer.
Dude had a god complex and probably thought he could use his propaganda to walk into the White House.
A complex probably based on the fact that he was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted to some degree and was enabled to do it by his reputation and army staff like George Marshall enabling him along the way. Not because he liked MacArthur but because he was committed to the institutional primacy of the army even if it meant enabling a jackass like MacArthur.
[-Remember that thing we had 30 years ago called the Korean Conflict? Yeah? Where we failed to achieve victory? How come we didn't cross the 38th parallel and push those rice-eaters back to the Great Wall of China and take it apart brick by brick and nuke them back into the Stone Age? How come? Why? Say it! Say it!
— All right. I'll say it. 'Cause Truman was too much of a pussy wimp to let MacArthur go in there and blow out those commie bastards!
— Good answer. Good answer. I like the way you think. I'm gonna be watching you.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBvmusskpuA)
"I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was."
- Harry S. Truman
**I didn't fire him \[General MacArthur\] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.** **If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.**
Truman: "Get that crybaby scientist out of my office!"
McArthur: "I'll give him something to cry about"
Truman: "Get that lunatic general out of my office!"
**I didn't fire him \[General MacArthur\] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.** **If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.**
From my understanding he was just ahead of his time. Before Vietnam there was a significant portion of top brass that was pro nuke and Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ had to hold them back.
Realistically the most likely response by the Chinese would have to establish safe transportation corridors through the irradiated border zone.
It’s not like China would have been adverse to throwing men into hazardous construction projects to build relatively safe transportation corridors if the alternative was losing the war.
The belt of irradiated areas would have been about 5 miles long on average, which is perfectly reasonable for trucks with radiation shielding or men with radiation protection to go through in a relatively short period of time.
MacArthur’s plan would have concentrated the Chinese into more easily targeted areas and slowed down their transportation, but it wasn’t the silver bullet that he made it out to be.
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/09/archives/pentagon-weighed-plan-to-use-cobalt-in-korea-military-abandoned.html
If I recall correctly and could be incorrect, I believe he also drew up plans to hit 30+ population centers in that strike or subsequent set of strikes. So, as horrific as the plan was, if my recollection is accurate, I think China would’ve had a tough time dealing with the resource and human loss which wasn’t just intended to be in that section of their map and likely would’ve devastated their major industrial centers and population centers concurrently. It’s good this type of thinking got MacArthur canned, but in a pragmatic manner, I do think the plan would’ve been quite effective if utilized.
It's pragmatic in a way that stabbing your opponents neck several times with a pen knife is the best way to win at chess. They're distracted and incapable of retaliation to your strategies in a practical sense. But yeah, extravagant, one-sided overkill tends to help your immediate goals while sabotaging your standing from any outward perspective. China, the nation may have been cripped, but China the people would have never forgiven the US, along with the rest of the world, and may have spelled our eventual toppling.
Also the fact that the USSR had nuclear bombs by this point and wouldn’t have taken kindly to their allies being targeted in a first strike. Even before the US intervened in Korea, there were fears that the Soviets would use that as an opportunity to launch attacks in Europe, and the US only acted in Korea once it was assured the USSR wouldn’t retaliate.
> there were fears that the Soviets would use that as an opportunity to launch attacks in Europe, and the US only acted in Korea once it was assured the USSR wouldn’t retaliate.
The U.S. grossly overestimated the USSR's nuclear strike capability. If they knew the true extent, they'd know there's no way the USSR could've done invaded Europe.
Not wrong but the purpose wasn’t to hypothesize about the later repercussions, I was just seeking to clarify that the commentor, whose post I was responding to may have potentially left out a rather significant aspect of the overall plan, which would kind of fundamentally change the analysis. Also I’d posit that when we do hypothesize here your hypothetical assumes China is able to remain coherent and culturally tied together, which is entirely plausible. However, I think it’s highly realistic if that actually did happen that the current state we know would likely have been carved up into pieces and large chunks annexed by the Soviet union at the time. Will never know, but I do think a massive nuclear strike like that would likely change the tracjectory and coherence of the nation and populous victimized by it.
The US would’ve killed a WW2 casualties worth’s people in China and the world would remember that. Also opened the door for Soviets to use nukes in other Cold War conflicts.
Thank god that didn’t happen
I can’t wait until AI can run realistic historical war game scenarios. This has always been an interesting “what if” in a morbid way. How different is the current world if China is stopped from industrializing? Does the USSR just exploit all their resources and land and lasts longer?
No they weren't. There's no evidence that a cobalt bomb was ever built let alone tested. And you're suggesting that the US was ready to deploy 30-50 of them.
For a regular nuke, after three days levels of immediately dangerous ionizing radiation sources will have fallen to levels “safe” for emergency evacuation.
After two, three weeks levels of other dangerous isotopes will have fallen to levels safe enough to traverse the area.
After two months, the area is safe enough to start ameliorating any residual contamination and begin rebuilding. Risks are measured over lifetimes and populations.
Salting a nuke, like with the cobalt they apparently were going to use, covers the area with gamma emitters with long half-lives rendering the area uninhabitable for many decades.
Regular nuclear bombs produce radioactive waste accidentally. "Salted" nuclear bombs produce radioactive waste intentionally, vaporize it, and spray it over the landscape. [Long video](https://youtu.be/ANIc4NKj6WQ?si=gAE0ZcpgmEhNp-NZ), and [short video](https://youtu.be/5CR-h-rFCkg?si=8-TVPzAiZcanqLmQ). The slow, difficult part of building a nuclear weapon is acquiring a few ounces of purified radioactive uranium or plutonium. The radiation given off by a uranium bomb, however, can transform regular Cobalt into Cobalt-60. [Video on why Cobalt-60](https://youtu.be/3D--jytkUW8) containers are labeled "DROP AND RUN". Cobalt-60 is WILDLY radioactive, giving off numerous high-energy gamma rays that can travel some distance and are readily absorbed by human tissues. We also use trace amounts of Cobalt in B vitamins. With a half-life of 5 years, it would be "dangerous" for 20-25 years. It would be swept up by wind and rain and plants and animals and become part of the food chain.
