Would Ken power have even been necessary? Or would Ken power have been relegated to the dust bin of history as Barbie power supplanted the inferior tech?
Barbie was developed as a sex doll to raise troop morale, This led to avoiding indoctrinating young girls with unrealistic ideals of female attractiveness, thereby promoting a more balanced conception of sex roles and a moderate and more broadly accepted view of feminism, calming the culture wars.
Having the bomb hasn’t been useful in the military conflicts we’ve chosen to engage in. But those choices are profoundly shaped by having the bomb. No state will try to force the US or any other nuclear armed powers into an existential fight. This deterrence is an enormously important military “use” of the bomb.
Without the bomb, someone might be tempted to TRY, though. China, for instance, could go and build a blue-water navy full of carriers, expecting to just try and win an all-out slugfest over the Taiwan Strait, confident that if they just build more bombs to lob at us, they stand a decent chance of breaking our navy.
Instead, they don’t bother. Because they know that a slugfest stands a good chance of escalating, and no one can back down from that.
Something to keep in mind is that the absolute easiest way for China to break out of "our box" would be for them to break away one of our allies. They made a decent start with the Philippines, but just couldn't bring themselves to stop attempting to dominate them and so drove the Philippines right back to the US.
I'd contend Korea is too early in the history of nuclear weapons to be a useful indicator of anything as "MAD" didn't exist at the time that conflict started. Post-Korea -- by which point both superpowers had meaningful nuclear arsenals and fusion bombs had been developed -- there was never again a "stand-up war" between either superpower and a proxy of the other superpower, let alone between the superpowers themselves.
It is *precisely* because we had vast superiority in theater-level and strategic nuclear arms that we were able to allow ourselves and the Europeans *not* to arm to the teeth to the tune of 10% of GDP to credibly deter the Soviets.
The development of the US nuclear arsenal is among the biggest contributing factors to Europe's post-war boom, and to a lesser extent to our own.
EDIT: Just to be clear, as-is the US spent high single-digit percentages of the economy on military applications every year from 1949 to 1969. Imagine near-doubling that figure?
Lots of excellent debatable topics in this one Matt but the bottom line on nuclear was demonstrated yet again about a year ago when Putin saber rattled with nucs. What did wee do... we checked our stockpile.
Noope. Yes the soviet union suffered huge losses but by 1945 they were already the most powerful land army by a lot. And once they had rebuilt their economic base after a few years they no longer needed American materiel.
This is correct. And led directly to the first use doctrine. Military planners expected to have to retreat from almost all of West Germany in the initial phases of a conflict as massed armor came through the Fulda gap.
One reason for the anti-nuclear position of many "peace activists" in the 50s and 60s was that many of those activists were communist sympathizers. They believed in the utopian vision of a socialist world while ignoring the reality of socialist governments. They wanted the US to lose the cold war and our lead in nuclear technology was a problem.
McCarthy's tactics went way overboard. But his thesis was correct.
I think the main point is that the middle of the electorate was the most correct, authoritarianism in all its forms was the thing to be feared most, regardless of political alignment.
I don't think we have really learned our lesson completely. However, being willing to accept criticism from even your worst (either by temper or faith), most vicious critic and evaluate it in context is an important skill for a reasonable adult to have. I try to practice it as much as my ego will allow.
I'm not sure how this stakes out in the discourse. Should they not have made a big deal about it? Jim Crow was a big deal, its the government sponsored racist racketeering with paramilitary rape and murder as an additional enforcement mechanism. I think the communists would have picked up on it no matter what.
Of course it was worthwhile to call out the U.S. on racism. But I'm just wondering if they would have been blind to it without U.S. liberals bringing it to their attention. It's true that international Communism was ideologically and to some extent practically non-racist but it's hard to imagine the Russians caring much about ethnicities, tribalism, racism etc. based on their internal adoption of Communist ideology. Seems like Jews in the U.S.S.R. were always a bit uncertain of their safety. Don't know much about how ethnic groups in the eastern part of the U.S.S.R. were integrated into the bureaucracies and overall culture.
I guess I just earnestly think that if US liberals had not made a big deal about it, it would have been much worse. If the Soviets are the only ones calling you on your racist, oppressive bs, ya done messed up. It's better for a democracy to have it's toughest critics within because, if they are working in good faith, they are the ones who ultimately make it better.
Many ethnic minorities in the pre-1960s Soviet Union were subject to discrimination and even what could genuinely be called ethnic cleansing and genocide. There was obviously, however, basically no media attention for it, so westerners were largely oblivious to it or otherwise uncritically accepted Soviet propaganda about how wonderful it was that the children of these poor indigenous Siberians were getting packed off to modern schools, etc., etc.
I don't know about the 50s but I never got a 60s- 70s vibe that was "sympathetic" to communism. There was plenty of radical socialism floating around but I'm not sure how much of it at that point included admiration of actual communist countries. I think that most dovish folks at the time were more concerned about possible nuclear war. (And in the meantime perhaps benefiting from being part of the the aerospace industry.)
I also knew some U.S. Marxist academics during the 1970s who were actively supportive of Allende, for example. They got kicked out of Chile when he was overthrown, but that still isn't "sympathy for communism." Our inability to evaluate the possible effectiveness of governments in Central and South American was hampered by the domino theory. (If we had given Allende a chance by supporting his government, that would also have counteracted any "domino" influences from the U.S.S.R.) This is just my general-knowledge-based opinion.
