Watching this film, if you turn off the narrator, you see the same guys as our guys, doing their jobs, making the same preparations (down to the anti-flash white paint on the aircraft), executing the same commands -- all just normal people who were caught up in a terrible arms race. Some of them out of duty, others out of ambition.
Makes you think about how, in the age where technological achievement can so quickly outpace the control of individuals, yet also relies on those same individuals to make it happen -- how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
It's no profoundly new sentiment, but in some ways we need to overcome our caveman instincts when we're stocked with nuclear weapons.
When walking through the Pima Air and Space Museum, where NATO and Soviet-bloc aircraft of matching generations often sit almost side-by-side, the similarity of the aircraft was striking.
While some of the similarity can be explained by espionage, much of it comes from the confrontation between ingenuity and Nature. These instruments of war, built by professionals who deeply respected their adversaries, memorialize the extent to which each side was desperate to prevent the other from gaining an operational edge. It is the science of life and death, confronting not entropy (as we do in the case of Covid-19) but other humans.
As a scientist who builds instrumentation, looking particularly into the landing-gear wells and bomb-bays, I felt great connection with those who built the instruments. People, just like me, built these things because they felt that they had to in order to defend their homes. I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked -- devoting instead a portion of my time to non-proliferation work -- but it is easy to see how humanity reaches such a point.
I see in today's era of closing borders and increasing nationalism the prospect of conflict not seen since the 1940s. Tectonic stresses have built for decades; we must find ways to relax them gently in a way that is beneficial to everyone, so that humanity might prosper and thrive for generations to come.
> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked
The issue with this is that by the time we are under attack it’s already too late to develop weapons. Most of the naval and air assets we used to fight World War II (the modern ur-example of a just conflict) were on the drawing board and planned, if not already in production, prior to Pearl Harbor. The problem is only magnified today where it takes years, not months, to build a ship, for example. Pledging to not work on weapons and other military projects absent a conflict is, in essence, a pledge never to work on weapons or military projects ever.
Agreed. My general position is that, creatively applied, the weapons we have are good enough. This is not in a relative sense, but an absolute one.
I do not wish to spend my limited time on the planet improving the fundamental rate at which we can kill one another. We, as a species, are already excellent at that task.
I am a physicist. If we are involved in a protracted conflict, there will be plenty of opportunities akin to MIT's Rad Lab or the Manhattan Project to which I might contribute. R.V. Jones is a personal hero. Until then, I would rather contribute to preserving life or chasing down nature's secrets (my day job through 9/16, when I cast off on a new odyssey).
Your point is correct and important; I like to think of it as the proverbial "speak softly and carry a big stick".
There's however one key, pivotal change that happened during the wartime - scaling out the manufacturing and logistics. Primarily USA, and largely Great Britain and USSR, scaled out production of weapons, vehicles & materiel, subassemblies, and certain raw materials by factor of 10x or even 100x. Same with the related logistics. This was a huge undertaking[1], required high level of engineering, manufacturing, and managerial expertise. If people like GP only got into weapons & materiel production in the wartime, they'd still contribute greatly to the military effort.
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[1] building and relocating whole factories, rearranging production lines, and adjusting designs & manufacturing techniques for streamlining. Example, a ship was built in under 5 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Robert_E._Peary
The NIKE missile silo is interesting too. They have some information about the armaments of the US and the USSR. From what I recall, or what at least left an impression, the US had technically better missile systems that were reliable but less nukes overall. In contrast, the USSR had worse targeting and less reliable missiles and so was relying on a very large number of nukes. I remember thinking about the probabilities.
The US actually had many more and much better nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but they thought the soviets were much further along than they really were.
While there was lots of bluffing on both sides (Star Wars, cough), the notion of "better" is a terrible misunderstanding of that time, and of nuclear weapons today. Once capacity exists on all sides to end earth several times over, better is an exercise and distinction without meaning, a mad illusion of value maybe to military grammar nazis
Capability of actual MAD did not exist for most of the Cold War. If Kennedy went bonkers and initiated pre-emptive strike. USA would survive. It would lose some of the major cities and tens of millions of people, but it would live. USSR would cease to exist a long with all of its proxies in east Europe. A lot of the Europe would be gone but again probably damage on level of Black Death not extinction event.
Soviet intel and propaganda was always far above what west could do. It is what kept it looking close for two decades.
Korea for example. US could easily use nukes with impunity. It did not but there would be no consequences in terms of nuclear retaliation as Stalin knew what the equation was. Still he took the bet to attack south.. just a mad lad that he was. When Chinese counter attacked if US used nukes again there would be no retaliation, McArthur got retired over that.
I am really happy we lived through that. It is incredibly lucky that it was US that got the nukes first and not Germany or USSR or other similar regime.
The whole race was about creating nukes to nuke the other nukes out of the orbit when they are attacking, so the total amount of nukes was way beyond what was required to destroy the other side.
I can only speak for Sweden, but a lot of large military and civilian defence bunkers (and hardened, fixed in bedrock artillery) went obsolete went “the other side” got better targeting systems.
Until then, a lot of the installations were immune to anything but a direct hit, which was incredibly unlikely. Airbursts just wouldn’t have cut it to crack open the more serious underground installations.
Just to clarify I meant the old “hit somewhere in the city core” airbursts against which our underground shelters would have held up pretty well. To maximise impact a ground hit is seldom the right choice, too much energy is initially absorbed. (Also the fallout is made worse in a ground burst which can be a bad thing for an attacker if they want to follow up with boots on the ground.)
Guidance systems were (and are) presumably worse, if one has to judge by officially released data.
Propulsion systems were much more difficult to keep in a ready to launch state, and much more fragile.
In general, USSR preferred less sophisticated solutions, instead making sure they could be easily replicated.
Because that had worked for them in WW2, when German tanks (among many other things) were technically superior to their Soviet counter-parts with the results we all know.
Fortunately this will never happen but I have always been curious about how US technicals would fare in a ground-war in Russia. My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes, at least compared to their Soviet (now Russian) equivalents. What’s the US equivalent for the Russian Ural or Kamaz trucks?
> My bet is that they would fail most of the times with no possibility of easy fixes
That's a solid bet. The US has not engaged a similarly sophisticated opponent in generations and with high unit costs of American weapons, any such war would be extraordinarily costly.
