The “Doomsday Clock”
Just watched a show on the History Channel about the “Doomsday Clock”. You know the one - Where midnight represents the thermo-nuclear annihilation of all life on Earth, and we were just 7 minutes away. when they came up with it, the upper limit on the clock was fifteen minutes to midnight, because The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists honestly believed that nuclear war was just about inevitable. (It is also worth noting that a not insignificant number of people (not just at the Bulletin) who esposed this view were pro-Soviet, and expected the U.S. to start the war)
To this day, they seem to think it’s a foregone conclusion that we will wipe ourselves out in a nuclear free-for-all. However, I have a different view. We were never in danger of nuclear annihilation. Sound radical? You bet. Things are a little different now, but not much. An all-out nuclear assault is still as likely as monkeys taking flight from rectums. A one-off incident of nuclear terrorism is likely.
There’s one thing that underlies my entire thesis. Nobody ever really believed that a nuclear war was winnable. Sure, they said it. But nobody rational could ever conceive of a situation in which nations engaged in unrestricted, unlimited nuclear war could have anything but losers (note that this was the premise of War Games - great movie, by the way).
This thesis is often referred to as the “Rational Actor Assumption”. Simply, at the height of the cold war, it was reasonable to conclude that the Soviets didn’t want to die any more than we did. Therefore, nuclear war was unlikely. And in all the proxy wars we fought, there were no nukes ever used. And as long as everyone involved doesn’t want to die, this assumption works.
Even now, when faced with an enemy that doesn’t want to live, I still think that the possibility of a nuclear response is as close to nil as one can get. Even if a nuke were detonated in midtown Manhattan, and the public cried out for nuclear devastation of the holy cities of Islam, I don’t think such destruction would be forthcoming. The political price is too high to bear.
And before you try to hit me in the face with North Korea, Kim Jong Il is crazy, but he’s not suicidal. He’s trying to play the same game that Gorbachev and Reagan played, but neither he nor Clinton is very good at it. Nuclear Poker requires a good poker face. Clinton (and Bush) smile way too much for them to be effective. And have you looked at Kim? Could you ever take him seriously?
Yep. Here I am, some schmuck (posting in my pajamas, natch) basically saying that sixty years of doomsaying and fear-mongering were entirely wasted. All that energy that could have been put to productive use was instead used to scare people into believing something impossible was likely to happen at any moment.