an idle thought

There are still about 48 days or so before Trump Is inaugurated and for all that time Biden is president. As he demonstrated by his decision to release missiles to the Ukrainians, his actions are not limited by the fact that he is a lame-duck. Apparently Americans owe somewhat more than one trillion dollars on their credit cards. .Does Biden have the authority to transfer any significant amount of that debt to federal agencies with much lower fees?  No doubt Trump could cancel that act as soon as he comes to office, but that would be the whole point.  Americans would experience a month and a half of debt relief and then perhaps blame Trump for its reestablishment.

For those of you who like myself obsessively watch television news, it is useful to recall that nobody has yet been appointed to anything because Trump is not yet inaugurated.

There is no such thing as a Tactical nuclear weapon

During my long convalescence, I wrote several blog posts in my head. One of them concerned the talk about Russia's use of nuclear weapons. Since the talk has reemerged, I have decided to post it here. To make it of reasonable length, I have omitted an explanation of the difference between fission and fusion nuclear weapons. If anybody is interested, I can give that in a second post.

The distinction between tactics and strategy has a long history in discussions of military affairs. Tactics concerns choices on the battlefield. Whether to use massed archers before a cavalry attack, whether to combine infantry with a tank battalion, whether to defend a front with long dug in trenches – that sort of thing. Strategy concerns large-scale military decisions – the best example from recent wars is Hitler's disastrous decision to attempt to fight a two- front war, which was the source of his defeat.

Nuclear weapons were developed in the United States during the second world war by the so-called Manhattan project, headed by Robert Oppenheimer. The theory underlying the development was well-known by physicists around the world, but the technical problem of developing a usable nuclear weapon were formidable.

When the first prototype worked, it was so powerful that an entirely new term was invented to describe its magnitude. Bombs had been used in the first world war, in the Spanish Civil War, and extensively in the second world war. The convention had developed of classifying these bombs according to the amount of TNT equivalent to the explosive they contained. A 500 pound bomb was a bomb  whose explosive power was equivalent to 500 pounds of TNT. A bomb  rated at 1000 or 2000 pounds of TNT was called a "blockbuster" because even one of them could destroy several buildings in the city.   Oppenheimer and his associates invented the term "kiloton" or "1000 tons" to describe the bomb they created.

After the first prototype worked, Pres. Truman gave the order to use one against Japan. The war against Japan had for the most part consisted of a series of amphibious attacks of Pacific islands. Each island attack was extremely bloody.  Truman was told that an amphibious attack on Japan itself could cost a hundred thousand American lives. He therefore ordered that a nuclear weapon be dropped on a Japanese city in effect to terrify the Japanese into surrendering.  The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was rated at six or seven kilotons.  When the Japanese failed to surrender, Truman ordered a second somewhat more powerful bomb to be dropped on the city of Nagaski. This time, the military surrendered and the war was over.

That was the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war.

There are a good many old people around who were alive when these nuclear weapons were used – I am one of them. There are even some men still alive who were in the Army when they were used. But 79 years later there is no one in any army now who was alive when they were used. No Lieut., Major, Col., or General alive now was in the Armed forces when they were used.

In the 1960s, dispite a good deal of opposition From Oppenheimer andd others, the United States developed fusion or so-called hydrogen bombs, each of which was roughly 1000 times as powerful as the original fission bombs.Once again, a term had to be invented for them – megaton bombs.

Because the atomic bombs were too powerful to be used, for example, in the Korean War, an entirely new field of study called "deterrence theory" came into existence, staffed and developed not by soldiers but by psychologists and economists and political scientists. (This, by the way, was the subject of the first book I wrote, which I never got published.)

What is the point of all this:  it is widely assumed that the war between the United States and the Soviet Union using fusion bombs would last perhaps an hour or two before both countries would in effect be obliterated. Avoiding such a war (and, if you can believe it, actually planning for such a war) was clearly a matter of strategy.  By default, the fusion bombs – descendants of the bombs originally used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were labeled "tactical nuclear weapons."

The war between Russia and Ukraine has been fought with traditional weapons, notably with the use of cruise missiles. A cruise missile is essentially a small pilotless airplane launched from as much as a thousand miles away, guided by radio and then pointed at its target.  Guided missiles can carry payloads of various sorts, but a typical guided missile carries a warhead equivalent to 1000 pounds of TNT.

A "5K tactical nuke", as they are jauntily referred to by supposedly knowledgeable military characters on television, would therefore be the equivalent of 10,000 guided missiles.  Since its warhead would have the explosive power 5 thousand tons of TNT, which is to say 10 million pounds of TNT, it would be as powerful as 10,000 guided missiles each of which carry explosives equivalent to 1000 pounds of TNT.

What earthly could use such a weapon be on the battlefield?  If two groups of massed tanks faced one another, it could certainly wipe out all of the Ukrainian tanks, but it would probably also wipe out all of the Russian tanks as well, and a good deal of the surrounding territory to boot. Depending on which way the wind was blowing, it would also kill the Russian commanders and everyone else in the neighborhood.

That is why there is no such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon.

UPDATE

Still here, struggling.  Carry on. 