Sympathy for Soviet communism got increasingly complicated in the west after Khrushchev's denunciations of Stalin and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and took pretty close to a death blow with the 1968 Prague Spring. This is the era when you have the whole, "Well, the Soviet Union wasn't *really* communist" rhetoric evolve, despite many, if not most, western communists in the 1920s and '30s gleefully declaring what a wonderful model of communism the Soviet Union was.
Scientists always want to share information. Always. It is in the nature of scientific inquiry that the search for truth, which is how Oppenheimer always regarded his nuclear work - as a search for the "truth" of the atomic world - is better with more brains and more questioning and more hypotheses and more experimentation and more analysis and more discussion. The bottom line is always to increase the general amount of knowledge and facts about our universe.
You can say this is naive but that is the nature of scientist to think like this. From their perspective (scientists), they would say using the search for truth in the service of petty human squabbles is what is naive.
The existence of the bomb has prevented direct major power conflict since it was first used. One could argue that it’s saved tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of lives. The existence of nuclear weapons has been a tremendous boon to world peace.
If you prevent some smaller wars but then eventually you get a big war that kills everyone is that really such a good trade? So far so good I guess but there have been a number of close calls and it’s only been less than a hundred years.
A boon to peace? Perhaps. On the other hand, with the passage of time the third use of nuclear weapons in warfare mathematically approaches 100%. I’m actually not a pessimist on this score: I think it’s plausible, and I hope likely, that one day these weapons are banned by international law (with the ban itself enforced by a strong inspections and monitoring system). But we actually need to start making progress on this front again, and right now humanity is moving in the opposite direction.
I don’t think failure in Afghanistan shows conventional military weakness anymore than our failure in Vietnam or Iraq--or Afghanistan!--does. Hard to win asymmetrical conflicts In difficult terrain against a committed ideological enemy. The Soviets had no problems in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, as one example.
The Greek and Italian communists were extremely popular because they had lead the resistance to fascism, and thus were in a position to take over their respective countries by a combination of elections and brute force. The local armies were of course destroyed and discredited.
The French communists would have been in the same position except that a charismatic Catholic general who by the Joe Manchin value-over-replacement standard was maybe the greatest politician of the 20th century elbowed his way into leading the Resistance. The USSR would have aided the Communists with money and arms, and if America left Europe alone, who would oppose them? If you read the press from 1946, the assumption was that the cold war would be between the UK and the USSR.
If Henry Wallace had been President (and this just means FDR dying earlier or not replacing him with Truman) there's every chance that Communist regimes would have come to power in Austria, Greece, Finland, Italy and maybe France (in 1945 the PCF was the biggest French party).
All it would have taken is for the US to have disengaged from Europe after WWII like we did after WWI. Our having the bomb made it much easier for Truman to do the Marshall Plan and Nato after WWII because it was clear during our brief nuclear monopoly that *if* there were to be a US-Soviet world war, the US would win.
The original end-of-history guy who inspired Fukuyama, Kojève, wrote a memo to the French coalition government in 1946 urging French military and political intervention in Spain, Belgium, Italy and the westernmost bits of Germany to establish a "Latin Empire" of communist-friendly regimes dominated by Paris. (In a footnote he says "Latin Empire" sounds too much like Mussolini so maybe they should call it a "European Union" instead.)
If there had been no Marshall Plan (which is what kept the Communists out of power in France), there's plenty of crazy things like this that might have happened. If pro-communist French started a civil war in Belgium the Dutch were ready to invade and annex Flanders.
The ratio of tanks and ground troops in Europe at the end of WW2 between the Soviets and the Americans was approximately 10 to 1. There is a reason why the Soviets were able to occupy the eastern European countries. The fact that the U.S. had the bomb was the only thing that kept the Soviets from rolling across the rest of Europe.
That's rather unfair to Nicholas II. Literally everyone, including the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, expected the Russian Army in World War I to be much more effective than it turned out to be.
(1) The Russian military really did have some reforms/modernization post-1905 that were expected to boost its effectiveness;
(2) The war started with a Japanese sneak attack that destroyed a substantial part of the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor and immediately put the Russians at a disadvantage in the opening phases of the war because Japanese could freely ferry troops and supplies to the combat zone, whereas the largest concentration of Russian troops and equipment was in Vladivostok and had to be moved overland to the combat zone rather than being able to be moved by ship down the coast (since they would have been easy prey for the Japanese fleet at that point).
(3) Russia was fighting at the end of an insanely long logistical tail, both by rail and by sea, whereas in a European war Russian troops would be expected to be more easily resupplied/reinforced.
(4) In a European war, Russian troops would have been expected to see themselves as fighting for "Mother Russia," whereas in the Russo-Japanese War the Russian forces were fighting for territories that had been occupied for forty years or less and which were overwhelmingly populated by "Asiatic" populations, not ethnic Russians or other European ethnic groups.
That's an even weirder take? You can certainly make the case that the Russo-Japanese War was the result of Russia pushing harder on the Japanese than was advisable, but (1) that is surely more accurately described as Russia underestimating Japanese resolve (Nicholas II's plan was that the Japanese would back down short of war, not that Russia was going to go on the offensive from the outset), and (2) I don't see how anyone can describe Russia as "launching" the Russo-Japanese War -- Japan both attacked first and declared war first and I don't think even the Japanese at the time tried to claim they were engaged in preemption of an imminent Russian attack, nor were Russian forces plausibly positioned for such an attack.
