In a remarkable burst of efficiency, I have managed to finish this page somewhat early – so here it is! To all my fellow citizens of the USA, Happy Independence Day. And to everybody, this is a pair of pages that reads best as a spread, so… yes, I know it’s been forever since I’ve done this, but the full spread is on topwebcomics.com, so vote, and you can see it! Oh, yeah, meaningless ranking systems. Hooray! But still.
Colonel Haulley, by the way, is speaking a paraphrase of… I’m afraid I don’t remember who. Either General Power or General Le May. During the Cold War, he quipped, when asked about the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, that “If there are two Americans and One Russian left at the end of the war, then we’ve won.” I guess it was General Power, because it was Curtis Le May who said of Cuba, during the Crisis, “I’ll fry it!”
Yikes. People were pretty damn strident in the Cold War.
Anyway, I’m putting my feet up for a little while, here, so enjoy the comic, enjoy the weekend, and I’ll see you next week, God willing!
General Le May was a interesting character; part of the Air Force Bomber mafia who thought bombers could win every war. As a former cold warrior I’m amazed that we as a species didn’t blow ourselves up in those decades. They just didn’t have the science or thought what would happen if the bombs started to fall. When you learn about just how close we came during the Cuban Missile Crisis; we were very lucky.
The probabilities were strongly in favor of us doing so, actually. Just before Able Archer, actually, the Soviet early warning satellite network malfunctioned and it was only a single commander exercising common sense that saved them from starting a war. And there were dozens of other such incidents.
That one is an odd incident indeed. “Hmm, missiles. I will hope that the warning system is wrong and the americans have not launched a decapitation strike.”
Another scary period was 1983 and the combination of various events that year. Look for example at the English Wikipedia article “Able Archer 83”. Kind of puts a knot in your stomach. :-s
I chalk it up to lack of understanding and poor coordination between governments vested with too much power.
There was several times we came close in the last five decades, Able Archer was one of them. I think people fully didn’t realize what would happen until this TV movie came out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
I was in HS and it woke everyone up. Until then most people thought whoever struck first would be less destroyed. Crazy times.
Or you could just watch the end of “WarGames”, and learn that “the only winning move is not to play.” 😀
Hermann Kahn’s approach is one I think came closer to the truth: deterrence must be credible, but also must be conducted within the context of international custom and understandings about what an opponent will or will not do. To turn away from nuclear war and fail to plan for it just because it’s horrible is not a sufficient response, nor can you rely on your opponent to take the same approach.
Well, they didn’t call it “MAD” [Mutually Assured Destruction] for nothing, y’know. 😉 Or, as a great man once said, “Deterrence is the art of producing, in the mind of the enemy, the *fear* to attack.” 😀
LeMay seems to have sent a personal letter to each of presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy advising a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the difference between LeMay and a number of fictional counterparts is that he did not attempt it without permission from the civilian authority.
In Le May’s defense, he adhered to the theory born in World War 2 that wars of the modern variety were immoral and bloody, and that once started, the best that you could hope to do was win it was fast and decisively as you could. And the pattern if the 1950s was one of Communist imperialism, so you can see where that idea came from. It wasn’t until the Cuban Missile Crisis that both sides really had to come face to face with their own mortality on a global scale.
Hermann Kahn warned of it and of the kind of “fail safe” crises we and the Soviet both experienced in the 1970s and 1980s, but people didn’t listen. They thought he was trying to win a nuclear war, when he was trying to find ways to prevent one.
The theory was born earlier:
“War is cruelty; it cannot be refined.” -General William T. Sherman
Sherman was one of the first truly modern Generals.
I’m from the Clinton years and too late for the Cold War.
Curtis LeMay was effective in wiping out enemy population centers in Europe and Japan. The problem was that people like him, MacArthur, and Patton were creatures of war, and didn’t fare too well in peacetime. Patton had the luck to die three months after the war while MacArthur was fired by Truman for advocating an atomic response against the Chinese.
On another note, I can see that’s Captain Rucker in Continental Army uniform from the Scimitar Op and before the skull plate, but what about Sarah and Haulley?
MacArthur’s multiple request for nuclear response against the Chinese read more like panic than anything else, he didn’t take the Chinese army seriously in spite everyone warning him otherwise.
Which should have been expected considering his performance on December 8, 1941.
Its amazing that the PLA had slipped 200,000 troops into Korea without anyone noticing. Even after the Marines started to have full out battles around the Chosin Reservoir and captured scores of these “new troops” MacArthur’s HQ still didn’t believe they were Chinese. Fascinating and scary times.
The other problem LeMay has is that he’s pretty much been villified due to his having run SAC – a lot of positions and quotes attributed to him either didn’t happen or have been…decontexified to make him fit the cigar-chomping warmonger image.
The fact he had a form of facal palsy sticking his face in a permament scowl didn’t help.
I’m pretty sure though that the Tommy Power quote is authentic.
That said, Mac was somebody who was forever and only a political creature – while hailed as a hero by the press anybody who actually served with him utterly loathed him and regarded him as a complete incompetent at best.
I can’t fault Lemay’s thoughts on war. It is a brutal,dirty business and the only way to win (end it) is to make the other side suffer to the point of surrender.
Well, even he acknowledged that, had he lost the war, he’d have been shot as a war criminal. When a nation is put on a war footing in the modern fashion, the result is just insanity.