A big advocate of the nuclear first strike strategy - during the Cuban missile crisis he almost did it. A Richard Rhodes piece in The New Yorker from 1995
snip
...
He decided that his goal was “to build a force so professional, so powerful that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build a deterrent force.” But as LeMay began turning sac around, he had to face the mortal question he had skirted in his speech to the Ohio Society. Despite the poor performance over Dayton, atomic bombs made hitting the target right the first time far more probable than ordinary high explosives had allowed. Given a “war aim of complete subjugation of the enemy,” the Air Force War Plans Division had recently concluded, “it would be feasible to risk an all-out atomic attack at the beginning of a war in an effort to stun the enemy into submission.” So when LeMay took his ideas for a sac war plan to his superiors in the Air Force, he proposed that “the primary mission of sac should be to establish a force in being capable of dropping 80% of the stockpile in one mission.” By then he was confident, he assured them, that “the next war will be primarily a strategic air war and the atomic attack should be laid down in a matter of hours.” The Air Force agreed: the plan that resulted entailed destroying seventy Soviet cities in thirty days with a hundred and thirty-three atomic bombs, causing up to 2.7 million deaths and another four million casualties. American air-power strategists had a name for such an attack as LeMay was proposing: “killing a nation.”
...
the last time democracy nearly died in america
Jill Lapore writing in The New Yorker.
snip
...
American democracy,” as a matter of history, is democracy with an asterisk, the symbol A-Rod’s name would need if he were ever inducted into the Hall of Fame. Not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act can the United States be said to have met the basic conditions for political equality requisite in a democracy. All the same, measured not against its past but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from “full democracy” to “authoritarian regime.” In 2006, the U.S. was a “full democracy,” the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a “flawed democracy,” and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed. True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.
Nothing so sharpens one’s appreciation for democracy as bearing witness to its demolition. Mussolini called Italy and Germany “the greatest and soundest democracies which exist in the world today,” and Hitler liked to say that, with Nazi Germany, he had achieved a “beautiful democracy,” prompting the American political columnist Dorothy Thompson to remark of the Fascist state, “If it is going to call itself democratic we had better find another word for what we have and what we want.” In the nineteen-thirties, Americans didn’t find another word. But they did work to decide what they wanted, and to imagine and to build it. Thompson, who had been a foreign correspondent in Germany and Austria and had interviewed the Führer, said, in a column that reached eight million readers, “Be sure you know what you prepare to defend.”
...
06:32 in Current Affairs, General Commentary, history | Permalink | Comments (0)