So much Russia gaslighting going on ... I'll just stick to my submarine lane but Russia really did build the titanium hull alfa-class in 1968. We had nothing like it. Our response -- the Los Angeles-class -- were slower and operated at shallower depths. We've still never built a titanium hull sub because the welding requirements are frankly insane. Good spy stories about how we confirmed they were welding a titanium sub (leather shoes) because conventional wisdom thought it was operationally impossible.
That’s a wunderwaffe argument--yes certain powers have cool shit we can’t make. That’s not the same as having the capacity to effectively use the to win wars. V2s, and Kinzhals are not war winners, they’re the military equivalent of party tricks
Overestimating your strengths while underestimating your opponent isn't irrational. It is incorrect, but not irrational. Starting a war with a nuclear power, though, IS irrational.
Seems like those Baltic countries stayed in an awful long time, though? Did they just not get around to secession until everyone else coincidentally got around to it?
This piece is too focused on America. Germany, France, and Japan all entered the post-war era with their institutions and physical infrastructure in ruins. All three were free to pursue better regulatory choices than the US, and all three came to depend more upon nuclear energy than we did. Yet none of the three rode nuclear power to Yglesian-style energy abundance, despite the obvious commercial incentives for doing so. The NRC may explain American malaise, but it couldn’t keep Japan or Germany from getting the cost of nuclear down to 2.5 cents/kWH.
Still moderately pricey though. My utility is cheaper than the French average despite having natural gas as 40% of the generating mix alongside 55% nuclear.
This is one component of my favorite sci-fi trope, where humans are monstrous creatures with a thirst for blood who evolved on a hell planet.
They like to jump off cliffs and hit each other in the head for fun, they recreationally poison themselves, they went to their planet's moon on deadly chemical rocket ships for no reason, and they discovered nuclear bombs before nuclear power plants.
- I think you are being very naive to think that if nuclear power hadn’t been developed in a peaceful capacity first that governments wouldn’t have turned around and try to more militaristic ends. And given in your counterfactual Germany still likely (eventually) rebuilds its military and Soviet Union isn’t utterly devastated by war (just merely devastated by Stalin’s purges and collectivization). Just a lot of markers to me that a nuclear bomb would be both developed and used. In fact likely used more than twice
- I’m increasingly under the belief that pop culture impacts popular imagination and beliefs about history and the world more than we want to admit. In this case, I think we underrate how much The Simpsons has likely been a pretty big headwind against acceptance of nuclear power. Other examples. Perhaps most impactful, Americans view of antebellum south is likely shaped by Gone With The Wind as much as history textbooks. Bend it Like Beckham being a hit is a huge part of why Beckham became a star in America and why soccer finally took off in popularity in America. Will and Grace being a successful tv show being a big factor in gay rights movements. And currently, War Games and even more acutely Terminator franchise being a huge background part of all conversations regarding AI. I’m sure I’m missing many other examples but these are the ones that just pop to mind first.
"The Simpsons" is 100% downstream on problems with acceptance of nuclear power. Media coverage of real life incidents like the Karen Silkwood affair (1974-79) and Three Mile Island (1979) and films like "The China Syndrome" (1979), in which a civilian nuclear power plant is basically the villain, along with numerous films from the 1950s through 1970s that depict nuclear energy as unusually dangerous even without it being the main part of the story (thinking, for example, of "The Swarm" (1978), which includes a scene where killer bees fly into the control room of a civilian nuclear power plant that then literally blows up as the unsupervised reactor melts down), are the actual culprits, with "The Simpsons" just reflecting the existing zeitgeist. (Corroborated by the fact that permitting for new nuclear power plants in the US was basically dead before "The Simpsons" ever started airing in 1989.)
Much as I love the Simpsons I think this is way overselling their cultural import vis a vis nuclear power - but it's also several decades after widespread civilian nuclear powerplant construction both real and hypothetical did and would have taken place. Indeed, long before the Simpsons, nuclear power was contemporarily strongly identified with the techno-optimist view of civilizational development and space exploration even while the dangers of nuclear weapons were recognized - hence its strong identification with 50s-60s era retrofuturism (one could conceivably call it "atompunk" by analogy to "steampunk" - in fact Google tells me this is A Thing already, although I hear and use the term "retro-futurism" more commonly). It's all over Asimov, for example.
Another point is that without having established technological and economic dominance amid the postwar devastation, the US college system doesn’t necessarily become one of our major exports, nor one of the top systems in the world.
Perhaps. But a large reason why we beefed up our secondary education system is because nukes put us into MAD with the Soviets, even before we actually understood what MAD was or how it worked.
Without nukes, we don’t have a Space Race or proxy wars, we just start building a postwar empire the old fashioned way rather than a hegemony.
Ironically the medical studies done on the survivors of the Atomic bombs in Japan have shown that radioactivity is a lot less harmful than previously suspected. There is a barely detectable increase in mortality in survivors which requires a dose of at least 100 fold higher than the level set as safe by regulators.
Sadly this information has not been used to modify the regulations.
The ‘safe’ level set for air pollution by fossil fuels increases mortality more than radioactivity from the atomic weapons blasts!!
The levels of radioactivity in the Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are less harmful than the levels of air pollution in a typical large city.
People were harmed by forcing them to evacuate, especially if they were moved to cities.
I'm assuming this is one of those posts written by ChatGPT because it spiraled off in a hallucinatory direction. That because the Manhattan Project had a military focus (and unnecessary because Germany didn't pursue the bomb and we beat them without it) we lost the chance to build a solid civilian energy program?
