Category Archives: History

War Atrocities

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is having a discussion about intentionality. I think this is a little off:

Whether it was necessary or not is a serious debate, but I am personally at a loss to understand why the shortcut of firebombing Dresden was less outrageous than waterboarding some SS offficer would be. Likewise, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved the deliberate killing of civilians. It was deemed necessary, and in my mind justifiable, to avoid (i.e. shortcut) the deaths of American and Allied soldiers via a conventional invasion.

Not exactly. The civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were collateral casualties. The actual targets were military facilities and arms factories.

Bill Whittle has a devastating video riposte to Jon Stewart’s historical ignorance on this issue.

As an aside, had Roosevelt still been alive that summer, the war might have dragged on for much longer, because his policy was unconditional surrender. He had already probably extended the war in Europe with this policy, because if he had accepted terms from Mussolini, they might have been able to take Italy at much lower cost of life. The extended weeks of negotiations entailed by the Italians’ unwillingness to accept unconditionally gave the Germans time to occupy Italy, which resulted in a bloody conquest, whereas a surrender with terms could have resulted in a more rapid Allied takeover with few casualties, and more reserves for attacking Germany from the south much earlier than Normandy.

Roosevelt wouldn’t have allowed the Japanese to (among other things) keep the emperor, and he might have run out of bombs before the Japanese would have surrendered (they only had three, and it would have taken a while to make more plutonium) and had to invade.

Truman was more reasonable. He just wanted to end the war, and would have been happy to let them have a dozen emperors if that’s all they wanted.

So FDR extended the depression by meddling in the economy right up until the war started, at which point he left it alone to focus on the war (and of course with able-bodied men in uniform, the unemployment rate finally dropped). Then he meddled in the war and probably lengthened it as well (and it would have been even worse had he not died in the spring of ’45). One wonders in the cases of both Wilson and Roosevelt how long they would have remained in power if they hadn’t been struck down by their health. Truman tried to tinker with the economy after the war, but the Republican Congress wouldn’t let him, so the economy finally recovered completely, after fifteen years.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems a little related. Will Barack Obama apologize for World War II?

Gun Porn

Here ya go. Cutting down a tree with a gun. It’s pretty amazing to see the brass waterfalling out of that thing. I want to be a mythbuster.

The first known instance of this took a lot longer. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, the hot lead was so unremitting and thick that it cut down an oak tree of a foot-and-a-half diameter over the hours-long duration of the battle. The stump is now in the American Museum of History. It was probably the most intense battle of the war up to that point, and it’s hard to contemplate the hell it must have been for the combatants.

They Won

So why is the left still angry? Glenn asks: “maybe it’s become a habit.”

“Become” a habit? It seems to me it’s an intrinsic feature of leftism, which is based on a permanent state of envy, class warfare and seeking “social justice” and “equality.” Which is why it is leftists (from Hitler to Stalin to Mao and Pol Pot) who have been responsible for hundreds of millions of violent deaths over the past century. You have to break the eggs to make the social-justice omelette through the collective will. It’s not individualists who do that kind of thing.

[Update late morning]

More evidence of lunacy on the left: hating Milton Friedman.

Space Nuclear Waste Disposal

When I wrote that piece about Three-Mile Island the other week, I forgot to mention my own recollections of the event. It was interesting timing, because it happened in the middle of a senior space systems engineering project that I was involved with at the University of Michigan. It was an annual course taught in the Aerospace Engineering department, required for Aerospace majors, which I took as an elective (though it wasn’t my major, I took many courses there, including several graduate ones, tailoring my own astronautical engineering degree, but without the emphasis on aeronautics). The course was taught by Harm Buning (who died only three years ago — I really ought to write about him some time). The project was to figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste in space. This was a couple years before the Shuttle had its first flight, and we still believed the hype about its cost and safety, so it was the assumed launch vehicle, but the question was what to do with the stuff once it was in LEO.

Having been pretty heavily involved with the L-5 Society (I had actually spent a semester the previous year volunteering at the HQ in Tucson, and had met people involved with the MIT mass driver work, including Henry Kolm and Eric Drexler — the people in that now-classic picture are, from right to left, a twenty-four year-old bearded Eric wearing a Maxwell’s equations teeshirt (one of which I also had at the time), Henry, Gerry O’Neill, someone unknown to me, and Kevin Fine — geek and space enthusiast city — I could write a sad book titled “We Were Space Enthusiasts, And Young…), I suggested that we use a linear synchronous motor to propel it out of the solar system. The class adopted the idea, and we came up with a crude systems design (about what you could expect from college seniors for such a complex project). It was in the middle of the project that TMI occurred, making it seem even more relevant.