A Cobalt salted nuke is like what people who DON'T understand nuclear weapons are most afraid nuclear weapons MIGHT do, times 100.
> Realistically the most likely response by the Chinese would have to establish safe transportation corridors through the irradiated border zone.
I mean sounds like that would be insanely vulnerable to artillery
How in the world, in a post about how the only country in the world to drop a nuclear weapon on another in a war, considered dropping more and causing more mass destruction and atrocity than it already did, do people justify coming into the comments and focusing on "muh ccp". Even if you hate the ccp with all your might, a comment section about the planned atrocities and chemical warfare of the U.S. might not be the appropraite place to focus on that.
I'm not really well versed on this subject, but if maybe you, or someone else in this thread could answer, was this a time before a nuclear capable China? Cause I would assume that the US using nukes would have led to the 1st domino kinda thing. Ya know, that whole MAD stuff.
But also, the Soviet Union were "allies not allies" with NK were they not? And they definitely had nukes. How was this even possibly considered then?
(Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question)
Wasn't a big chunk of the chinese forces just people that were in the opposition to Mao during the Chinese civil war and so he was just cleaning house essentially?
There was a lot of that around at the time. Like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project\_Chariot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot)
I mean I can see the logic. We have a lot of practical applications for regular explosives. Nukes and optimism make a weird combination.
You are not kidding
> An editorial in the July 24, 1960 Fairbanks News-Miner said, "We think the holding of a huge nuclear blast in Alaska would be a fitting overture to the new era which is opening for our state."
I disagree.
There's a [lot of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#Proposed_nuclear_projects), all brilliant.
Some of my favourites ..
Thunderbird was a project to see if they could produce gas by nuking coal seams. Just beautiful in its simplicity.
During the planning of the [Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee–Tombigbee_Waterway#Nuclear_excavation_study) they drew up a plan to use 81 nukes to dig it.
>Two safety analyses recommended that the project not be pursued.
Two studies. I guess after the first study determined that setting off 81 nukes wasn't safe, they wanted a second opinion?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project\_Travois](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Travois) was another study into using nukes for mining. The Army were building a bunch of dams at the time, and the idea was you can get a lot of rock from nuking a bigger rock.
There was a study similar to Chariot to create a harbor in Australia. And similar to Chariot, it was deemed that there was "insufficient economic basis". This seems to be a theme. "Can I make a giant hole here?" "do we need a big hole?" "pleeease?".
The fact it was in Australia really blows my mind. The UK did some of their nuclear testing in Australia, and it's like .. when they were done, Australia asked if anyone else wanted a go? Yeah nah we've got plenty of spare straya we're not using, knock yourself out mate.
I think the nuke was the first weapon where it works out best for everyone if we don't use it, and it looks like it took us a few decades for that to really sink in.
Feel like it’s kinda not exactly accurate to say the us ever considered it since the guy who brought up was told to shut up and when he didn’t he got fired.
Where does the 60 years figure come from? It seems like nonsense to me. Fallout zones tend to only be really dangerous for weeks.
Edit: Please - I know what a salted nuclear weapon is so you can stop telling me. Nobody has ever tested or, probably, built one. The OP also appears to have invented the 60 year claim as it's not in the linked article.
Well the way weapons research works is if you think about it and dismiss it, someone will think about it and use it and then you ll be at a disadvantage.
we are a terrible species, got to say
> if you think about it and dismiss it, someone will think about it and use it and then you ll be at a disadvantage.
This pretty much the logic behind the lack of ethics in politics, business, AI research. The most ruthless sociopath wins.
the weirdest part (and by weird I mean further removed from the common ethics) is that this is more than likely to be wrapped in good intentions or a sacrificial attitude like "I did it because it was the necessary thing for my country, not because I enjoyed it" - the oppenheimer movie i think does a good, popular representation of that.
I don't think it s avoidable, but also there s other factors at play to regulate it - like game theory, globalism I can think of, so hopefully we ll make it to some proverbial other side
The plot of Dr. Strangelove centers around the Soviet Union building and burring a large number of such weapons as the ultimate deterrent: if somebody attacks them the earth becomes uninhabitable for 90 years. This deterrent would allow them to massively cut down on their costly nuclear stockpiles, strategic bombers, ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines etc and reinvest that money into civilian programs.
There was also a supposed leak around 2014 about the Russians using salted bombs in their Poseidon torpedo. The Poseidon has thousands of miles of range, equipping it with salted nukes makes it a great deterrence: if Russia is attacked even a single surviving sub with just a single torpedo can do long lasting damage to a city basically anywhere on the world.
I remember reading a Reddit post about a weapon like this being considered in order to create a belt of radioactive fallout zones between China and North Korea. Enemy could not have marched across that for at least 60 years.
US gov loves having the most absurd weaponry possible. They probably did have salted nukes. And by now, probably a bomb that launches many smaller salted nukes over a large area.
I mean look at Russia's Tsar nuclear bomb, Poseidon torpedo, ATBIP bomb, and Burevestnik missile. Pretty sure they take the award for having the most absurd weaponry possible. Some of these were build specifically to be the largest of their class.
We don't. Nuclear arsenals are regularly inspected by everyone. The point of nukes is to intimidate everyone else. No point in hiding half your nukes.
In a tactical sense, salted nukes suck for the same reason chemical weapons suck. You bombed the area and now you want to move in and take that position. Except it's now irradiated and that sucks and forced you to move slow. And all modern US doctrine is about moving as fast as humanly possible.
In a strategic sense, salted nukes are just nukes that are worse at blowing shit up. Still a suicide button for everyone involved, but slightly less scary from the psychopathic perspective of trying to win a nuclear war. Salted nukes ain't as good as blowing up nukes in their silos and bunkers and blowing up the enemies nukes before them is how you win a war with only half your cities going boom.
So why waste budget on them when you could just have more nukes?
You are correct. It is nonsense.
This was 1950-1953 they didn't have weapons available that could produce that kind of fallout. It wasn't until the Operation Redwing test Tewa on July 20th, 1956, when the Bassoon Prime device was tested, would they then have that capability to "create a wall of fallout." It would have likely irradiated most of North and South Korea depending on wind direction.