Nope.
Had there been no WWII Manhattan Project, there would have been a Cold War Manhattan Project. Hitler didn't build the bomb, but the Soviet Union was going to with or without spies. And so we would have. Or we would have done so alone to reduce the Soviet threat to Europe. And given the Cold War, the military focus on nuclear power would have dominated its civilian uses in any case.
And even if we had had a more robust civilian program, what reason is there to think nuclear power would have triumphed over super cheap oil and coal back in the 1950s?
Overall, I think that you’re underrating the likelihood that somebody goes in pretty hard on bomb development relatively early in the nuclear reactor development cycle even in the “No World War II” scenario. Nuclear fission’s weapons potential was pretty immediately obvious to much of the global physics community, and even the no-Nazi Germany world would have a lot of great power rivalry and mutual suspicion— especially because tensions between the Western European imperial powers and the USSR would be more salient in that timeline.
Stalin certainly would have wanted the sort of security guarantee the bomb would offer, and if he started a bomb development project, the British and French would want to avoid falling behind.
Yeah, my impression is that in a no-WWII scenario Germany probably would have leaned heavily into nuclear weapons. Strategically, nuclear weapons make a huge deal of sense for a nation with powerful potential enemies to the east and west, and its geographic protection to the north and south.
Really good point. The war and Hiroshima "toxified" the public view of nuclear energy, while directing nuclear power technology in a direction optimized for plutonium production, rather than for intrinsic safety. A case can be made that the introduction of nuclear weapons has actually prevented subsequent global war by raising its cost, but that's a different question.
I’m somewhat unsure that the war toxified the view of it as much as the subsequent Cold War. Like I’ve never met a greatest generation person who was all that bothered by nuking Japan, and silent gen people weren’t so bothered it wasn’t really till boomers arrived in adulthood that we get this discomfort.
Almost all my grandparents were thrilled we didn’t have to do a grueling invasion of Japan which would have been incredibly bloody.
My take: the bombing of Hiroshima was tragically justified. I wish they had waited longer to see the Japanese response before bombing Nagasaki, however.
There was little controversy within the US at the time about using the Bomb. It was widely seen as a great triumph and fantastic success. Indeed the Cold War helped us all to appreciate the magnitude of the horror of nuclear war, but I'd say the actual use of the Bomb on a city was the single most important factor in helping us appreciate its horror, and thus linking nuclear energy to Doomsday.
A much smaller domestic oil and gas industry, more limited foreign oil industry, and more limited hydroelectric potential probably were major contributors. I'm also not sure how self-sufficient France was on coal production post-WW2.
Also, I think, a long tradition of a strong, centralized state that generally enjoys widespread, deep(ish) support for its large projects (yes, you might feel differently if you're an unemployed 22 year old of Algerian Heritage)—especially as those projects buttress the vision of an independent France in an increasingly Anglo-Saxonized world. Ergo, if the French State says France needs large scale nuclear power, most French people have generally been in agreement.
"This was a monumental undertaking that cost $2 billion relative to the 1940 GDP of $200 billion."
Whenever someone tells us the cost of something a long time ago, they will normally convert it to modern values using inflation. This is not too useful, because incomes have typically risen faster than inflation. We need to know what the cost meant at the time. If something cost $5 in 1850, what could $5 actually plausibly buy in 1850? And what was the median weekly wage in 1850? For larger projects, the cost as a percentage of GDP is more relevant, as was done here.
Can't wait to read your counterfactual history of Barbie.
Oppenarbie: The Counterfactual
What if she had not been weaponized from the first?
Would people associate her with peaceful, domestic uses, instead of global hegemony and mutual assured destruction?
Would Ken power have even been necessary? Or would Ken power have been relegated to the dust bin of history as Barbie power supplanted the inferior tech?
Oppenheimie, surely?
Somewhere, Jesse Jackson shivers as feels as though someone just stepped on the grave of his 1984 presidential campaign.
Barbie was developed as a sex doll to raise troop morale, This led to avoiding indoctrinating young girls with unrealistic ideals of female attractiveness, thereby promoting a more balanced conception of sex roles and a moderate and more broadly accepted view of feminism, calming the culture wars.
Having the bomb hasn’t been useful in the military conflicts we’ve chosen to engage in. But those choices are profoundly shaped by having the bomb. No state will try to force the US or any other nuclear armed powers into an existential fight. This deterrence is an enormously important military “use” of the bomb.
Without the bomb, someone might be tempted to TRY, though. China, for instance, could go and build a blue-water navy full of carriers, expecting to just try and win an all-out slugfest over the Taiwan Strait, confident that if they just build more bombs to lob at us, they stand a decent chance of breaking our navy.
Instead, they don’t bother. Because they know that a slugfest stands a good chance of escalating, and no one can back down from that.
Isn’t China in the middle of trying to break out of our box on the Pacific?
Something to keep in mind is that the absolute easiest way for China to break out of "our box" would be for them to break away one of our allies. They made a decent start with the Philippines, but just couldn't bring themselves to stop attempting to dominate them and so drove the Philippines right back to the US.
They would have gotten started a lot sooner without the bomb.
I'd contend Korea is too early in the history of nuclear weapons to be a useful indicator of anything as "MAD" didn't exist at the time that conflict started. Post-Korea -- by which point both superpowers had meaningful nuclear arsenals and fusion bombs had been developed -- there was never again a "stand-up war" between either superpower and a proxy of the other superpower, let alone between the superpowers themselves.