T-34, which was superior to most German tanks like pzkpfw 3/4 when it was introduced, was produced in vast numbers, around 80000. German designed a competitive tank with the Panther, but only about 6000 were made, and they were beset by reliability problems.
Add in the production by the Western allies, such as 50000 Sherman tanks, the surprising thing is that Nazi Germany didn't collapse faster.
Don't know about modern hardware. Certainly Soviet hardware has a reputation for reliability in adverse conditions. OTOH the first Gulf war was a pretty damning indictment of the warfighting ability of Soviet armour.
I have seen a description of the allied fighting in Normandy that concluded that it doesn't matter if your tanks are 6 times better if your enemy has 10 times the number of tanks.
> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked
Attacked by whom and for what purpose and for what ends? How would you moderate your response to an attack based on the circumstances? How do you even know the attack was real or that it had the intent that was reported by the media[1]?
The US is a big country, and while its mainland has never suffered any significant attack by a nation-state in de-jure war, the US is "attacked" in some way or another quite regularly - the immediate example is 9/11 of course, but what about economic and social attacks (e.g. Russia social-media manipulation, or the PRC's attempts to replace US influence abroad)?
I assume the US is your home - but from my perspective (as a non-American) that seems a tad chauvinistic: do I detect you implying that the US worth defending but not other democracies? Or 1,001 other points one could make along similar lines.
I appreciate that one's moral philosophy and position on the extent of the right to self-defence (from the person, to the home, to the town, to the nation) is a very complicated and subjective topic, so to be clear: I don't mean to attack your stated position at all (I'm sure you have a well-reasoned position), but it's a bad idea to try to succinctly summarize one's opinion on this matter in particular on the Internet.
[1] Thinking of 9/11 again: I'd wager the vast majority of Americans would repeat the "they hate us for our freedom" line without thinking too much about how much of a gross-oversimplification that line was when there were in-fact many reasons for the plot (e.g. https://mershoncenter.osu.edu/news/what-caused-911-and-conse... ). I guess if anything good came out of 9/11 it's that Islamofascist militants realised any political message they want to make would be completely distorted or misrepresented in the American media landscape - even if some of their goals were still achieved (e.g. getting the US stuck in a quagmire in the Middle East).
Although I was not thinking about conspiracy theories like 9/11 or Perl Harbor, fundamentally I am quite curious to find why is more believable for average American that Putin can rig US election than that Trump can attack some oversea country with excuse of them having chemical weapons.
I remember that Iraq was attacked with strong claims from intelligence agency that they have weapons of mass destruction (another president), America destroyed Iraq and what remained from that destroyed economy was seed of ISIS. Later on, when they have not found any evidence of weapons official admired that they spiced the info. Because hey oil was interest to protect. Despite biggest protest in history of the World, and despite not having UN approval America attacked Iraq.
Also, I am curious to find out, what makes someone think that it is ok to drop a bomb that will level entire city and kill thousands innocent people, basically committing genocide. Allays were portrayed as good in WW2 but are we?
First bombed was dropped to Hiroshima 70,000 people vaporized instantly, later on 140,000 would die. Now I guess they had some kind report, but they did not stopped there, they dropped another one to Nagasaki.
So let say they did not know about first one, but second one was pure genocide, targets were civilians.
Now I ask among those ~300,000 was there any innocent child?
My point is what ever way you feel it is justifiable it is not, history is written by the winners, and our "morality" tends to bend accordingly.
As we progress in future, if we do not find mechanisms to identify human psychopathic tendencies we are doomed, as each fraction of advancement would just mean higher risk and probability of mutual destruction. Technology is just a multiplier of all our abilities and who we are. Although we tend to think we are better than our savage ancestors, history has proven number of times - that we are not.
> devoting instead a portion of my time to non-proliferation work
This is very interesting to me, what line of work are you in such that you are able to devote a portion of your time to non-proliferation work? Having previously worked at one of the NNSA labs it's my understanding that non-proliferation work is often classified, but I'd be interested to hear how normal technically-minded folks can contribute.
> I have promised myself never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked
What if it is the United States that attacks another country? Would you build weapons for that other country instead? Pacifism should be an universal attitude for it to make sense at all.
(I've noticed many revolutionary movements fail when their key exports turn out to have been worth less, due to stocking or substitution, on world markets than they'd been planning. Sometime I should check successful revolutions, and see what happened in their export markets...)
> never to build weapons unless the United States is attacked
It'd be kinda late to start building weapons then. Imagine a country being attacked by an adversary like USSR and start building weapons at the moment of the attack only. They couldn't last a week.
Note also that the official ideology of the USSR presumes ultimate violent overthrow of every non-socialist state. While late USSR has mellowed down somewhat and preferred stealth and sneaky rather than open combat, the expansionist drive has never been gone. And I wonder what we could have seen if USSR would have been the only country that had nukes in their possession...
Reminds me of the TV series, The Americans[1]. It did a great job of humanizing people on both sides of the Cold War. Sure, there were those that were blinded by their nationalism, but a majority on both sides we just trying to live their lives in a not so dissimilar way from the other.
Try the Russian version "Adaptasiya" (Adaptation). We use it for testing speech transcription and machine translation since there are no official English subtitles for it. The show's pretty good.
> how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
Or to find a way of life that doesn't include "people at the top" as the primary decision making apparatus.
> but in some ways we need to overcome our caveman instincts when we're stocked with nuclear weapons.
In a lot of ways, it is our caveman instincts that make mutually assured destruction a viable political option. It's probably what also prevents us from using scorched earth as a common warfare tactic. This seems a bit like looking a gift-horse in the mouth.
> Or to find a way of life that doesn't include "people at the top" as the primary decision making apparatus.
How exactly does that work? “Mr. President, a foreign nuclear submarine just surfaced off the coast of Florida. They are not responding to our hails and their launch tubes are open. What do we do?” “Well we need to have a referendum and ask everyone, regardless of training, intelligence, and with no clearance or access to intelligence briefings what orders I should issue.”
The point of having leaders is to lead. Humans don’t do well without leaders. The most successful leaderless movement we’ve seen was the Occupy movement and nobody would ever call that any kind of success. It’s is in our nature as much as it is in the mathematics that describes our society.
