Bush Think: A Nuclear War Can be Fought and Won!

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

This is an interesting article I came across while browsing for old Rand nuclear war scenarios. I've never heard of the web site (The Existentialist Corral) and I've never seen the article itself referenced, so I don't know what it's "reality rating" is here on the DU. I pass it on to you only for what I perceive it to be, and hope you get something from it.

http://existentialist-corral.blogspot.com/2008/01/bush-think-nuclear-war-can-be-fought.html

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Bush Think: A Nuclear War Can be Fought and Won!

God, how I despise people who think war is a game.
--Last Chance Democracy Cafe

The origin of 'Bush think' may be found in a scenario dreamed up at the Rand Corporation at the height of the Cold War. Rand had designed mathematical models that dared think the unthinkable: a nuclear war can be won! Typically, the scenario relied heavily on 'game theory'. It proposed to use 'nukes' like poker chips, so-called 'rational incentives', to manipulate the other side. Rand theorists 'gamed' how many megatons might be dropped on a city, which cities would be nuked, how many deaths it would take to bring the Russians to the bargaining table.

A clue to Bush's thinking may be found in Bush's remarks to Matt Lauer of NBC Sept. 2, 2004. The topic was the War on Terrorism that Bush committed the US to fight.

I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world — let's put it that way.

That would appear not to have been the case or the outcome. Terrorism is always been worse under GOP administrations. There is no reason to believe that 'terrorism' is in any way 'less acceptable' especially to those to whom Bush had addressed his remarks at the outset of his foreign adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps as a result of his failures, Bush has resorted to dragging out a scenario that had been 'gamed' by the Rand corporation at the height of the cold war.

-snip-

More at link.

[Kitty Herder]

1. These people don't realize that there are NO winners in any kind of war,

and especially in a nuclear war. If we fill our environment with radiation, or cause a nuclear winter, everyone on the planet loses. Everyone. Even the Bushies and other rich, powerful warmongers. Sure, they can hide in bunkers if necessary and survive, but what kind of life is that?

How horrifying that they could even think of the possibility of winning a nuclear war!

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear Prisoner_Number_Six!

Who wins a nuclear war?

The fucking cockroaches, that's who...:grr:

[shadowknows69]

4. And our "government" in their city sized underground bunkers

They only care about their own survival and "winning".

[Quantess]

3. The winners will be the Christian Fundies who get scooped up in Jesus' arms when everyone is killed.

And everyone else, including the wussy liberals, go to hell.

Yeah, right.

[formercia]

5. ..and the people of Iraq would greet us with flowers and candy.

Not, methinks.

[patriotvoice]

6. Fortunes of War

The damage done to all these places
is quite... unbelievable!
You have never seen such pain
walking through bombed cities.

A cancerous civilization:
fed on its own body.
It is never healing, yet
somehow not quite dying.

You never could win a war
that's what you have to learn.
Here everybody is a loser;
you will get nothing in return.

Thousands of men died on both sides
and this is the greatest loss.
The cities can be built again,
but there is no hope for all these men.

Civilian targets were also bombed --
wives and children died as well.
We destroy our own future:
How could you say you won a war?

You never could win a war
that's what you have to learn.
Here everybody is a loser;
you will get nothing in return.

-- Funker Vogt