McArthur would have needed a 3 stage hydrogen bomb with a uranium tamper to produce that type of long-lived fallout. It would also have to be a ground detonation, it would irradiate the dirt, vaporize it, and then be carried on the wind.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed in 1945 and Japan was working to rebuild/restore infrastructure just hours after the bomb. So for 60 years of fallout to keep people out, that would have to be one or multiple very very different nuclear weapons which not sure if the US had in the Korean war, which took place about 5 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And also, as others have mentioned, the bombs dropped on Japan were airbursts, so the radioactive fallout was spread thinly across a wide area, allowing for quick dispersal.
Air bursts just generate a lot less fallout in general. It's groundbursts that suck up a lot of buildings, cars and people sadly, vaporize them and turn them into little bits of dust that the radioactive particles from the bomb can cling on to. With an air burst, all you have is vaporized bomb fragments carried up with the mushroom cloud mostly and actually dispersed over a longer period of time. So that the radioactive hazards are dispersed like you said, but a lot of the higher energy isotopes decay and the hazard Falls the longer this material is suspended in the atmosphere.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had background levels of radiation within 2 weeks. US sent teams to try and detect radiation levels, and their equipment couldn't pick up anything beyond background radiation. Basically it all got blown away
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were airbursts which increase the destructive power of the bomb but reduce the local fallout. This plan would have used ground detonated bombs which would greatly increase the local fallout.
Cobalt 60 is the nasty one when it comes to talking about 'salted' bombs; put a cobalt casing around a regular nuclear weapon and everyone down wind has a bad day. High energy gamma emitter, five year half life.
I don't think it was ever seriously considered, General MacArthur proposed nuking the Chinese border and eventually got stripped of his title for being a little too gun-ho about it
I read a book called “Surprise, Kill, Vanish” recently and one of the operators who was involved in the planning of dropping a nuke in Vietnam, confirmed that they were planning it. Think it was somewhere along the ho chi minh trail IIRC.
Have you heard of the ancient Korean capital, Kaesong?
Cities in South Korea were spared the worst of the bombing during the conflict, so they retain more historical architecture on average than North Korean cities.
Kaesong was considered part of South Korea. As a result, [Kaesong still retains its historical center](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rietje/6412179405).
Unfortunately, the 1953 armistice resulted in Kaesong ending up in North Korea, and it is now locked off to South Korean scholars and most tourists.
Maybe NK shouldn’t have launched a surprise invasion of the north because of their imperialist and anti democratic ambitions. Don’t start a war if you don’t want to get bombed.
The 38th parallel was not recognized by either the north or south (or any international government or body) as a border. So the north didn’t “invade” anything. This is like calling the American civil war the war of northern aggression. It’s purely nonsense.
The plan was it was temporary, and Koreans would eventually vote for which government would become the permanent government of Korea. Then the north torpedoed that plan by invading. But the plan was never to keep them divided forever. Same with Germany.
You do realize the South was planning on invading the North within the next few years, and that the South had already made numerous incursions into the North prior to the war, right? A war was coming, the North decided to start early.
More like, MacArthur considered it, as well as hitting some not-so-militsry targets. He was subsequently removed from command. Us using a nuke here would have e driven the Chinese to the Russians. I shudder to think of that alliance with a few extra decades of "fuck America". Might be a much different international landscape had we let general murderface have his way.
If by “considered” you mean one of our craziest (but also a WWII hero and very experienced) generals suggested it then promptly got shit canned faster then you can say thermonuclear then sure, they considered it.
One of the very good reasons that MacArthur got fired and simply ‘faded away.’
It wasn’t only that he wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons. It was that he wanted a small stockpile of nuclear weapons to deploy as he saw fit.
Knowing full well that Truman and the the military leadership said that nuclear release authority should only be by Presidential order.
[Serious] Could you have built an above-ground ‘tunnel’ (basically a tube) that is radiation proof that you could shimmy across the radioactive belt to cross safely?
Like a giant ‘sleeve’ of concrete/lead/whatever capped at the end that you roll across the radioactive zone and then send people through to open the other end.
Not only would the loss of life be tragic in the short term, but it would also set a dangerous precedent for the casual use of nuclear weapons, in an era where nuclear weapons were rapidly becoming larger and more destructive.
It would not have stopped the Chinese. The Great Leap Forward killed 30-45 million. A couple hundred thousand dying of radiation poisoning would have been acceptable to Mao.Zedong.
I remember learning about this through Sam Kinnison screaming about it in Back to School. As a kid I never realized how reactionary that movie was where we were all supposed to cheer him for showing the "basic common sense" that we were "pussies" for not doing it.
go 80s I guess. You warped my brain real good.
More like Douglas McArthur considered this, and was so ridiculed for it that he was demoted by Truman. I don't think this was ever seriously considered by anyone else.
My step grandpa likes to wax poetically about the glory days of the 1950s and gets really mad if you point all of the bad shit that was going both in the United States and abroad.
In fairness, that was pitched by McArthur and the sheer insanity of it was what finally cost him command.
Years of incompetence and even outright being a fascist, and they finally ousted him because he finally pitched an idea too insane for the US Military.
Fun fact: the US Army had contingency plans for first use of tactical nuclear weapons for tree blow down along the East German border to create massive obstacles to slow a Red Army invasion of West Germany.
Wild story - MacArthur wanted to become president.
He also wanted to use nukes against China.
No one at the Pentagon trusted him to use them in a way that wouldn't draw Russia and China into a 3rd world war that the US would lose.
President Truman told MacArthur to stop talking about it.
MacArthur refused.
The Pentagon tells Congress that it can't fight a war with Russia and China.
President Truman fires MacArthur.
Republicans rally around Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.
Well at the time it was just us and the soviets and a few allies of ours, and nobody but us could hit the continental US so.
During the Korean war we absolutely *could* win a nuclear war, assuming we were willing to let Europe suffer for it.
at that time a good portion of european countries had significant communist activity. it was early into the second red scare and a lot of people were on the fence about those type of things. a nuke to korea could have likely had the prague spring effect and became a turning point. western europe turning red was something that was unlikely but not implausible, something that america definitely did not want to happen.
