NY TIMES SELF-PARODY WATCH

Weekly James ^ | 9/10/02 | James Morrow

[TheToddinator]

NY TIMES SELF-PARODY WATCH. From Tuesday's editorial page:

"During the Truman administration, some strategists suggested attacking the Soviet Union while it was still militarily weak to prevent the rise of a nuclear-armed Communist superpower. Wiser heads prevailed, and for the next 40 years America's reliance on a strategy of deterrence preserved an uneasy but durable peace."

Yeah, it's great that millions of people got to live under Soviet tyranny, die in gulags, and boil their shoes for soup for four decades while the rest of us in the West did duck-and-cover drills. Thank Christ the United States didn't swagger in there after World War II and set up a democracy or something like that. That would've just been awful.

[gcruse]

This would have required not only a nuclear attack, but a massive occupation afterwards. Hindsight is 20/20, but not always realistic.

[henderson field]

There was one A-bomb left. It was being saved for Tokyo in case the Japanese didn't cave in, but it could just as well have been used on Moscow. Occupation? Maybe no more than Japan.

[evolved_rage]

Don't forget, no USSR, no space race, no computers, no internet...no FR.

What if Superman landed in Berlin and not in Smallville, USA?

[Consort]

And China would be at least twice the size as it is today.

[WOSG]

Don't forget, no USSR, no space race, no computers, no internet...no FR.

On the contrary, we'd have the "peace dividend" about 40 years earlier ... A lot of things would have been different and saving billions on defense just a small part of the benefit. Imagine Russia like it is today ... in the 1960s. ... we could do business. ... imagine most of the third world being liberated not to socialist tyranny but free market economics ... the world as a whole would be hugely richer.

And you dont need a space race to fuel technology.... the transistor radio was enough for Sony, the calculator enough for intel, the car radio enough for motorola, etc. The transistor progress was *faster* in 1990s than 1970s, so dont imagine the cold war helped that.

[evolved_rage]

I believe necessity is the mother of invention. While a few more years of war in the 40s would have sped up a few technological developments, I don't believe that private industry would have developed the products we have today without all the pork in government spending attracting them by paying for their R&D.

For example, drug companies get 75% of their new drugs from NIH, rather than developing new drugs themselves. I don't believe eliminating NIH would result in a replaced level of private research, albeit more economically performed. I know, ban the FDA... Businesses just do not risk profits the way the gubmint spends our taxes. IMHO, war R&D was necessary during the cold war, and resulted in accelerated technical development.

What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly???