For such is the logic of war.
If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles.
And then mutual annihilation will commence. …
What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that,
though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins,
the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?
— Nikita Khrushchev (1894 – 1971), October 1962 & 1963.
[Peace is] the necessary rational end of rational men. …
[The] expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them [is not] the most efficient, means of assuring peace. …
[In] the final analysis, our most basic common link is that …
- we all inhabit this small planet …
- we all breathe the same air …
- we all cherish our children's future, and
- we are all mortal.
—John Kennedy (1917 – 63), Commencement Address, American University, Washington, 10 June 1963)
(Susan Bellows, JFK, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 2013)
(Adriana Bosch, Eisenhower, PBS American Experience, WGBH, 1993)Harry Haldeman (1926 – 93) [White House Chief of Staff, Nixon Administration, 1969–73]:
When Eisenhower arrived in the White House, the Korean War was stalemated.
Eisenhower ended the impasse in a hurry.
He secretly got word to the Chinese that he would drop nuclear bombs on North Korea unless a truce was signed immediately.
In a few weeks, the Chinese called for a truce and the Korean War ended.
(The Ends of Power, Times Books, 1978)
Daniel Ellsberg (1931):
Whether such threats actually affected the Chinese decision makers or whether they even received them remains uncertain and controversial.
What is neither uncertain nor inconsequential is that the Eisenhower administration, including [then vice president] Richard Nixon, regarded them as successful.
In line with this belief, Eisenhower and Dulles relied on such threats repeatedly, in a series of crises.
[And later Nixon, as president, made similar threats towards the North Vietnamese.]
(pp 311-2)
[Eisenhower’s judgment was] that no war between any significant forces of the United States and the Soviet Union could remain limited more than momentarily.
Therefore, if such a conflict were pending, the United States should immediately go to an all-out nuclear first strike rather than allow the Soviets to do so. …
[Any] alternative approach was unacceptable from a fiscal point of view.
[His economic advisors had convinced him] that preparation to fight even a limited number of Soviet divisions on the ground … would compel an increase in defense spending that would cause inflation, precipitating a depression and "national bankruptcy."
(pp 94-5)
In 1961, [within the US] arsenal there were some 500 bombs with an explosive power of 25 megatons.
Each of these warheads had more firepower than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history. …
The preplanned targets for the whole force included … every city in the Soviet Union and China.
There was at least one warhead allocated for every city of 25,000 people or more in the Soviet Union.
(pp 98-9)
In 1986, the US had 23,317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40,159, for a total of 63,836 weapons.
(p 144)
[The Strategic Integrated Operations Plan:]Since this unleashed attacks on all major Sino-Soviet urban-industrial centers and governmental and military control centers, this policy maintained no plausible basis for inducing any Soviet commanders or units to terminate operations prior to expending all their weapons upon US and allied cities.
- provided for no distinction between the USSR and China; …
- allowed for no avoidance or postponement of attacks on cities; …
- allowed for no option to minimize nonmilitary casualties; …
- offered no option for preserving enemy command and control capability, [and]
- allowed for no Stop order once an authenticated Execute order was received by [Strategic Air Command] forces.
(pp 126-7)
David Shoup (1904 – 83) [General, US Marine Corp]:
[Any] plan that murders 300 million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan.
That is not the American way.
(p 103, emphasis added)
Daniel Ellsberg (1931):
Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack — or responding to such an attack — has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations.
The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the [imperative] to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a US first strike against the USSR or Russia.
(p 12)
The … arrangements made in Russia and the United States have long made it highly likely, if not virtually certain, that a single Hiroshima-type fission weapon exploding on either Washington or Moscow — whether deliberate or the result of a mistaken attack (as in Fail Safe or Dr Strangelove) or as a result of an independent terrorist action — would lead to the end of human civilization (and most other species).
(The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017, p 305)
Robert McMahon:
By 1960, the United States [had achieved] the coveted ‘triad’ of bomber-, land-, and submarine-based nuclear weapons, each part of the triad capable of obliterating major Soviet targets.
The total US nuclear arsenal had grown from approximately 1,000 warheads in 1953, Eisenhower’s first year in office, to 18,000 in 1960, his last.
