New John Mearsheimer lecture on tactical nuclear weapons just dropped -- fascinating stuff. transcript from Grok Bot: "So it's just very important to understand that tactical nuclear weapons were seen for much of the 1950s as a magic weapon. Now, what happened to throw cold water on this whole... line of thinking was a war game that was run in mid-June 1955. This is called Carte Blanche, and we had the situation where the Soviets would attack with conventional forces. We would use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons in response. And of course, the Soviets would use nuclear weapons of their own. Now, what happened in this war game, basically about 3,000 NATO aircraft from 11 different countries were employed in the war game. And about, I'd say, 335 nuclear weapons were employed. The usual range is 335 to 355. That's how many tactical nuclear weapons were employed in this war game. And by the way, the Russians, of course, employed nuclear weapons as well as the NATO forces in this war game. And in fact, the Russians or the Soviets ended up using or deploying or exploding more nuclear weapons, slightly more nuclear weapons than NATO did. But let's say the total was about 335 nuclear weapons. And the war was fought almost exclusively on West German soil. Now, what was the end result? The end result is that 1.7 million West Germans died and 3.5 million West Germans were wounded. Moreover, these numbers don't take into account the subsequent deaths that would occur as a result of the radiation poisoning. So you just want to think about that. You had a war game that went from June 20th to June 28th. This is 1955, the middle of the 50s, and it ended up with 1.7 million West Germans dead. What is this tell you? In effect, it tells you that you're destroying Germany to save Germany."show more

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