European military and Popular Mechanics

It's not nice to kill people.

John

Les Cargill:

To be precise, the French, as usual, lost a war they started and managed to sit at the post-war negotiations table on the winners' side.

Yeah, Spanish influenza, that killed almos a fourth of the population, had nothing to deal with it.

Evidently he knew french egos.

So you prefer a six pack and a dartboard?

You wouldn't say that on a battlefield, when they are shooting at you.

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"Total war is a war limitless in its scope in which a belligerent engages in the mobilization of all their available resources, in order to render beyond use their rival's capacity for resistance.

"The practice of total war has been in use for centuries, but it was only in the middle to late 19th century that total war was identified by scholars as a separate class of warfare. In a total war, there is less and sometimes no differentiation between combatants and civilians than in other conflicts, as nearly every human resource, civilians and soldiers alike, can be considered to be part of the belligerent effort."

"One of the earliest forms of total war occurred in the Warring States Period, when the State of Q=EDn or Ch'in (778 BC-207 BC) enacted reforms that transformed the nation into a war machine. The population was divided between soldiers who actively fought in the armies and farmers who fed the armies. Industrial development was concentrated on war, resulting in the perfection of bronze weaponry technology..."

Thirty Years War, Hundred Years War, yada yada.

I concur with Vladimir, read a Bible for plenty of other, similar examples not mentioned in the Wiki article (ex. Canaan). It wasn't a matter of trashing somebody's city, it was a matter of every able- bodied member of your tribe *exterminating* some other tribe.

Mark L. Fergerson

snipped-for-privacy@bid.nes:

And not only weaponry, I suppose. War is not as bad as it looks.

Not that it doesn't look horrible.

Michael A. Terrell:

By all means.

Under those conditions, it's still not nice.

John

John Larkin:

But much better than the converse.

Duh! Why do you think soldiers say, 'War is Hell!'?

That's for sure.

-- Les Cargill

With Bismarck on the scene, it's kinda hard to say the French really started it. Bismarck is quoted as saying one of his own books: "I knew that a Franco-Prussian War must take place before a united Germany was formed."

That too. But the effective loss of the Navy didn't help; the Germans were not exactly defeated conclusively...

-- Les Cargill

Somebody's confusing the Spanish flu (1917-19, ~1% of the population) with the Black Death (1340s, ~30%).

But never mind. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I think you are right. Dr Kahn did help Kubrick with some of the ideas and contributed the idea of a Doomsday Machine. However, his intention appeared to be to make the point that a massive retaliatory nuclear strike was not such a smart idea. You can't get any more massive than killing all life on the Earth - he was making a point in game theory.

A book about him is on Google Books but with some of the interesting bits for resolving this conundrum missing. p41 does however say that as a result of his book "On Thermonuclear War" and the ideas that Kubrick picked up on he was popularly known as "The Real Dr Strangelove". Anyone have a paper copy and care to precis what it says?

The start of chapter "The Real Dr Strangelove" p61-63 are missing.

I was very surprised to read that he was pulled off nuclear projects for being suspected Kommunist more than once in the Cold War paranoia.

Regards, Martin Brown

Martin Brown:

Gosh!

Thanks for the infos I cut. :-)

Phil Hobbs:

What? 1% in the US, maybe. Certainly not in Europe.

"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."

Huh - "Nature"! LOL eh?

Most soldiers do say that. Or at least believe it to the extent that most conscripts will not actually, deliberately, shoot the enemy. Professional soldiers are somewhat different, but if you really want people who will kill without hesitation then you go to special forces.

Dirk Bruere at NeoPax:

If you refer to exclusively scientific topics, that holds true.

But when it comes to any politically-sensitive issue (such as History, global warming, "renewable" energies and the like) my LOL holds truer.