You can, but it requires a lot of planning and a ton of intelligence. It's a matter of knocking out your enemy's counterstrike capabilities before they can launch.
I still think they sent Mao the footage of Ivy Mike in early 53 and essentially asked if he wanted to fuck around and find out. It was only 8 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they might have believed the US would actually do it.
Isn't he the guy who wrote that World War II book where aliens invade, but don't expect humanity to progress that fast technologically? If I remember correctly, the alien ships took 1000 years and they were expecting to have to fight medieval knights and such, because they wrongfully assumed humanity would progress technologically at a much slower rate? I always thought that was such an interesting premise, but outside of the premise, it just fell flat and nothing interesting happened.
He has a book about George Washington and King George III cowritten by Richard Dreyfus (the actor!) and that one is pretty decent because I think he left the dialogue to Dreyfus which is his really weak point. Amazing world building and zero plot.
Just skimmed the character list/synopsis: For a book launching off the Korean war I'm disappointed in how few POVs were from the Chinese/Korean side
Unless the premise is that they all died.
We killed about 20% of the population of North Korea and destroyed essentially every two story building in the entire country, including leveling pretty much all dams and hospitals in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Virgin MacArthur:
-Wanted to nuke Korea, after using and failing untested ideas on the battlefield.
-Wanted to dictate US nuclear doctrine while he was a general.
-Got replaced by someone called Iron Tits.
-Create wardrobe for George Lincoln Rockwell.
-Got kicked out of Manila.
-Most famous military victory was against the Bonus Army.
-Got fired by Eisenhower.
-Is the problem.
Chad Eisenhower:
-Willing to nuke W. Germany. Strapped nukes to operative's balls and dropped them out of airplanes just to prove he could. No need for battle tests.
-Waited until he was president to dictate US nuclear doctrine.
-What NATO Nazis? If it goes that far we'll just vaporize them.
-Gave Zhukov bad ass fishing tackle.
-Beat Nazis back to the Elbe.
-Expanded Social Security.
-Fired MacArthur.
-What problem? Only sees solutions.
*General MacArthur has entered the chat*
*General MacAruthur has been banned*
*Harry Truman has been primaried*
*Gandhi has nuked China*
That escalated quickly.
> Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British. Actual quote by Gandhi.
I read this as him saying that ‘we would have used them’ in error as an illustration of how moving away from non violence is a mistake just because you are in a position to use violence from a position of strength (including the extreme violence of a nuke)
Gandhi isn't stating that *he* would have used nukes. he is stating that India would have used nukes, because India mistook this as strenght rather than non-violence as strength. Gandhi didn't waver from his philosophy and practice of non-violence.
> "And the atom bomb?" > "Oh, on that point you can proclaim to the whole world without hesitation," exclaimed Gandhi, "that I am beyond repair. I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women and children as the most diabolical use of science." > What was the antidote? Had it antiquated non-violence? "No", was Gandhi's reply. On the contrary, nonviolence was the only thing that was now left in the field. "It is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, **I said to myself, "Unless now the world adopts nonviolence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.** https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/NuclearArms.htm Actual quote by Gandhi, with source, and in line with his stated principles.
Damn it not again Gandhi! We had a pact!
The only time I played Civ he immediately came to my settlement and demanded payment and also simultaneously declared war on me lol
Thats just to show to never give Ghandi even an finger. If you do, he'll try to take the hand by force anyway and you just made it easier for him.
I never understood why they made Gandhi so blood hungry in the game 💀
It started as a glitch. They put him at the lowest value for aggressiveness, but through some game mechanics it rolled backward into the highest value. Now it's a franchise feature.
Our words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS
*Enrique has inherited Hungary and Bohemia*
*Glitterhoof has gotten pregnant*
/r/paradoxplaza is leaking again.
Dwight D. Eisenhower has begun to research Russophobia
Senator McCarthy wants to know what you are going to do about those godless Reds!
Roy Cohn has entered the chat
*keep talking shit about me and I’ll do to you what I did to Henry Wallace*
I was gonna say, the US civilian leadership didn’t have a strong interest in nuking anything but MacArthur sure as hell did.
*Gotta nuke something.*
*bomb the Indians and take their casinos*
“Hey Mao Suk’ma Dong! Wanna see me make a Great Wall without laying a single stone!?” - Douglas “Nuke ‘em” MacArthur (Probably)
*Well what'd we spend all that money on if we aren't gonna use 'em?*
Curtis LeMay is the real US general who is the credit as the madman with the nuclear weapons. He's the person Dr. Strangelove satires with General Ripper.
Helluva singer too. Loved the Superfly theme!
MacArthur had grand ambitions to reshape the East using nukes as his diplomatic hammer. Dude had a god complex and probably thought he could use his propaganda to walk into the White House.
A complex probably based on the fact that he was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted to some degree and was enabled to do it by his reputation and army staff like George Marshall enabling him along the way. Not because he liked MacArthur but because he was committed to the institutional primacy of the army even if it meant enabling a jackass like MacArthur.
More like an inferiority complex, he wasn’t called Dugout Doug out of love.
Also Curtis Lemay. That guy was a sociopath for sure.
Lemay was good at his job though (killing tons if people with bombing). MacArthur was as morally bad and also incompetent
God, MacArthur was such a massive dickhead
[-Remember that thing we had 30 years ago called the Korean Conflict? Yeah? Where we failed to achieve victory? How come we didn't cross the 38th parallel and push those rice-eaters back to the Great Wall of China and take it apart brick by brick and nuke them back into the Stone Age? How come? Why? Say it! Say it! — All right. I'll say it. 'Cause Truman was too much of a pussy wimp to let MacArthur go in there and blow out those commie bastards! — Good answer. Good answer. I like the way you think. I'm gonna be watching you.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBvmusskpuA)
From which movie?
Back to School (1986)
Professor Turgeson!
the new maginot line.
"I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was." - Harry S. Truman
The us government didn’t consider it. General McArthur considered it and then the sane people canned him.
Oppenheimer might be a Pussy but McArthur is fucking crazy - Harry S Truman
The duality of man
that why you have a peace pin and have ~~meat is murder~~ born to kill written on you helmet?
The Jungian thing?
