[AR] Re: Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 09:24:30 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 19 Feb 2018, Uwe Klein wrote:
Nope, sorry, neither. Apollo simply had nothing to do with A (and the
"uniformed mad men", incidentally, included the entire leadership of the
Soviet Union --
The background to the Cuba crisis and the various invasion plans from the
same time frame speak against it.
The "mad men" were clustered around the US military.
I think you're confusing "nuclear war is winnable" with "nuclear war is
acceptable and desirable". The Soviets fully agreed that a nuclear war
would be a terrible disaster, and was to be avoided if humanly possible.
But if it did happen, winning it was a meaningful concept, hideous though
the cost would be -- indeed, surely the best way to discourage the US from
starting such a war was to make it clear that the Soviets would win it.
(Although, at the time of the Cuba crisis, they were not yet in a position
to do that.) Terrible disasters and hideous costs could be survived, as
witness what the USSR had been through only a decade or two earlier.
Incidentally, the pro-nuclear-war faction in the US was not all military.
John von Neumann, in particular, strongly supported preemptive war -- like
some of the military, he thought the war was inevitable, and the longer it
was delayed, the worse it would be for the US.
Henry
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