I am learning how this blog works. Something happens to get me interested in rereading some part of Poul Anderson's works even though I have posted about it more than once before. Recently, it was the concluding Dominic Flandry novels. Currently, comparing future histories has focused my attention on Anderson's Psychotechnic History. I will probably reread and post about at least the opening three stories of this series, while at the same time checking what I have already posted about them, e.g., Scene-Setting.
The opening story is "Marius." However, searching the blog for "Marius" brings up references to the Roman general of that name and also some mere lists of titles including "Marius" as well as more substantial information about the contents of the story, e.g.:
Etienne Fourre
Etienne Fourre II
Future History Continuity
Valti, Desai And Seldon
Even apparently straightforward Anderson stories are dense with information and content.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And "Marius" is very much an early Cold War SF story. That is, it reflects the anxieties and tensions of the first 20 years or so after WW II, when people most expected the USSR to openly go to war with the US. Novels like ALAS, BABYLON also reflects this mood (I can't quite recall the author's name, Frank...).
Sean
Sean:
Pat Frank.
Kaor, DAVID!
That's the man! I've read ALAS, BABYLON at least twice and I think Paul would find interesting. I also thought of Neville Shute's even grimmer ON THE BEACH, but I didn't recall when it was written (in 1959, when I looked it up). Both books reflects early Cold War tensions and fears.
Sean
Sean:
Another book worth reading is Philip Wylie's *Tomorrow!* (1954), focusing on two neighboring cities in the U.S. Midwest when the Soviets launch a surprise nuclear attack. Wylie was advocating for the Civil Defense program, and he drew a comparison because one of the cities had a CD program and the other didn't.
Wylie's *Triumph* (1963), on the other hand, portrays the Ivans deciding they don't want to CONQUER the U.S., but to ANNIHILATE it — a scenario I didn't feel was in keeping with their real-world goals.
Wylie disagreed with me, writing, "Russian Communist leaders had always been willing to pay ANY price whatsoever to conquer the world, so long as SOME world remained to be ruled in slavery, and so long as some of the Soviet elite survived to be its rulers."
Wikipedia describes the book as a "worst-case USA/USSR 'spasm war' where both sides empty their arsenals into each other with extensive use of 'dirty' bombs to maximize casualties...." This includes weapons placed to send radioactive tsunamis sweeping across the U.S. *Triumph* ends with the last fourteen people alive in the ENTIRE Northern Hemisphere being evacuated to Australia.
People tend to exaggerate the effects of nuclear weapons.
They're very destructive, but even a global exchange at the height of the Cold War wouldn't have had effects on that scale (and "nuclear winter" was a non-starter).
Likewise, fallout is a terrible menace but a temporary one. 90% is gone in a couple of weeks, and 90% of the remainder in about six months; the isotopes involved mostly have short half-lives.
Some linger, but not many.
We detonated around six hundred weapons in above-ground testing in the 1950's and 1960's, and there were long-term health consequences, but they required fairly sophisticated statistical analysis even to -detect-.
Secondary effects (starvation, mostly) would probably have killed far more people than the actual blast and radioactivity. A collapse of civilization in the northern hemisphere was possible; total depopulation, no.
Incidentally, the Soviets tended to build bigger-yield devices because their accuracy was crap, and their maintenance standards so low that they had to calculate on a lot of their weapons just not working.
Generally speaking, the inverse-square law makes very large bombs less effective than a couple of smaller ones.
Over time, both sides moved towards larger numbers of more accurate smaller-yield bombs, and worked to eliminate fallout as much as they could, on the simple basis that what goes around, comes around -- and wind knows no boundaries.
War isn't about killing people; that's a by-product, rather like pollution from industry.
War is about making people do what you want by showing them that you -can- kill them.
It's a form of political negotiation.
Kaor, DAVID and Mr. Stirling!
