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Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of inexperience and reckless judgment for saying Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the United States as the Soviet Union did in its day. The likely GOP presidential nominee made the criticism yesterday in Chicago, Obama’s home turf. “Such a statement betrays the depth of Senator Obama’s inexperience and reckless judgment,” McCain said.McCain has proved beyond the shadow of doubt that he’s delusional. It’s intuitively obvious that Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the US as the USSR did in its day. By several orders of magnitude.
...
(Speechless.)
Senility is the only reasonable explanation. McCain, for one, should know that there's a slight gap between "might be able to produce an atom bomb in 2-10 years" and "has a well-developed strategic capability with over 30,000 warheads, including the world's largest force of H-bombs mounted on ICBMs".
Uh, "the same serious thread" should have been a threaT I guess :)
Charlie @1: scaremongering worked a threat for Republicans for more than a decade. If anything, this attack is banal and old... exactly what you would expect by yet another warmonger WASP grown up during the Cold War. The soon we get rid of that generation, the better...
Isn't McCain, like, about a hundred years old and no longer capable of learning new tricks? [/s]
That's the impression I have of him. (No insult to genuine centenarians is intended. Including, especially, the 100-something year old Crow woman who was there to see Obama yesterday, as they adopted him.)
Either delusional or willing to pander to a "base" that is, no matter how delusional it makes him look.
By the logic that Iran is a direct nuclear threat to the U.S., shouldn't McCain argue that Russia (with its arsenal of ICBMs and bombers, and a vaguely hostile leader) poses an even bigger threat and America must bomb Russia right now for the sake of national security?
This seems to kind of confirm what Obama's been saying all along about how experience isn't very helpful if it doesn't come with good judgment, and how we're in need of a leader with a fresh perspective.
Because if you honestly can't see the literal and figurative ocean between Iran's and the USSR's spheres of military influence, you probably shouldn't be permitted near pointy objects of any kind--let alone nuclear launch codes.
I think the Things Younger Than John McCain website is again relevant.
Favorites include
The Twelve Steps
Penicillin
The Lincoln Tunnel
Plutonium
Bugs Bunny
Dick Cheney!
Helvetica
When the United States begins weekly duck and cover exercises in all of its schools nationwide (knowing that it is a futile exercise, yet necessary to show some degree of control over our lives); when the populace as a whole begins building fallout shelters in their basements, and backyards, and neighborhoods, and stocking them with supplies for a month or more; when we sit in fear listening to the radio and/or watching the television for news updates regarding the blockade around Iran (figuratively speaking, that is) and wondering if this may be our last day, our last hour on earth -- then, and only then, will Iran be as great a threat to the US as the Soviet Union under Khrushchev. Where the hell was McCain in the '50s and '60s. . . certainly not in the United States!
Two questions:
(1) What is John McCain smoking and why hasn't it been banned yet?
(2) I wasn't in the US when Nixon was president, so I have to ask: Was he anywhere near this delusional?
Fragano, in answer to #2: Not that I recall.
Tricky Dick? He was crooked as heck, but he wasn't batshit insane.
Also -- he had a sense of shame, and when required, for the good of the country, he resigned.
My dad is 83 and has Alzheimer's, and he can quite clearly see the difference between the USSR and Iran. WTF, John McCain, WTF.
James D. Macdonald #13: I was under the impression that Nixon had a pretty clear paranoid streak and some rather odd obsessions (about Jews, for example).
#8 ::: annalee flower horne
There's no literal ocean between Iran and Russia. I suppose you could count the Caspian sea, but it's tiny, and doesn't pose any kind of barrier between the two nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Caspianseamap.png
The only question I have is whther this is effective as fearmongering; granted that people reading this blog are more likely to be concerned about a police state than a terrorist attack, we should keep in mind that this puts us in a minority.
So; does this actually hurt McCain's campaign? Or does being overdramatic about the threat of Iran make it look to the public like we need a 3:00AM candidate more than we need a reformer?
In any case, as with Bush's attempted appointment of Harriet Meyers, paving the way for an ultraconservative judge that got through, does this set McCain up for less opposition when he starts bashing Obama's policies in earnest?
Nixon never threatened to nuke countries that weren't actually threatening us, as far as I recall, and he knew what diplomacy meant. He wasn't entirely sane (that 'enemies list' was one symptom), but he wasn't really delusional.
When McCain says this, he is saying to authoritarians, "I believe in your worldview, I validate you, please vote for me and I will protect you." The reason he does this is that it works for authoritarians. That it is delusional is entirely beside the point.
There's nothing Obama can do to "beat" that, in the minds of those McCain is addressing with this, because Fox News has already anointed McCain. By the laws of succession, McCain is their Leader; all that remains, in their minds, is to force the rest of the country to acknowledge it.
The crucial question is: how many people are those people? They're a minority, yes, but they're vocal. And if Obama would win, they'd grumble, but they'd "respect the Office" and they'd go along, just as they did under Clinton.
I honestly don't know how to defang this virulent meme, but don't for a second doubt it exists. Yes, there are lots of people who hear McCain say that, and pump their fists because it makes them feel part of the winning team. It doesn't matter if it's true. It really doesn't. Think of it as verbal primate dominance display (which it is) and it will all make sense.
David @17 - I don't think we're in the minority any more.
As villains go, Nixon was a complex -- even tragic -- figure. (How many other US presidents have had an opera written about them?) Our present-day batch, McCain included, have all the depth and complexity of a set of paper dolls. Evil paper dolls, granted, but still flat and flimsy when you stand them up next to their predecessor.
The Republican base is the 27% of the electorate who think Bush is doing a good job. That's 7% who genuinely think he's doing a good job, and 20% who can't reliably tell you who the president is.
wintermute @16: I said "spheres of military influence," as in, there's a literal ocean (the Atlantic) between what the Iranian military can reach and what the USSR's military could reach in its day. Sorry for the confusion--my wording was a little obscure.
"There is an old Vulcan proverb: only Nixon could go to China."
PJ Evans #18, & others about Nixon: I've read that Nixon used a ‘Madman’ tactical manoeuvre (there are other references). D'you think you'd need to be just a touch unbalanced to do that?