Millitary-style leaders will probably keep being a necessity. But perhaps in a less top-down controlled society, there would be less chance that things get to the point of the submarine surfacing at all.
Most large conflicts in human history have been about imperialism - one powerful ruling class trying to expand their power to new lands. Without the ruling class, it is hard to imagine millions of people caring whether they "control" some piece of land thousands of miles away. Would the US have gone to Vietnam if there weren't a ruling class that cared about extending their influence? To Irak? To Afghanistan? To El Salvador? Would they have orchestrated coups against the democratic leadership of Iran to protect BP's operations, and reinstalled their ousted absolutist monarchy? Would they have assassinated Iranian generals?
It’s far more complex than that. I live in a country that has successfully implemented a regional response to COVID 19 with the national government playing the role of coordinator but not dictating policy. The failure in the US is a failure at all levels and on all sides. Forcing policy from the top wouldn’t have worked any better if you don’t have trust and competence at local levels.
You just constructed and knocked down two strawmen in rapid succession. The first is about long term direction vs. short term coordination. The second one is a cherry-pick and you call it both successful and unsuccessful in the same sentence.
Logistical challenges in themselves do not invalidate an idea. They may make it impractical, but not invalid.
My point is the same as George Carlin’s: think of an average person and realize that 50% of the population is stupider than that. If people are dumb enough to fall for the Plandemic videos they are easy to manipulate. Leadership requires training, intelligence, wisdom, and expertise, which is why so few people possess those qualities. Do you truly think an average person is capable of making decent decisions when governing? Hell, something like 3/4 of the US voters don’t bother voting once every two years. An average person is neither qualified nor interested in making decisions that affect their country.
If you want another counterexample: California. It’s the only place where the ballot can contain a referendum to lower taxes and another referendum to increase spending and people sincerely vote yes to both without ever realizing wtf they are doing or what it means.
I would rather live in a society where politicians just do their jobs, don’t steal or fuck up, and I don’t have to think about it because their decisions are rational. There is nothing rational about a mass of random citizens.
> how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
I've thought about this a lot over the past two decades. If I had to summarize my conclusions in two statements, this would be it:
1. Desperation is the enemy of civilization.
2. The larger the group vilified by an ideology, the more evil that ideology is likely to be.
As an example of (1), we live in a technologically advanced age replete with wealth, but we seem to be driven by competition that has left even billionaire investors feeling desperate to preserve/grow their wealth.
As an example of (2), it is more likely that our perception of a large community is skewed, than that community being wholesale evil. This applies equally to the former Soviet Union, your preferred enemy nation, and also the 50% of your country who are on the opposite side of the left-right divide.
Mutually assured destruction sounds like a viable approach on paper except for the fact that accidents happen even in the best designed systems. And there has been a number of close calls already.
> how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
I'd argue that its more important for us to imbue everyone with a sense of personal responsibility. Instill in everyone that they are personally responsible for everything that they do without regard for what anyone else does.
>executing the same commands -- all just normal people who were caught up in a terrible arms race. Some of them out of duty, others out of ambition.
>Watching this film, if you turn off the narrator, you see the same guys as our guys, doing their jobs
We should teach our children that, "getting caught up" is never an excuse or a mitigation of their own personal responsibility for their actions. Whether they are motivated to participate in bad behavior out of duty, ambition or just "doing their job" - their motivations are ultimately irrelevant - they always remain personally responsible for their actions regardless of their motivations.
Unfortunately this is not a popular position because so few of us are willing to own total responsibility for our own actions. Its much easier to wave a finger in the air and blame "leadership" for our behavior, or point to the fact that very few people take explicit personal responsibility for the results of their behavior, and use that as a rationalization for not taking responsibility themselves. Many will argue that they shouldn't be held responsible for their actions because their individual actions are inconsequential in the big scheme of things, but I would argue that every individual's action is infinitely consequential in terms of their own personal responsibility. We are all completely responsible for what we do as individuals and not responsible for what others do (and consequently cannot use the bad behavior of others to excuse or mitigate our responsibility for our own bad behavior). You cannot willingly be a cog in the machine and at the same time disavow the product that the machine turns out.
It was interesting how the Soviets had built a dead-hand system caller Perimeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand, but then didn't seem to advertise its existence to the West, which would make sense to do typically. And some believe (wiki has a quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Zheleznyakov) that it was to give the people at the top a better chance to react more rationally. In a way, it was to allow the possible "Petrovs" in their midst to do the right thing.
The perimeter seem to be not some individual system, but a feature grafted into all C3 gear that gives the launch officer a clear indication that the strategic command has been taken out, and an automatic decision making about what target plan to follow (remember, up until late 80s, all ICBMs had to be programmed at the factory, and the memory was scarce)
Soviet ICBM infrastructure, and staff that was left outside of Russia confirm this, it had no provision for fully automated launch. Stationary launch positions especially were stuffed with all kinds comm gear to ensure that the silo is not cut off from the superior officers under any circumstances.
At most, it is an automated target designation, and "fire at will" switch.
I think it's also clear from the major distinctions between the sources of those "people at the top" that there is very little uniqueness about them.
The soviet union tore down an existing ruling class and replaced it with another "egalitarian" group that really acted in a way that was not so different in so many ways.
The Soviet system was kind of like capitalism, but just with one corporation and getting fired meant going to prison or being executed and you weren't allowed to quit (immigrate out).
I don't think it's actually anything to do with capitalism. It's all about having a an agenda and projecting that onto others which is always the fundamental flaw in professed egalitarian ideologies, at some point you'll have to take something from someone that is not willing to give up or exploit someone for the "greater good" and at that stage you'll be no different than the "tyrants" you replaced.
The minute humans are in charge and setting the rules the fallible flaw has been introduced.
There was nothing egalitarian in the Soviet leadership, with some historical debate about maybe Lenin (though even with Lenin, one of his first acts after coming to power was to dissolve the Soviets, the democratic, independent factory-ruling councils that had sprung up).
With Stalin definitely, the only goal was complete control over the population and over the state. Sure, egalitarianism was paid lip service, but it was entirely propaganda.