The university seems to have put many of these older (typed by department secretaries– no word processors back then) reports on line, including this one. I’m sure I have a dead-tree copy somewhere, but it’s nice to see it on the web. It’s been a long time, and I was distracted at the time because my father had his second heart attack in April of that year, and died a few weeks later. Due to time missed, I had to finish up my sections early in the summer to avoid an Incomplete for the course, so I don’t remember how much of it and which parts I wrote, but it was quite a bit of it (at least the orbital mechanics and the dynamics of the payloads in the accelerator, and how much wall play they would have to have). Dave Steigmann wrote a lot of the structures section, I think. The report says that it’s authored by Kevin Blankinship, but he was probably just final editor, because he was officially the team project manager. One of the things that this course taught was not just engineering, but how to work as an engineering team (including managing with the politics and personal interactions). These were…interesting. I won’t say any more than that, to protect the guilty, whoever they all may be. 😉

Anyway, is it feasible? Probably not, but it was a good project for the purpose of learning how to consider all aspects of a space system, and project teamwork.

[Update a while later]

The project name was pretty good acronymery. I don’t recall whether it was mine, someone else’s, or the result of a brainstorming session. But it was Project NEWDUMP (Nuclear Energy Waste Disposal Using Mass-Driver Propulsion).

For anyone who is willing to read the thing, it is probably entertainingly rife with howlers, from the perspective of three decades later. This one on page four jumped off the page at me:

The Space Shuttle has substantially reduced the cost of space transportation since the Apollo project, with possible improvements for further economy.

Note the tense, and not also that this was written about two years before first flight.

The Beginning Of The Myth

I missed noting it yesterday, but it was the fiftieth anniversary of the announcement of the Mercury 7. It set the pattern for the mythology of the NASA astronaut (with two minor variations — the first in the sixties when it was no longer necessary to be a test pilot, and in the late seventies, when women were allowed into the club). I may have more thoughts later, but to me, it was one of the key events that led us off on a very wrong path that has resulted in the space quagmire we’re in to this day.

Speaking Of Pirates

Did you know that they were early incubators of democracy?

Yes, those stereotypically lawless rum-chuggers turned out to be ardent democrats. And in their strange enlightenment, Leeson sees the answer to a riddle about human nature, worthy of “Lord of the Flies” or an early episode of “Lost.” In the absence of government and law enforcement, what becomes of a band of men with a noted criminal streak? Do they descend into violence and chaos?

The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government limits the other’s power, emerged in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But by the 1670s, and likely before, pirates were developing democratic charters, establishing balance of power on their ships, and developing a nascent form of worker’s compensation: A lost limb entitled one to payment from the booty, more or less depending on whether it was a right arm, a left arm, or a leg.

The idea of enlightened piracy is strange swill to swallow for those steeped in a pop culture version of the pirate – chaos on the high seas, drinking and pillaging, damsels forced onto the plank. Sure, there’s something about the independence of piracy that still speaks to people today. (Even the founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day acknowledge that there is, in people who love to say “Aargh,” a yearning for a certain kind of freedom.) But it turns out that pirate life was more than just greedy rebellion. It offers insights into the nature of democracy and the reasons it might emerge – as a natural state of being, or a rational response to a much less pleasant way of life.

Of course, those were largely pirates of the Anglosphere. Somehow, I suspect that Somali Muslims might generate a different kind of pirate society.

Just What We Need Right Now

A new fantasy history about FDR:

Nothing to Fear claims to provide a “riveting narrative account of the personal dynamics that shaped the tumultuous early days of FDR’s presidency.” Although entertainingly written, it provides little new evidence and even less analysis. What it does offer is an account of Roosevelt’s first 100 days—what Cohen terms “the third great revolution in American history”—for readers whose faith in that revolution remains unshaken and who wish to reclaim the New Deal legacy today. Cohen’s heroes gamely overcome the “business interests” and “powerful financial interests” who try to derail or at least temper Roosevelt’s bold policies.

The result is a polemic that inadvertently raises more questions than it answers. Ray Moley, for instance, became an outspoken critic of the New Deal after leaving the administration, writing in 1939 that Roosevelt suffered from “a kind of mental autointoxication.” By 1948 he was warning about creeping statism, and by 1960 he was a full-fledged Goldwater Republican. Whatever doubts Moley had about the New Deal at the time go unmentioned in Nothing to Fear, and his recantation is the subject of just one paragraph in the epilogue. A pivotal character in American political history is thus reduced to a one-dimensional apparatchik.

Well, what do you expect from the New York Times? It took them years to admit the (Pulitzer-winning) lies and propaganda of Walter Duranty.