OTOH, I reckon that to want to be POTUS enough to actually seriously run, and, even more, to succeed, you'd need to be slightly more than just a touch unbalanced. (The same goes for PM of Oz.)
Annalee:
Ah, that makes more sense. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
I'm just so used to people completely misusing "literal" that I didn't stop to tease out an actual correct meaning for it. I'm literally burning with embarrassment ;)
What I find baffling about this is the assertion that we should not talk to the Iranian government because it poses as big a threat as the USSR did. Even if the comparison were true, it would be an arguement in favor of engagement, not against it.
After all, we did hold regular diplomatic discussions with the Soviet Union, and these were pretty much essential to avoiding hostilities on several occasions. Imagine what might have happened if Robert Kennedy hadn't been talking to Ambassador Dobrynin during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's not a pretty picture.
When considering the willingness to use those weapons, one has to consider that the Iranians just might pose a greater threat especially because of the fanaticism of those in power. Granted, it may be a show only to secure a base of power, but one has to wonder how dedicated the Iranian power structure is to that fanaticism.
Sadly, Saddam got off too easy for causing the Iranians to revitalize their military after the fall of the Shah.
Tom @26: Do you really expect the party that f***ed up the Middle East to be logical?
Wasn't it Churchill who said, "Better jaw-jaw than war-war?"
IMVHO, talk is better than military action, as the former usually doesn't cost anywhere near as much as the latter...
Michael Roberts @#19:
And if Obama would win, they'd grumble, but they'd "respect the Office" and they'd go along, just as they did under Clinton.
Are you being sarcastic? Ok, I'm not American, and I was pretty young at the time, but that's not how *I* remember the Nineties.
Mez 24: It was a MADman strategy. MAD was a "balance of power" doctrine, Mutual Assured Destruction, the idea being that you just have so many nuclear weapons that if "either" side starts a nuclear war "both" sides will be completely destroyed.
And then they put MEN (hormonal creatures that we are) in charge of it. Madness indeed, but not self-described as such.
My quotes above are because of course not every nation was an ally of either the United States or the Soviet Union, but everyone in the world would have been killed by the MAD war, had it begun. It was a scary time; I remember hearing as late as the 80s that something like a third of gradeschool children in the US "believe they will die in a nuclear war."
Debra Doyle #20: As epitaphs go that one's brilliant.
wintermute @25: no worries-- I'm right there with you on the misuse of "literally."
And here's a usage question (actual question; not being a smartass): is "literally burning" correct when referring to a burning sensation? As far as I'm aware, that's the actual medical description of the symptom--hence creams and whatnot that treat "itching and burning." But it does conjure up images that would warrant Xopher's bucket of water.
James D. Macdonald #21: YOMANK.
Xopher #31: I'm no expert, but I don't think that anything like the whole world population would realistically have died in the aftermath of a full-scale exchange between the US and USSR. I gather there would have been a godawful number of people dead, especially in the two main targets and those downwind of them, ugly (but probably very hard to predict) global climate effects, and a worldwide rise in cancer rates and such for many years to come. But ISTR that more energy has been released by big volcanoes and meteor strikes than both sides had in arsenal. God only knows what the survivors' societies would look like, though. Maybe some places would have come through pretty well, and others turned into someplace from which you'd voluntarily emigrate to North Korea or Sudan.
I think Micheal nails it in #19.
I think Those People are watching their happy place -- where they go to be angry and self-righteous and to scare people -- go from briefly being the zeitgeist to being generally regarded as a malignant ploy.
Albatross @35: I grew up in the UK. Until the end of the cold war, I never lived more than 5 miles from a strategic target likely to be on the receiving end of a number of H-bombs in the first exchange. The official UK government estimates in the 1960s were for 60% civilian fatalities at 6 months; by the 1980s, we were looking at 60% dead in the first hour, rising to 95% mortality (and possibly even complete extinction) at 12 months.
This sort of overkill probably went for Germany, the low countries, North-East France, Northern Italy, Poland, and just about everywhere in the likely theatre of ground combat. As the old joke put it, "how far apart are the villages in West Germany?" ... "About five kilotons."
Estimates for mortality in the USSR and USA were in the 50% to 70% range after 12 months. (Remember, not all injuries kill instantly, and we're talking about literally tens of thousands of warheads landing on those territories.) Small rural towns and smallholdings might come off relatively lightly, but cities would be ... well, think of what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans, square it, and apply that to every single city in North America.
Best estimates for a full-on NATO/WarPac exchange were for it to kill somewhere in the 600M-1Bn range directly, and for indirect effects to kill another billion people over subsequent years (environmental damage, radiation effects, climactic effects, total collapse of the global trade system, total collapse of the developed world economies, etc).
At least we now know, with 20/20 hindsight, that the Soviets didn't want to go there either.
And it's fairly clear the Iranians don't, either -- as witness the fact that they haven't gone all out to take down Israel at any point in the past 29 years.
I find it hard to believe everyone "in the world" would have died even in an Apocalyptic nuclear exchange between the US and USSR. Certainly nearly everyone in the two countries would have died, but Australia? South Africa? South Pacific islands?
The novel "On the Beach" addressed this, but I don't think the wind currents and half life of fallout would have produced that kind of result.
Would have sucked to be in the Northern Hemisphere at that time though.
Charlie #37: Yeah, the Iranians are clearly impossible to deter and unafraid of consequences. That's why they did their best to hide their nuclear program for so long, and why they apparently funnel weapons and training to their friends in Iraq and Lebanon rather than openly attack the US and Israel.
The whole Iran is the new Nazi Germany meme is delusional, but it's a consistent delusion. The neocons have been selling it for several years now, in their attempt to get public support for invading or bombing Iran.
The talking points about whether Obama should be talking about talking to Iran are another example of the way serious policy questions get turned into games in the US. (I assume everywhere, but the US is where I understand politics.) The real issue is how we should try to keep the Iranians from developing nukes (if we can), and whether there's some way to get some kind of minimally non-hostile relations between us. But that's hard to think about, complicated, depressing, and not subject to simple black hats vs white hats reporting, so what we get is this nonsense. (Perhaps next, McCain can criticize Obama for saying he doesn't care about the shape of the conference table.)