It is *precisely* because we had vast superiority in theater-level and strategic nuclear arms that we were able to allow ourselves and the Europeans *not* to arm to the teeth to the tune of 10% of GDP to credibly deter the Soviets.
The development of the US nuclear arsenal is among the biggest contributing factors to Europe's post-war boom, and to a lesser extent to our own.
EDIT: Just to be clear, as-is the US spent high single-digit percentages of the economy on military applications every year from 1949 to 1969. Imagine near-doubling that figure?
Lots of excellent debatable topics in this one Matt but the bottom line on nuclear was demonstrated yet again about a year ago when Putin saber rattled with nucs. What did wee do... we checked our stockpile.
Yeah this isn't correct at all, every history piece I've ever seen agreed that the Soviets had conventional military superiority on the ground
In 1975 or 1985? What on earth are you going on about?
There wasn't much of an army opposing them in Western Europe, including ours. Heck, we couldn't stop North Korea in the early going.
Noope. Yes the soviet union suffered huge losses but by 1945 they were already the most powerful land army by a lot. And once they had rebuilt their economic base after a few years they no longer needed American materiel.
This is correct. And led directly to the first use doctrine. Military planners expected to have to retreat from almost all of West Germany in the initial phases of a conflict as massed armor came through the Fulda gap.
One reason for the anti-nuclear position of many "peace activists" in the 50s and 60s was that many of those activists were communist sympathizers. They believed in the utopian vision of a socialist world while ignoring the reality of socialist governments. They wanted the US to lose the cold war and our lead in nuclear technology was a problem.
McCarthy's tactics went way overboard. But his thesis was correct.
The communists were also right about Jim Crow.
I think the main point is that the middle of the electorate was the most correct, authoritarianism in all its forms was the thing to be feared most, regardless of political alignment.
"The communists were also right about Jim Crow."
Exactly. Everyone should have been oppressed, not just black people. Luckily, we have learned our lesson about such unequal treatment.
I don't think we have really learned our lesson completely. However, being willing to accept criticism from even your worst (either by temper or faith), most vicious critic and evaluate it in context is an important skill for a reasonable adult to have. I try to practice it as much as my ego will allow.
They probably wouldn't have been that aware of Jim Crow's significance without our own civil rights activists making a big deal about it.
I'm not sure how this stakes out in the discourse. Should they not have made a big deal about it? Jim Crow was a big deal, its the government sponsored racist racketeering with paramilitary rape and murder as an additional enforcement mechanism. I think the communists would have picked up on it no matter what.
Of course it was worthwhile to call out the U.S. on racism. But I'm just wondering if they would have been blind to it without U.S. liberals bringing it to their attention. It's true that international Communism was ideologically and to some extent practically non-racist but it's hard to imagine the Russians caring much about ethnicities, tribalism, racism etc. based on their internal adoption of Communist ideology. Seems like Jews in the U.S.S.R. were always a bit uncertain of their safety. Don't know much about how ethnic groups in the eastern part of the U.S.S.R. were integrated into the bureaucracies and overall culture.
I guess I just earnestly think that if US liberals had not made a big deal about it, it would have been much worse. If the Soviets are the only ones calling you on your racist, oppressive bs, ya done messed up. It's better for a democracy to have it's toughest critics within because, if they are working in good faith, they are the ones who ultimately make it better.
Many ethnic minorities in the pre-1960s Soviet Union were subject to discrimination and even what could genuinely be called ethnic cleansing and genocide. There was obviously, however, basically no media attention for it, so westerners were largely oblivious to it or otherwise uncritically accepted Soviet propaganda about how wonderful it was that the children of these poor indigenous Siberians were getting packed off to modern schools, etc., etc.
Wonderful that they helped push our mushy middle to kill the retort. It didn't work out perfectly but is a damned sight better than what came before.
I don't know about the 50s but I never got a 60s- 70s vibe that was "sympathetic" to communism. There was plenty of radical socialism floating around but I'm not sure how much of it at that point included admiration of actual communist countries. I think that most dovish folks at the time were more concerned about possible nuclear war. (And in the meantime perhaps benefiting from being part of the the aerospace industry.)
I also knew some U.S. Marxist academics during the 1970s who were actively supportive of Allende, for example. They got kicked out of Chile when he was overthrown, but that still isn't "sympathy for communism." Our inability to evaluate the possible effectiveness of governments in Central and South American was hampered by the domino theory. (If we had given Allende a chance by supporting his government, that would also have counteracted any "domino" influences from the U.S.S.R.) This is just my general-knowledge-based opinion.
Sympathy for Soviet communism got increasingly complicated in the west after Khrushchev's denunciations of Stalin and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and took pretty close to a death blow with the 1968 Prague Spring. This is the era when you have the whole, "Well, the Soviet Union wasn't *really* communist" rhetoric evolve, despite many, if not most, western communists in the 1920s and '30s gleefully declaring what a wonderful model of communism the Soviet Union was.
Ho > Diem.
Scientists always want to share information. Always. It is in the nature of scientific inquiry that the search for truth, which is how Oppenheimer always regarded his nuclear work - as a search for the "truth" of the atomic world - is better with more brains and more questioning and more hypotheses and more experimentation and more analysis and more discussion. The bottom line is always to increase the general amount of knowledge and facts about our universe.
You can say this is naive but that is the nature of scientist to think like this. From their perspective (scientists), they would say using the search for truth in the service of petty human squabbles is what is naive.
