Some of the most important discoveries to come out of the Los Alamos lab are related to nuclear medicine.

I wonder if the people who wish everyone at the lab had died will take a moral stand and reject their cancer therapies.

Then there’s the argument that the nuclear bomb has saved far more lives than it’s taken. I can’t imagine how the bellicose hatred so often expressed by the US and USSR in the ’50s and ’60s would not have led to the century’s third gigantic war had we not been deterred by the possibility of mutually assured destruction.

I mean, seriously, have you ever taken a look at the incredible mismatch in conventional forces? Our stuff was typically a little better technology wise, but even if your tanks are not that great, if you have 25 of them for every 1 of your opponents, they don’t have to be.

I hate the fact that nuclear weapons exist as much as anyone else, but there is a very good argument to be made that their existence is responsible for creating a level of restraint in world politics that might not be there otherwise.

The kind of wishing displayed in that TV show demonstrates a complete inability to weigh facts in historical context.

It plays some real games with the audience, and I enjoyed them. The sound effects wandered from being part of the action to being part of the score. I just thought it was wonderful.

And the performances were generally good. Knightley has never played anyone so brittle.

And the photography…my goodness.

It probably won’t win the Best Picture Oscar, but I think it might deserve it.

That is, we would have beat them by sheer weight of men and metal; and against them, we wouldn’t have had to contend with the German advantage in tactical and operational _nous_. Though the geography means it would have been long and bloody.

Our GDP was always enormously greater than the Soviets’; the CIA estimates which put theirs at about 1/3 of ours turned out to be grossly overoptimistic.

Though it was much closer to the reality than the Soviet Union’s own statistics — by the 1980’s, the Soviet government was often using the CIA statistics themselves.

Their only chance of beating us would be to knock us out before we could fully mobilize, which the Atlantic Ocean (and English Channel) would make extremely difficult.

You’ve got to be careful when estimating the economy of a totalitarian state; the artificial prices and/or currency levels make accurate comparisons very difficult even when they’re not deliberately hiding things.

Eg., the World Trade Organization just revised its estimate of China’s GDP down by 40%, after re-examining the purchasing-power levels, and they’re probably right.

This makes a whole series of policy assumptions about China questionable.

A friend of mine was an artillery officer in Germany during the 80’s, and has sat in the meetings where they discussed the tactics they’d use in the event of a Russian invasion. It basically amounted to firing off nuclear artillery shells, and then hiding.

Didn’t sound like a confidence that they could win a ground war.

– it’s the other way ’round.

We knew that there could be no conventional war in Europe; whoever was losing would reach for the nukes, and that’s _why_ our conventional forces were relatively small.

If there hadn’t been any nuclear weapons, we’d have had much larger ground armies.

What earthly point would there be in trying to duplicate the USSR’s 50,000 tanks when they’d all be radioactive dust in the stratosphere on Day Three anyway? And as a bonus, nukes are cheaper.

“You send a tank across the German border, we blow up the world.”

The Soviets tried to have huge nuclear _and_ huge conventional forces, and from a smaller economic base; as a result, they bankrupted themselves and collapsed.

Ultimately, most large, prolonged wars are won by the side with the deeper pockets. “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

That’s how WWI went, it’s how WWII went, and it’s how WWIII (aka The Cold War) went. It’s not inevitable that the side with the bigger GDP will win, but it’s the way to bet.