John L: the USA and USSR were not the only targets that would have been nailed in an exchange. Virtually all the European NATO and Warsaw Pact countries would have been flattened -- smaller land area, denser population, likely to already be the theatre of battle for a conventional war before things went nuclear, and within range of both sides' tactical and theatre weapons (never mind the long-range strategic assets).
The effect of a US/USSR exchange would have been to destroy Europe at the same time, effectively ringing down the curtain on western civilization.
albatross, I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember the "destroy the world n times over" statements, where n was a large two-digit number. They were saying that the US and USSR had n times the number of nukes it would take to put every bit of the surface of the Earth inside the blast radius of at least one of them.
Of course, they wouldn't be used that way. They'd be targeted on the US, the USSR, and their various allies (and probably on nonaligned nations that were annoying to one or the other power). Probably China too, so they couldn't swoop in and take over after the two "sides" got done killing each other. That doesn't leave much.
Anything that wasn't nuked would be lethally close to something that was. Anyone who survived would be killed by the radioactive dust clouds that would encircle the Earth. Anyone who didn't die of that would die eventually of starvation, because growing food on the Earth would no longer be possible (because of the occlusion of sunlight, never mind the impossibility of finding unpoisoned ground to grow on). And that's assuming that the "nuclear winter" theory was wrong.
At any rate, that's what we were taught. That's what I believed. If McCain wants people to believe Iran poses THAT kind of existential threat, he's got a long way to go!
John @38: What you're not realizing is that both the USA and the USSR were going to be firing ICBMs at each other's allies as well.
So the bombs would be hitting all the NATO countries and the entire Soviet bloc. What the bombs didn't kill, the fallout and the resulting economic collapse would finish off.
Remember the US still exports a fair amount of grain -- what happens to those countries that are dependent upon US farmers for their bread when the breadbasket is radioactive slag?
It's also worth noting that Nixon got to see a real war for his very ownself.
Most of the people who either swallow this, or rush to spread it (either for a living or free of charge) never have, and would, to steal a phrase from John Rogers over at Kung-fu Monkey, be running around "shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls* who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house" at the propsect of actual risk. They're (to use a childish phrase) scairedy-cats, and they're using their tough talk and strutting to hide (they hope) that fact. Those worst thing you can do is fail to call them on it; putting them through rigorous and relentless questioning, mocking what they imagine to be the validity of their arguments makes them unravel pretty quickly.
In the case of someone like John McCain, I think it's a combination of Right-wing Authoritarianism and the fact that the only tool he's learned to use, so to speak, is a hammer. He is able to tell himself he has some understanding of warfare; his military background did not progress to the point where he would have be expected to do anything but fight when told to do so. He's never been expected to handle long-range strategic planning or to advise in that sort of capacity.
There are also those who have become a little too carried away with the American tendency to apply sports metaphors to warfare, and have forgotten that while you may have only one way to get to the Super Bowl, there's more than one way to handle an international situation.
Nixon was ready to talk tough for the sake of the base, and then to sit down and work out deals. He was able to grasp the consequences, both foreign and domestic, of failing to make deals. His flaws would fill books (and have done so and will do so) but any and all comparisons of him with his acolytes leave Nixon looking pretty impressive.
___________
*My apologies to all actual Japanese schoolgirls, and to all those who have been Japanese schoolgirls, who do not deserve in any way, shape, or form to be compared to American neocons, their mouthpieces, or the idiots buying and drinking their Kool-aid.
Albatross @35: While true(ish), volcanoes and meteorite strikes commonly happen somewhere else. A lot of nuclear weapons, especially second strike weapons and tactical nukes in Europe, would have been used on our most populated areas. (Towns and villages in West Germany-as-was were an average distance of the radius of effect of a 10 kilotonne weapon apart; "tactical" weapons typically go from 5 kilotonnes to 500 kilotonnes.)
The Soviet Union had plans to attack us, possibly with nukes(1). Iran has plans to attack us, possibly with nukes(2).
Threat(USSR) == Threat(Iran). QED.
Makes perfect sense to me...
</sarcasm>
(1) but more likely to attack our allies with their 3-1 superiority in armour, and their 10-1 superiority (and known willingness to use it up) in manpower. But, you know, the best defence to that is "invade and we'll nuke you", and so they had to have an answer to *that*, and...
(2) no, I'm not going to give suggestions.
Lori: Yes, I think so.
albatross, we had no intention to dogpile. Sorry.
Me @44 & Charlie @37: A kilotonne here, a kilotonne there, and pretty soon you're talking real damage.
Albatross and John, may I plead Air Force Brat, and RPGs? I grew up with Civil Defense pamphlets in the house, duck-and-cover drills at school, and spent a good portion of my time at college discussing what would be the best direction to go if someone did push that button?
My apologies for the pile-on as well...
Charlie @ 40: Yes, both sides' general game plan for Armageddon seemed to have been to fight a land and air war across Europe, and then for the loser to start the global thermonuclear war. I recall during the Cold War some American NATO general complained that German towns and villages were "only a few hundred kilotons apart". Not to mention that the US and USSR had both strategic (long-range) and tactical nuclear weapons stationed in various European countries, making them nuclear targets to the other side. (I'm not instructing you about that - just mentioning it to others who might not have thought about that part. It seems weird to think of people having not grown up with this history.)
I expect the world economic and distribution system would also largely collapse for a while, meaning that probably after an interval the survivors can't ship food across the world, and also probably some crop failures due to short-term climate change ("nuclear winter") - which, to address albatross's comment, has happened in the aftermath of Really Big volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa. So starvation would take a toll in a lot of food importing areas which weren't directly targeted, like parts of Asia.
In the end, I think one might have expected to see Australia, Brazil, and India become the new world powers.
