Somehow we lived

Are you looking for a book to make you feel much worse about the nature of humanity?  Desperately in need of depressing news?  Are you hunting for a sense of doom and despair?  

I have just the book for you!

The Doomsday Machine is the latest in my 'stuff people recommended' series of readings.  It is a book written by a nuclear war planner turned anti nuclear activist detailing the history of nuclear weapons in the US.  It goes into detail about just how out of dangerous the cold war was, how out of control the nuclear weapons were, and how constantly we were exposed to civilization ending nuclear war.

It is depressing to hear just how aggressive and reckless people were.  The US military was so worried about not being able to annihilate their enemies that they gave permission to fire nuclear weapons to a huge range of people and refused to create systems to prevent individual pilots and soliders from using nuclear weapons on their own initiative.  When systems were put in place to prevent armageddon individuals carefully circumvented them.

For example, there was a system where there were 2 safes with codes to fire nukes.  There were always supposed to be 2 people on duty, each of which knew the combination to one safe.  Both safes were required to fire, so in theory this meant that a single rogue person couldn't end humanity.  In practice the soldiers all just shared their combinations with one another so if one of them was away for some reason the other could easily fire the nukes and end us all.

This isn't stupidity.  There are stupid people in the military, just like anywhere, but that isn't what happened here.

If I were to prioritize four situations in nuclear standoffs, I would list them as 

Everyone lives

Enemies die

We die

Everyone dies.

The soldiers clearly prioritized them as

Enemies die

Everyone lives

Everyone dies

We die.

Their overriding concern was not the continuation of humanity, but rather the destruction of their enemies.  They were desperately concerned not for life, but for saving face.  Better that America being a pile of ash and all humans die than anyone else feel like they had pulled one over on America.

They knew what they were doing, they just thought that macho posturing and patriotic bullshit was more important than all human life.

This, more than anything, is the story of nuclear weapons.  It is a bunch of assholes who wanted to push people around who were willing to kill us all to maintain their deathgrip on power.  It is despicable, and yet not at all surprising.

Normally I agree with the statement that it is foolish to ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but that isn't the case here.  It is all malice, all the way.

By the end of the book I was stunned at the colossal evil at the heart of the US military.  This, coming from someone who was already convinced that the US military is one of the most evil things around.  I spend days wondering how it is that I am still alive, and thinking constantly that I am surely not going to live to see my 50th birthday, much less die at a ripe old age.

The Doomsday Machine is good.  Well written, informative, and important.  We all need to understand why this insane situation occurred, and advocate for changing it.  Reading it, however, will not be a fun thing to do, and you will despair at what we have wrought.  In addition, you will never wonder about the Fermi Paradox again.  There aren't any aliens visiting us because they all eventually nuked themselves into oblivion.