Pox
01-15-2009, 11:37 AM
I found this interesting...
At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090400/HMS-Apocalypse-Deep-Atlantic-submarine-waits-alert-nuclear-missiles-end-world--.html)reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."
The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter
<snip>
According to the reporters for BBC Radio 4, the safe containing the safe containing the Letter of Last Resort is to be opened only in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain that kills both Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a second, not identified person—the person he's designated as his alternate nuclear decision-maker in case of his death.
Assuming the death of his second as well, Brown's letter, the voice from the grave, from a person most probably reduced to radioactive ashes, will (theoretically) condemn to fiery death tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of innocent civilians.
<snip>
And what if it's a mistaken launch by a salvo of Russian nuclear missiles that succeeded in vaporizing the United Kingdom? Should millions of citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg, say, be destroyed without a chance to plead their case that it was a human or mechanical error? How would the sub commander know the circumstances if there's no one in authority left alive (or no functioning communications equipment to let him know)?
<snip>
And it seems stunningly foolish, counterproductive, indeed self-destructive for the Royal Navy to reveal that the United Kingdom's last line of deterrence, its ultimate safeguard against nuclear attack—the certainty of retaliation—is not certain at all. In fact, any fanatical enemy could figure it had a 50-50 chance that Gordon Brown did not order retaliation. In all likelihood, it's probably 90-10 against; what prime minister, what human being would want to put in his own handwriting the order to kill tens or hundreds of millions of innocent civilians—especially at the point when the threat to do so had failed to deter the attack it was meant to deter?
<snip>
This was always the problem with MAD, and it was spotlighted again by the Radio 4 documentary, which disclosed that at least one person in a position similar to that of Gordon Brown says he would have refused to give a Last Resort order to retaliate. That would be Denis Healey, former defense secretary to Labor PM Harold Wilson. Healey told the documentary makers, "I realized I would find it very, very difficult indeed to agree to use a nuclear weapon—and I think most people would."
Even if Britain were already lost, Healey told the BBC, "I think I would still have said that that, I'm afraid, is no reason for doing something like that. Because most of the people you kill would be innocent civilians."
Of course, innocent civilians, millions of them, might have been killed in the United Kingdom if the Soviets had known this was Healey's attitude at the time.
In 1996, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, wrote a remarkable essay for the London Spectator in which he reflected precisely on this paradox. He says that from conversations with Thatcher and Reagan, he was convinced both of them would have carried out the threatened nuclear retaliation at the heart of deterrence. They would have pushed the button no matter what. But he also said that upon further reflection of a religious nature, he realized that to do so would have been obscenely immoral. I've been obsessed with this question my entire life. The high point, though, may have been my frank discussion of it with the spear carriers of nuclear Armageddon, the Minuteman missile crewmen I met on a magazine assignment at the height of the Cold War. These were the men who, deep beneath the Great Plains in the "launch control centers," held the keys to the missile launch consoles. It was they who would perform the physical Last Resort act of twisting those keys in their slots and sending salvos of nuclear holocaust missiles halfway round the world.
http://www.slate.com/id/2208219/pagenum/3
simple question: what would your letter say?
At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying powerful ICBMs (nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles). In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090400/HMS-Apocalypse-Deep-Atlantic-submarine-waits-alert-nuclear-missiles-end-world--.html)reports, "there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and it is from the Prime Minister. In that letter, Gordon Brown conveys the most awesome decision of his political career ... and none of us is ever likely to know what he decided."
The decision? Whether or not to fire the sub's missiles, capable of causing genocidal devastation in retaliation for an attack that would—should the safe and the letter need to be opened—have already visited nuclear destruction on Great Britain. The letter containing the prime minister's posthumous decision (assuming he would have been vaporized by the initial attack on the homeland) is known as the Last Resort Letter
<snip>
According to the reporters for BBC Radio 4, the safe containing the safe containing the Letter of Last Resort is to be opened only in the event of a nuclear attack on Britain that kills both Prime Minister Gordon Brown and a second, not identified person—the person he's designated as his alternate nuclear decision-maker in case of his death.
Assuming the death of his second as well, Brown's letter, the voice from the grave, from a person most probably reduced to radioactive ashes, will (theoretically) condemn to fiery death tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of innocent civilians.
<snip>
And what if it's a mistaken launch by a salvo of Russian nuclear missiles that succeeded in vaporizing the United Kingdom? Should millions of citizens of Moscow and St. Petersburg, say, be destroyed without a chance to plead their case that it was a human or mechanical error? How would the sub commander know the circumstances if there's no one in authority left alive (or no functioning communications equipment to let him know)?
<snip>
And it seems stunningly foolish, counterproductive, indeed self-destructive for the Royal Navy to reveal that the United Kingdom's last line of deterrence, its ultimate safeguard against nuclear attack—the certainty of retaliation—is not certain at all. In fact, any fanatical enemy could figure it had a 50-50 chance that Gordon Brown did not order retaliation. In all likelihood, it's probably 90-10 against; what prime minister, what human being would want to put in his own handwriting the order to kill tens or hundreds of millions of innocent civilians—especially at the point when the threat to do so had failed to deter the attack it was meant to deter?
<snip>
This was always the problem with MAD, and it was spotlighted again by the Radio 4 documentary, which disclosed that at least one person in a position similar to that of Gordon Brown says he would have refused to give a Last Resort order to retaliate. That would be Denis Healey, former defense secretary to Labor PM Harold Wilson. Healey told the documentary makers, "I realized I would find it very, very difficult indeed to agree to use a nuclear weapon—and I think most people would."
Even if Britain were already lost, Healey told the BBC, "I think I would still have said that that, I'm afraid, is no reason for doing something like that. Because most of the people you kill would be innocent civilians."
Of course, innocent civilians, millions of them, might have been killed in the United Kingdom if the Soviets had known this was Healey's attitude at the time.
In 1996, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, wrote a remarkable essay for the London Spectator in which he reflected precisely on this paradox. He says that from conversations with Thatcher and Reagan, he was convinced both of them would have carried out the threatened nuclear retaliation at the heart of deterrence. They would have pushed the button no matter what. But he also said that upon further reflection of a religious nature, he realized that to do so would have been obscenely immoral. I've been obsessed with this question my entire life. The high point, though, may have been my frank discussion of it with the spear carriers of nuclear Armageddon, the Minuteman missile crewmen I met on a magazine assignment at the height of the Cold War. These were the men who, deep beneath the Great Plains in the "launch control centers," held the keys to the missile launch consoles. It was they who would perform the physical Last Resort act of twisting those keys in their slots and sending salvos of nuclear holocaust missiles halfway round the world.
http://www.slate.com/id/2208219/pagenum/3
simple question: what would your letter say?