Everyone in the world dies? Most likely not - that would take something like a Siberian Traps or Chicxulub-scale event. But a full-scale global nuclear war would likely have had a bigger effect than the Black Death did world-wide, and it would have been all at once rather than over a century or two.
Oh, gee, and I see I'm late to the party too. Uhhh, can we just plead shared PTSD among Cold War kids?
fidelio @ 43...
Perfetcly work-safe, except to your keyboard or to your monitor.
(My many thanks to the MLer who first posted a link to this a few years ago.)
It was a scary time; I remember hearing as late as the 80s that something like a third of gradeschool children in the US "believe they will die in a nuclear war."
Speaking as someone who was in elementary school at the time... *g*
I believed (quite sensibly) that *if* there was a nuclear war, I would die. I lived 10 miles from Harrisburg, about 100 miles from Washington DC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Pittsburgh and NYC were a bit farther, but I was still well within a potential fallout plume. I was within 5 miles of a nuclear power plant, which also had to be targeted. And if the Soviets failed to use nukes on all of those cities, they were stupider than my 10 year old self could imagine.
I didn't believe that grownups would be silly enough to actually *fire* nuclear weapons.
And I was young enough that I thought the US Navy supply depot was a better target than Ft. Indiantown Gap. As an adult, I know that the fort is a better target, since it's a weapons test site. All in all, I did a fairly decent analysis for a 10 year old. I didn't worry much about destroy *the* world or not, since I understood that even if the adults weren't trying very hard, I would be dead. (I think I figured on severe radiation sickness, since I'd be too far from the local ground zeros to be vaporized)
Clifford @ 51
Yes. I belong to that club too.
Duck-and cover drills in classrooms with vinyl-coated curtains. The desks didn't provide much cover either. (Taking cover in a hallway with glass skylights never made much sense, either.) The joys of living near a nuclear-research facility never pale, even some decades removed ....
Sorry folks, didn't mean to dogpile.
(But I grew up five miles up the road from the Vickers tank factory -- where 90% of the British Army's armour came from, so a prime strategic target -- and ten miles from the intersection of the M1 and M62 motorways -- probably one of the four most important logistic road interchanges in the UK -- and ten miles or so south of Catterick barracks, a major army base -- and if you draw the overpressure rings for a 200Kt IRBM warhead around each of 'em, I was just about bracketed.)
I suspect half my generation have low-grade PTSD simply from growing up on Airstrip One. And when folks who don't remember what it was like to have a couple of thousand warheads pointed at an area about the size of Greater Los Angeles start talking it down, that tends to push my button.
I'm too young for duck-and-cover drills as such, though they did use a book labeled "civil defense" for "tornado drills." No hiding under the desks; we filed into the hallway (no skylights, and the big windows were in the classrooms) and sat at the sides. I think we may have covered our heads with our arms, but the last time we did that (if we did) was about 38 years ago, so my memory of it is spotty.
Funny how the stupid lies about protecting yourself from nuclear attack turned useful when applied to tornados.
I seriously doubt that India would be spared to become a replacement superpower.
Serge,
Don't forget Halo Kitty!
Nancy C Mittens @ 58... Hmmm. "Page not found."
Charlie Stross @55: I still occasionally have nightmares that I'm trying to get people to evacuate a city. I've never figured out what triggers them...
I was at a Pagan festival a few years ago, and many of the attendees were military, former military and EMTs. What the organizers didn't know is that the local volunteer fire department used the "nuclear attack" alert sequence to call the volunteers in for a run.
It's 7AM on a lovely sunny Saturday morning -- and the siren goes off. More than half the camp bails out of their tents wondering who the hell decided to start WWIII. The folks running the festival had an interesting time calming things down.
Well, I did say I figured it would have sucked to live in the Northern Hemisphere if an all-out nuclear war had broken out.
For the Southern Hemisphere, though, times would have been tough for sure, but global human extermination? Nah; we're too adaptable a species to let a little thing like half a planet sterilized kill us off.
Comparing Iran to this kind of Armageddon, though, is the height of McCain-ish stupidity, and makes me wonder if he's in the early stages of Alzheimers already.
I'm turning 30 later this year, so I was 10 or 11 when the Warsaw Pact fell apart, the Berlin Wall became an art project instead of a geopolitical reality, etc...
The early-80s paranoia really is a foreign territory to me, as a result. All those strange SF stories of the "OMG teh Soviets haz invaded America" or "we just launched all the nukes" themes rank somewhere only slightly above Orsen Wells' radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in terms of "scary things that should keep me awake at night", really.
McCain's as scary as the USSR, really line is likely to be met with "Remind me again what the USSR was?" from voters my age and younger...
Wirelizard @62: By the 1980s, I'd been living with the awareness of "what if they drop the bomb" for 20 years. The older Boomers have lived with it even longer.
Nixon also negotiated with China, making him, in McCain and Bush's book (which they coauthored) an appeaser like Obama.
Nixon may have been many things but an appeaser to red China? Um, no.
I remember "tornado" drills (and then came to Calif. for earthquake drills, hell we even had an earthquake once).
Honestly, I didn't expect to live to the age I'm at now. When my scout troop went camping, the leader took a transistor radio, "in case something happened." We all knew what "something" was, and I was uneasy for the entirety of the first trip I went on (I was 11).
The first time I noticed the nightglow of LA, I was half-convinced the city was burning from a bomb I'd not heard.
I don't know, from here, when the fears are different, how much that's affected me. I do know that terrorists don't scare me the same way; and somehow they seem to scare alot of "kids" (for want of a better term) in their middle twenties.
And shits like McCain are responsible for that sort of fuckwittery, so he deserves all the mockery and obliquy we can serve up.
I've heard stories of people freaking when large-scale flash photography is being done. (This was at a time when St Ronnie was saying he didn't understand why people were upset about the possibility of nukes going off, because it didn't keep him awake at night.)
Listening to movement conservatives these days is actually kind of heartwarming. They're blaming the defeats of 2006 and the likely bloodbath in November on . . . nominees not being conservative enough.