By then, the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) boasted a total of 1,735 strategic bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons on Soviet targets. …
Aided by secret reconnaissance photographs [Eisenhower knew] that the United States maintained a formidable lead over its rival in deliverable nuclear weapons.
Still, a political frenzy surrounded the supposed missile gap, and the non-existent gap actually emerged as a galvanizing issue in the 1960 presidential election.
(The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp 74‒6)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900):
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, [and] ages, it is the rule.
(Aphorism 156, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)
(Nuclear Nightmeres, While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government, Episode 5, Season 2, Vice, 2021)Rationality Alone Will Not Save Us
Against stupidity
The Gods themselves
Contend in vain
— Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805)
India and Pakistan have fought three vicious conventional land wars.
Yet despite their border disputes [they] have not fought a major conflict since since they generated nuclear capacity in the 1970s. …
Post-WWII history is littered with examples of deterrence preventing powers from using nuclear weapons in an offensive manner.
During the long peace of the Cold War there was actually a very limited chance of nuclear war.
Why?
Because Washington and Moscow were rational calculators of nuclear risks. …
Now it's true that Pakistan could one day implode into chaos and one or more of its nukes could fall into the hands of jihadists who are irrational enough to use them.
Still, the lesson [of history] is clear: nuclear deterrence works.
— Tom Switzer (1971), India and Pakistan nuclear tests 1998, ABC Between the Lines, 31 May 2018.
India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today. …
Some people think that the nuclear winter theory developed in the 1980s was discredited.
And they may therefore raise their eyebrows at our new assertion that a regional nuclear war, like one between India and Pakistan, could also devastate agriculture worldwide.
But the original theory was thoroughly validated.
The science behind it was supported:Because India could rapidly overrun Pakistan with conventional forces, it would be conceivable for Pakistan to attack India with nuclear weapons if it thought that India was about to go on the offensive.
- by investigations from the National Academy of Sciences,
- by studies sponsored within the US military, and
- by the International Council of Scientific Unions, which included representatives from 74 national academies of science and other scientific bodies. …
— Alan Robock & Owen Toon, Local Nuclear War, Global Suffering, Scientific American, January 2010, pp 75, 78 & 80.
Striking first would offer a tremendous advantage, and would emphasize degrading the highest political and military control to the greatest possible degree. …
[There] is no other targeting strategy that can achieve the war aims that underwrite survival.
— Bruce Holloway (1912 – 99), Commander in Chief, US Strategic Air Command (1968-72),
Letter to Dr Francis Kane, TRW Inc, 31 March 1980.
[With] the advent of the nuclear peace … there is no possibility of a war between the … major powers — Chinese, Russian, French, British, Americans and so on — they're simply never going to fight.
— Edward Luttwak (1942), Saturday Extra, 11 September 2010.
[We] no longer have to worry about … the prospect of a nuclear world war that would put an end to civilization or to human life itself.
— Steven Pinker (1954), The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, 2011, p 30.
Robert McNamara (1916 – 2009) [Former US Secretary of Defense]:
It was luck that prevented nuclear war [in October 1962.]
We came that close to nuclear war at the end. …
Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies.
And that danger exists today.
(Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara, 2003)
(National Insecurity, While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government, Episode 4, Season 1, Vice, 2020)
Michael Dobbs [Writer] (1950):
Kennedy's nightmare scenario during the missile crisis was that war would start without either him or Nikita Khrushchev really wanting it.
Somebody would make a mistake, and there would be a spiraling chain of events that would quickly get out of control. …
Both leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, were beginning to lose control over their own forces.
(Susan Bellows, JFK, PBS American Experience, WGBH, November 2013)
Curtis LeMay (1906 – 90) [General & Chief of Staff, US Air Force]:
[The withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey and Italy] is the greatest defeat in our history.
We should invade [Cuba] today.
(28 October 1962)
[Who] is more qualified to make that decision [to initiate launch on warning:](Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017, p 113)
- some politician who may have been in office for only a couple of months … or
- a man who has been preparing all his adult life to make it?
Jack D Ripper [General, US Air Force]:
[War] is too important to be left to politicians.
