Is the President driving us towards nuclear war ? (expanded)

No no, not the present POTUS.   There is commentary by the bushel about that, you don’t need more from me.

Rather, this is simply another noticing of historical precedents and parallels, for the benefit of those who were born yesterday.

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There is no high-ranking military officer serving the current administration, remotely as scary General Curtis E. LeMay, a proponent of pre-emptive all-out nuclear war, and commander of the SAC (which was in a position to carry out his dream at a nod from their commander).  JFK didn’t like him, but didn’t fire him;  rather, he promoted him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.   (Partly along the lines of the old maxim, “Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”  But that's a risky strategy. )   It would be anachronistic to call LeMay “a character out of Dr Strangelove”;  rather, that movie classic partly based its characters on him.

As McGeorge Bundy phrased it in July of 1961:

The only plan the United States had for the use of strategic weapons  was a massive, total, comprehensive  obliterating attack upon the Soviet Union -- an attack on the Warsaw Pact countries and Red China, [with] no provision for separating them out. … An attack on everything Red.”

Quite different from using a bunker buster on Pyongyang’s missile sites.

As indicated, JFK was not as hawkish as LeMay, nor even as his hot-headed brother RFK.   But he too could be provocative.  Re a June 3, 1961 head-to-head meeting with Khrushchev, which Kennedy prefaced by saying “This is the nut-cutter”:

“Force would be met by force,” Khrushchev warned Kennedy …

“The President concluded the conversation,” noted the transcript, “by observing that it would be a cold winter.”

-- Richard Reeves, President Kennedy:  Profile of Power (1993), p.  171

What -- switching the subject to something less controversial, like the weather, to avoid confrontation?  No;  then as now, there was a problem with self-censured news.

What Kennedy actually said was stronger:  “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be war.  It will be a cold winter.”

-- id.

And, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 18 Oct 1962:

Acheson was appalled when he met alone with the President, and heard him use the same phrase, “Pearl Harbor in reverse” -- as if the United States were planning a sneak attack without provocation.

“I don’t know where you got that,” Acheson said to John Kennedy. “It is unworthy of you to talk that way.”
-- id, p. 378

Similarly,

Stevenson was shaken by the President’s casual manner, as two years before  Kennedy had been shocked by Eisenhower’s casual talk of nuclear weapons.

-- id, p. 275

For an even more hair-raising example of Presidential brinksmanship, read about Reagan’s 1983 escapade, that really might have got us all killed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

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As always, our purpose is neither to trash JFK, nor to excuse the present fellow, but simply to provide a spot of perspective.

For the full roster of posts on this theme, click here.
For the post that launched the series:

Russian Meddling in the U.S. Presidential Election

Climate Change (re-updated)

With a monster storm bearing down upon an already battered and now quivering New England (a storm felicitously named “Nemo” -- nice touch), and with the ominous enigma of Global Climate Change  oppressing the national psyche,

tonight seems an opportune time to repost the below.

[Note:  For an even more bone-chilling essay, suitable to being read by flashlight while banshee winds wail withoutdoors, check out this:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/01/take-shelter-re-updated.html  ]

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For a mini-movie

of madness and salvation,

click here:

The Penitent and the Impenitent Thief

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[Last posted 26 Nov 2012]

Today's ironic update:

Le Qatar,  premier émetteur de CO2 par habitant

Le Qatar est l'hôte de la dix-huitième conférence des Nations unies sur le climat.

[Earlier post:]

Just a couple of observations.

(1) Logical

That the planet has entered a period of climatic instability, seems reasonably well-established, both anecdotally, and by more systematic scientific analysis.

That said instability has been caused by human activity, to   (a) some  (b) a significant  (c) an overwhelming  extent,  are distinct propositions, each necessarily  (and progressively) less certain.  -- Nothing disputable is being asserted here:  for any propositions P, Q, the joint assertion "P&Q" is (if anything) less certain than either proposition asserted separately.  Remarkably, there are experiments apparently demonstrating that many people do not recognize this.  But that would get us into the psychological.  Those who cannot appreciate the point, are invited to turn on the television.

