Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When the Soviets wanted to assess what chance they had of winning a surprise preemptive nuclear war against the West (before, of course, the West launched one)? What fraction of nukes should be used? What fraction should be reserved for re-retaliation against the inevitable retaliation? What fraction of bombs on either side would misfire or be inaccurate? What were the odds of taking out the Western communication systems in a first strike? How many Western submarines might be close to the Soviet coast to launch their missiles? How much damage might the bombs do? When there are a huge number of variables, and the odds of each of those variables can be different every hour, statisticians do multiple runs with different numbers probabilities in each run. This is called by a racy name, Monte Carlo runs. And Monte Carlo runs is exactly what Colonel Valery E. Yarynich did to evaluate the USSR’s chances. And with so many variables with unpredictable probabilities in the equation, Ya...

I remember this lesson at school about the effects of the Hiroshima (or was it Nagasaki?) bombing. It left me, well, totally untouched. I guess it was poorly written or maybe I was too young for it. Also, it didn’t have sound bites, like the International Court of Justice ruling that said: “Their destructive power…cannot be contained in space and time.” Space and time. So Einsteinian in its sound. Kind of ironic, isn’t it? Recently, I read a book titled “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III” by Ron Rosenbaum. I am totally unmoved by any of the let-us-get-rid-of-nukes argument the book had. Mostly because the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. How would you ensure everyone not only eliminates their stockpiles but can also be trusted to not build them again ever? Besides, I am not worried about nukes with the Americans, Russians, Chinese, Brits, French, Israelis and Indians since they all desire to live; none of them is suicidal. That leaves the Paki...