I think McCain has bought into that. Even if he's only in it for the votes, that's enough to taint him beyond all hope for me. I'm worried that the fact he isn't [resentful whisper]you know[/resentful whisper] will make him the vote of choice for a large portion of Clinton fans, moonbattery notwithstanding.
#53: "I didn't believe that grownups would be silly enough to actually *fire* nuclear weapons."
My take was the opposite. I knew that adults had already been, uh, silly enough to fire nuclear weapons at cities and that they would certainly do it again if they felt the need. So the lesson I learned was that the adults who were stupid, inhuman, vain, deluded, and malicious enough to contemplate doing it again were in charge, and those sane enough (on any side) to say that this was something so evil that it could never be justified were a tiny minority treated with contempt. This did not result in any great respect for the wisdom of adults. And yeah, I thought that nuclear incineration or radiation poisoning were pretty likely ways for us to go - not inevitable, just a decent chance.
Mind you, I didn't actually live on top of any military targets in Norwich (unless you count the Rowntree-Mackintosh factory, producing those vital chocolate war goods), but I assume that the Soviet plan would have included nuking all large-jet-capable airports in the UK, like, say, the one 5 miles north of our house. And failing that, RAF (USAF) Lakenheath & Mildenhall were 40 miles away - Lakenheath being a US F-111 base and (still) home to a US nuclear weapon stockpile, Mildenhall being a US air-refueling and surveillance base and at the time the European home of the SR-71.
But count me as another who thinks that extinction wasn't really a risk. The survivors of a nuclear war wouldn't exactly be facing a cheerful world the next day, but I have faith in the cockroach-like survival abilities of human beings.
Anyway, on the subject of Iran, the idea that they do or can ever pose any kind of serious threat to the US is so laughable that I also wonder about the faculties of someone who seems to be making this claim sincerely. If it's not sincere, then we should just take it as a proud boast that he intends to maintain the Bush tradition of making shit up about non-existent threats and then invading faraway countries at random, at spectacular cost, and with hugely counterproductive results in fending off the actual - significant but not existential - threat of terrorism. Thanks for the heads-up!
(Not to state the obvious. It'd be kind of nice if the press did some obvious-stating on this subject, wouldn't it?)
Emily @53: I believed (quite sensibly) that *if* there was a nuclear war, I would die.
Ditto. grew up in Norfolk, VA home to the largest naval base on the planet. I'm pretty sure there was at least one warhead aimed directly at my house.
I had a minor respite form this for the 3 years we lived in GTMO, Cuba... na, I'm kidding! I had at least three nukes pointed at my head and one of them may have even been American. Once a year, everyone had to stay inside for a two nights in a row while the Marines ran around the base pretending the Cubans were invading.
And people wonder my my generation is addicted to antidepressants.
A data point about what the US military believed would be the outcome of a nuclear war, circa 1968.
In the fall of 1968 I was sent on temporary duty to a large hole in the ground in central Pennsylvania*, where I joined the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in celebrating nuclear war games. Because of my job, I had access to the communication channels in and out, and got to see the daily sitrep that they posted. Approximately 36 hours after the beginning of the exercise, less than 24 hours from the launch of the first missle, they reported US civilian casualties in excess of 100 million (population at the time was less than 200 million). Because of the timing this could not have included deaths from either primary ionizing radiation or fallout, only from blast, heat, and direct exposure to X-rays and neutrons close to the blast. And the exchange of warheads wasn't yet finished, so more immediate deaths were to be expected. They didn't report estimates of deaths from ionizing bomb radiation or fallout, or delayed deaths resulting from the bombs and the immediate aftermath, but scaling up from the results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and what reading I've done on predictions about nuclear war, I would be very surprised if more 20-30 million (perhaps 15%) of the civilian population were left alive after 3 months, and many of those would die of starvation, exposure, and disease in the next year.
As for the rest of the world, well, the JCS didn't much care enough to estimate it closely, but in that scenario, most of Europe and western Russia was already dead.
Please note that this sitrep stated that, given the figures, the US was "winning".
* Emily @ 53: If you'd been hit by a nuclear warhead in Harrisburg, it would probably have been one that strayed off target at Carlisle Barracks, 18 miles west. That being an extremely hardened site, I would be surprised if the Soviets planned to chuck less than 50 or 100 megatons at it, especially given the accuracy of their early ICBMs.
Michael @19:
Remember that 50% of people are of below average intelligence, and somepercentage of the remainder are republicans. Do you realy beleive that a majority of the country understands what realistic odds for dying in a terrorist attack are? How those odds change when Iran has nukes? How they change when we are aggressively persecuting Iraqis?
These aren't simple isues, and a lot of people are convinced that "The muslims" want to kill us all. It's a good thing they don't know how many there are, or they would really freak out!
Oh, are we doing target-size wars?
Since 1980 (when the saber-rattling was still going strong) I've been living in Hawaii on the same rock with US CINCPAC (central command and control for the Pacific fleet and all Pacific theater forces), Pearl Harbor itself (where nuclear submarines were and are based), and the nuclear weapons storage depot for the Pacific fleet (out at West Loch of Pearl Harbor.) That's not to mention an Air Force base, and a major Army base, and a major Marine and Marine Air Corps base. Some military friends told me back then that according to their briefings, the USSR had warheads with a total of at least 100 megatons targeted at various points on the island. I would not be surprised if Russia still does have a few missiles aimed here, "just in case".
At least it would have been pretty damn quick.
One of the things that's a little scary about McCain is that he was a Navy pilot, which means his view of combat is quite different from the average groundpounder, and even from Army and Air Force pilots. Pilots often get a feeling of distance from the fighting (literally vertical distance, but a feeling of insulation from it as well), and Navy pilots come from a tradition of pushbutton war from a distance that has been largely true for the US since the end of WWII. I had hoped that his being shot down and taken prisoner would have moderated that viewpoint somewhat, but it seems not. I don't trust him to understand, or even care about, the military or diplomatic consequences of using unnecessary or excessive military force in the maelstrom we've created in the Middle East.
Bruce:
The article in last Sunday's NY Times magazine, here, talks about how McCain's particular war experiences (never actually fighting in the thick of things on the ground) may have given him a different perspective on Vietnam and Iraq than the other senators who served in Vietnam.