The existence of the bomb has prevented direct major power conflict since it was first used. One could argue that it’s saved tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of lives. The existence of nuclear weapons has been a tremendous boon to world peace.
If you prevent some smaller wars but then eventually you get a big war that kills everyone is that really such a good trade? So far so good I guess but there have been a number of close calls and it’s only been less than a hundred years.
Exactly. It’s an extremely high risk strategy.
A boon to peace? Perhaps. On the other hand, with the passage of time the third use of nuclear weapons in warfare mathematically approaches 100%. I’m actually not a pessimist on this score: I think it’s plausible, and I hope likely, that one day these weapons are banned by international law (with the ban itself enforced by a strong inspections and monitoring system). But we actually need to start making progress on this front again, and right now humanity is moving in the opposite direction.
I think it’s easy to imagine a lot more Soviet shenanigans in Europe in a world without nukes.
Hey Stalin, what’s the place with all the goofy shit on the walls?
Russian military increased rapidly after the war. The Soviet Union invested heavily in military technology all through the 50s and 60s.
I don’t think failure in Afghanistan shows conventional military weakness anymore than our failure in Vietnam or Iraq--or Afghanistan!--does. Hard to win asymmetrical conflicts In difficult terrain against a committed ideological enemy. The Soviets had no problems in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, as one example.
The Greek and Italian communists were extremely popular because they had lead the resistance to fascism, and thus were in a position to take over their respective countries by a combination of elections and brute force. The local armies were of course destroyed and discredited.
The French communists would have been in the same position except that a charismatic Catholic general who by the Joe Manchin value-over-replacement standard was maybe the greatest politician of the 20th century elbowed his way into leading the Resistance. The USSR would have aided the Communists with money and arms, and if America left Europe alone, who would oppose them? If you read the press from 1946, the assumption was that the cold war would be between the UK and the USSR.
If Henry Wallace had been President (and this just means FDR dying earlier or not replacing him with Truman) there's every chance that Communist regimes would have come to power in Austria, Greece, Finland, Italy and maybe France (in 1945 the PCF was the biggest French party).
All it would have taken is for the US to have disengaged from Europe after WWII like we did after WWI. Our having the bomb made it much easier for Truman to do the Marshall Plan and Nato after WWII because it was clear during our brief nuclear monopoly that *if* there were to be a US-Soviet world war, the US would win.
The original end-of-history guy who inspired Fukuyama, Kojève, wrote a memo to the French coalition government in 1946 urging French military and political intervention in Spain, Belgium, Italy and the westernmost bits of Germany to establish a "Latin Empire" of communist-friendly regimes dominated by Paris. (In a footnote he says "Latin Empire" sounds too much like Mussolini so maybe they should call it a "European Union" instead.)
If there had been no Marshall Plan (which is what kept the Communists out of power in France), there's plenty of crazy things like this that might have happened. If pro-communist French started a civil war in Belgium the Dutch were ready to invade and annex Flanders.
Pretty sure wargaming predicted a loss by NATO if the So pets ever invaded in the 50s or 1960s.
The ratio of tanks and ground troops in Europe at the end of WW2 between the Soviets and the Americans was approximately 10 to 1. There is a reason why the Soviets were able to occupy the eastern European countries. The fact that the U.S. had the bomb was the only thing that kept the Soviets from rolling across the rest of Europe.
“ USSR lacked the means to start a war with the US, ”
See Putin, Vladimir and Romanov, Nicholas - lacking the means hasn’t stopped Russian leaders from launching ill advised wars.
That's rather unfair to Nicholas II. Literally everyone, including the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, expected the Russian Army in World War I to be much more effective than it turned out to be.
Why, after 1904-05, they believed this, is beyond me.
Probably because of four major factors:
(1) The Russian military really did have some reforms/modernization post-1905 that were expected to boost its effectiveness;
(2) The war started with a Japanese sneak attack that destroyed a substantial part of the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor and immediately put the Russians at a disadvantage in the opening phases of the war because Japanese could freely ferry troops and supplies to the combat zone, whereas the largest concentration of Russian troops and equipment was in Vladivostok and had to be moved overland to the combat zone rather than being able to be moved by ship down the coast (since they would have been easy prey for the Japanese fleet at that point).
(3) Russia was fighting at the end of an insanely long logistical tail, both by rail and by sea, whereas in a European war Russian troops would be expected to be more easily resupplied/reinforced.
(4) In a European war, Russian troops would have been expected to see themselves as fighting for "Mother Russia," whereas in the Russo-Japanese War the Russian forces were fighting for territories that had been occupied for forty years or less and which were overwhelmingly populated by "Asiatic" populations, not ethnic Russians or other European ethnic groups.
I’m referring to the Russo Japanese war.
That's an even weirder take? You can certainly make the case that the Russo-Japanese War was the result of Russia pushing harder on the Japanese than was advisable, but (1) that is surely more accurately described as Russia underestimating Japanese resolve (Nicholas II's plan was that the Japanese would back down short of war, not that Russia was going to go on the offensive from the outset), and (2) I don't see how anyone can describe Russia as "launching" the Russo-Japanese War -- Japan both attacked first and declared war first and I don't think even the Japanese at the time tried to claim they were engaged in preemption of an imminent Russian attack, nor were Russian forces plausibly positioned for such an attack.
Russian actions leading up to the 1905 war showed a contempt for Japanese power and interests that we can absolutely blame Nicholas for.
