war – Collected Thoughts

Dark Sun : The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Science, American, Richard Rhodes, Non-Fiction Quotes

An Arms Race is a Hall of Mirrors

May 1, 2018 at 9:48 PM February 14, 2019 at 12:38 PM itemprop="discussionURL"0

But [Enrico] Fermi and [Isidor Isaac] Rabi also condemned their friend Edward Teller’s Super [hydrogen bomb design] in the strongest language that appears anywhere in the nine pages of the GAC [General Advisory Committee] report. “Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of the very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. “It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a …

Dark Sun : The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, American, Richard Rhodes, Non-Fiction Quotes

The Traditional and Instinctive Russian Sense of Insecurity

April 29, 2018 at 3:13 PM February 14, 2019 at 12:46 PM itemprop="discussionURL"0

There were few places on earth less pleasant in winter than the Soviet capital; [US Ambassador to the Soviet Union George] Kennan calls the time [spent sick] “these unhappy days,” and associates his five-part telegram with “an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon.” For a year and a half, he wrote thirty years later, still exasperated, “I had done little else but pluck people’s sleeves, trying to make them understand the nature of the phenomenon with which we in the Moscow embassy were daily confronted and which our government and people had to learn to understand if they were to have any chance …