Sherry Chandler

11 Comments

• 1. mike lovell replies at 7th August 2008, 10:31 am :

  If you look at the overall picture from the days of the Cold War, MAD policies were literally the only thing stopping all out war with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. With all the “incidents” that occurred between them, us, and respective allies, without the nuclear threat, we would have already fought WW3. Who knows how it would’ve ended, or where we would be today. But as horrible as the idea behind it all is, I think it offered us time. Time for us to look at civility or diplomacy and to evolve it; time for the voices of peace and tranquility to come out more to the forefront. While our world is far from perfect, and wars still continue, the stigma of MAD ideology has kept things slightly more contained.

• 2. Tommy replies at 8th August 2008, 9:32 am :

  Cue the bullying from the pro-bomb crowd: “If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, millions of people would have died in the invasion! The bombs saved lives! So I am not at all repentant that we fried those g–ks.”
  Seriously, I have seen this argument every year, like clockword, on Hiroshima Day. It hasn’t gotten any more convincing.

• 3. Tommy replies at 8th August 2008, 9:43 am :

  Mr. Lovell, what do you think of the strategy that our elder statesmen have been pursuing lately, which is basically to convince the world that we so crazy, we think we’ll survive MAD? It would seem counterproductive to me to run around spraying shaving cream out of our mouths in an effort to convince people that we’re crazy and they better leave us alone. All that would do in real life is get the nice young men in the clean white coats to come and take us away (ha ha!). What it’s doing as a foreign policy is convincing other states, like, say North Korea, that we’re a threat and they’d better stockpile nukes so that they could strike first, thus increasing the threat of nuclear holocaust. MAD is one thing, but this is quite another.

• 4. Max replies at 8th August 2008, 9:46 am :

  WAR IS UGLY! Good or Bad options? Who knows for sure!
  Little different cut from here.
  My father and uncle (who raised me) served in WWII in the Pacific, they came home alive. In that respect (Japan was beat and could have surrendered, even after the first bomb they didn’t surrender as far as I’m concerned they did it to their own people). Plus Japan started that war, which disrupted many of our peoples and their peoples lives.

  My punch line is; I’m here, if the war wasn’t ended when it was, I may not have been.

• 5. sherry replies at 8th August 2008, 10:11 am :

  War is ugly, and doesn’t seem to solve many problems, which is why I’m against it. Discussion is good here but let’s play nice. I don’t want anybody to get into a fight as to who did what that was right or wrong in the past. I do think it behooves us to take a good look at what we did and grieve a bit for the noncombatants who have been killed by our bombs. Right or wrong in doing it, it was a terrible thing to do.

  I despise air war most of all because it is so indescriminate. And I raised my kids on literature like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, so they were raised to despise bombing. I made a fair number of parenting mistakes but I don’t consider that one of them. But Tommy, Mike’s not a bully. He’s a man with sons of his own.

  Max, I don’t mean to be exonerating Japan or making them the victim. Watching some of Kurosawa’s earlier films, I’d say there were a fair number of Japanese citizens who felt that the war ruined their culture. But that the other guy is wrong may not always make us right. I think that’s an essential flaw in the American make-up, to think that what we do is right because we do it.

  Truman took a tremendous risk in dropping Fat Man and Little Boy because nobody knew for sure whether the nuclear explosion was controllable. It might have destroyed us all.

  True, it stopped the war, but at what seems to me to have been a pretty high price for future generations, like my sons and any grandsons I might have. The probelm with MAD, Mike, is that it made us more than a little mad. How many times do we have to be able to kill one another before we have enough? We don’t seem to be able to stop proliferation — or proliferating — and when humans have weapons they can not always be restrained from using them.

  Now Bush wants to arm space and if you want to live with weapons floating around above your head like that, I sure don’t. That is truly, truly mad. But it will probably be done unless global warming gets us first.

• 6. mike lovell replies at 8th August 2008, 12:43 pm :

  Cue the bullying from the pro-bomb crowd: “If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, millions of people would have died in the invasion! The bombs saved lives! So I am not at all repentant that we fried those g–ks.”
  –Quote from Tommy

  Tommy, first off, let me assure you, I am not necessarily of the supposed “pro-bomb” crowd. My am former military, and my paternal grandfather was in the Pacific during WWII. How much different would things be if we hadn’t dropped the bombs? I don’t know, I really don’t. And I pride myself in knowing an awful lot about warfare, tactics, strategies and so forth from thousands of years worth of experiences I have studied.
  My only point is, that the policy of mutually assurred destruction, which was directed strictly toward the Soviet Union, and those under it’s authority (Cuba, China to a degree, etc etc), was that it actually delated what would have otherwise been WWIII. We have had bigger wars sparked off seemingly smaller incidents, that what we were engaged in directly or indirectly with the Soviets on a military scale. MAD sat atop a huge and volatile powder keg of imbalance.
  Whether or not I agree with the dropping of the bomb is one thing, but my addressment of MAD I think is right on. Afterall, MAD wasn’t MAD until Kennedy assured Kruschev that he would counter every offensive maneuver brought by the Soviets.
  And in respect to “the bomb” at all….we just finished first. Germany and Russia had already laid major inroads into the research. Someone was going to have it, regardless. Right or wrong, when we developed, tested and used the technology, we secured ourselves a spot atop the world and a target all at the same time.