So much Russia gaslighting going on ... I'll just stick to my submarine lane but Russia really did build the titanium hull alfa-class in 1968. We had nothing like it. Our response -- the Los Angeles-class -- were slower and operated at shallower depths. We've still never built a titanium hull sub because the welding requirements are frankly insane. Good spy stories about how we confirmed they were welding a titanium sub (leather shoes) because conventional wisdom thought it was operationally impossible.
Thank god their powerplants and mechanicals all sucked.
Silence is golden.
That’s a wunderwaffe argument--yes certain powers have cool shit we can’t make. That’s not the same as having the capacity to effectively use the to win wars. V2s, and Kinzhals are not war winners, they’re the military equivalent of party tricks
Overestimating your strengths while underestimating your opponent isn't irrational. It is incorrect, but not irrational. Starting a war with a nuclear power, though, IS irrational.
it may be irrational. It also might simply be accidental.
Woke history is an entertaining concept.
My point is that MAD keeps a lid on major power conflict. As history has clearly demonstrated.
Three years after? Sure. Twenty-five years after?. Not remotely hard to imagine.
This always bothers me when people say some version of Japan and Korea and Taiwan should defend themselves more than they do now.
It seems like hey we want to replay the lead up to WW1 but in Asia.
The Baltic states didn't fight a war of independence, the USSR collapsed politically. What are weapons supposed to have done?
Seems like those Baltic countries stayed in an awful long time, though? Did they just not get around to secession until everyone else coincidentally got around to it?
This piece is too focused on America. Germany, France, and Japan all entered the post-war era with their institutions and physical infrastructure in ruins. All three were free to pursue better regulatory choices than the US, and all three came to depend more upon nuclear energy than we did. Yet none of the three rode nuclear power to Yglesian-style energy abundance, despite the obvious commercial incentives for doing so. The NRC may explain American malaise, but it couldn’t keep Japan or Germany from getting the cost of nuclear down to 2.5 cents/kWH.
France is the counterfactual here. They did ride nuclear to energy abundance.
Still moderately pricey though. My utility is cheaper than the French average despite having natural gas as 40% of the generating mix alongside 55% nuclear.
In response to the 1973 oil embargo though, as I understand it.
22 cents a kilowatt hour is not what energy abundance looks like. https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/France/electricity_prices/
This is one component of my favorite sci-fi trope, where humans are monstrous creatures with a thirst for blood who evolved on a hell planet.
They like to jump off cliffs and hit each other in the head for fun, they recreationally poison themselves, they went to their planet's moon on deadly chemical rocket ships for no reason, and they discovered nuclear bombs before nuclear power plants.
I believe this is a variant of the 'Humanity, f*** yeah!' trope.
(Too much time wasted on tv tropes)
Deathworlders, I take it?
Did not know about this one, thanks! Hope it's good!
Lol it epitomizes the trope, if not having outright invented it.
It's also something like a million and a half words long, be warned.
Take a look at the New Yorker cover for July 24, 2023.
A few stray thoughts:
- I think you are being very naive to think that if nuclear power hadn’t been developed in a peaceful capacity first that governments wouldn’t have turned around and try to more militaristic ends. And given in your counterfactual Germany still likely (eventually) rebuilds its military and Soviet Union isn’t utterly devastated by war (just merely devastated by Stalin’s purges and collectivization). Just a lot of markers to me that a nuclear bomb would be both developed and used. In fact likely used more than twice
- I’m increasingly under the belief that pop culture impacts popular imagination and beliefs about history and the world more than we want to admit. In this case, I think we underrate how much The Simpsons has likely been a pretty big headwind against acceptance of nuclear power. Other examples. Perhaps most impactful, Americans view of antebellum south is likely shaped by Gone With The Wind as much as history textbooks. Bend it Like Beckham being a hit is a huge part of why Beckham became a star in America and why soccer finally took off in popularity in America. Will and Grace being a successful tv show being a big factor in gay rights movements. And currently, War Games and even more acutely Terminator franchise being a huge background part of all conversations regarding AI. I’m sure I’m missing many other examples but these are the ones that just pop to mind first.
"The Simpsons" is 100% downstream on problems with acceptance of nuclear power. Media coverage of real life incidents like the Karen Silkwood affair (1974-79) and Three Mile Island (1979) and films like "The China Syndrome" (1979), in which a civilian nuclear power plant is basically the villain, along with numerous films from the 1950s through 1970s that depict nuclear energy as unusually dangerous even without it being the main part of the story (thinking, for example, of "The Swarm" (1978), which includes a scene where killer bees fly into the control room of a civilian nuclear power plant that then literally blows up as the unsupervised reactor melts down), are the actual culprits, with "The Simpsons" just reflecting the existing zeitgeist. (Corroborated by the fact that permitting for new nuclear power plants in the US was basically dead before "The Simpsons" ever started airing in 1989.)
Much as I love the Simpsons I think this is way overselling their cultural import vis a vis nuclear power - but it's also several decades after widespread civilian nuclear powerplant construction both real and hypothetical did and would have taken place. Indeed, long before the Simpsons, nuclear power was contemporarily strongly identified with the techno-optimist view of civilizational development and space exploration even while the dangers of nuclear weapons were recognized - hence its strong identification with 50s-60s era retrofuturism (one could conceivably call it "atompunk" by analogy to "steampunk" - in fact Google tells me this is A Thing already, although I hear and use the term "retro-futurism" more commonly). It's all over Asimov, for example.
Excellent post. This needs wider circulation.
Another point is that without having established technological and economic dominance amid the postwar devastation, the US college system doesn’t necessarily become one of our major exports, nor one of the top systems in the world.