In fact, the proper historical name for the economic system used in the USSR is "state capitalism". You still have corporations that employ people for a fixed wage, but instead of being controlled by private interests, they are controlled by bureaucrats appointed by the ruling dictators.
Socialism would have meant that the worker-owners get payed based on the profits of the factory, and that they have a direct say in how the factory is operated. In the USSR, no one had any say in how anything was operated, save for the unelected ruling elite.
That's my point though, ostensibly it was all in the name of providing equity to the work class whom were seen as disadvantaged and exploited, but actual fact they were more used as proxy for middle class intellectuals to tear down the class above them and replace it with themselves.
Whether or not they were doing this out of conscious malice or it's just a natural course I'm not actually sure.
My point is that it was obviously malice, with the 'noble goal' working only as propaganda. If there is any natural course to this, it is only that violent revolutions tend to naturally progress to dictatorial regimes, as they are a good moment for the most ruthless to seize power.
The flavor of populism that the new dictators choose to use to ensure the population stays docile seems to matter much less.
Also, there were plenty of contradictions with capitalist principles of profit-oriented production. There were lots of examples when factories or whole industries worked not only suffering constant financial losses, but without common sense at all, like empty trucks roundtrips to meet the plan of "distance per month", assigned from above.
Or the whaling industry charged with bringing in an absolutely meaningless required quota of whale carcasses with tragic results. It’s almost like a runaway AI chasing an arbitrary goal.
The constant financial losses aren't a symptom of poor management because some services - like health care and public transport - are public costs that shouldn't be run to generate shareholder profits.
The dogma that they should be run at a profit makes as much sense as expecting your plumbing, heating, and car to generate cash for your household budget.
"Empty trucks" are very much a thing in capitalism. Ask any airline about flying empty planes to keep slots.
The real difference between "capitalism" and "communism" is that capitalist economies are consumption-driven and geared to producing status-signalling Veblen goods and services, while communist economies tend to be run on a defensive war orientation.
It's easy to sell ad-driven acquisition and consumption as freedom, but real freedom is a rather difficult principle for a society to deal with.
Both are totalitarian, strongly nationalist and propagandising, and unsustainable in their different ways, but - at least in the home territories - capitalism does a much better job of painting a smiley face on its bleak underside and keeping its failures out of the mainstream narratives.
The other thing about Stalinism is that you could be imprisoned or executed for incompetence. You would be accused of being a saboteur. That would be like if capitalism made incompetence at your job a criminal offense.
I like what you said so much, to digress just a bit two thoughts:
- I was thinking about the same lines few days ago watching coloring of Roman statues, and how they look lifelike, and then coloring of WW1 photos, and how it looks as business as usual, no fuss no drama, just another ordinary day - sky is blue birds are singing and humans are having war.
- 2nd train of thoughts were some fiction "theory" how we humans were created by aliens as working force. And then somehow amusing thought was that if you have bionic robots or mechanic, but after they served their purpose (mining for instance) they need to dismantle themselves, all you need is to add a self-destruct feature, but feature must be part of the character so they will not suspect. So instead you as overload alien creating killer switch and risking they going after you, they will do it on their own ...
To go back to main subject, most of us are unaware are the things we do good or bad, we work to feed family or just to survive. Maybe some guy out there thinks he is working in strict chemical factory but in fact he is working for a drug lord or some dictator that is creating chemical weapon. For him not feeding his family is bad thing, and he does the job he is educated for.
Very much like biblical "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
Most of us do not, I am working on a banking software... maybe it will create misery putting in spiral debt some family that will become homeless...
> Makes you think about how, in the age where technological achievement can so quickly outpace the control of individuals, yet also relies on those same individuals to make it happen -- how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
You would have to convince everyone that everyone has a right to live and survive and have basic comforts.
If those scientists and engineers refuse to work on weapons, how will they make money and put food on their table?
They won't even be allowed to walk out if they know secrets.
If they were to detach from their society and go forage in the wild and attempt to start a self-sufficient community, they won't be able to defend against government, military or criminals (a redundant list you might say but I digress).
You have to convince the soldiers who enforce the will of "the people at the top", but then how would they earn a living?
> Some of them out of duty, others out of ambition.
Don't forget the fear component!
> Stalin was fascinated by the thought of a “super bomb” and set up an atomic bomb project and put Lavrentiy Beria change and told him that he had five years to produce an atomic bomb or face the consequences.
> Whilst the rest of the Soviet Union suffered shortages of men, materials and food, Beria setup a secret town and put in the top scientists to work on the atomic bomb with no expense was spared. Beria had two lists, one for those who would get promotion for their work and the other for those that failed, they would face the gulag or execution.
The Tsar Bomb started development in 1961 and at that time the fear component became much lower (aka Khrushchev Thaw). Both Stalin and Beria died in 1953.
A related problem is how to prevent over cavepeople from stocking their own caves with these weapons. What do we do about the North Korean cave or the Iranian cave?
Most countries are most powerfully concerned with protecting themselves. Both North Korea and Iran are mostly stocking weaponry and military knowledge because they are facing constant threats from the world's most powerful military that their leadership will be annihilated.
Iran is constantly being threatened with the use of force by one of the most powerful and belligerent countries in the region (Israel). It has a history of having its leaders deposed by the USA. It has a history of making deals with the USA, keeping its end of the bargain, and discovering the USA had no intention of doing so (while accusing Iran of being the problem). It is one of the only places where their particular religion is accepted in the region, with extreme intolerance of it from one of the other powerful nations in the region (Saudi Arabia). And it is one of the few countries who still care about the fate of the Palestinians.
There's a cost to answering this question wrong too -- the US spent the better part of last century toppling governments and installing sock-puppets, and it led to resentment, terrorism, and revolutions that brought even worse governments.
> That arms race is the only reason why we haven't had a major war in the last 75 years, and won't have one in the foreseeable future.
The Cold War was one of largest wars in history by casualties, on the same rough order as (and possibly ahead of) WWI.
Nuclear weapons are a big part of why it was popular to maintain the rather paper-thin fiction that it was simply a series of separate conflicts that happened to have the same parties standing behind the principal combatants (or involving at most one of those backers directly).