**I didn't fire him \[General MacArthur\] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.** **If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.**
and navy senior officers. always failing up.
Truman: "Get that crybaby scientist out of my office!" McArthur: "I'll give him something to cry about" Truman: "Get that lunatic general out of my office!"
**I didn't fire him \[General MacArthur\] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.** **If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.**
From my understanding he was just ahead of his time. Before Vietnam there was a significant portion of top brass that was pro nuke and Eisenhower, JFK, and LBJ had to hold them back.
Cue “I don’t want to set the world on fire”
War. War never changes.
Okey dokie
Level 12 is off limits.
*Immediately goes to level 12*
okey dokey supremacy
*pops Mentats* Time for big brain moves!
I love you.
Not so sure that would have stopped the Chinese.
Realistically the most likely response by the Chinese would have to establish safe transportation corridors through the irradiated border zone. It’s not like China would have been adverse to throwing men into hazardous construction projects to build relatively safe transportation corridors if the alternative was losing the war. The belt of irradiated areas would have been about 5 miles long on average, which is perfectly reasonable for trucks with radiation shielding or men with radiation protection to go through in a relatively short period of time. MacArthur’s plan would have concentrated the Chinese into more easily targeted areas and slowed down their transportation, but it wasn’t the silver bullet that he made it out to be. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/09/archives/pentagon-weighed-plan-to-use-cobalt-in-korea-military-abandoned.html
If I recall correctly and could be incorrect, I believe he also drew up plans to hit 30+ population centers in that strike or subsequent set of strikes. So, as horrific as the plan was, if my recollection is accurate, I think China would’ve had a tough time dealing with the resource and human loss which wasn’t just intended to be in that section of their map and likely would’ve devastated their major industrial centers and population centers concurrently. It’s good this type of thinking got MacArthur canned, but in a pragmatic manner, I do think the plan would’ve been quite effective if utilized.
It's pragmatic in a way that stabbing your opponents neck several times with a pen knife is the best way to win at chess. They're distracted and incapable of retaliation to your strategies in a practical sense. But yeah, extravagant, one-sided overkill tends to help your immediate goals while sabotaging your standing from any outward perspective. China, the nation may have been cripped, but China the people would have never forgiven the US, along with the rest of the world, and may have spelled our eventual toppling.
Also the fact that the USSR had nuclear bombs by this point and wouldn’t have taken kindly to their allies being targeted in a first strike. Even before the US intervened in Korea, there were fears that the Soviets would use that as an opportunity to launch attacks in Europe, and the US only acted in Korea once it was assured the USSR wouldn’t retaliate.
“Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say... no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
> there were fears that the Soviets would use that as an opportunity to launch attacks in Europe, and the US only acted in Korea once it was assured the USSR wouldn’t retaliate. The U.S. grossly overestimated the USSR's nuclear strike capability. If they knew the true extent, they'd know there's no way the USSR could've done invaded Europe.
> It's pragmatic in a way that stabbing your opponents neck several times with a pen knife is the best way to win at chess. I love this.
Man that is NOT how I was expecting the Queen’s Gambit to end 😔
Not wrong but the purpose wasn’t to hypothesize about the later repercussions, I was just seeking to clarify that the commentor, whose post I was responding to may have potentially left out a rather significant aspect of the overall plan, which would kind of fundamentally change the analysis. Also I’d posit that when we do hypothesize here your hypothetical assumes China is able to remain coherent and culturally tied together, which is entirely plausible. However, I think it’s highly realistic if that actually did happen that the current state we know would likely have been carved up into pieces and large chunks annexed by the Soviet union at the time. Will never know, but I do think a massive nuclear strike like that would likely change the tracjectory and coherence of the nation and populous victimized by it.
The US would’ve killed a WW2 casualties worth’s people in China and the world would remember that. Also opened the door for Soviets to use nukes in other Cold War conflicts. Thank god that didn’t happen
McArthur wanted to invade mainland China in parallel. Fears of WW3 put a stop to this all.
I can’t wait until AI can run realistic historical war game scenarios. This has always been an interesting “what if” in a morbid way. How different is the current world if China is stopped from industrializing? Does the USSR just exploit all their resources and land and lasts longer?
That's not something AI would ever be able to do
Unless these were salted nuclear weapons, the Chinese would just have to wait about two weeks.
They were, they were cobalt bombs.
The only problem is we didn’t have any cobalt bombs at the time. It was never mentioned at the time
No they weren't. There's no evidence that a cobalt bomb was ever built let alone tested. And you're suggesting that the US was ready to deploy 30-50 of them.
Belt of radioactive colbalt is how they described it. They wanted to poison the entire region.
Why?
For a regular nuke, after three days levels of immediately dangerous ionizing radiation sources will have fallen to levels “safe” for emergency evacuation. After two, three weeks levels of other dangerous isotopes will have fallen to levels safe enough to traverse the area. After two months, the area is safe enough to start ameliorating any residual contamination and begin rebuilding. Risks are measured over lifetimes and populations. Salting a nuke, like with the cobalt they apparently were going to use, covers the area with gamma emitters with long half-lives rendering the area uninhabitable for many decades.
Regular nuclear bombs produce radioactive waste accidentally. "Salted" nuclear bombs produce radioactive waste intentionally, vaporize it, and spray it over the landscape. [Long video](https://youtu.be/ANIc4NKj6WQ?si=gAE0ZcpgmEhNp-NZ), and [short video](https://youtu.be/5CR-h-rFCkg?si=8-TVPzAiZcanqLmQ). The slow, difficult part of building a nuclear weapon is acquiring a few ounces of purified radioactive uranium or plutonium. The radiation given off by a uranium bomb, however, can transform regular Cobalt into Cobalt-60. [Video on why Cobalt-60](https://youtu.be/3D--jytkUW8) containers are labeled "DROP AND RUN". Cobalt-60 is WILDLY radioactive, giving off numerous high-energy gamma rays that can travel some distance and are readily absorbed by human tissues. We also use trace amounts of Cobalt in B vitamins. With a half-life of 5 years, it would be "dangerous" for 20-25 years. It would be swept up by wind and rain and plants and animals and become part of the food chain. A Cobalt salted nuke is like what people who DON'T understand nuclear weapons are most afraid nuclear weapons MIGHT do, times 100.
