alt Hacker Newsdaily reminder that john von neumann, smarter than me, you or anyone else here, recommended a first strike on the soviet union as the obvious strategy
maybe intelligence isn't the only thing
Replies
+1
You can be certified genius in many areas but to assume that intelligence extends to all areas would be folly.
Game theory obvious? Maybe. Geopolitically? Human-wise? Doubtful.
I’m generally very suspicious of anything / anyone that recommended killing millions as the best option.
"Why didnt we bomb Moscow?"
The answer cannot be posted or discussed in earnest on the 'open' internet, but I think the answer is making itself more obvious every day.
Who knows. At the time, maybe it would have stopped decades of cold war.
For thousands of years, the culture with the upper hand in technology has always wiped out everyone else. So when US had the bomb and USSR didn't, there was a short window to take over the world. Even more than the US did.
Maybe the US conspiracy theory people wouldn't mind a 'one world government' if that government was actually the US.
And unipolar worlds seem to be more peaceful than fragmented worlds. Fragmented worlds get WW1.
So did Patton. As an Eastern European - they should have listened to him. Communists were way bigger scourge on humanity than the Nazis.
He was not alone in that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_war#Case_for_preven....
One crucial difference is that they recommended that as the lesser of two evils, arguing it would be better to make the first strike before the USSR had a huge arsenal to strike back than to wait for an inevitable more devastating war.
So far, it seems they were wrong in thinking a nuclear war with the USSR was inevitable.