However --  a point generally overlooked in the chatter on the airwaves (we shan’t dignify it with the name of ‘debate’) is this:  None of these latter propositions need be true, for the solution to the empirical problem (aetiologically agnostic)  to require human activity -- such as reduction of certain greenhouse-gas emissions, or giant mirrors in space, or what have you.

In exactly parallel fashion:  If a patient is in pain, it need not be the case that this pain was inflicted by some ruffian, for us to be able to do something about it.  And though the pain is  in any case  not the result of an aspirin- or opiate-deficiency, still it may be mitigated by the administration of such analgesics.
People are concerned about the economic costs of dealing with climate change, as well we should be.  But the need for action, and the kind of action needed, is logically largely independent of the politically fraught question of the exact degree of "blame" to be assigned to human activities.

An elementary observation, but often lost.

A note to Teabaggers:  Ignore the big words in this post, and think about poor Mr Bear

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The term "climate change", which has been gaining curency, is preferable to the previously popular (and more visualizable) "global warming".  For even if a slow secular rise in temperatures is the motor of the various changes that eventuate, it is but a small part of the resulting human experience.  Moreover, the rise per year looks trivial on paper, next to the much larger daily fluctuations.  The point is not that, on some particular day, instead of being a sizzling eighty-one, the mercury hits a sizzling eighty-one-and-a-half, but that more heat is being dumped into a hydrodynamic system, which feeds local instabilities, and may nudge changes in overall pattern.
Indeed, as a (counterfactual) thought-experiment:  Imagine rotating the climate-sphere partway around the globe, while keeping all the numbers (temperature, humidity, etc.) initially fixed.  Now nothing has statistically changed, but on a human level (agriculture, housing, transportation -- everything),  it would wreak havoc.  

Another serious problem, not related to heat per se, is that the process, rather than being self-regulating (as has fortunately been the case for much of what goes on over the earth) is in some ways self-accelerating.  "Warming" sounds like just bumping up the thermostat, a linear process.  But warming melts snow and ice-caps, which in turn decreases the earth's albedo, and (moreover) releases greenhouse gases from melting tundra: a vicious circle.  If ice were black, we'd be in luck.

(2) Psychological

(i)  The attempts by such scoundrels as Rick Perry or Donald Trump, to impeach the basic honesty of a significant proportion of climate scientists, is -- putting it at a minimum -- implausible simply on psychological grounds.   The motivations for scientists include recognition by their peers, the discovery of truth, the fun of solving puzzles, not having to wear a necktie, etc.  Very few get into the game for hope of fame or fortune;  and nobody goes into climatology (meteorology, geology….) for such reasons.  Certainly such folk are to be trusted, within their area of expertise, at least as much as casino magnates and Texas politicians, outside of theirs.

[Note:  Informed criticism of the consensus, such as that by Freeman Dyson, is certainly in place;  the consensus has been wrong before.  I am myself skeptical of modeling in general, and of long-term extrapolation over nonlinear, chaotic systems. But that is not the level at which the likes of Trump and Perry operate.]

(ii)  The frantic opposition of the wingnuts of the Right, to scientifically uncontroversial propositions, is in some ways puzzling.  If you actually own a polluting plant, or are captain of a polluting industry, your opposition is comprehensible, though reprehensible.  But most naysayers are by no means in that position.   The ferocity of their denial  cannot well spring from cool economic calculation;  there is something else going on, at a deeper level.  Something broken;  something sick.

Thus -- antedating the current climate debate by many decades -- consider the case of Ronald Reagan, as described by one who know him well, having written more than one biography about the man, Lou Cannon:

Reagan attracted … attention with his discovery that trees and other vegetation were primarily responsible for air pollution, and with his wildly incorrect ‘suspicion’ that the Mount St. Helens volcano had released more sulfur dioxide into the atomosphere ‘than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving’.”