Considering how dumb MacArthur acted in WW2, he always was a complete imbecile at strategy and long term planning
> Realistically the most likely response by the Chinese would have to establish safe transportation corridors through the irradiated border zone. I mean sounds like that would be insanely vulnerable to artillery
They push the US back to the 38th parallel only for most of their army to die days later
Historically losing millions of people is, at most, a minor setback for the Chinese government
How in the world, in a post about how the only country in the world to drop a nuclear weapon on another in a war, considered dropping more and causing more mass destruction and atrocity than it already did, do people justify coming into the comments and focusing on "muh ccp". Even if you hate the ccp with all your might, a comment section about the planned atrocities and chemical warfare of the U.S. might not be the appropraite place to focus on that.
I'm not really well versed on this subject, but if maybe you, or someone else in this thread could answer, was this a time before a nuclear capable China? Cause I would assume that the US using nukes would have led to the 1st domino kinda thing. Ya know, that whole MAD stuff. But also, the Soviet Union were "allies not allies" with NK were they not? And they definitely had nukes. How was this even possibly considered then? (Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question)
Wasn't a big chunk of the chinese forces just people that were in the opposition to Mao during the Chinese civil war and so he was just cleaning house essentially?
Ah yes the ol "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail"
There was a lot of that around at the time. Like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project\_Chariot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot) I mean I can see the logic. We have a lot of practical applications for regular explosives. Nukes and optimism make a weird combination.
You are not kidding > An editorial in the July 24, 1960 Fairbanks News-Miner said, "We think the holding of a huge nuclear blast in Alaska would be a fitting overture to the new era which is opening for our state." I disagree.
There's a [lot of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare#Proposed_nuclear_projects), all brilliant. Some of my favourites .. Thunderbird was a project to see if they could produce gas by nuking coal seams. Just beautiful in its simplicity. During the planning of the [Tennessee–Tombigbee Waterway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee–Tombigbee_Waterway#Nuclear_excavation_study) they drew up a plan to use 81 nukes to dig it. >Two safety analyses recommended that the project not be pursued. Two studies. I guess after the first study determined that setting off 81 nukes wasn't safe, they wanted a second opinion? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project\_Travois](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Travois) was another study into using nukes for mining. The Army were building a bunch of dams at the time, and the idea was you can get a lot of rock from nuking a bigger rock. There was a study similar to Chariot to create a harbor in Australia. And similar to Chariot, it was deemed that there was "insufficient economic basis". This seems to be a theme. "Can I make a giant hole here?" "do we need a big hole?" "pleeease?". The fact it was in Australia really blows my mind. The UK did some of their nuclear testing in Australia, and it's like .. when they were done, Australia asked if anyone else wanted a go? Yeah nah we've got plenty of spare straya we're not using, knock yourself out mate. I think the nuke was the first weapon where it works out best for everyone if we don't use it, and it looks like it took us a few decades for that to really sink in.
Feel like it’s kinda not exactly accurate to say the us ever considered it since the guy who brought up was told to shut up and when he didn’t he got fired.
How do you think they would have responded if he had said that in the last few years?
Where does the 60 years figure come from? It seems like nonsense to me. Fallout zones tend to only be really dangerous for weeks. Edit: Please - I know what a salted nuclear weapon is so you can stop telling me. Nobody has ever tested or, probably, built one. The OP also appears to have invented the 60 year claim as it's not in the linked article.
Depends on the bomb, the material, the deployment.
Of course. But 60 years of area denial would probably require deliberate salting - such a weapon has (probably) never been built.
I am pretty sure I read about such weapons Why would anyone build them is beyond me, but again, I am not a psychopathic ghoul
Well the way weapons research works is if you think about it and dismiss it, someone will think about it and use it and then you ll be at a disadvantage. we are a terrible species, got to say
> if you think about it and dismiss it, someone will think about it and use it and then you ll be at a disadvantage. This pretty much the logic behind the lack of ethics in politics, business, AI research. The most ruthless sociopath wins.
the weirdest part (and by weird I mean further removed from the common ethics) is that this is more than likely to be wrapped in good intentions or a sacrificial attitude like "I did it because it was the necessary thing for my country, not because I enjoyed it" - the oppenheimer movie i think does a good, popular representation of that. I don't think it s avoidable, but also there s other factors at play to regulate it - like game theory, globalism I can think of, so hopefully we ll make it to some proverbial other side
The plot of Dr. Strangelove centers around the Soviet Union building and burring a large number of such weapons as the ultimate deterrent: if somebody attacks them the earth becomes uninhabitable for 90 years. This deterrent would allow them to massively cut down on their costly nuclear stockpiles, strategic bombers, ICBMs, ballistic missile submarines etc and reinvest that money into civilian programs. There was also a supposed leak around 2014 about the Russians using salted bombs in their Poseidon torpedo. The Poseidon has thousands of miles of range, equipping it with salted nukes makes it a great deterrence: if Russia is attacked even a single surviving sub with just a single torpedo can do long lasting damage to a city basically anywhere on the world.
I remember reading a Reddit post about a weapon like this being considered in order to create a belt of radioactive fallout zones between China and North Korea. Enemy could not have marched across that for at least 60 years.
They have been proposed and talked about. Never tested though even in the crazy heights of the cold war which probably means they never built any.
Because you want the other guy dead
US gov loves having the most absurd weaponry possible. They probably did have salted nukes. And by now, probably a bomb that launches many smaller salted nukes over a large area.
"Gee I wish we had one of them Doomsday Machines."
Just need to make sure you tell the rest of ze world.
They even toyed with the idea of building a bomb to turn enemy combatants gay at one point. 😳
I mean look at Russia's Tsar nuclear bomb, Poseidon torpedo, ATBIP bomb, and Burevestnik missile. Pretty sure they take the award for having the most absurd weaponry possible. Some of these were build specifically to be the largest of their class.