They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
(Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964)
Robert Kennedy (1925 – 68):
[Those favoring diplomacy are] losing momentum. …
The generals are itching for a fight.
They want to go.
(Meeting with Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador, 27 October 1962)
(Family Secrets, The Kennedys, Episode 4, 2018)
Robert Kennedy (1925 – 68):
[Aerial reconnaissance] indicated that [Cuban] missiles were being directed at certain American cities …
[The] estimate was that within a few minutes of their being fired 80 million Americans would be dead.
(Thirteen Days, 1969)
Chris Matthews:
There were 90 nuclear warheads [in Cuba in October 1962] in all.
30 of them possessed 66 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
There was an equal number of warheads with the firepower of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, plus an assortment of other, smaller ones.
(Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Simon & Schuster, 2011, Reader's Digest, 2013, p 237)
Daniel Ellsberg (1931):
[On] Saturday, October 27, 1962, a chain of events was in motion that might have come [within a handbreadth] of ending civilization …
[Despite] the fact … that both leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy, were determined to avoid armed conflict … each hoped, by threatening war, to achieve a better bargain.
For the sake of a better deal they both were willing to postpone by hours or days the settlement that each was willing to make.
[Meanwhile,] their subordinates (unaware that they were supporting a pure bluff in a game of bargaining) were taking military actions that could unleash an unstoppable train of events …
[John Kennedy, and the other members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, assessed the risk of "some form of nuclear war" to be at least 10%.]
(p 201)
[As Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara later] compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters.
Decades later … a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed [McNamara] that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000 [so as to defeat this safeguard against unauthorized launches.]
(The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017, p 62)
Contents
Rationality Alone Will Not Save Us
All Flesh is Grass
The Sum of All Fears
Nuclear Roulette
Nuclear roulette is a game in which if either player shoots, both die.
Neither player can win.
Both players can lose.
In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg describes his work on the command and control of US strategic forces at RAND in the heart of the nuclear weapon's establishment from 1958-64.
US weapons crews had the capacity to circumvent the chain of command and launch their weapons (and order subordinate forces to launch their's) without authorization.
Once launched they could not be recalled (despite a public statement once made by Ronald Reagan that submarine launched weapons could be).
Tom Switzer's editorial of 31 May 2018 ("India and Pakistan nuclear tests 1998") spruiks the deterrent benefits of nuclear weapons proliferation as a guarantor of peace between rational adversaries.
This raises a number of questions:
- Why shouldn't the Middle East also enjoy the benefits of a regional balance of terror, like those that prevail in South Asia and Europe?
That is to say, why pursue counterproductive sanctions against Iran, when an Iranian bomb (and in due course a Saudi bomb) can stabilise the region by balancing Israel's nuclear arsenal? - Has the spread of nuclear technology/materiel from Pakistan to North Korea and Iran made the US and its allies safer?
- Does he believe that Douglas MacArthur was calculating rationally when he pressed Harry Truman to extend the Korean police action into China and kick off WWIII?
Or when Curtis LeMay urged John Kennedy to invade Cuba in the face of 42,000 Soviet troops armed, unbeknownst to the Americans, with nuclear weapons? - And, since falsifying the hypothesis that "deterrence works" would, in all likelihood cost billions of people their lives, how sure do you have to be, to justify the risk that you might be wrong?
Switzer is betting his life (and everyone else's) on:
- the rationality of national leaders (and the thousands of other people in a position to launch nuclear weapons), and
- the infallibility of the systems and procedures machines they rely upon.
As an example of rational calculation, it is not impressive.
It betrays, ironically enough, an implicit and distinctly irrational faith in human rationality.
That is to say, it is irrational not to recognise the limitations of human rationality and work within them.
In an ideal world inhabited by perfectly rational self-interested agents (ala political realism) with access to complete information (ala game theory) mutual assured destruction may be a stable equilibrium.
However, in real life, geopolitical crises involve:
- thousands of imperfectly rational human beings,
- operating under conditions of incomplete information (command and communications infrastructure being likely early targets of attack) and extreme time pressure, and
- in circumstances which are complex, rapidly changing, and highly stressful.
The greatest enemy of rationality is the fog of war.
Fail-Safe, in the context of nuclear conflict, is an oxymoron.