Do you recall one event during cold war where 65.000 men were killed in just one day?. Or how compares the 40.000.000 casualties during ww1 with the coldwar?.
For a single day, I think there are a few days of the Indonesian anti-communist purges that would qualify. Overall, about ½-1 million were killed, over a period of a few months, but a lot of the deaths happened over a period of just a few days when the army rolled up into central and eastern Java.
Just thinking out loud here, but how long would this level of having no “major” wars have to last for it to have been worth it if it ends in nuclear war?
It's not how long they _last_, it's how many lives they take. USSR alone lost some 25 million people in WW2, mostly young, able bodied men. Some estimates put the casualty count even higher. Imagine the impact of taking basically all military aged men in the United States and sending them into a massive, five year long meat grinder. That's what this war was like for the USSR and other countries that couldn't wait until 1944 to directly intervene.
So yeah, I think it's great that we can no longer have major wars, and I think it's worth having the nukes if that's what it takes to deter others.
The fact that there was no major war with country possessing nuclear weapons makes me think that nuclear weapon is a very good thing to have. Imagine North Korea without nuclear weapons. They would be democratized in a blink of an eye.
North Korea didn't have nuclear weapons for almost half a century.
There are enough conventional artillery pieces installed at the border to flatten a substantial fraction of Seoul in minutes.
More fundamental than that conventional mutually-assured-destruction deterrent, there are larger forces that matter: North Korea exists because China and the Soviet Union wanted it to continue to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_(O... The international sanctions on North Korea continue to fail because North Korea's existence is convenient.
In a limited timeframe, sure. Beyond that, I'm genuinely scared.
Murphy's law comes to mind. A small probability of badness + enough time = a near inevitable disaster.
It only takes one person to overreact for us all to start nuking each other.
I see no easy way out, apart from striving to become a multi-planetary civilization. Even then, it'll be a matter of time before the same pattern emerges.
It’s possible that the least bad though still horrific scenario is an obvious accident that instead of leading to a war results in a universal backlash against these weapons.
Well, the only reason they didn't get democratized is because they had enough artillery to turn Seoul and Incheon into a puddle. It's the same mechanism, mutually assured destruction.
South Korea didn't get democratized until 1987, to my knowledge. So I think it's unproven that the war and subsequent stalemate prevented democracy in NK in the near term.
What you say is true, but it would be ahistorical not to remark that the genesis of North Korea was the previous "democratization" of the Korean peninsula that resulted in stomach churning war crimes, the destruction of nearly every habitable structure, and the execution of innumerable civilians. NK's "Juche" survivalist ideology is perfectly understandable given what they had to rebuild from.
I think we should not so casually make remarks that imply a military intervention would do anything to benefit the Korean people.
There's even a nuclear tie-in as Gen. MacArthur was pressing Truman to drop a necklace of "30-50" bombs in order to irradiate the land and make it impassable for 60 years.
I'm not supporting North Korea, I'm just suggesting that nuclear weapons works for them, so it must be pretty effective thing. If not for nuclear weapons, who knows how world would look today. USA and USSR would definitely fight each other, killing thousands of people in process.
I agree with you regarding holding nukes keeping them from being invaded (so called "nuclear peace"). I was referring more to the part where you said "democratized in the blink of an eye" which could be interpreted as a positive thing. Not trying to dunk on you, just that this kind of phrasing is how Americans let themselves be led into wars.
I cynically think that neither China or South Korea want to deprogram 30 million brainwashed people, or absorb the land area that has (likely) barely functional infrastructure and no resources to exploit that would cover the costs of integrating the worlds largest cult into your nation and upgrading the infrastructure alongside it. I think each side is hoping the other one has to deal with it.
I doubt either of them have the capability to do it in the first place! Invading an industrialised, heavily armed country of 30 million people which has been planning for that to happen for decades is an extremely big deal. Note that it didn't go well in the Korean War, and North Korea is much more prepared for it now than then.
That seems like an odd use of the word "invade". I mean, your definition is implicit, but I'm not sure it's quite standard.
If I search the internet for, say, "soviet invasion of germany" I get almost entirely hits such as plans for invading West Germany for WWIII, or alternate histories where the Soviets invaded Germany at the beginning of WWII instead of signing a pact. Also the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
It's not entirely unheard of to refer to Soviet offensive into Germany at the end of WWII as the "invasion of Germany", but it seems to be somewhat rare and unusual. And with Bing, unlike Google, I didn't find that usage at all.
I wonder if people rarely use the phrase because it seems vaguely to imply sympathy with the Nazis.
Oh, wow, this is great. Seeing all this in detail is really interesting. It's even better after seeing the static, low-quality pictures on Wikipedia and then watching this and seeing that they are in fact part of a high-quality, video capture of the bomb. I can't wonder how many similar "secret" projects have such good documentation and videos of them that haven't seen the light of day yet…
Edit: no, really, go check out the Wikipedia image of the bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) and then watch the video. They have the recording they pulled that exact picture on the top of the page from, except the quality is significantly better in every aspect. (If you're impatient: https://youtu.be/nbC7BxXtOlo?t=1780)
I'm astonished that they would release this video. Even 60 years onward, this test is still beyond the capabilities of many nations and so it's surprising to me that this wouldn't remain classified. It goes into quite extensive detail on the logistics and planning and even shows footage of the bomb with panels removed.
Edit on downvotes - is my surprise at its declassification misplaced? Does every teenager these days know how to plan and carry out a 50 megaton nuclear test by reading Wikipedia?
"though in such a case the limiting factor in developing such a weapon is not usually design difficulty but rather the procurement of material (enriched uranium)"
This paragraph refers to the simpler-to-design gun type (eg Fat Man). According to WP the three PhD guys designed a much more complicated implosion-type bomb within only 3 years with public information and only basic tools.
Fat Man is the “much more complicated” design and the guys picked it because it is more challenging.
Results of the analysis are still classified (declassified document is redacted to death) but there are some accounts claiming that Dr. Teller uncovered that the design was viable and would produce a blast within order of magnitude of the “inspiration”.
If the account above is true it means anything from low single digit kiloton range to low double digit.
But I do not think today anybody would doubt that. The biggest obstacle to fission bomb making are materials themselves. Lack of public data to calibrate would mean nothing to terrorists (1 kiloton is still terror-inducing) and nation states have no problems in accessing nuclear scientists.