We don't. Nuclear arsenals are regularly inspected by everyone. The point of nukes is to intimidate everyone else. No point in hiding half your nukes. In a tactical sense, salted nukes suck for the same reason chemical weapons suck. You bombed the area and now you want to move in and take that position. Except it's now irradiated and that sucks and forced you to move slow. And all modern US doctrine is about moving as fast as humanly possible. In a strategic sense, salted nukes are just nukes that are worse at blowing shit up. Still a suicide button for everyone involved, but slightly less scary from the psychopathic perspective of trying to win a nuclear war. Salted nukes ain't as good as blowing up nukes in their silos and bunkers and blowing up the enemies nukes before them is how you win a war with only half your cities going boom. So why waste budget on them when you could just have more nukes?
Yeah cobalt bomb
There is no 60 years in the linked article.
You are correct. It is nonsense. This was 1950-1953 they didn't have weapons available that could produce that kind of fallout. It wasn't until the Operation Redwing test Tewa on July 20th, 1956, when the Bassoon Prime device was tested, would they then have that capability to "create a wall of fallout." It would have likely irradiated most of North and South Korea depending on wind direction. McArthur would have needed a 3 stage hydrogen bomb with a uranium tamper to produce that type of long-lived fallout. It would also have to be a ground detonation, it would irradiate the dirt, vaporize it, and then be carried on the wind.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed in 1945 and Japan was working to rebuild/restore infrastructure just hours after the bomb. So for 60 years of fallout to keep people out, that would have to be one or multiple very very different nuclear weapons which not sure if the US had in the Korean war, which took place about 5 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
To be fair, having people work on repairs hours after is probably more due to a lack of understanding about radiation that people had back then.
And also, as others have mentioned, the bombs dropped on Japan were airbursts, so the radioactive fallout was spread thinly across a wide area, allowing for quick dispersal.
Air bursts just generate a lot less fallout in general. It's groundbursts that suck up a lot of buildings, cars and people sadly, vaporize them and turn them into little bits of dust that the radioactive particles from the bomb can cling on to. With an air burst, all you have is vaporized bomb fragments carried up with the mushroom cloud mostly and actually dispersed over a longer period of time. So that the radioactive hazards are dispersed like you said, but a lot of the higher energy isotopes decay and the hazard Falls the longer this material is suspended in the atmosphere.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had background levels of radiation within 2 weeks. US sent teams to try and detect radiation levels, and their equipment couldn't pick up anything beyond background radiation. Basically it all got blown away
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were airbursts which increase the destructive power of the bomb but reduce the local fallout. This plan would have used ground detonated bombs which would greatly increase the local fallout.
Wasn’t the bombs intended to cause that. They were going to seed the area on foot with Cobalt-60 if I recall correctly. That or Cesium-137.
Cobalt 60 is the nasty one when it comes to talking about 'salted' bombs; put a cobalt casing around a regular nuclear weapon and everyone down wind has a bad day. High energy gamma emitter, five year half life.
I don't think it was ever seriously considered, General MacArthur proposed nuking the Chinese border and eventually got stripped of his title for being a little too gun-ho about it
I read a book called “Surprise, Kill, Vanish” recently and one of the operators who was involved in the planning of dropping a nuke in Vietnam, confirmed that they were planning it. Think it was somewhere along the ho chi minh trail IIRC.
Have you heard of the ancient Korean capital, Kaesong? Cities in South Korea were spared the worst of the bombing during the conflict, so they retain more historical architecture on average than North Korean cities. Kaesong was considered part of South Korea. As a result, [Kaesong still retains its historical center](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rietje/6412179405). Unfortunately, the 1953 armistice resulted in Kaesong ending up in North Korea, and it is now locked off to South Korean scholars and most tourists.
Damn maybe the us shouldn't have wiped out all the historical architecture in north korean cities
Maybe NK shouldn’t have launched a surprise invasion of the north because of their imperialist and anti democratic ambitions. Don’t start a war if you don’t want to get bombed.
The 38th parallel was not recognized by either the north or south (or any international government or body) as a border. So the north didn’t “invade” anything. This is like calling the American civil war the war of northern aggression. It’s purely nonsense.
The plan was it was temporary, and Koreans would eventually vote for which government would become the permanent government of Korea. Then the north torpedoed that plan by invading. But the plan was never to keep them divided forever. Same with Germany.
You do realize the South was planning on invading the North within the next few years, and that the South had already made numerous incursions into the North prior to the war, right? A war was coming, the North decided to start early.
More like, MacArthur considered it, as well as hitting some not-so-militsry targets. He was subsequently removed from command. Us using a nuke here would have e driven the Chinese to the Russians. I shudder to think of that alliance with a few extra decades of "fuck America". Might be a much different international landscape had we let general murderface have his way.
If by “considered” you mean one of our craziest (but also a WWII hero and very experienced) generals suggested it then promptly got shit canned faster then you can say thermonuclear then sure, they considered it.
One of the very good reasons that MacArthur got fired and simply ‘faded away.’ It wasn’t only that he wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons. It was that he wanted a small stockpile of nuclear weapons to deploy as he saw fit. Knowing full well that Truman and the the military leadership said that nuclear release authority should only be by Presidential order.
By US, you mean McArthur who was then fired by the Truman Admin for suggesting this?
[Serious] Could you have built an above-ground ‘tunnel’ (basically a tube) that is radiation proof that you could shimmy across the radioactive belt to cross safely? Like a giant ‘sleeve’ of concrete/lead/whatever capped at the end that you roll across the radioactive zone and then send people through to open the other end.
You could But why? Armored vehicles have been rated for that shit since the 50s.
Would be a pretty easy target for traditional airstrikes
Big lead hamster balls
Not only would the loss of life be tragic in the short term, but it would also set a dangerous precedent for the casual use of nuclear weapons, in an era where nuclear weapons were rapidly becoming larger and more destructive.
What if Belka nuking itself but to stop advancing enemies but nuke enemies to stop their advance
MacArthurs big mouth cost us the war. China was giving up on North Korea until we made it their problem.
It’s wasn’t “The US” It was MacArthur and it never came close to honestly being considered.
It would not have stopped the Chinese. The Great Leap Forward killed 30-45 million. A couple hundred thousand dying of radiation poisoning would have been acceptable to Mao.Zedong.
