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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (27241)	12/24/1998 2:10:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

re: Secret nuclear blackmail These deliberations were kept secret from me because I am a notorious blabbermouth, and have access to wide bandwidth. If you will read the diplomatic correspondence that is now being published, especially from Russia, you will see that many inexplicable actions are explained by the hypothesis of secret threats that were or were not made. China's incredibly dangerous invasion of North Korea in the autumn of 1950 was really not dangerous at all. Stalin had given Mao the go ahead, and, most important, the United States had not threatened to nuke 'em. (There was a very good reason -- and Stalin suspected it -- we had very few nuclear weapons ready to deliver. He also doubted that nuclear war was much worse than any other kind.) Similarly, in the '73 Yom Kippur War, when the Israelis were bailed out by the American airlift and were about to destroy the Egyptian Army and attack Cairo when the Soviet Union proposed (1) a U.S. - Soviet peacekeeping force; and (2) Brezhnev threatened that if the US did not agree then "we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally." US intelligence detected Soviet military preparations, Kissinger rejected the demarche and US forces were put on world wide alert. This put one-third of US bombers in the air heading for fail safe points for the USSR to see on their screens, and Brezhnev blinked. As you may recall, everything was going to hell domestically. No one consulted me (I was Economic Adviser to the Director of the ACDA at the time -- no reason they should) but I figured out on my own that it was high time to start burrowing in the back yard, the second time since the Cuban missile crisis. I decided then and there that any time someone backed off from an advantageous action without any other good reason, I would assume that someone else had threatened -- secretly in order to protect their enemy's amour propre -- to blow their butts off of the face of the earth. See no reason to change my opinion.