To give an idea of how dire things were during the Cold War... How many SF stories and/or movies were there with the premise that it'd take an outside force to keep us away from extinction? Remember The Architects of Fear?
One of the things that's a little scary about McCain is that he was a Navy pilot, which means his view of combat is quite different from the average groundpounder....
He was a fucking Airedale. That means his brain doesn't function below 5,000 feet. As we surface sailors used to say of the fucking Airedales, it's a pity they're allowed to wear the same uniform we do.
As asked back in the Who You Callin' "Terrorist"? thread, pointing to Teresa's fact-filled and prescient essay On Iran Basic(1)(2)
Don't they know any Iranian Americans?
There are about 300,000 Iranian-born people (60% now naturalized citizens) in the US, representing nearly 1% of immigrants here, and somewhere between 600k to 1300k Iranian Americans.
Have the talked to them recently?
Talked to them about how well this sort of rhetoric is going to help with getting a more moderate government voted in? [It was looking close back in 2006-2007] Thought about how well that last interference (with the political campaign) went for helping Iran and Iranians move away from hardliners?
While I can understand that the "Hey, we're thinking about bombing Iran. Your parents were born there, you've visited your relatives there several times. How do you think it'll go?" conversation could get awkward, it should be a necessary conversation.(3)
Because with 40k total Iraqis in the US (since the war, maybe 40K +700 1,000 now) I can see how they might never have met Iraqis other than that lying 'Curveball' source.
But Iranians and Iranian-Americans? The hardliners in the US have to be actively avoiding I&I-A's to have not been seeing that this rhetoric doesn't make any sense...
Hey.
Wait.
That seeming blunder by the administration, where it became public that the US was supporting the moderates, which helped the conservatives win, that was deliberate? Because they wanted the right sort of government around in time for the 2008 elections, because we need an enemy and China (400 nukes, communist gov't) isn't practical for that?
I. deeply. resent. the. way. this. administration. makes. me. feel. like. a. nutbar. conspiracy. theorist.
--------------------
(1) TNH: "Insofar as any other right-wingers are holding on to the “war with Iran” meme, I suspect it’s so they can claim afterwards that Iran was the big enemy all along, and the U.S. could have licked them and ended terrorism forever, but the Evil Liberals and Democrats wouldn’t let them do it."
(2) in which I'd put together some data on the likelihood of meeting Iranian-Americans (high, similar to Greek-Americans or Armenian-Americans) v Iraqi-Americans (low, similar to Icelandic-Americans)
(3) Not that it should make a difference. Still, during the 80's, when people said to me "We just need to bomb those commies" and I'd reply "I have relatives in those commie countries" then the wanabee commie bombers at least had the decency to shut up.
Wirelizard @62:
McCain's as scary as the USSR, really line is likely to be met with "Remind me again what the USSR was?" from voters my age and younger...
That's depressing. Does that mean that a large segment of the voting public might categorize the old USSR as "As dangerous as Iran" because that's the way its being defined now?
Avedon Carol points out he's wrong about Reagan getting hostages out of Iran by not negotiating too.
When considering the willingness to use those weapons, one has to consider that the Iranians just might pose a greater threat especially because of the fanaticism of those in power. Granted, it may be a show only to secure a base of power, but one has to wonder how dedicated the Iranian power structure is to that fanaticism.The "willingness" or lack thereof of Iran's leaders to use "those weapons" can be discerned from the fact that the Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued a fatwa prohibiting the production and use of nuclear weapons.
James @ #77, Airedale or member of the Brown Shoe Navy (scroll alphabetically).
I hadn't heard either term for a long time, but Airedale reminded me.
James @79
I was born in 1991.
I could see the level of stupidity in a comparison between Iran and the USSR straight off.
Surely it's not that bad? Even people as young as me have picked up the vague idea that way-back-when, the USSR was BIG AND SCARY...and I'm pretty sure most of us realize Iran is not on that sort of level.
(I'm not the voting public you refer to, though...I'm English and nine months under voting age.)
I think it's "funny" the way McCain talks about "sanctions" against Iran; instead of conversation.
Does he think China (with veto powers in the UN) is going to allow a large supplier of oil to be embargoed?
It's a recipe for futher isolating the US in the international arena, and I worry about the reactions of those who feel impotent as we fade from the stage as "the global superpower".
James D. Macdonald @72: I'd say your depressing possibility is, well, possible, but the situation is (of course) more complex than that. Looking over my memories of 20-something students in recent years and to some extent agreeing with Wirelizard, I'd say that they fall into three large and overlapping groups: First, the ones who understand intellectually the difference between the USSR and Iran but who don't quite understand it emotionally; Second, the ones who don't really understand the USSR at all but who figure they'd better find out before deciding whether or not McCain has a point (hence the "remind me" type of question); and Third, the ones who think Iran, Iraq, and probably Afghanistan are all the same nation anyway and who couldn't locate the Middle East or any part of the former Soviet Union on a well-marked map. In my experience, that last group is the smallest and has its equivalent in all generations, but they do exist.
Oops--I meant "James D. Macdonald @79," of course.
James D. Macdonald @ 77
I'd not heard the term "Airedale" before, but I've heard "Brown Shoe Navy". It's funny, I didn't meet many Navy pilots until after I got out of the service; I assumed they were pretty much the same as Army chopper pilots or arty spotters, or maybe Air Force zoomies. The thing about zoomies is that a lot of them spent time in close air support of infantry, where you might be flying at only a few hundred or a thousand feet so you can make sure to drop ordnance on the enemy and not on your own troops. This sort of flying leaves you vulnerable to small arms fire, which tends to make you think more like a soldier and less like a knight riding into noble battle.
James D. Macdonald @ 77, Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)@87
I have a friend* who claims to have successfully convinced conversative military guys NOT to vote for McCain because he's a naval aviator.