When I went to college, seventy-four years ago, five percent of adult Americans had four-year college degrees. This meant that aside from doctors, most lawyers, dentists, college professors, most [but not all] high school teachers, and such, virtually no adults had college degrees.  I cannot recall whether universities offered MBAs.  My first father-in-law made it to the rank of Vice-President of Sears, Roebuck without the benefit of a college experience, let alone a degree, and there were more private than public tertiary institutions.

America was a severely economically stratified country, although corporate presidents made twenty or thirty times the salaries of workers, not a thousand times.  But because of the relative rarity of college degrees, the economic mobility of working-class American men [I will come to women and African Americans later] was less obvious. 

Today, three-quarters of a century later, a third of American adults have college degrees. Sixty percent of young Americans start college, but since only 55 percent finish, the college educated portion of the population is still only at one third.

I have spent the last four months, lying in bed and watching television. During that time, I have watched hundreds of hours of commentary on the political situation. I cannot think of a single commentator who does not have a college degree. I should like to try and experiment and that has almost never been attempted. Let me ask what America looks like to one of the two thirds of the population without a college degree. To such a person, most of the good jobs are closed off. Without a college degree in America today, an ordinary American cannot be a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, a nurse, a college professor, a high school teacher, a middle school teacher, an elementary school teacher, an FBI agent, a Wal-Mart store manager, and in most large cities, a police officer, or a management trainee. It matters not how ambitious or hard working such a person is, he is simply denied those opportunities for lack of the educational credentials. 

The truth is, even fifty or seventy-five years ago when the minority of workers had any real shot at the good jobs in this country but because access to such jobs did not require such credentials, it was possible to conceal that lack of access from view. 

Today, there are more than 3,000 college and university campuses that offer a four-year degree. And I'm not talking about those elite institutions that virtually guarantee their graduates of the upper middle-class jobs with salaries over $100,000 a year, with pensions, benefits, paid holidays, and the like. The United States is the third largest country in the world. Only China and India, each with well over a billion residents, or larger, because the United States has so large a population, it is possible to make the mistake of supposing that the concerns of the one-third with college degrees, especially when being discussed by people who have college degrees, constitute a totality or at least the preponderance of the concerns of Americans. But even that enormous population is only one-third of all the adults in America. 

The obscene character and performance of Donald Trump and his characterless followers make it easy to dominate our attention. But the real question is how such a desperate group of protofascists could command such support of virtually of half the voting population. Once we recognize the real character of America's population, the answer becomes obvious. The democratic party in the recent decades has become the party of the educated third of America. Because of the complexity of America's history with slavery, and the almost self-destructive embrace by the republican party of anti-abortion politics, the democratic party has been able to conceal from itself it's lack of commitment to the interest of the non-educated two-thirds of the population (one of the many ironies of the education of the electoral fiasco that has just played out before us is the fact that Joe Biden is the most genuine supporter of the interests of the non-college educated class). If we managed to survive the next several years, a survival that will be made more probable if Hakin Jefferies manages to gain control of the house perhaps, we will finally begin to ask whether the interests of the two-thirds of the AMerican population without college degrees should be made central to the concerns and mission of the democratic party. 

(Dictated from my bed in the skilled nursing facility at Carolina Meadows with the invaluable assistance of Erika Hamlett)

THE RETURN OF THE IRREPRESSIBLE

Four months ago I slipped in the kitchen and banged the back of my head on the floor, producing a subdural hematoma.. Thus began a saga that led me to the emergency room at UNC hospitals, and put me on a ventilator for five days. At one point the neurological team treating me were ready to give up, and were only dissuaded by the intervention of my son, Tobias and my doctor, Thomas Keyserling.

Now, three months later, I am much improved, although consigned to a wheel chair [as much by my Parkinson's as by the effects of the fall.]

There is one small problem:  I failed my swallow test.  As a consequence, I run the risk of pneumonia in my lungs if I eat or drink anything.  Hence I receive all my food through a tube in my stomach.  I have not eaten or drunk anything in three months.  Sigh.

I have a good deal to say about one thing and another.  But it will take time.  I hope you amused yourself in my absence.

SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

 I managed to make it through college, graduate school, and a Harvard instructorship without owning a car, but in 1961, As I set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts to find out whether there was a world beyond Harvard Square, I decided I needed transportation, so I bought Sam Todes' ancient Plymouth for a $100.  The next year, when I got married, I decided wanted to get rid of the car but I could not find anybody to buy it or even take it away. I will never forget calling the police department and having a Sgt. lean in conspiratorially to the telephone as he said "dump it in the river." Eventually i did find a garage that would take it away for $25 (that is to say, I paid them $25 to take it away.)

Now, 63 years later, I have decided my car owning days are over, so I shall do something or other with my 20-year-old Toyota Camry and rely from now on on the transportation of others.As losses go, it is small one.

SAD NEWS

Yesterday, by way of an anonymous comment on this blog, I learned for the very first time the devastating news that Noam Chomsky a year ago had a massive stroke and is still recovering slowly from it.  There is really nothing I can say save to hope that he makes a full recovery in time. Norm is five years older than I and I suppose it is hardly surprising that he is having serious health problems, but if anybody wants further proof of the nonexistence of a good God one can simply reflect that Henry Kissinger lived to be 100.  Lord knows, it is long past the time when my prayers would have any effect even if I knew to whom or to what to direct them. If anyone has recent news of how Norm is doing. I would appreciate an email.