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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I'd love a source for the wargaming story if you have one. I don't recall similar stories from my reading of nuclear history books.

From "Nuclear Warfare 101" by Stuart Slade:

Aha, I hear you say what about the mad dictator? Its interesting to note that mad, homicidal aggressive dictators tend to get very tame sane cautious ones as soon as they split atoms. Whatever their motivations and intents, the mechanics of how nuclear weapons work dictate that mad dictators become sane dictators very quickly. After all its not much fun dictating if one's country is a radioactive trash pile and you're one of the ashes. China, India and Pakistan are good examples. One of the best examples of this process at work is Mao Tse Tung. Throughout the 1950s he was extraordinarily bellicose and repeatedly tried to bully, cajole or trick Khruschev and his successors into initiating a nuclear exchange with the US on the grounds that world communism would rise from the ashes. Thats what Quemoy and Matsu were all about in the late 1950s. Then China got nuclear weapons. Have you noticed how reticent they are with them? Its sunk in. They can be totally destroyed; will be totally destroyed; in the event of an exchange. A Chinese Officer here once on exchange (billed as a "look what we can do" session it was really a "look what we can do to you" exercise) produced the standard line about how the Chinese could lose 500 million people in a nuclear war and keep going with the survivors. So his hosts got out a demographic map (one that shows population densities rather than topographical data) and got to work with pie-cutters using a few classified tricks - and got virtually the entire population of China using only a small proportion of the US arsenal. The guest stared at the map for a couple of minutes then went and tossed his cookies into the toilet bowl. The only people who mouth off about using nuclear weapons and threaten others with them are those that do not have keys hanging around their necks. The moment they get keys and realize what they've let themselves in for, they get to be very quiet and very cautious indeed.

An email exchange doesn't strike me as a great source for a claim like this. It would be fantastic if Stuart Slade was an army colonel who participated in this exchange, but I don't know who he is or why he should be an authority on this topic. The email is also written as a retelling of someone else's story rather than like a primary source.

Thanks. I could have sworn I'd seen a version of it in print, but the closest book I have on the material was Age of Radiance, and it's not in that book.

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