*sub brat
Remember, with Naval Aviators, below the rank of Lieutenant Commander they don't interact with enlisted folks. (Sure, they know the enlisted exist, and they see 'em prepping their planes, but they aren't giving them orders or writing their evals, or approving their leave chits, or inspecting their berthing, or otherwise dealing with them on a personal basis.)
"Brown shoe" refers back to the days (and this was a long time ago) when naval aviators did have their own uniforms (aviation greens) which had brown shoes (rather than the black shoes that real sailors wear).
Kathryn from Sunnyvale @78: But Iranians and Iranian-Americans? The hardliners in the US have to be actively avoiding I&I-A's to have not been seeing that this rhetoric doesn't make any sense...
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but -- that population is not at all evenly distributed. For comparison purposes, I'd met exactly one Jew before I escaped the Midwest and went to college, and there are five million Jews in the US. I wasn't actively avoiding them -- they just didn't live near me. I'm still not sure I know any Iranian-Americans, though I probably do. I can totally see how McCain's base, the people who think bombing Iran is a good idea, live in places such that there aren't any Iranians around who could smack them with a clue-bat.
(Really this goes for most minority groups -- non-white people, gay people, non-Christians, science fiction fans. They more or less didn't exist, or weren't at all evident, where I grew up. Frankly I like where I am now a lot better.)
Kevin @90,
I wasn't being sarcastic. I do know, and should have written, that half of I&I-A's live in California. They're certainly not evenly distributed. (and in part I was doing a compare-and-contrast with the probability of them having met an Iraqi-American.)
However, one town where a well-educated group is going to be represented is Washington D.C. One list of prominant Iranian-Americans shows many living in D.C.
I'm old enough to remember a time when nuclear war was a possibility--I was born in 1976--but it never scared me very much. This probably says less about my courage than it does about the degree to which I was off in my own little world. I just managed not to think about it very much. By the time I became politically aware I was hearing words like "glasnost" and "perestroika," and I had the impression that the USSRused to be dangerous--and was maybe still a little dangerous--but would soon settle down, get a steady job, and raise begonias or something.
Oddly, I recall first becoming aware of nuclear war from a strip in an old Peanuts collection where Linus mistook the first snowfall of the year for fallout. I had to ask my parents what "fallout" was. (There's also a Vietnam-era Peanuts sequence where Snoopy gets caught in a protest over "dogs being sent to Vietnam and then not getting back" and is tear-gassed.)
Emily @ 53: I grew up in Lexington, MA, 3 miles from Hanscom AFB-as-was. And 15 miles from MIT.
I was certain I was dead. I just hoped that whatever hit the base was big enough to kill me instantly.
James D. Macdonald @ 79: The ones who think about the USSR at all know, intellectually, that yes, there was a reasonable chance they could help End The World, and that Iran is nowhere near as dangerous.
Wesley@92 nails it, pretty much: I think people my age and younger - the ones who started being policitally aware with glastnost & such - we lack the real visceral oh sh*t the world is gonna end in mushroom clouds twitch mentioned in this thread.
It's entirely possible to be (barely) voting age these days and grow up not just post-MAD, but post-glasnost. Russia's always been a dysfunctional quasi-democracy, prone to some sabre-rattling but too broke/disorganized/democratic to do anything beyond rattle.
Kathryn #78, I live in Southern California, not far from "Tehrangeles", and the only Iranian-American I know is originally of Armenian descent and thus has a totally different perspective on geopolitics. (Incidentally a few of those people on Wikipedia's list appear to be of Armenian descent as well, based on their names -- the -ian or -yan ending is an indicator.) Additionally, I suspect there's a geographical bias in the distribution of the US hardliners in addition to the uneven distribution of immigrants you mention in #91, and that it will be away from the large metropolitan areas with large immigrant populations.
Me @91 re: Kevin @90.
Looking at the map of foreign-born I&I-A in America (from link 1, post 78), the 20k (which is a floor, because they'll have families) in the DC-Baltimore metropolitan area equals 1 in 400 randomly selected people. In professional groups (engineers, doctors, etc) the rate will be higher.
I was born in 1974 but due to books, still worried a fair bit about nuclear war as a teen (as a child, I worried about venomous snakes and leprosy, even though I lived in Canada. This was also due to books). Actually, I mostly worried about radiation sickness (Chernobyl happen during my lifetime, and I'd also visited Hiroshima as a 12-year-old): through college, I'd look around at buildings, trying to gage where I'd have to stand to be vapourized quickly and avoid the two weeks of agony.
(throws water on wintermute)
What?? Everyone's doing it.
Serge, a better link?
This thread is making me feel old. Stop doing that.
When I was in high school, I was pretty sure the human race and possibly the world was doomed -- "Someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away! They're rioting in Africa, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah-dah..." I remember the 1961 Berlin crisis, when Kennedy called up the troops and sent the Air National Guard to Germany, and we all thought there was going to be war. People who genuinely believe that the threat from Iran compares in any way to the threat from the USSR have bought wholly into Bush's War on Terror and clash of civilizations rhetoric. I believe there are fewer of those folks than there once were.
I still think the human race is doomed, though. (Grump, grump.)
Speaking of targeting Obama...
Apologies for all the pointing I've been doing.
I was born in 1975, and I remember being really annoyed at the people in power, but not really scared of a nuclear war. I was in NYC, so I would have been dead before I knew it, but there were no drills for it, and it was not an ever-present fear.
One of my exes (yes Serge, that ex) grew up in Buffalo, and was 5 years older than I am. He sometimes spoke of his fears of the world ending in a giant mushroom cloud. Of course, he believes the Book of Revelation will occur exactly as written, and we are in the End Times, so take that with a grain of salt.
#21 James D. Macdonald: The Republican base is the 27% of the electorate who think Bush is doing a good job.
That "27%" fraction turns up again and again, in all sorts of political contexts. (E.g., Iit was just about the fraction of Americans who still supported Nixon when he was resigning in shame.)
One of the finest blog posts of the 21st century (Kung Fu Monkey: Lunch Discussions #145: The Crazification Factor) also defines "27%" as the crazy portion of the electorate:
John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. [This was written several years ago...] I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is --Tyrone: 27%.