All complex systems are prone to failure — without exception.
And, nuclear deterrence needs to fail only once for mutual annihilation to commence.
In overestimating human rationality, Switzer underestimates the human capacity both for:
- irrationality, and
- rational miscalculation.
Say, by engineering a war in the Middle East to bring on the Second Coming of Christ.
Not only can rational self-interest not save us.
But irrational self-interest may well destroy us.
In the trade off between:
- potential benefits (reduced conventional or unilateral nuclear warfare), and
- potential costs (ranging from civilisational collapse to species extinction),
And who decides?
The fact that we are not all dead may be evidence that nuclear deterrence works.
On the other hand, it might just mean that our luck has not yet run out.
As in Russian Roulette, no matter how many rounds you survive, there is no guarantee that the next round will not be your last.
Switzer imagines that he is relying on human rationality to keep us safe; when, in reality, he is relying on a combination of luck and wishful thinking.
Nuclear deterrence works: because humans are rational.
Until it doesn't: because humans are not rational enough.
(peaceandlonglife)
Would you like to know more?
Nuclear Poker
[In June 1961, the US Air Force] assistant chief of staff … believed there were "at least" 120 [Soviet ICBMs, ie] upwards of three to five times as many as [the US had.]
(p 152)
[This was based on] the fundamental premise that the Soviets were pursuing a program of world conquest like Hitler’s.
[Assuming this was true, they would logically seek to obtain a first strike capability as soon as possible.]
(p 162)
It had actually been leaks from the Air Force about the alleged Soviet superiority in ICBMs that had encouraged Kennedy to campaign for the presidency on a promise to eliminate the "missile gap" by accelerating our own missile program.
For the Air Force even to entertain what Army and Navy intelligence had been saying secretly for several years — that the Soviets were actually greatly inferior to the United States in strategic capability and numbers and that they showed no signs of attempting to change that situation — might have undermined the perceived necessity for an increased missile force, and perhaps radically lowered the size of the force that the Kennedy administration would procure.
(p 146)
[In September 1961, satellite reconnaissance of all suspected missile sites in revealed] that the Soviets had exactly four ICBMs, soft, liquid-fueled missiles at one site, Plesetsk.
Currently we had about 40 operational Atlas and Titan ICBMs. …
Hence, in terms just of ICBMs alone, the numbers were 10 to 1 in our favor.
(p 164, emphasis added)
A single US missile warhead, landing several miles away, would destroy all four with near certainty.
[In] terms of actual survivable missile capability against the United States, the Soviets had no deterrent at all.
(p 163)
In 1959 [two of the top Soviet experts at RAND] warned with unusual urgency that the Soviets were probably conducting a crash program on ICBMs that would give them a significant first-strike capability …
Their premise was that Bolsheviks did not bluff.
On that assumption, the sequence of [Khrushchev’s] allusions to rockets and sausage making told them that he had already arrived at the capability he had earlier predicted and now claimed.
They were wrong.
Khrushchev had been bluffing.
(p 166)
(Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017)
Would you like to know more?
All Flesh is Grass
I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of Man.
The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.
Someday science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.
— Henry Adams (1838 – 1918), 11 April 1862.
I wish I could produce a substance, or machine, of such frightful efficacy, the wholesale devastation, that war should therefore become altogether impossible.
— Alfred Nobel (1833 – 96)
One by one, the cities blossomed.
The atmosphere rippled over each explosion, as if a giant steel ball had been dropped in a pond.
Over the western limb, beyond the Atlantic, a brighter-than-dawn glow was creeping, now yellow, now purple, now green.
The whole world was being swept by a crown fire, with the flames leaping not from tree to tree, but from city to city, continent to continent.
People were no more substantial than pine needles.
— Greg Bear (1951), Eon, 1985, Gollanz, 2002, p 201.
[At Hiroshima it] is probable that more persons were killed in one six-hour period … than in any other recorded attack of any kind.
— Effects of the Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan: A Report on Eight Cities, United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division, Report 90, April 1947.
