| ▲ | pvg 7 days ago | |||||||
SciAm's approach had thrown away any chance of appealing to the Washington decision-makers, controlling the nuclear weapons It seems to have worked, though - the biggest nuclear war skeptic in that administration was Ronald Reagan and he's one of the world's most successful nuclear arms controllers and disarmers, whatever one may think of the rest of his politics and policies. | ||||||||
| ▲ | bell-cot 7 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||
> It seems to have worked, though... Did it? Or did Reagan have clear memories of WWII - when he was 30-ish years old - and the horrific level of death and devastation which even conventional bombing had inflicted upon Europe and Japan? "I don't want any American city to end up like Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima" was a perfectly acceptable right-wing value. My read is that Reagan understood the difference between talking big & tough, and actually starting a war. He obviously had a taste for proxy wars, but conflicts with direct US involvement were very few and small on his watch. | ||||||||
| ||||||||