There are so many parts of the conversation where you expect someone to push back, along the lunes of "and that's why this is so stupid". For example, when talking about the effect of fallout on neutral parties ... There ARE no neutral parties unaffected by fallout.
The "mirroring" phenomenon evident in 1956 persisted for decades.
In the early years of the Reagan Administration, his defense secretary Cap Weinberger issued a book entitled "Soviet Military Power" in order to justify their huge arms buildup.
As Tom Gervasi pointed out in his "annotated and corrected edition" of SMP, many examples of the Pentagon attributing weapons capabilities to the Soviets were quite literally reflections of what the US had already done or planned to do. After 40+ years, I still have my copy of Gervasi on a bookshelf _somewhere,_ but it isn't easy for me to retrieve. Otherwise I would quote some specific examples.
Maybe Prof. Wellerstein is familiar with Gervasi and could comment on the reliability of his interpretations...?
I'm not understanding the math presented. The text shows a discussion of 8 xxx weapons as groundbursts, against airfield targets.
Lets posit we "fill in the blank" with the workhorse 1.7 MT arsenal weapon.
Surely a strike of 8 of those, just 8, does not result in the casualty stack that is then discussed? What am I missing? Does a single strike of even 8 ea, 60 MT weapons account for such massive casualty numbers?
It is presumably contemplating 8 weapons targeted against *each* airfield. There must surely have been more than 8 total military airfields available to the Soviet Union.
At that time, the USA had the Mk. 17 and Mk. 24 @ 15? MT yield in the inventory as well as the Mk. 15 which tested at 1.7 or 3.8 MT depending on which set of test data I look at.
For comparison, see the fallout map of Castle Bravo, also 15 MT and a ground burst (more or less, small island, big bomb, lots of sea water).
I think there must be a number, not just a yield estimate, in the redacted portion after "eight" -- like eight thousand, for example. For just eight weapons, the fallout casualty estimates don't make sense even if the weapons are HUGE, and the discussion about it not being an unreasonable number of weapons doesn't make sense either....
One issue here is that this was a army study, and the fallout damage was from airforce strike, the implication being maybe the army need for nukes on the battlefield wasnt as bad?
Sadly, 324 million casualties is not a large number, when compared to the number of people society kills during peacetime. Take socially induced abortion as the current death toll record holder at 73 million globally per year. All totted up to the current day that's over 4 billion casualties from abortion alone. Nuclear weapons are relatively safe, even if used at full tilt by both sides.
Of course it's easy to kill within society, at scale, so long as the narrative the tribe follows allows you to define a human being as inhuman or evil in some way(the jews, foetuses etc) and have the people upholding that society backing up the narrative. Then they can be slaughtered with impunity in grotesquely high numbers, yet it will be forbidden to call it genocide of course and anyone who does will be brutally censored. But we tend to rather conveniently overlook this do we not? While we do our charity, NGO work, planet saving, DEI, protest marches, holding power to account, and so on and so on.
> Sadly, 324 million casualties is not a large number, when compared to the number of people society kills during peacetime. Take socially induced abortion as the current death toll record holder at 73 million globally per year. All totted up to the current day that's over 4 billion casualties from abortion alone. Nuclear weapons are relatively safe, even if used at full tilt by both sides.
This strikes me as a bit of a fallacious comparison. Even if we accept that abortion is the same as killing/wounding a full-on human being, you're talking 73 million deaths globally - so out of a population of 8 billion - over the course of a whole year compared to 324 million in the course of 1-2 weeks, maybe a month at most. That's 200,000 daily abortions vs 10,800,000 daily casualties to nuclear war, and 0.1% of the given regions (or, well, the given worlds) population vs 33% of the given regions (the Communist bloc having a population of 970 million in 1956). The timescales and relative proportions drastically affect how much impact can be tolerated.
Am I being fallacious. Or are you resisting fiercely. Because of the shame and guilt of it. And would rather allow genocide at scale so as not to face that shame and guilt?
USA never tested a device over 15 MT, though such designs were studied.
USSR tested exactly one weapon in that size range but had the sense to NOT do it as a ground burst & also substituted lead for U238 in the various pushers, tampers & radiation casing (where use of DU or natural uranium might have resulted in the dirtiest bomb ever otherwise). It was "93% clean" yet still caused a spike in atmospheric C-14 approximately equal to all the previous thermonuclear tests of the whole world up to that point. As I recall, Andrei Sakharov computed each megaton of thermonuclear airburst equated to 6,700 cancer deaths world wide over the next 8,000 years?
There are so many parts of the conversation where you expect someone to push back, along the lunes of "and that's why this is so stupid". For example, when talking about the effect of fallout on neutral parties ... There ARE no neutral parties unaffected by fallout.
The "mirroring" phenomenon evident in 1956 persisted for decades.
In the early years of the Reagan Administration, his defense secretary Cap Weinberger issued a book entitled "Soviet Military Power" in order to justify their huge arms buildup.