One Megaton Airburst* Over the Southern Tip of Manhattan(Lawrence Feedman, Atlas of Global Strategy, MacMillan, 1985, pp 86-7, adapted) | ||
| Distance from Ground Zero (km) | Windspeed (kph) | Projected Effects |
| 12.0 | 55 | >50% mortality from thermal radiant exposure (severe burns) People flash-blinded by reflected light Light damage to buildings Branch damage to trees Sporadic fires |
| 8.0 | 150 | Telephone lines blown down 30% of trees blown down Grass and shrubs catch fire |
| 6.5 | 260 | Buildings severely damaged Upholstery, canvas and clothing ignite Long term risk of receiving lethal dose of radiation from fallout |
| 5.0 | 470 | Houses destroyed Multistory buildings and bridges severely damaged Main fire zone:
|
| 3.0 | 760 | People killed by blast and heat Reinforced-concrete multistory buildings, factories and bridges leveled 90% of trees blown down Cars and trucks blown long distances |
| *For comparison: the 15 kiloton airburst over Hiroshima killed 188,661 and injured 79,130 (p 83). | ||
(Hiroshima — The Next Day, 2010)
(Inhuman Kind, Vice, 2016)
(Justin Pemberton, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2019)
(Rushmore DeNooyer, The Bomb, PBS, 2015)
(David Heycock, The Arsenal, Alistair Cooke's America, Episode 12, BBC, 1972)
(Inside the Cuban Missile Crisis, Crossing the Line, 2012)
George Orwell (1903 – 50):
[All] talk of "limiting" or "humanising" war is sheer humbug …
Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? …
(Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country.
This, I believe, is less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period.)
On the other hand, "normal" or "legitimate" warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. …
War is not avoidable at this stage of history, and since it has to happen it does not seem to me a bad thing that others should be killed besides young men. …
[The] suffering of this war has been shared out more evenly than the last one was.
The immunity of the civilian, one of the things that have made war possible, has been shattered.
I can't feel that war is "humanised" by being confined to the slaughter of the young, and becomes "barbarous" when the old get killed as well.
(As I Please, Tribune, 19 May 1944)
Enrico Fermi (1901 – 54) & Isador Rabi (1898 – 1988):
By its very nature [a thermonuclear bomb] cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.
It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity …
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole.
It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.
(An Opinion on the Development of the 'Super,' 30 October 1949)
Daniel Clery:
At around 11.30 on 30th October [1961, a Soviet TU-95V dropped a 50 megaton Teller-Ulam type hydrogen] bomb above the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. …
The fireball could be seen 1,000 kilometres away and the mushroom cloud rose to seven times the height of Everest.
A village fifty-five kilometres away was completely destroyed and … windows were broken in Norway and Finland, more than 1,000 kilometres distant …
[It] was the most powerful device of any kind ever built.
To produce such a blast with conventional explosives would require a cube of TNT 312 metres on each side, roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower [—] ten times the total amount of conventional explosives used in World War II.
(A Piece of the Sun, 2004, p 202-3, emphasis added)
John Galbraith (1908 – 2006):
War once had a clear class aspect; it was the common soldier, the son of the peasant or working-class family, who was at risk.
Modern nuclear war is dramatically more democratic; all ranks and all classes equally will be swept away. …
One hopes that this will be recognized — and that the weapons commitment will breed a political movement that crosses all income and class lines.
It is, after all, the affluent who have the most to lose.
(The Affluent Society, 4th Edition, Penguin, 1984, pp xxxvi-vii)
John Kennedy (1917 – 63):
[To] those nations who would make themselves our adversaries, we offer not a pledge but a request:
That both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self destruction …
(Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961)
Chris Matthews:
Kennedy … knew that [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] leaned towards a 'first strike' option, especially in the case of Soviet move on Berlin.
This meant an 'obliterating' nuclear attack on all Communist countries: 3,000 weapons aimed at a thousand targets.
(Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Simon & Schuster, 2011, Reader's Digest, 2013, p 233)
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970):
So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race.
To improve the fighting quality of separate States without having any means of preventing war is the road to universal destruction.
(A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd Edition, 1961, p 541)
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 59):
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.
(Democracy in America, 1835, Bantam, 2011, p 807)
George Santayana (1863 – 1952):
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
(Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922)
Robert McNamara (1916 – 2009) [Secretary of Defense, 1961-68]:
In [a] single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo. …
How much evil must we do in order to do good?