Fortunately, getting enough material is what makes this lunacy impractical.
This begs the question: Is it illegal to design a nuclear weapon? Or any weapon for that matter, sounds like hell of a hobby. Could you outsource a modern day Kalashnikov to the third world through the daily Slack and Zoom?
Not really, there is a big framework of regulations designed specifically to make that not a thing - from international treaties to local laws. They cover all sorts of things including the materials, the development and trade of adjacent and dual-use technology and industrial capacity, etc.
>Edit on downvotes - is my surprise at its declassification misplaced?
Yes.
If you think that this is even a fraction of the data and resources needed to replicate that chain of events, then you probably seriously misjudge the difficulty faced with regards to the engineering and construction of such a device.
The teenager comment is somewhat hyperbole, I think -- but it's not necessarily wrong. The basic principals behind these devices have been public knowledge for as far as I can remember; diagrams of how they work have been in magazines like Scientific American since the mid 70s -- maybe earlier.
This "teenage knowledge" threat predates Wikipedia, that's for sure. I was sending away cash for nefarious science kits way before Wikipedia.
I don't think it's a fraction of the data and resources needed to pull it off. But if I were, say, Kim Jong Un, this video might give me enough of a sense of how many people, time, and budget I might reasonably allocate for this kind of project. That's not the kind of information that I'd likely get from Scientific American; also, even if I can find a blown-up schematic of a nuclear weapon in a magazine, no matter how detailed it is, I'll never be sure that some important "secret sauce" isn't left out of the image. Seeing hi-res footage of a real device is different in that regard.
This isn't showing you anything about the _manufacture_ of the warhead, though, and the design and manufacture is the hard bit. And today, it's mostly hard because it's _expensive_; the technology isn't all that secret.
Why should anyone care? If making larger and larger hydrogen bombs was militarily useful, people would have continued to do it. But there is actually no purpose to making the largest explosion possible, let alone literally blowing up the world which someone once claimed was theoretically possible.
Why would a bomb that is larger than needed to destroy the largest city be useful?
One motivator for these giant bombs was the poor accuracy of the early ICBMs. The Soviet Union at one time planned to get around this with really enormous warheads and ICBMs; the Proton rocket used to launch Mir and ISS components started life as a design for a super-ICBM (though it was never deployed as such). By the time this test happened accuracy had improved enough that it was kind of pointless, and the whole thing is a bit of a historical oddity.
Both the US and Soviet Union did explore using really big fusion bombs for geo engineering (there was a bonkers plan to dig a harbour in Alaska with them, notably), but early testing of these concepts were not promising and the atmospheric test ban killed it off.
The Tsar Bomba was never intended to be a practical weapon. Modern computing (ever had to read/sign a disclaimer for FEM software saying "I will use this to make nukes"?) combined with espionage at the time means that there is almost no chance that there is anything particularly useful contained in the footage.
I also read that, as well as it being detected by an American nuclear surveillance plane, the detonation wasn't actually publicly announced within the Soviet Union.
There are hundreds of videos of nuclear tests publicly available. They're not revealing anything here. It's arguably weird it took this long; the Soviet Union and Russia have released footage of other tests before.
> Does every teenager these days know how to plan and carry out a 50 megaton nuclear test by reading Wikipedia?
> Go check out the Wikipedia image of the bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) and then watch the video. They have the recording they pulled that exact picture on the top of the page from, except the quality is significantly better in every aspect.
The bad image quality on Wikipedia is intentional because the use of this photo is restricted by copyright laws [0][1]. Resolution downscaling is done for all non-free photographs and images on Wikipedia to conform to the fair use criteria to the maximum extent under the U.S. Copyright Law.
Intuitively, the copyright system in the Soviet Union (or any other country, for that matter) for works created by civil servants while performing official duties for the government should be similar to the U.S. Copyright Law - under public domain. Unfortunately, if the Wikipedia editors were correct, when Russia joined the Berne Convention, a lot of previous uncopyrightable works have been retroactively granted for copyright again. The result is an extremely complicated copyright situation, making the vast majority of Soviet Union public domain works non-free.
This image is a faithful digitisation of a unique historic image, and the copyright for it is most likely held by the person who created the image or the agency employing the person. It is believed that the use of this image may qualify as fair use under the Copyright law of the United States. Other use of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement.
If you believe the argument is mistaken and the photograph is free, you can simply screenshot the full-resolution denotation scene in the film and upload it to Wikipedia, and persuade the editors that it's indeed a public domain work, but good luck with that given the complex situation...
Interesting, so this really is the first release of a high-resolution copy, I stand corrected. Unfortunately, nobody can upload it to Wikipedia because of copyright problems.
This whole video is a fascinating window into Soviet engineering culture of the time, with lots of juicy shots of classic oscilloscopes and the like. I would give my right arm to see a similar video of their space program.
If, like me, you were confused by the propeller blades being black on takeoff, despite being painted white earlier in the video - only the backs were painted, as the aircraft was flying away from the bomb on detonation.
The video is surprisingly high quality. It almost looks like a movie set, especially the night scenes. It's really great to watch even for just the cinematography. You can tell they the filmmakers really cared about the details.
To be fair, the detonation had to be synchronized with the recording equipment start. They were proudly describe analog control system which start recorders at correct time.
They refer to it as a "clean" bomb and let people walk around at the hypocenter immediately afterward, saying the radiation measured was insignificant. How is this possible? Is this a common feature of hydrogen bombs?
A hydrogen bomb is triggered by a smaller plutonium/depleted uranium device. It's the moral equivalent of a detonator for C4, with a sprinkle of X-Rays and plasma on the side.
The punchline is about a third of the way down:
> The fission reactions though, especially the last fission reactions, release a tremendous amount of fission products and fallout. If the last fission stage is omitted, by replacing the uranium tamper with one made of lead, for example, the overall explosive force is reduced by approximately half but the amount of fallout is relatively low. The neutron bomb is a hydrogen bomb with an intentionally thin tamper, allowing most of the fast fusion neutrons as possible to escape.