-- Ronald Reagan (1991), p. 129

Note further that these were not the impromptu ravings of some dipso in a bar, but the considered public pronouncements of someone very much in the public eye.  They cannot thus be easily dismissed.

RFI:  I had thought that the classic line “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all” had been spoken by Reagan’s ecocidal Secretary of the Interior James Watt (you’ve got to credit the Gipper with a gift for irony, in that appointment);  but the Web consensus attributes it to Reagan.   Anyone have facts?

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Miscellaneous anecdotal attestations of shifting weather-patterns (other than a slow secular rise in average temperatures):
Weird storms expected through Monday in Southland

[Update 26 July 2012]  Oof!  And now this.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/science/earth/strong-storms-threaten-ozone-layer-over-us-study-says.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
(Several astute Readers' Comments here, btw.)

This is a genuine threat.  Already in the south of Patagonia, people can't be outdoors for more than a couple of hours without being exposed to a harmful dose of radiation.

-- Oy veh, and now this!
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/us/rise-in-weather-extremes-threatens-infrastructure.html?src=me&ref=general
"From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.

On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,” leading to “horrendous cracking,” said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,” creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.

Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm."

[Update 4 August 2012]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here--and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/gJQAW75NVX_story.html :
"This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change."

[Update Sept 2012]  For discussion of a cinematic reflection of Climate-Change Anxiety, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/09/take-shelter-updated.html

[Update 23 Nov 2012] Paul Krugman weighs in on the Republican mindset:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/opinion/krugman-grand-old-planet.html?src=me&ref=general

[Update 27 Nov 2012]  Zum Thema;
http://www.dradio.de/aodflash/player.php?station=3&broadcast=348687&datum=20121127&playtime=1354028931&fileid=d93c64ee&sendung=348687&beitrag=1933959&/

 

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Was für Krimi liest wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?

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Sigmund Freud und Sherlock Holmes

[Update 10 Jan 2013]   As wildfires rage:

   Australia is so hot  they had to add new colors to the weather map

   "Deep purple" now represents the heat dome.

[Update 18 Jan 2014]  A chilling -- or rather searing -- anecdote about the toll of rising temperatures:

At the Australian Open, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Stupidity

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/sports/tennis/players-are-not-cool-with-australian-open-heat-policy.html?hp

[Update 19 Jan 2014]  

HERE’S a scary fact about America: We’re much more likely to believe that there are signs that aliens have visited Earth (77 percent) than that humans are causing climate change (44 percent).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/kristof-neglected-topic-winner-climate-change.html?ref=nicholasdkristof

Dumbo Does Diplomacy: the Prequel

We earlier sketched Romney’s fumbling fiasco of foreign junketry in “Dumbo Does Diplomacy”, but without putting it into any perspective, thus leaving open the possibility that the footless performance was peculiar to Romney, with no larger political implications.   But he in a sense was following a precedent:   that of another handsome clueless politician, Ronald Reagan.   The fact that, after ample evidence of his ignorance (and senescence, harbinger of Alzheimer’s) in his first term,  he won a record landslide victory in his re-election bid, which sent the message:  the President doesn’t need to know anything, just make him photogenic, the gullible public will slurp down whatever we spoonfeed them.

Ronald Reagan had terrific stage presence, and was good at glad-handing, so long as nothing of substance had to be said, beyond what he -- an actor reciting lines written for him by others -- could read off  his ever-present index cards.  In his first term, Nixon sent him on goodwill trips  to cultivate our favorite right-wing rulers:  Marcos, Chiang, Yew and Franco.   Later, in preparation for his own future Presidential bid, he went on a whirlwind junket across Europe and Asia;  as former Washington Post political reporter Lou Cannon put it, “This enabled Reagan to deal with questions about his inexperience in world affairs  by rattling off a list of all the foreign leaders he had met (usually omitting Franco).”

