>Force pilots were allowed to fire their nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States.
Nuclear anti-aircraft rockets?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device...
Crazy times....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-26_Falcon
I guess it wasn't the author's fault, but that's the one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. Until about 1990, anti-aircraft missiles were horribly inaccurate. I read somewhere that the chance of scoring a hit with a korean-war era air-to-air missile was about 5%. Why would anyone want to launch a nuclear missile that's pretty much guaranteed to not his its target?
Anti-aircraft missiles with optional nuclear warheads. Basically, the idea was to nuke their nuclear bombers.
Is it impotence that causes people to surveil? Some other voyeuristic impulse? Could be fun to explore.
It also gets at the culture of corruption surveillance and power engender.
Though when you realize that the surveillance required dedicated observers and resulted in paper records, you realize how vastly more capable current US operations are.
"Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win"
it was an absurd time as the world changed so radically so quickly and strategists scrambled to figure out doctrine, policy, strategy, and how to use the emerging thinking of game theory.
another book on the evolution of nuclear policy is 'the dead hand', which looks at the emergence of nuclear deterrence from the first bomb through the recent years following the breakup of the USSR. the dead hand referred to in the title is the failsafe the soviets built to strike back once they had been demolished.
It wouldn't work. No film depiction could possibly be as absurd as what has already been foisted onto our everyday lives already.
Oh yeah. It could work.
After reading it, I'm convinced that sheer dumb luck has been the deciding factor in not having seen so very many unplanned nuclear detonations over the years.
This quickly led to a crash program in standardization of atomic (and later, nuclear) weapons and increasing their shelf-life.
I'm also not sure how you could consume any sort of news for any period of time and still hold on to this belief. Of course we hear about the worst, and it's put as shockingly as possible, but with all the terrible things that happen every day, "almost everyone" just doesn't seem to me to work in your statement.
In the former case--ongoing practices--it is hard to make a credible argument against oversight.
Some details may need to be withheld from the public to protect basic operation security. For example, the identities of overseas informants ought not to be disclosed, lest they be immediately imprisoned or executed by their governments. Nor should there be a Twitter feed giving up-to-the-minute location data on US special forces teams. These examples seem farcical, but they illustrate the point that at least some operational details genuinely deserve secrecy. (Unless you reject the underlying premise that the United States should conduct intelligence and military operations overseas at all. But that's a very different discussion.)
But even though specific details may need to be kept secret--for a reasonable amount of time, until they're no longer actionable by enemies--the nature of the government's ongoing practices ought to be disclosed.
The latter case--wherein lower-level officials are permitted to make judgment calls in time-sensitive emergencies--is rather different. This is the situation contemplated by the White House during the Cold War.
As the reasoning went, the American nuclear deterrent must be credible, or else the Soviets would seize the opportunity and launch an unprovoked attack on the US, Germany, or both. If a communication breakdown between the White House and the military could render the nuclear arsenal unusable, that would tend to diminish the credibility of the deterrent. On the other hand, the risk of a lower-level official making the wrong judgment call and starting a world war is appreciable.
Given these considerations, reasonable people could disagree on what the optimal policy would be. It is not unreasonable or morally repugnant to conclude that certain trusted military officers should be granted the authority to make a judgment call when a) the situation is an emergency, and b) the chain of command has broken down.
Again, the key distinction here is between ongoing practices and emergency measures in a hypothetical, worst-case scenario. That distinction must affect our moral judgment of the respective policies.
Maybe we shouldn't be sending out special forces teams or covert operatives. If there is something the government wants to keep secret, perhaps they shouldn't be doing it.
> It is not unreasonable or morally repugnant to conclude that certain trusted military officers should be granted the authority to make a judgment call when a) the situation is an emergency, and b) the chain of command has broken down.
Or perhaps systems should be built with redundancy and decentralization. It shouldn't be up to any one person to make the decision to launch a nuke, or any other attack. We have methods such as Shamir Secret Sharing that would require multiple people to agree to something before being able to provide something to authorize a use of force.
> Again, the key distinction here is between ongoing practices and emergency measures in a hypothetical, worst-case scenario. That distinction must affect our moral judgment of the respective policies.
Unless that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is the government going awry and surveying it's entire populace and killing its citizens without going through any process set down by the constitution of said country. In that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is it really OK to be giving the government more power and leeway while decreasing the transparency?
Ahem ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldo_Rivera#Fox_News_to_pre...
"Controversy arose in early 2003, while Rivera was traveling with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. During a Fox News broadcast, Rivera began to disclose an upcoming operation, even going so far as to draw a map in the sand for his audience. The military immediately issued a firm denunciation of his actions, saying it put the operation at risk; Rivera was nearly expelled from Iraq. Two days later, he announced that he would be reporting on the Iraq conflict from Kuwait."
Somewhere between the generality of Murphy's Law and the specificity of Rule 34 is an observation that states that an idiot will always arise to complete an idiotic possibility.
Prime real-world example: During the Munich Olympics hostage crisis, police prepared to raid the occupied rooms with overwhelming force (a la "SWAT team"). The raid was called off at the last minute when they realized reporters were broadcasting live video of the preparations & locations, and the terrorists were watching it on TV.
As the reasoning went, the American nuclear deterrent must
be credible, or else the Soviets would seize the
opportunity and launch an unprovoked attack on the US,
Germany, or both. If a communication breakdown between the
White House and the military could render the nuclear
arsenal unusable, that would tend to diminish the
credibility of the deterrent.
For the nuclear deterrent, the worst-case scenario was basically the end of the world as we know it. Either the USSR takes over the world, or global civilization is entirely wrecked. I'm not sure which one would have been considered worse. Either way, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, die.
For counter-terrorism operations, the worst-case scenario is orders of magnitude smaller. There appears to be no credible threat of any terrorists obtaining WMD, so they're pretty much limited to casualties in the thousands.
I think that much of our current woes come down to applying cold-war thinking to terrorism. The situations just aren't comparable. We were facing a true existential threat from a powerful enemy that outclassed us in many ways. Now, we're facing a minuscule threat that can, at most, kill a small number of our citizens from time to time. There were realistic scenarios that end with, "and the US was destroyed/defeated by the USSR", but there are none that end with, "and the US was destroyed/defeated by al Qaeda".
Somehow I don't see the value of a system which would've made it impossible for him to do so.
Competence is fleeting. A hundred years after Napoleon France produced the generals who 'fought' WW I.
Of course, whenever I have that thought, part of me fears that I'll ironically be vaporized by an errant nuclear weapon, moments later. I reassure myself that, at least, it will be a quick end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_bombs_and_health
And you haven't considered the risk of not dying!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg ("Threads redefines the word grim...")
Their mission assumed DC and SAC HQ were already taken out.
In a very British way, our ultimate deterrent relies on hand written letters from the serving PM carried by each sub:
[1] Strategic Command - in charge of, amongst other things, global strike and strategic deterrence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Command
That and all good satire has truth in it. The more truth and the better illustrated, the better the satire. Kubrick was a visionary for a reason.
Less link-baity of a title but much more accurate.