> Khrushchev wanted a 100 megaton weapon and to achieve such size, the engineers added a third stage on the thermonuclear warhead. Normal hydrogen bombs comprise two stages. Understanding the extreme radiation releases, the engineers, and among them Andrei Sakharov, decided to reduce the actual yield of 100 megatons to around half.
Two-stage nuclear weapons get cleaner as they get bigger, because the excess neutrons from the second stage will destroy any long-lived fission products from the first stage. On top of that, all you need is a tamper that doesn't get activated by neutrons and you can push the fallout down to insignificance. This is why "atoms for peace" and such initiatives were not quite as stupid as they sound at the outset, as it would have been possible to build bombs that don't cause much fallout for them.
However, since you can roughly double the power of any two-stage bomb by replacing the tamper with uranium, at minimal expense and with no added mass, but at the cost of producing massive amounts of fallout, real bombs deployed for war generally would have made a lot of fallout.
That's all true of bombs detonated high up in the air where the only elements around are hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and argon - none of which tend to be neutron activated in a particularly dangerous way. On the ground if you're using bombs for engineering work there are a lot of other elements that do get very upset if you hit them with fusion neutrons.
Even in the context of 3 stage designs there's a huge difference in fallout between airbursts and groundbursts. It's the groundburst fallout that would have killed everyone in Copehagen and Stockholm if WWIII had gone down when the wind was blowing from the east, even with a successful US first strike.
I was appalled to learn that nuclear weapons testing roughly doubles the radiation exposure of a person living at sea level (the atmosphere blocks a lot from outer space).
There are two types of fallout: local and global fallout. Airburst creates relatively little or no local radioactive fallout relative to groundburst.
Only fission is always dirty. Hydrogen bomb can be made clean, dirty or extremely dirty (salted) depending on the tamper material. Also, underwater explosions of hydrogen bomb create dirty explosion due to natrium in the water. Need for fission reaction to start the fusion reacton creates always some radioactive particles.
Tzar bomba was airburst hydrogen bomb with lead tamper. It was relatively clean but the fission core still crated global fallout.
Well clean is relative. Hydrogen bombs still have a traditional fission stage and that is going to produce fallout. However the bomb was detonated several kilometers above ground which means that fallout would generally be dispersed widely downwind from the source of the explosion.
I'm not a 100% sure but it certainly might have been possible that the location wasn't very radioactive afterwards.
Most of the nuclear fallout on a nuclear explosion is from detonating at or near ground level which turns the dirt and dust around there radioactive while blasting it high into the air. An air burst bomb only has the radioactive material that failed to explode in the bomb, and like someone else mentioned that is easy to deal with and isn't a real big problem in the first place unless you intentionally are making your bomb inefficient and dirty.
26:13 "Before landing the [radiation reconnaissance] helicopter – a check for radioactivity. Even in the very centre of the site, it was insignificant."
It was cleaner than most fusion bombs, and fairly high up, so it probably wasn't _too_ bad on the ground. Also their attitudes would have been different. There were hundreds of atmospheric tests in those couple of decades.
Despite the cheery orchestral music, I don't think a video that was classified for 60 years would have been produced as propaganda. I assume it was intended as an internal technical report for high-ranking officials.
They had internal propaganda too. Just like all US military produced World War 2 era documentary and training films describe the conditions as downright cheery.
There isn't really a distinction to be drawn between "a documentary to inform decision makers" and "propaganda". Everybody in the Soviet Union was lying to everyone else -- they were responding rationally to the incentives they were presented with.
Quite eerie to watch the column of dirt rise so slowly after such a violent explosion. Same for the aftermath, other than perhaps the melted snow exposing the red dirt below, the landscape hardly looks any different after the test.
Amazing that the mushroom cloud nearly reached space.
a bit of pedantism - giving that it was air heated by the radiation and shock wave the speed of sound was much higher, so while going up very fast, the dirt being moved up by convection and pressure differential may have still moved subsonically wrt. the local speed of sound.
I put the speed of sound purely as a comparison. The local speed of sound is irrelevant because the dust was moving with the medium and not relative to the medium.
Except for the situation of being directly impacted by shockwave, the medium - air in this case - can't move faster than the speed of sound, ie the speed with which the pressure differential causing the movement is propagated. Once the fireball expanded and shockwave passed, the mushroom goes up because it's hot and thus it is moved by the atmospheric pressure. For example you wouldn't have mushroom going up without an atmosphere. It is able to go that fast because the whole surrounding volume was preheated by radiation and the shockwave with the resulting speed of sound increase .
Similar physics - it's a fusion bomb, hence the low residual radiation. Wikipedia claims, BTW, that the energy released by this explosion was about 16.6 times all explosive energy released in WW2, and about 1/10th of all energy released by all nuclear testing.
Yes, but the initial nuclear charge is comparatively small (1.5MT), and dispersed over a large area, since the bomb is detonated pretty high above the ground. To my knowledge there is only one such charge in this bomb. If its yield weren't limited to 50MT, there'd be two such stages. Andrei Sakharov suggested not using U238, replacing it with some passive material in the secondary module. The yield was limited because if it weren't, there _would_ be a lot of radioactive contamination, and the fireball would touch the ground, exacerbating the problem.
Wow, I never realized Tsar Bomba was scaled down. Wiki link says with U238 it would have yielded over 100MT. Also confirms that it was a very clean bomb, with over 97% of the energy coming from fusion.
97% energy coming from fusion is in no way proof of this being clean bomb. 3% from fission is still many times more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb. We also don't know how much fissile material there was (and how much was dispersed in environment). Because the bomb was detonated high up there wouldn't be hotspots on the ground but the release was still there, dispersed for all humanity for decades to come.
Calling the bomb clean would be like calling somebody's vomit clean because it was diluted in large amount of water and then sprayed on all walls so there are no large concentrations of it.
Everything's relative. Of course it generated more radioactivity than Hiroshima's measly fifteen kilotons, but for a fifty megaton bomb it was pretty darn clean.
Well, that lake your city draws their drinking water from? I guarantee someone vomited, peed and shat into it. The issue is the concentration. Remember that because this was 4KM above ground, the resulting fallout was spread over tens of thousands of square kilometers.