As Tom Gervasi pointed out in his "annotated and corrected edition" of SMP, many examples of the Pentagon attributing weapons capabilities to the Soviets were quite literally reflections of what the US had already done or planned to do. After 40+ years, I still have my copy of Gervasi on a bookshelf _somewhere,_ but it isn't easy for me to retrieve. Otherwise I would quote some specific examples.
Maybe Prof. Wellerstein is familiar with Gervasi and could comment on the reliability of his interpretations...?
I'm not understanding the math presented. The text shows a discussion of 8 xxx weapons as groundbursts, against airfield targets.
Lets posit we "fill in the blank" with the workhorse 1.7 MT arsenal weapon.
Surely a strike of 8 of those, just 8, does not result in the casualty stack that is then discussed? What am I missing? Does a single strike of even 8 ea, 60 MT weapons account for such massive casualty numbers?
It is presumably contemplating 8 weapons targeted against *each* airfield. There must surely have been more than 8 total military airfields available to the Soviet Union.
I think typically 100Kt devices would be used but in much higher number. To localise the maximum effect per tonne.
At that time, the USA had the Mk. 17 and Mk. 24 @ 15? MT yield in the inventory as well as the Mk. 15 which tested at 1.7 or 3.8 MT depending on which set of test data I look at.
For comparison, see the fallout map of Castle Bravo, also 15 MT and a ground burst (more or less, small island, big bomb, lots of sea water).
https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/maps/bravo-fallout.html
I think there must be a number, not just a yield estimate, in the redacted portion after "eight" -- like eight thousand, for example. For just eight weapons, the fallout casualty estimates don't make sense even if the weapons are HUGE, and the discussion about it not being an unreasonable number of weapons doesn't make sense either....
One issue here is that this was a army study, and the fallout damage was from airforce strike, the implication being maybe the army need for nukes on the battlefield wasnt as bad?
Sadly, 324 million casualties is not a large number, when compared to the number of people society kills during peacetime. Take socially induced abortion as the current death toll record holder at 73 million globally per year. All totted up to the current day that's over 4 billion casualties from abortion alone. Nuclear weapons are relatively safe, even if used at full tilt by both sides.
Of course it's easy to kill within society, at scale, so long as the narrative the tribe follows allows you to define a human being as inhuman or evil in some way(the jews, foetuses etc) and have the people upholding that society backing up the narrative. Then they can be slaughtered with impunity in grotesquely high numbers, yet it will be forbidden to call it genocide of course and anyone who does will be brutally censored. But we tend to rather conveniently overlook this do we not? While we do our charity, NGO work, planet saving, DEI, protest marches, holding power to account, and so on and so on.
> Sadly, 324 million casualties is not a large number, when compared to the number of people society kills during peacetime. Take socially induced abortion as the current death toll record holder at 73 million globally per year. All totted up to the current day that's over 4 billion casualties from abortion alone. Nuclear weapons are relatively safe, even if used at full tilt by both sides.
This strikes me as a bit of a fallacious comparison. Even if we accept that abortion is the same as killing/wounding a full-on human being, you're talking 73 million deaths globally - so out of a population of 8 billion - over the course of a whole year compared to 324 million in the course of 1-2 weeks, maybe a month at most. That's 200,000 daily abortions vs 10,800,000 daily casualties to nuclear war, and 0.1% of the given regions (or, well, the given worlds) population vs 33% of the given regions (the Communist bloc having a population of 970 million in 1956). The timescales and relative proportions drastically affect how much impact can be tolerated.
You forgot to do the maths fully.
73 million, per year, for decades.
The worst nuclear war kills relatively few.
Am I being fallacious. Or are you resisting fiercely. Because of the shame and guilt of it. And would rather allow genocide at scale so as not to face that shame and guilt?
Are you running cover for the tribe?
We All Have a Theory
https://www.northstokelife.com/2026/05/we-all-have-theory.html
This insanity never gets old.
It does. But you are forbidden from discussing it.
https://www.northstokelife.com/2026/03/the-purpose-of-war.html
Well, maybe not 60 Mt in 1956, but the Soviet Union had 210 ICBMs with a 20 Mt warhead each in 1973-1974.
Right. But not 60 Mt in 1956.
USA never tested a device over 15 MT, though such designs were studied.
USSR tested exactly one weapon in that size range but had the sense to NOT do it as a ground burst & also substituted lead for U238 in the various pushers, tampers & radiation casing (where use of DU or natural uranium might have resulted in the dirtiest bomb ever otherwise). It was "93% clean" yet still caused a spike in atmospheric C-14 approximately equal to all the previous thermonuclear tests of the whole world up to that point. As I recall, Andrei Sakharov computed each megaton of thermonuclear airburst equated to 6,700 cancer deaths world wide over the next 8,000 years?
https://history.aip.org/exhibits/sakharov/nuclear-testing.html