• 7. Max replies at 8th August 2008, 1:22 pm :

  DRESDEN GERMANY REVENGE BOMBING RAID!
  I feel the Dresden bombing was also appauling, because this seemed to be a Revenge Bombing of a city that was not militairly defended, or didn’t have a military purpose. Our Army Air Force along with the RAF did the deed.

  Quote
  In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The population of the city was now far greater than the normal 650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army.

  On the 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF attack. Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. As a result of the firestorm it was afterwards impossible to count the number of victims. Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some German sources have argued that it was over 100,000.
  UnQuote

  I don’t feel this should be overlooked or forgotten.

• 8. sherry replies at 8th August 2008, 3:00 pm :

  In his collection Buckdancer’s Choice, James Dickey writes what I think is one of the most horrible poems in English literature. It’s called “The Firebombing.” It is horrible not because it’s bad but because it’s so honest about the experience of being a pilot firebombing a city (I apologize for messing up the formatting in this medium):

  One mosquito, dead drunk
  On altitude, drones on, far under the engines,
  And bites between
  The oxygen mask and the eye.
  The enemy-colored skin of families
  Determines to hold its color
  In sleep, as my hand turns whiter
  Than ever, clutching the toggle—
  The ship shakes bucks
  Fire hangs not yet fire
  In the air above Beppu
  For I am fulfilling

  An “anti-morale” raid upon it.
  All leashes of dogs
  Break under the first bomb, around those
  In bed, or late in the public baths: around those
  Who inch forward on their hands
  Into medicinal waters.
  Their heads come up with a roar
  Of Chicago fire:
  Come up with the carp pond showing
  The bathhouse upside down,
  Standing stiller to show it more
  As I sail artistically over
  The resort town followed by farms,
  Singing and twisting
  All the handles in heaven kicking
  The small cattle off their feet
  In a red costly blast
  Flinging jelly over the walls

  …

  Gun down
  The engines, the eight blades sighing
  For the moment when the roofs will connect
  Their flames, and make a town burning with all
  American fire.
  Reflections of houses catch;
  Fire shuttles from pond to pond
  In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
  With this in the dark of the mind,
  Death will not be what it should;
  Will not, even now, even when
  My exhaled face in the mirror
  Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
  The death of children is ponds
  Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
  The terraces of hills
  Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
  At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out.
  That is what should have got in
  To my eye

  And shown the insides of houses, the low tables
  Catch fire from the floor mats,
  Blaze up in gas around their heads
  Like a dream of suddenly growing

  Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
  Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
  Die, there is not even sound;
  One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
  Turned blue by the power of beauty,
  In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
  Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
  Seeing the ponds catch fire
  And cast it through ring after ring
  Of land: O death in the middle
  Of acres of inch-deep water!

• 9. Max replies at 8th August 2008, 4:12 pm :

  I appreciate the poem. It captures the truth of the Horror of war, which should be avoided at all costs. Human beings can be awfully mean to one another.
  Signing off for the weekend, I’m home and got to build more fence.

• 10. Helen Losse replies at 8th August 2008, 9:25 pm :

  My parents met in England where my Dad was a soldier in WWII, so without WWII, I wouldn’t exist. But I’m a pacifist and don’t even know who MAD is. All war is bad all the time. As for “offering us time,” I guess it depends on who you think “us” is. Didn’t offer much to the folks the bomb was dropped on, now did it?

• 11. mike lovell replies at 9th August 2008, 10:34 am :

  Helen…MAD= Mutually Assured Destruction
  also, “us” is a reference to humanity as a whole, the very existence of human life on this planet of ours. While many suffered an ill-fated and early demise because of the bomb, the pure shock of the immense power of the bomb itself, as well as the madness of man’s own mind to conceive such weapons of destruction, was enough to make those who observed, stand back and realize (in my opinion)that upping the ante with every successive military conflict, as had occurred over the milenia of warfare, had found its end game with the bomb. That basically our military technological advancements would only result in the elimination of technological advancement itself, if pursued to a further, more powerful degree. The egomaniacal huffing and puffing between the US and the Soviets, while tense and very horrific at times, had to either remain as it was until someone backed down, or we all bit the dust. It was during this era that peacemakers and active pacifists were able to speak out. We have a long way to go to eradicate war from our planet, but I think it’s a lot closer than the egos getting the best of some political leaders who decide to blow up the world in order to prove who’s more right, even if their “rightness” (of their mind anyways) will only last at most a couple hours prior to the total end of human life.

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