Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Megadeath explained, 9 Feb 2004
At first glance, this book looks like its going to be heavy going, and it is. It encapsulates completely the mind-set of the military strategists and planners at the height of cold-war paranoia. The author tries his very best to habituate the public to h-bomb testing and how if we only kill 2 million people everything will come out alright in the end. Looking at the opinions expressed in this book today it stuns comprehension that obviously highly intelligent people like the author really did believe that admittedly, although the country's economy may suffer setbacks that recuperation really was possible, and standards of living in the post-war world wouldnt be all that bad! At the time this book was written, it was believed to be worth investing in civil defense, although after reading this it is easy to see why this campaign fell flat. The public werent very interested. It is obvious that while civil defense would save some lives, it would not save all lives, and what came afterwards would make life not worth living!
I got the feeling that this book tries very hard to push the civil defense idea as a good one, that yes although post-attack life may be difficult, it would not mean that life would not prevail. In retrospect it is incredible in its naivety, but one must remember that this was written at a time when not all the facts were known about contamination etc, and the bomb was still seen as the saviour of the free world.
It is a weight tome, but if you can read it to the end, it provides a real insight into what made these strategists tick. There is the concept of the Doomsday machine, which featured in Dr. Strangelove. This was a series of computers rigged up to buried H-bombs which would automatically trigger massive retaliation if the defending country was attacked. This was proved to be theoretically possible, but, as far as is known, the idea was never adopted by either ofthe superpowers.An interesting foray into a world which we will hopefully never inhabit again.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Contemplation of the unthinkable, 8 Feb 2004
This book is truly a remarkable tome. The thinking that goes behind it is basically this: How do we justify megadeath: that killing only two million people is okay, but killing twenty million is deemed unaqcceptable. This was written at a time when the American government, and in particular the RAND corporation were paid to think the unthinkable, and trying to get people to habituate themselves to hydrogen bomb testing and if we only killed 2 million people everyting would come out alright in the end. Reading this nowadays, post cold-war is actually something which stuns comprehension, that people really did think that a thermonuclear war was not only survivable, but that the countrys economy would actually be able to recuperate in such a way that post-war conditions would not actually be that bad. The mind-set of the author which prevails throughout is that a thermonuclear would be bad,but it would not be the end of civilisation, or the end of history. It is pretty heavy reading, lots of statistics, tables etc., but it gives an interesting hypothetical evaluation of future possible wars, and what these would entail. A very interesting book, even if nowadays a lot of the rhetoric seems almost humorous in its optimistic outlook. It is fascinating to think that this stuff was actually deadly serious at the time. Frightening speculative stuff, and if one can remain committed to reading this all the way through, food for thought.
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by Herman Kahn
by Martin J. Sherwin
by Tom Wolfe
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DVD ~ Powers Boothe