(The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara, 2003)
Burning Cities
TO THE BOMBER COMMAND:
The primary object of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy’s civil population, and in particular of the industrial workers. …
[Be] clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories …
(British Air Staff Directive, 14 February 1942, emphasis added)
Fritz Sallagar:
For the first time, a bombing directive had singled out the parts of cities where civilians were housed most densely as the primary objective of individual attacks and of the overall campaign.
[This] was to remain the primary objective for Bomber Command for the remaining years of the war.
(The Road to Total War: Escalation in World War II, R-465-PR, RAND Corporation, April 1969)
Freeman Dyson (1923):
I arrived at the headquarters of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command just in time for the big raids against Hamburg.
[In one night] we killed 40,000 people and lost only 12 bombers, by far the best we had ever done.
For the first time in history we created a fire storm, which killed people even inside shelters.
The casualties were about 10 times as numerous as in a normal attack of the same size without a fire storm. …
In every big raid we tried to raise a fire storm, but we succeeded only twice,
- once in Hamburg and
- once two years later in Dresden [where 25,000 were killed].
[From] our point of view [the Dresden fire storm] was only a fluke.
We attacked Berlin 16 times with the kind of force that attacked Dresden once.
We were trying every time to raise a fire storm.
There was nothing special about Dresden except that for once everything worked as we intended.
It was like a hole-in-one in a game of golf.
Unfortunately Dresden had little military significance and anyway the slaughter came too late to have any serious effect on the war.
(Disturbing the Universe, Harper & Row, 1979), p 28)
Arthur "Bomber" Harris (1892 – 1984) [28 March 1945]:
Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified.
But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. …
I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
(Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February, 1945, Bloomsbury, 2005, p 432)
Daniel Ellsberg (1931)
For every ton of bombs dropped on England in the nine months of the Blitz, [the Allies, principally Britain,] eventually dropped a hundred tons of bombs on German cities.
More than [500,000 German] civilians were killed.
(p 245)
[The] RAF was using magnesium-thermite bombs that couldn’t be put out with water.
They had to be smothered with sand. …
If enough planes were sent in en masse to do patterned area bombing with incendiaries, a lot of little fires would start simultaneously throughout a large area.
This would be helped by first dropping high-explosive bombs, which would break up the structures and make for better kindling, and also block fire trucks from the streets. …
[In] Hamburg on the night of July 27, 1943, in Operation Gomorrah [temperatures rose] up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Everyone died in the area within the circle of fire, fed by winds coming from all directions, at up to 150 miles per hour.
(pp 246-7)
Operations analysts turned to questions of what the mix should be of explosives and different sorts of incendiaries for the most efficient, cost-effective ways to burn German workers and their families alive.
City burning … was becoming something of a science. …
The most effective weapon for Japan was the M-69, a small incendiary bomb, many of which were dropped in a single casing.
The casing was designed to release 38 incendiary bombs made to fall in a random pattern.
Delayed-action high-explosive bombs would also be included, exploding minutes to hours after landing, to deter and obstruct firefighters.
People became conditioned to stay away from these little thermite or napalm bombs when they first landed and could still be smothered fairly easily with sand.
(p 252)
For five solid months before August 1945, the US Army Air Force had been deliberately killing as many Japanese civilians as it could.
The atomic bomb simply did it more efficiently, one bomb doing what [had previously taken] 300 bombers to do …
(p 260)
The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world.
Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.
(p 261)
(The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017)
Would you like to know more?
Edward Luttwak (1942)
Senior Associate, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington.
[We] have wars for a reason …
[War] throughout history [has brought] peace.
If you go to where war lived most comfortably, like Europe, it's not like it's a desert.
[Look at] all the cities they built:
- the cathedrals,
- the houses,
- the wealth,
- the technology,
- the science.
Because they had peace.
When did they have peace?
When the previous war had reached its natural conclusion … an organic, natural peace.
[What's] happened since 1945 [is that] we have an … invented this perverse United Nation's mechanism where outsiders step in and prevent war from achieving its purpose, which is … to bring peace.
(ABC Saturday Extra, 11 September 2010)