I think the die was cast here pre-war, many of the best scientists had already left Europe due to the Nazis even before invasion.
(see the other really fun alt-history post on what if the Habsburg Empire had stuck around)
Perhaps. But a large reason why we beefed up our secondary education system is because nukes put us into MAD with the Soviets, even before we actually understood what MAD was or how it worked.
Without nukes, we don’t have a Space Race or proxy wars, we just start building a postwar empire the old fashioned way rather than a hegemony.
Ironically the medical studies done on the survivors of the Atomic bombs in Japan have shown that radioactivity is a lot less harmful than previously suspected. There is a barely detectable increase in mortality in survivors which requires a dose of at least 100 fold higher than the level set as safe by regulators.
Sadly this information has not been used to modify the regulations.
The ‘safe’ level set for air pollution by fossil fuels increases mortality more than radioactivity from the atomic weapons blasts!!
The levels of radioactivity in the Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are less harmful than the levels of air pollution in a typical large city.
People were harmed by forcing them to evacuate, especially if they were moved to cities.
This is fascinating. Do you have any good sources that you recommend for people to read up on this that you found useful?
I'm assuming this is one of those posts written by ChatGPT because it spiraled off in a hallucinatory direction. That because the Manhattan Project had a military focus (and unnecessary because Germany didn't pursue the bomb and we beat them without it) we lost the chance to build a solid civilian energy program?
Nope.
Had there been no WWII Manhattan Project, there would have been a Cold War Manhattan Project. Hitler didn't build the bomb, but the Soviet Union was going to with or without spies. And so we would have. Or we would have done so alone to reduce the Soviet threat to Europe. And given the Cold War, the military focus on nuclear power would have dominated its civilian uses in any case.
And even if we had had a more robust civilian program, what reason is there to think nuclear power would have triumphed over super cheap oil and coal back in the 1950s?
This does seem to underrate the huge peace dividend that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has delivered.
Eventually, I guess. DoD spending was above 9% of GDP as late as 1969.
Overall, I think that you’re underrating the likelihood that somebody goes in pretty hard on bomb development relatively early in the nuclear reactor development cycle even in the “No World War II” scenario. Nuclear fission’s weapons potential was pretty immediately obvious to much of the global physics community, and even the no-Nazi Germany world would have a lot of great power rivalry and mutual suspicion— especially because tensions between the Western European imperial powers and the USSR would be more salient in that timeline.
Stalin certainly would have wanted the sort of security guarantee the bomb would offer, and if he started a bomb development project, the British and French would want to avoid falling behind.
Yeah, my impression is that in a no-WWII scenario Germany probably would have leaned heavily into nuclear weapons. Strategically, nuclear weapons make a huge deal of sense for a nation with powerful potential enemies to the east and west, and its geographic protection to the north and south.
Really good point. The war and Hiroshima "toxified" the public view of nuclear energy, while directing nuclear power technology in a direction optimized for plutonium production, rather than for intrinsic safety. A case can be made that the introduction of nuclear weapons has actually prevented subsequent global war by raising its cost, but that's a different question.
I’m somewhat unsure that the war toxified the view of it as much as the subsequent Cold War. Like I’ve never met a greatest generation person who was all that bothered by nuking Japan, and silent gen people weren’t so bothered it wasn’t really till boomers arrived in adulthood that we get this discomfort.
Almost all my grandparents were thrilled we didn’t have to do a grueling invasion of Japan which would have been incredibly bloody.
Like Matt said, the debate over the use of the bomb on Japan is endless and can never be resolved.
But for those on the "no use" side, it's imperative they read Paul Fussell's great essay on the topic, "Thank God for the atom bomb." (https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf)
My take: the bombing of Hiroshima was tragically justified. I wish they had waited longer to see the Japanese response before bombing Nagasaki, however.
Just reread that for the first time in a couple decades.
Thank you.
There was little controversy within the US at the time about using the Bomb. It was widely seen as a great triumph and fantastic success. Indeed the Cold War helped us all to appreciate the magnitude of the horror of nuclear war, but I'd say the actual use of the Bomb on a city was the single most important factor in helping us appreciate its horror, and thus linking nuclear energy to Doomsday.
Ordnance is weapons. Ordinance is a law.
Any idea why France’s nuclear trajectory has turned out differently, with the bulk of their electricity generated via nuclear?
Relative to other EU countries, France also has large uranium reserves. That played some role.
A much smaller domestic oil and gas industry, more limited foreign oil industry, and more limited hydroelectric potential probably were major contributors. I'm also not sure how self-sufficient France was on coal production post-WW2.
Also, I think, a long tradition of a strong, centralized state that generally enjoys widespread, deep(ish) support for its large projects (yes, you might feel differently if you're an unemployed 22 year old of Algerian Heritage)—especially as those projects buttress the vision of an independent France in an increasingly Anglo-Saxonized world. Ergo, if the French State says France needs large scale nuclear power, most French people have generally been in agreement.
"This was a monumental undertaking that cost $2 billion relative to the 1940 GDP of $200 billion."
Whenever someone tells us the cost of something a long time ago, they will normally convert it to modern values using inflation. This is not too useful, because incomes have typically risen faster than inflation. We need to know what the cost meant at the time. If something cost $5 in 1850, what could $5 actually plausibly buy in 1850? And what was the median weekly wage in 1850? For larger projects, the cost as a percentage of GDP is more relevant, as was done here.