So long as all the public learned was from the White House press release,  rather than seeing the often dismaying performances from up close, this scenario worked just swell.  Cannon  describes a 1982 state dinner in Brasília:

Reagan raised his wine glass in a toast to [the] Brazilian President … and “the people of Bolivia”, a gaffe which he attempted to correct, and instead compounded, by saying “That’s where I’m going next.”  Reagan’s next stop  was actually Colombia, and his faulty toast became big news in that country as well.  The double blooper so dismayed the White House press office  that it altered the public transcript and quoted Reagan as toasting “the people of Bogotá”.

On Air Force One  returning from the five-day trip … Reagan said … “I went down to find out from them and their views.  And you’d be surprised, yes, because, you know, they’re all individual countries.”

-- Lou Cannon, President Reagan:  the Role of a Lifetime (1991), p. 462

Each with its own individual and precious and special, but easily confusable name.

I mention the incident, not to rake up cold coals, but because of the striking parallelism with Romney, and the continuing success of the Reagan-derived “President-as-Ken-Doll” strategy.  Again:

[Reagan] was briefed before each meeting by the appropriate experts, and he dutifully read the requisite policy points from his cards, floundering only when he departed from the prepared script.  During a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandhi, the Indian delegates were pleased when Reagan lauded the “green revolution” that had vastly improved their nation’s agricultural yields.    But the Indians were also bothered that Reagan did not seem to realize that the Indian government had played an important role in this agricultural revolution, which he depicted as strictly a triumph of capitalism. 

Later, during a conference session on food production, Reagan was expounding on the accomplishments of free-enterprise farming in the United States, when Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere interrupted and said, “Let me tell you something.  U.S. agriculture is the most heavily subsidized in the world.”

-- Lou Cannon, President Reagan:  the Role of a Lifetime (1991), p. 469

That sound familiar?  Obama’s line, “You didn’t build that”, pithy and easily mocked, contains more wisdom in its four words  than many a press release or campaign speech;  in this it resembles Clinton’s wise and (except by legal professionals) widely misunderstood “It depends what the meaning of is is.”  The booboisie (to resurrect Mencken’s term, still applicable) do not feel obliged to even attempt to comprehend the things they snicker at.

So it’s not just Romney.   Buoyed by the success of The Great (when pre-scripted) Communicator, the Republican Party, and its easily-dazzled voters, has come to welcome leaders devoid of expertise or intellectual curiosity.  It worked before, it’ll work again, so long as you don’t flub in front of the cameras.  (Of couse, this has become more difficult to do in the age of the iPhone, since cameras may lurk even in invitation-only conclaves of fatcats, in the dens of Boca Raton.)

Ironically, the Potemkin-village approach to the marketing and micro-managing of candidates  was given a substantial boost by the case of an earlier Republican politician who, by contrast with the crop today, was unusually knowledgeable:  Richard Nixon.  But he wasn’t at all likeable (stiff in a Romney way, but additionally unsavory), so he had to be packaged:  consult the classic of Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President.

So again -- Why even write?   No facts, no reasonings  will convince the Birthers and Voodoo-Economists and their kin.   Ours is the Society of the Spectacle, best symbolized by that empty and amiable actor.

And yet, a kind of bright side:  We have a system in which the evil of schemers is tempered by the stupidity of jurors and voters.   The result (to continue in the agrarian context above) is such costly tomfoolery as the farm programs;  but we avoid, say,  the famine and genocide of Lenin’s and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.  And while there have been plenty of boneheaded jury decisions, at least we are spared the likes of the Moscow show trials.  The voters are not rocket scientists (or, more relevantly: statisticians and epistemologists), but -- apart from the tinfoil-hat crowd -- they mostly have basic common sense, and respect for that wisely crafted document, the Constitution.

[Historical footnote on the theme of the perilous schemes of cabals and autocrats  being frustrated by the amiable indolence of their servants and subjects]

In 1894, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s choice of Reichskanzler, Prince Hohenlohe, had a

… reputation for stubbornness and evasiveness, which had led a member of his staff in Paris to say, “It is quite impossible to make him do anything of which he disapproves.  He flutters away like a little bird  when you try to catch him.”  These qualities served to baulk some of the Emperor’s more dangerous designs.

-- Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (1978), p. 262