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0 pointsbronson9y ago0 comments

They may have been just following our example.

'Meshcheryakov, the Soviet physicist, like all of the international observers, was not allowed to see any more than the reporters. But he still saw much. The mushroom clouds from Able and Baker interested him some, but he was more taken with what he saw in the people around him. The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine.'

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linkregister9y ago

Yes, when it comes to atomic atrocities, the United States is vastly more culpable than any other nation state. The Soviet Union excelled in different realms, such as imposing starvation (Ukraine), halting movement (all Soviet republics), and restricting information (all) on its vassal states.

pm909y ago

To be fair, the latter realms are very much within the reach of any autocratic state; its just that not many are either foolish or powerful enough to make use of them.

zeveb9y ago

> The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine.

Of course, disarmament doesn't really make sense: once science has discovered something, it can't be undiscovered. Integrating every new discovery into one's doctrine (even if that integration is, 'we'd rather not') is far more mature than pretending something doesn't exist.

dghf9y ago

I'm in the middle of reading _Command and Control_ by Eric Schlosser: if it is to be believed, then in the immediate wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was a widely held opinion (possibly approaching a consensus) even among the upper ranks of the US armed forces that atomic weapons should either be banned outright or placed under the sole control of a world authority, maybe even a world government.

Curtis LeMay (IIRC) stated that those two were by far the preferable options: but failing those, it was imperative that the US had "the best, the biggest, and the most".

xyzzy1239y ago

Disarmament can make sense from a game theoretic point of view if the parties involved can verify destruction of weapons, and monitor production.

Turing_Machine9y ago

"The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine."

If you look at the relative size of the two armies and (especially) the size of the tank corps, you'll understand why that was.

The United States wasn't about to give up nukes if it meant its interests in Europe would be at the mercy of a massive Soviet tank invasion.

knowaveragejoe9y ago

As with their space program, we actually have no real idea to what lengths the Soviets went to in terms of human cost. It's entirely likely that they were far more blase about the safety of everyone involved. In most areas of research and development, the Soviets were known for flying by the seat of their pants(the same could be said for the US shortly after the war, but that changed significantly in the coming decades).

> "The Americans, he told Moscow, were not in any way interested in disarmament. Rather, they were training their armed forces to integrate nuclear weapons into their military doctrine."

As others have pointed out, this is only a surface-level interpretation of what was going on.

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