Sure, but that radiation is dispersed over much, much greater distances and you need less radiation to give the effect intended. The end result is that the explosion zone is not nearly as radioactive as either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Also, there is vomit all over the pavements and walls of your city. Just in low concentrations.
This film shows a number of what appear to be ordinary off-the-shelf cameras being used to record data, for instance at 5:01 and 12:55. Are those Zorkis?
It’s interesting how they did the shot of the bomb on the parachute. It’s either not the real bomb (test drop of a dummy?), or camera operator should have been in the kill zone.
Glad I am not the only camera nut out there, my personal speciality is the pre-SLR era that I know far too much about to be healthy. The use of high-end, off-the-shelf cameras for military and scientific purposes does not surprise me that much. The “Luftwaffe Leicas” [1] for example are famous in camera circles and even today I frequently spot Nikon and Canon gear in physics labs when I walk around campus.
My guess for 5:01 [2] is a Zorki 6 with a rigid Industar-50 [3]. The top plate matches the Zorki 6 from what I can tell and the rigid Industar-50 has a very distinct shape when attached as it looks a bit “fat” in the middle.
At 5:08 [4] I think we have a Zorki S [5] based on the top plate. Those familiar with screw-mount Leica cameras can note the striking similarity, more on this later. I have no clue about the lens though, it looks akin to specialist lenses from the era that I have seen.
A word of warning, I am far far far more familiar with German and Japanese cameras from this era as it is what I have used in the past – corrections are welcome. Also, if you spotted other camera gear (no film cameras though, ask someone else…) do poke me.
To end on an interesting historical fact. The Zorki S you saw and plenty more from the era produced both in the USSR (do not say Russia, from what I remember plenty were made in the Ukraine) and Japan (both Nikon and Canon) were “Leica copies” that either looked very much like to their German counterparts, accepted lenses with the same mount (M39 or Leica Thread Mount), and/or had very similar lens designs. This means that lenses/cameras produced during this era tends to be compatible between makers and countries, which leads to a lot of fun if you can muster a little courage and try film. In particular the USSR-made cameras/lenses are dirt cheap these days.
Video is weird. It plays a bomb sound at the same time as the explosion is seen. And the sound is just like the classic stock bomb sound found in movies and video games throughout the 80s.
Anyway, looking at those explosions these days it usually reminds me that the total produced nukes by both sides - 100K+ - was sufficient to send an Orion style space ship to the closest star with 1-3% of the speed of light.
I was missing a segment on when they armed the bomb. Given it's absolutely massive explosive power I would assume they wanted to avoid a crash at the airport to detonate it. But perhaps it was armed already when attached to the plane?
This documentary looks like a fairy tale with an appropriate storyteller, music and narration. Like a massive nuclear bomb is the happiest achievement of the humankind. How schizophrenic is that??
That's much more sinister - especially the part at the end where they show the warhead landing in a densely populated area and caption it "Mission Accomplished" with a triumphant musical flourish.
Sadly it's standard military contractor stuff. It's a sick culture.
Alternatively there is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDL_pIPScSI about Minuteman III testing -- in which a song called "It's My Life" plays as we see breathtaking video of an unarmed Minuteman III missile climbing its way through the clouds at Vandenberg AFB and the West Coast; followed by footage of the reentry vehicles falling down from the sky at several kilometers per second, visible only as streaks of white light.
> The flash dome itself reached 20 km, while the ring of absolute destruction had a radius of 35 kilometers
Is there another term for “ring of bsolute destruction”? When I google that, all of the results are either for a book with that in part of the title, or a guitar effect pedal, or this article itself.
I’d like to read more about this - can anyone suggest a better search term?
How could it be that these guys were cleared to go in and measure the radiation? They’re there to get accurate measurements, in which case they could then see themselves that it was astronomical. Did they just knowingly sacrifice themselves? Or does the radiation spread and it really is low at the blast site?
> The Tu-95 plane carrying the bomb was far away at the time of detonation. However, the explosion’s shock wave caused the aircraft to instantly lose 1,000 meters of altitude, but it later landed safely.
I assume the pilots were fully prepped, but... still seems like a bad day
A few ten megaton bomb would create a very small earthquake, quite probably only detectable by instruments. You'd need to wade into millions-ten of millions of megatons to create an extinction event.
A lot. I'm more interested in Espionage than the Space Program (I imagine if you asked nicely Roscosmos might give you footage), but to this day there is more material from the KGB from defectors than official sources (and this includes material going back a century). The biggest single dump of KGB archives was from Mitrokhin, who in the burst of freedom after the union dissolved walked off with a few hundred thousand papers he'd copied (The book version is a good read).
It will likely remain that way for many years, the Russian Federation is still chekist just as the Soviet Union was before it - those who criticize Putin do not live long.
The biggest single dump of KGB archives was from Mitrokhin, who in the burst of freedom after the union dissolved walked off with a few hundred thousand papers he'd copied (The book version is a good read).
If possible, could you point me to the book you're referring to. I'm really interested in reading this.
The original Russian is classified (Make of that what you will - the British establishment very much did not leave no rock unturned when it came to soviet infiltration), the English is (I think) available online somewhere, and the aforementioned book is a summary of his papers.
The virus interferes at the moment, but I'd half like to book a cruise on the "50 years of victory" before it becomes redundant, after the next 20 or 30 years of polar warming.
(Is it still defection if one migrates from one capitalist country to another?)
Anything russia is capable of, that scares america, is promoted by the american administration since, well, that is there job security, ie, saving you from the enemy.
Maybe its fake news, but the money to be made from validating it, ie converting public money into a private monet, is to good an opportunity to refuse.
At the near-height of the Cold War, the US had a spy called Adolf Tolkachev. He has - somewhat romantically - been called the "Billion dollar spy", because he handed over strategically important information about Russian military capabilities (RADAR ceilings and the like). This allowed the US to change course, and spend the money on the right things. He was later betrayed by Aldrich Ames and/or Robert Hanssen.
Makes you think about how, in the age where technological achievement can so quickly outpace the control of individuals, yet also relies on those same individuals to make it happen -- how important it will be for us to somehow find a way for the people at the top to not lead everyone else down a wrong path.
It's no profoundly new sentiment, but in some ways we need to overcome our caveman instincts when we're stocked with nuclear weapons.