John: ... you said that immediately, and with some authority.
Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?
Tyrone: Hadn't thought about it. Let's split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification -- either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.
John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?
Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?
John: ... a bit low, actually.
Raphael @30 - no, I'm not being sarcastic, but don't confuse the actual authoritarian sheep with the wolves who manipulate them. The sheep grumble, but they didn't actually do anything. At most they can switch allegiance to a Limbaugh or a Bush -- but they must have an allegiance.
David @72 - what I'm saying is that the people we're talking about don't give a rat's patootie whether it's realistic or not; it's all code-words and pack recognition markers. By considering these people to be operating on a rational basis when it comes to their voting, you're not working with the right model.
I grew up in a Republican family in Indiana. My family are all intelligent people, and quite capable of parsing any of this stuff -- but it wouldn't matter. They would still have voted McCain. (The ones I'm talking about are mostly dead now, except my father, and he's leaning towards Obama. When he went to vote in the primary, he told the lady, "I've never done this before." She said, "Oh, the machines are no problem." He said, "No, I've never voted Democratic." She laughed.)
They would have voted McCain because he's on their side, you see. It wouldn't matter about the rest of it. On this level, this is what McCain is saying, and these people hear it clearly. You don't. You're still talking about rationality.
Again: that doesn't mean they're stupid. It doesn't mean they're ignorant (although they usually are.) But it does mean that you will never be able to change their opinion with facts, not without changing the people.
They are amenable to change. My uncle died three years ago, with a Bring the Troops Home Now sign in his front yard. (I was amazed.) My grandmother died last year, Fox News blaring -- but shortly before she died, she said, "That Barack Obama looks like a nice man." Wow. Of course, she thought George W. was a cleancut boy, too. But still.
Also, in re the other topic ongoing -- growing up in Indiana, I knew that if there was war, it would always be somewhere else. (They played that stupid Day After in school, can you believe it?) In about 2003, my father and I had a bit of an argument about Saddam Hussein -- my father claimed he was in fear for his own safety and mine, and that's why something had to be done. Even his wife, who was at Kent State in 1968 and is the "liberal" in the family (except for me) claimed to be in fear for the well-being of her daughter.
We all lived in Indiana at the time. I tried to bring home some sense of the size of the planet and the relative inability of a third-world dictator even to know Indiana existed, let alone physically threaten anyone in it. I failed.
But the seed I planted -- I think -- grew. I've had family members admit I was right. (Same damn thing happened a decade earlier when I was fulminating about Microsoft's shenanigans; you'd think they'd listen!)
I'm going to stop typing now and go back to work. Thank you for your support.
A good rhetorical/pragmatic principle:
-- When your opponent says something delusional, imagine a mindset in which the statement makes sense. Know your enemy.
Here's the mindset:
-- The Enemy is Satan. It doesn't matter if Satan is working through Moscow or Tehran; he's just as dangerous either way. Since Moscow never blew up part of Manhattan (remember that in this mindset, all Muslims are just alike), Iran (Iraq, al Q, whatever, it's all the same) is necessarily a greater threat.
. . . . .
Please tell me we won't get another president who "thinks" like that. Tell me it's impossible. I really need to live in denial of the fact that things can always get worse.
As far as what group turns up where:
The surgeon who did my mother's gall bladder surgery, in West Texas in the mid-90s, was from Turkey. As in, Turkish. He showed up for rounds - she described this - in jeans and cowboy boots.
rm @105. It's impossible.
Oh, wait -- you meant, tell you that and mean it? Sorry. Can somebody else help here?
Your source takes out of context.
From CNN:
McCain said Obama did not have an appropriate grasp of the danger Iran poses to the U.S.
"Senator Obama claimed that the threat Iran poses to our security is 'tiny' compared to the threat once posed by the former Soviet Union," McCain said during a speech in Chicago.
"Obviously, Iran isn't a superpower and doesn't possess the military power the Soviet Union had, but that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant.
"Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire, indeed," McCain said.
TimWB
Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire
Not to the US, directly, unlike the USSR.
Are you aware that Khamenei has issued a fatwa forbidding the development and deployment of Iranian nukes? And that he's in charge there?
(BTW, I've heard that the McCain campaign is hiring trolls now. They get paid in points. What they can get with those points hasn't been clarified.)
"It’s intuitively obvious that Iran does not pose the same serious threat to the US as the USSR did in its day. By several orders of magnitude."
To be fair, the USSR didn't pose the same threat the USSR was supposed to have posed in its day. Team B aside, even the conventional estimates were substantially inflated, weren't they?
GiacomoL @ 3: “scaremongering worked a threat for Republicans for more than a decade.”
Oh, it’s been a bit longer than that. Once you add to together the Cold War, the War on Drugs* and the War on Terra (after the War on Drugs started to lose public support), Republicans have been screaming about those scary furriners and traitorous Un-Americans for well over fifty years now. (I bet you could find similar rhetoric, probably about immigrants and blacks, going even further back.)
*The term was coined by Nixon in 1972, amidst the beginning of détente. It was revitalized by Reagan in the late 1980s, right after the wall fell. He also established the Drug Czar** we’ve all come to know and love.
**We always suspected their intense hatred of the Soviets was at least half jealousy, but really. They could at least try to be subtle about it.
Charlie Stross @ 40: “The effect of a US/USSR exchange would have been to destroy Europe at the same time, effectively ringing down the curtain on western civilization.”
Which is synonymous with the destruction of the entire human race how, exactly?
Gag Halfrunt @ 81: “The "willingness" or lack thereof of Iran's leaders to use "those weapons" can be discerned from the fact that the Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued a fatwa prohibiting the production and use of nuclear weapons.”
Thank you. Far better said than I would have. (As if the Soviet leaders weren’t plenty fanatical about Communism? It’s not like religious people have some sort of monopoly on crazy.)
rm @ 105: “Please tell me we won't get another president who "thinks" like that. Tell me it's impossible. I really need to live in denial of the fact that things can always get worse.”
“Liberty, getch yer liberty right here, now selling for the low low price of eternal vigilance!”
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