Richard Jernigan -> RE: Ukraine and Crimea (Mar. 21 2014 21:25:13)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Ruphus On the one hand Gorbi showed much less of an idealist than people think. After all gone into dissolving of the SU after having fallen for false promises of personal ernichment. Could you point us to more information on this? It wasn't featured much in the Western press. quote:
On the other hand there is no reason to assume tricky strategy behind his unarming proposal. ( None that I am aware of.) Instead it appeared plausible as sincere attempt to remove the idiocy of nuclear bombs. Actually, any intelligent mind could realize the sanity behind such suggestion, me thinks. Having spent a good part of my life observing, and to a considerable extent participating in human behavior relative to nuclear weapons, i think I am qualified to say that, whether or not it is a sane suggestion, I believe there is little hope for the success of a total nuclear weapons ban. However there has been a steady reduction in the risk of accident or miscalculation through the Test Ban and ABM Treaties, the sharp reduction of the number of weapons, the re-targeting of those which remain, and the increased level of Russian/US trust developed through cooperation in the destruction of weapons and inspection of the remaining stocks. quote:
ORIGINAL: gmburns Besides, an all-out ban would never be agreed to. How can one trust it? quote:
ORIGINAL: ruphus Despite of so much sweeping actual sinister goals of sabotage and destruction against any whatsoever left agenda especially behind Western post WWII policies, the question here would not have been a moralistic one ( in respect of earlier tactics about reduction / enhancement). I think sincere aims provided the USA would had taken the chance to explore chances and the unique opportunity to follow through with Gorbatchov´s suggestion of disarmament. Regardless of their lead, naturally. I estimate the background behind contra productive behaviour shown instead, to lie in the substantial and traditional creaming off from states budgets, which can hardly be had so freely like with draining of from states budgets for weaponry under propagandistic cause of hostile threat. Indepently from actual potential of threat, mind you. (The ending SU about to bomb the USA then, or any time close; come on now. [8|]) Neither side ever intended to bomb the other. Everyone realized that if either side initiated nuclear conflict, it would be suicide. Each of the two nuclear establishments moved with caution, not to unduly provoke the other side, nor to unduly frighten them. Each played not to win, but to stalemate. The U.S. advantage was that it could much better afford to play than the Soviets could. Everyone actually involved knew that this was the case. The Soviets denied it to prop up morale. The U.S. establishment never mentioned it, for fear of undermining political support. A similar political impulse was seen in the embargo of press photos or TV images of dead American soldiers in Iraq, for fear that it would undermine politcal support for a war, that in its earliest phases appeared to be going even better than expected. quote:
ORIGINAL: ruphus For Lockheed, Boing& co. the hypothetical end of nuclerar bomb building self-evidently will have steered prompt networking through established lines. That is were evil resides. When easy money towers over literally each and everything. - And I am certain that a business world like that in the future will be ethically filed side by side with preceding reckless profiteerings of the likes as Faber-Castell, BMW etc. during Third Reich. Ruphus While greed is a strong motivating force in capitalist societies, I think you overestimate its influence relative to the overpowering forces of fear and distrust between two diametrically opposed societies, the U.S. and the USSR, each announcing its intention to annihilate the other. Not annihilation through open war, but each attacking the other by the steady expansion of its sphere of influence, through the destabilization of weak governments, proxy wars like Vietnam and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, and the eventual asphyxiation of its adversary. The Soviets would much rather have spent the billions of rubles of the military budget on industrialization and raising the standard of living of the population. Instead they bankrupted the state, responding to American threats to destroy them, and due to the ineptitude of Soviet central planners, and the fake obedience of significant parts of the economy. Eisenhower cautioned against America becoming a "garrison state" out of fear of explicitly stated Soviet intentions to overpower the West. Despite your distrust of America, its citizens did in fact enjoy more personal freedom and less fear of the government than did anyone I have ever talked to who actually lived in the Soviet Union. I know some of them quite well. At the end of WW II the world had recently witnessed the Soviets' pre-war fanaticism in pursuit of a political theory, by killing millions of its own citizens through the intentionally created famine of "collectivization" of farmlands in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia itself. The repeated Stalinist "purges" were well known in the West, as was repression and state terrorism employed against its own citizens. What else might the Soviets be capable of? Who would want to live under such a system? The Soviets had seen the U.S. nearly instantly kill hundreds of thousands in the fire bombing of Tokyo and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Together with the British we pushed the Nazis back out of North Africa, neutralized Hitler's weak ally in Italy, and took our time building and gathering our forces, while the Soviet Union took the full violent brunt of the Nazi attack, losing 20-milliion people. Then we invaded a materially weakened German-occupied western Europe at a tiny cost relative to the Soviets' losses. There was a century-long record of the exploitation of labor by capital, only partly balanced by bouts of expanding prosperity and the emergency measures of the 1930s New Deal. What else were we capable of? There was indeed a financial incentive for the U.S. "military industrial complex." Having been a member of it at a high enough level to see, I can say that there was not the unbridled and unprincipled greed exhibited by a small but critical segment of the West's financial industry in recent years. We can see the dynamic at work in the recent expansion of the "intelligence community" in the USA. Against a threat of fanatically inspired terrorism which is not remotely as dangerous to the USA as the declared intentions and visible actions of the USSR, the intelligence community, enabled by technology, has far overstepped any bounds on government intrusion envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Their motivation is not greed. You don't make a fortune working for the government. The thought process, clearly visible when I was a part time contractor for the NSA 25-35 years ago, is "It's our job to protect the country by collecting and processing information, so we must do whatever is technically possible." During the Cold War, Congress and the Pentagon, motivated by far more powerful and reasonable fears of the USSR, poured money into nuclear technology and delivery systems. People made money as a result. They were also far more efficient at their work than the clumsier and slower design bureaus of the Soviet Union, whose work was often hampered by interference from the politicians. For example, of the two anti-ballistic missile radar design teams whose prototypes were tested at Sary Shagan on the shores of Lake Balkash, what we called "Design Team A" received far more resources than "Design Team B." Design Team B were clearly more innovative and faster moving. Design Team A had better political connections. Greed certainly played a role in the USA. Pursuit of a political theory and lust for political power played a significant role in the Soviet Union. Fear played a bigger role in both. RNJ
|
|
|
|