[Danieru]

> The scary thing for me about wars is that the soldiers aren't the ones making the decisions.

Letting Soldiers & Generals control the military is the exact mistake which lead to Japan's military aggression. Keeping the head of the military a civilian/politician is perhaps one of the few ideas everyone should be able to agree is smart.

[arethuza]

The Cuban Missile Crisis is another example where if things had been left purely to the militaries of both sides things would probably have escalated very badly.

[mhh__]

LeMay wanted to bomb Cuba immediately...

One thing that I cannot find a second citation for but really intrigued me is that there is apparently some kind of parallel-narrative around the double agent Oleg Penkovsky - at first glance he gave information to the west about the situation in Cuba, but on closer inspection some of his antics may be too good to be true (he apparently made it in and out of the Soviet Union alive despite being rumbled). Peter Wright in Spycatcher says that Penkovsky's assessments data of Soviet ICBM accuracy often didn't line up with satellite imagery of their missile testing ranges.

Ultimately we'll never know but its fascinating just how much we don't know about the cold war.

[arethuza]

President Johnson in '67:

"I wouldn't want to be quoted on this.... We've spent $35 or $40 billion on the space program. And if nothing else had come out of it except the knowledge that we gained from space photography, it would be worth ten times what the whole program has cost. Because tonight we know how many missiles the enemy has and, it turned out, our guesses were way off. We were doing things we didn't need to do. We were building things we didn't need to build. We were harboring fears we didn't need to harbor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap

[N1H1L]

Thanks for that name. I went down a rabbit hole, and found out that the double agent who blew his handler's cover - George Blake died less than a month back!

[mhh__]

I didn't realize he'd died. Good riddance, but still.

[Bakary]

The story of the CMC is absolutely bonkers. There were so many close calls and possible disasters that I am surprised we even ended up in this non-nuked timeline, even with the anthropic principle!

[smokey_circles]

I don't think that's true, but I'll also admit that the history of the cold war is very muddled and I am no historian.

The US's version was written by the white house's journalist. It is not objective and lots has been refuted from calls leaked by the soviets after the fact, and a few of the advisors too.

TruTV/Adam Ruins Everything has a take on it [0] (not saying that's the objective history but they raise some eyebrows).

Some facts we do know though:

1. JFK rode on an anti-communist wave to beat his opponent into office

2. The US moved missiles first

3. The military was following orders from the top

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wc9V7ggVg

--------

EDIT: on some reflection, I think I actually just proved your point. If that was just left to the military then cooler heads may not have prevailed

[arethuza]

I can strongly recommend "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War" by Michael Dobbs:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2606779-one-minute-to-mi...

For extra nightmare fuel "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday...

The latter book literally gave me nightmares.

[wolfd]

Additional recommendation: The Fog of War, the McNamara interview documentary. Absolutely fascinating look into the mind of the secretary of defense at the time.

[arethuza]

I need to watch that again - saw it years ago when it first came out. I'm currently reading Ellsberg's Secrets A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers - which is pretty shocking - they knew all along they could never win in Vietnam but continued for "reasons".

[arethuza]

A quote from the latter:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

"A hundred Holocausts" - that has haunted me ever since I first read it.

[capableweb]

Any similar books that are not written by either born US persons or people heavily influenced by US either via politics or education? Not saying the information in the books are not true, but would love an opinion and summation on the matter from someone not so deep into US politics.

[goodcanadian]

Well, at least one anecdote to illustrate things are always more complex:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almo...

[clairity]

note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested. distance fosters dispassion, so the leader not being part of the military specifically, rather than simply being a civilian, is what makes decisions more rational (also, as others have noted, that dispassion can also foster war because the civilian leader has no real skin in the game).

[dctoedt]

> note that it's not that they're in the military, it's that they're too close and invested

My strong impression has been that the Japanese military in the 1930s was a catastrophically-extreme illustration of Dunning-Kruger syndrome when it came to understanding international affairs and in particular understanding the psychology and industrial capacity of the United States.

(Admiral Yamamoto was a noteworthy exception: Having spent considerable time in the U.S, he strongly favored friendly relations with the U.S. and opposed going to war. When he was overruled by the militarists in the Army, he planned Pearl Harbor and Midway as a roll of the dice for what he judged to be Japan's only hope of success, namely by striking hard blows and trying for a quick negotiated peace. It didn't work out that way.)

[SllX]

Yes, but when the leader is a politician, he has skin in a different game: getting re-elected.

It doesn’t stop them from going to war, but it makes it less likely.

[clairity]

that's a different game from putting your life at risk.

[SllX]

I agree. It is however a strong motivation that has an effect on the choices of the civilian leadership of the military.

[ygjb]

That is straight up at odds with American (or Canadian, or for the most part, UK) history. In the United States Trump is the first "war-time" president to blow re-election during an active war, and his term was punctuated by attempts at troop draw down, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric towards Iran when he was low in polls.

Engaging in something that can be spun as a just war is a viable re-election tactic.

[SllX]

The important part here is that they are forced to actually take the steps of justifying the war to the public and consulting the legislature.

If you have the public’s support for the war, then a war isn’t going to hurt your election chances.

[scarmig]

I'm not sure I'd count Trump as a wartime President, though perhaps that's a result of appallingly low standards for what counts as peace.

[ygjb]

Yeah, it's sketchy, which is why I put it in quotes. The reason he is not really a war-time president is the only war he is even close to actually starting is a civil war :P

[mechEpleb]

Just because you wear a uniform doesn't mean you hold the same incentives as the grunts you're sending to die in some far off place.