Reply #59: (Nuclear war is winnable)... With Enough Shovels

[Octafish]

Nixon threatened to nuke Vietnam.

Know your BFEE: Nixon Threatened to NUKE Vietnam

I can only guess what The Trickster would've done as president in 1962.

Here's some light from Robert Scheer, based on what he found out about the mentality of these superhawk turdballs:

With Enough Shovels

from Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), pp. 18-26.

Its the Dirt That Does It

by Robert Scheer

VERY late one autumn night in 1981, Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, told me that the United States could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years. T.K., as he prefers to be known, added that nuclear war was not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe. He said, "If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it." The shovels were for digging holes in the ground, which would be covered somehow or other with a couple of doors and with three feet of dirt thrown on top, thereby providing adequate fallout shelters for the millions who had been evacuated from America's cities to the countryside. "It's the dirt that does it," he said.

What is truly astounding about my conversation with T.K. is not simply that one highly placed official in the Reagan Administration is so horribly innocent of the effects of nuclear war. More frightening is that T. K. Jones's views are all too typical of the thinking of those at the core of the Reagan Administration, as I have discovered through hundreds of hours of interviews with the men who are now running our government. The only difference is that T.K. was more outspoken than the others.

After parts of my interview with T. K. Jones ran in the Los Angeles Times, a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee demanded that Jones present himself to defend the views that Senator Alan Cranston said went "far beyond the bounds of reasonable, rational, responsible thinking;" Meanwhile Senator Charles Percy, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had confronted Jones at a town meeting in the senator's home state of Illinois and was sufficiently troubled by the Deputy Under Secretary's relatively complacent views of nuclear war to pressure the Pentagon for an accounting.

But by now the Administration had muzzled Jones, and he missed his first three scheduled appearances before the Senate subcommittee. It was at this point that a New York Times editorial asked: "Who is the Thomas K. Jones who is saying those funny things about civil defense?" Elsewhere Jones's espousal of primitive fallout shelters was dismissed easily and properly by editorial writers and cartoonists as a preposterous response to what nuclear war was all about. However, what these dismissals ignored was that Jones's notions of civil defense, odd as they may have seemed, are crucial to the entire Reagan strategic policy.

Reagan's nuclear arms buildup follows from the idea that the United States is vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons, an idea that rests in part on calculations made by this same T. K. Jones before he joined the government, when he worked for the Boeing Company. It was Jones's estimates of the efficacy of Soviet civil defense that provided much of the statistical justification for the view that the Soviets could reasonably expect to survive and win a nuclear war while we ourselves, without a comparable civil defense program, would necessarily lose.

And it was Jones's celebration of the shovel and primitive shelters as the means to nuclear salvation, once it was exposed to public debate, that helped to call into question the Reagan Administration's claim of American vulnerability. Jones had become fascinated with digging holes and with the powerful defensive possibilities of dirt only after he had read Soviet civil defense manuals that advocated similar procedures. In fact, it was from the Russians that he borrowed the idea of digging holes.If Jones's evacuation and sheltering plans were absurd on the face of it for the United States, how then could any observer take the Soviet civil defense program seriously? And if the Soviets are not capable of protecting their society and recovering from a nuclear war, how can anyone genuinely believe that they are planning to fight and win such a war?

Jones has been obsessed with the Russian threat ever since he served as a consultant for Nixon's SALT I negotiating team. An illustration of this obsession was offered by Roger Molander, a former staff member of the National Security Council under three Presidents. Molander, who left the government after the Carter Administration to found Ground Zero, the nuclear war education project, recalled that in 1973, he and Jones decided to accept an invitation to leave the SALT I talks in Geneva and visit the Paris Air Show, an elaborate event at which military contractors show their wares. As luck would have it, they ended up at a party sponsored by a U.S. defense contractor at a restaurant on the Eiffel Tower and met what Molander described as "an attractive American brunette and a beautiful Norwegian blonde." "It's a June night in Paris," Molander told me, free champagne, hors d'oeuvres, the lights of Paris—not bad, right? I'm a very aggressive bachelor at the time, T.K. is too, and we meet a couple of young women. At eleven o'clock we all go out to dinner, T.K. and I and these two girls. We find a beautiful little bistro, I remember running up the steps of Montmartre, feeling the effects of the champagne and a June night in Paris. An hour into dinner I am deep in conversation with one of the girl about who knows and who cares? It is Saturday night in Paris, I'm sitting at Montmartre, I'm eating canard a l'orange, and the last thing I'm thinking about is nuclear war.

Wafting across the table comes T. K. Jones, seriously talking to this Norwegian girl who is nodding, but who knows what is going through her mind? T. K. Jones is saying to her, "...and because the Soviet Union is threatening our ICBM force, we have to have mobile ICBM systems that would move around—" I'm thinking, "What? I've got an appointment back on planet Earth. Is this a human being? Does he understand why life is worth living?" We are in Paris on a Saturday night in Montmartre, off the Eiffel Tower with a couple of delightful young women. It is midnight, we don't have to be home until who knows what, and he is talking about mobile ICBM systems. I could not believe it! T.K. was still doing it when the evening ended.

T.K. is nothing if not consistent. Since his days as manager of program and product evaluation at Boeing, after he returned from the SALT I talks in 1974, he has been a major proponent of the view that we are vulnerable to a Soviet first strike unless we emulate the Soviet civil defense program. At Boeing, Jones had led a team that conducted tests attempting to simulate the effects of a nuclear blast on persons huddling in civil defense shelters and on machinery buried in the ground. On the basis of those tests, he argued later, both persons and machinery would have emerged barely scratched, even if the explosive had been nuclear rather than TNT. His colleagues from the Boeing project have recently been awarded contracts by the Reagan Administration to determine how to fight and survive a protracted nuclear war. In his new job at the Pentagon, Jones himself is one of the key officials in charge of coordinating the planning and acquisition of equipment for such a protracted nuclear war.

CONTINUED...

http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history261/nov2616.htm

I thank Goodness we had President Kennedy in charge in 1962.