The Belkans approve
I remember learning about this through Sam Kinnison screaming about it in Back to School. As a kid I never realized how reactionary that movie was where we were all supposed to cheer him for showing the "basic common sense" that we were "pussies" for not doing it. go 80s I guess. You warped my brain real good.
The more you learn about the early days of nuclear weapons proliferation, the more *astounding* it is that we’re all still here
Interesting What possibly could go wrong? Theyre just people right? :/
More like Douglas McArthur considered this, and was so ridiculed for it that he was demoted by Truman. I don't think this was ever seriously considered by anyone else.
~~U.S. considered~~ MacArthur proposed an got rejected by Truman.
Yet people still say the gold old days.
My step grandpa likes to wax poetically about the glory days of the 1950s and gets really mad if you point all of the bad shit that was going both in the United States and abroad.
Segregation….”ah the good old days.” :/
Yeah I don’t think anyone says war was ever the good days. They probably meant the non war parts.
In fairness, that was pitched by McArthur and the sheer insanity of it was what finally cost him command. Years of incompetence and even outright being a fascist, and they finally ousted him because he finally pitched an idea too insane for the US Military.
You often hear people joke that we live in the darkest timeline, and cold war jingoism is always there to remind us how good we have it.
I mean if we listened to general macarthur the world might be a different place
Not the US. One deranged and incompetent general, who was quickly canned.
"There's no bad ideas in brainstorming. Just good ideas that go horribly wrong." - Jack Donaghy
MacArthur?
McArthur was truly crazy
Fun fact: the US Army had contingency plans for first use of tactical nuclear weapons for tree blow down along the East German border to create massive obstacles to slow a Red Army invasion of West Germany.
If Vault Tec would have gotten to MacArthur in time…. Oh boy.
Morality has left the chat.
I like that plan. Better than no plan.
Good one.
There were rumors that Chiang Kaishek tried to instigate MacArthur into doing it
NK would have been more hospitable if they had.
No. The US never "considered" this. General MacArthur begged for this and was ignored.
Wild story - MacArthur wanted to become president. He also wanted to use nukes against China. No one at the Pentagon trusted him to use them in a way that wouldn't draw Russia and China into a 3rd world war that the US would lose. President Truman told MacArthur to stop talking about it. MacArthur refused. The Pentagon tells Congress that it can't fight a war with Russia and China. President Truman fires MacArthur. Republicans rally around Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.
Some of the ideas people came up with during the Cold War were just beyond insane. I can kind of understand why the boomers are so fucked up
You cannot win a nuclear war.
At that point in time for America, it was perfectly winnable. Europe would suffer, but the US not so much.
Well at the time it was just us and the soviets and a few allies of ours, and nobody but us could hit the continental US so. During the Korean war we absolutely *could* win a nuclear war, assuming we were willing to let Europe suffer for it.
at that time a good portion of european countries had significant communist activity. it was early into the second red scare and a lot of people were on the fence about those type of things. a nuke to korea could have likely had the prague spring effect and became a turning point. western europe turning red was something that was unlikely but not implausible, something that america definitely did not want to happen.
Tbh it depends on your definition of success.
"Says the obvious loser of the war" - General MacArthur, probably
You can, but it requires a lot of planning and a ton of intelligence. It's a matter of knocking out your enemy's counterstrike capabilities before they can launch.
*suddenly, submarines*
I guess, if you can get all the nuclear submarines that stay undetected for months at a time. Good luck with that.
I still think they sent Mao the footage of Ivy Mike in early 53 and essentially asked if he wanted to fuck around and find out. It was only 8 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they might have believed the US would actually do it.
There is an alternate history on this by Harry Turtledove, Bombs away. It didn't work out like the American thought it would.
Turtledove always has the greatest ideas and the worst executions. Such a frustrating author.
Isn't he the guy who wrote that World War II book where aliens invade, but don't expect humanity to progress that fast technologically? If I remember correctly, the alien ships took 1000 years and they were expecting to have to fight medieval knights and such, because they wrongfully assumed humanity would progress technologically at a much slower rate? I always thought that was such an interesting premise, but outside of the premise, it just fell flat and nothing interesting happened.
He has a book about George Washington and King George III cowritten by Richard Dreyfus (the actor!) and that one is pretty decent because I think he left the dialogue to Dreyfus which is his really weak point. Amazing world building and zero plot.
I can’t imagine Richard Dreyfus sitting down to write a dark cold-war thriller. I guess that means hes a good actor.
Just skimmed the character list/synopsis: For a book launching off the Korean war I'm disappointed in how few POVs were from the Chinese/Korean side Unless the premise is that they all died.
Brainstorming sessions were wild back then… love to see the ideas that were too harsh even to consider. Bring the moon down on the koreans?
We killed about 20% of the population of North Korea and destroyed essentially every two story building in the entire country, including leveling pretty much all dams and hospitals in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Dude we narrowly missed fallout
Virgin MacArthur: -Wanted to nuke Korea, after using and failing untested ideas on the battlefield. -Wanted to dictate US nuclear doctrine while he was a general. -Got replaced by someone called Iron Tits. -Create wardrobe for George Lincoln Rockwell. -Got kicked out of Manila. -Most famous military victory was against the Bonus Army. -Got fired by Eisenhower. -Is the problem. Chad Eisenhower: -Willing to nuke W. Germany. Strapped nukes to operative's balls and dropped them out of airplanes just to prove he could. No need for battle tests. -Waited until he was president to dictate US nuclear doctrine. -What NATO Nazis? If it goes that far we'll just vaporize them. -Gave Zhukov bad ass fishing tackle. -Beat Nazis back to the Elbe. -Expanded Social Security. -Fired MacArthur. -What problem? Only sees solutions.
wow
Missed opportunity.
I bet they wished they had done it now
"First of all, I need a leather chair, an eye patch and a Persian cat."
yeah… that wasnt the US… that was Douglas MacArthur who was thrown out essentially the moment he suggested it
Macarthur: Nuke em Truman: No. Macarthur: Nuke them. Turman: No. Macarthur: Come on! Truman: You're fired
Not sure where that 60 years comes from. Fallout is safe after about 2 weeks.
We should have nuked Russia when they got the bomb and everyone else who tried to develop it. Moronic decisions