David, what you said makes me even more skeptical of Wylie's TRIUMPH than I was of Shute's ON THE BEACH. For the reasons you gave: his premise did not fit in with what I knew of the strategic thinking of the Politburo. Above a certain level of nuclear force the Soviets concluded a nuclear exchange would fall too far on the minus side of their risk/benefit analysis.
We do see Poul Anderson speculating about what a "spasm" nuclear exchange between the US and USSR would be like in TWILIGHT WORLD and "Wildcat." I thought the latter might be more realistic than TWILIGHT til I read Mr. Stirling's comments.
Mr. Stirling: Many thanks for your comments about what nuclear weapons REALISTICALLY does. I agree on the need to avoid "supernaturalizing" nukes, that they are simply very powerful explosives.
Yes, war is about forcing your enemy to bend to your will, making him do what you want him to do. Not just killing him. Yes, secondary effects are more likely to kill far more people than nukes themselves. A socio/economic/political collapse is very possible, but not the total extinction of entire nations.
I'll be rereading Anderson's THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE. I can trust him to be as well informed, hard headed, and realistic as you are.
Sean
Well, the total or near total extinction of -small, densely packed- nations might be possible. Not of big ones.
TWILIGHT WORLD is quite well grounded, but it postulates a war quite a bit in the future of when it was written, and much more advanced technology -- nuclear-powered aircraft, for instance.
The Soviets were generally fairly cautious. Even Stalin was -- he never started a war with any Great Power, though he was quite willing to bully or annex small states when the international situation made outside intervention unlikely.
It helped that a Soviet leader could always take refuge in the "the dialectic will overthrow our enemies" rhetoric, which in Marxist-Leninist terms was unanswerable.
They talked much more aggressively than they acted, probably to increase their deterrent posture.
People talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki without realizing that LeMay's firestorm raid on Tokyo killed 130,000 people in one 24-hour period, more than either of the nuclear attacks. It was just much more labor-intensive.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Japan and the UK comes to mind as examples of small, densely packed nations which might be totally wiped out in a major nuclear exchange. But I hope that never happens!
Yes, vile and loathsome tho the Soviet leaders were, they were more cautious, most times, than their rhetoric would indicate. And they could fall back on Marxist argle/bargle to excuse their inaction.
I like Anderson's TWILIGHT WORLD and I'm glad it was even more sophisticated than I had thought so relatively early a work by him was.
Sean
Poul seems to have hit a "phase-change". Some of his very earliest work is pure pulp and rather simplistic.
But then after "Brain Wave" and "Three Hearts and Three Lions", he progressed to an altogether higher level.
Mr Stirling,
I think that BRAIN WAVE is amazing both for an original premise and for the systematic deduction of its implications.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling, I have to agree, some of PA's earliest works are frankly pulp stories and even, sometimes, simplistic. But most of even his most pulpy and simplistic stories are still worth reading, due to how well they ere done.
Paul, I dunno, isn't it rather implausible to think the Solar System moving out from inside some kind of intelligence damping "field" in BRAIN WAVE? I think Anderson handled some of the ideas and themes found in that book far better in his late phase works, such as THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. BRAIN WAVE, eminently readable and interesting tho it is, was still very much an early Anderson work.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
A nuclear exchange wouldn't likely be as bad as that portrayed in "Wildcat," not with the nuclear arsenals we have had in the real world, but one might imagine, as Anderson did, the Cold War continuing and intensifying, with arsenals being built up, including deliberately super-dirty bombs, until --
This may not make sense as a way of waging warfare in the traditional sense, making the enemy do what you want, except in the sense that it would be "rational" for each side to accumulate a larger, more horrific arsenal to deter the other side from attacking. However, sometimes each power may see the need to demonstrate that it cannot be pushed to far, and then the need to respond to actual invasion or other attack; machismo and other human emotions may enter into it, until the result is an all-out war that serves no one's interests. World War One is the classic example.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Kaor, Nicholas!
I think the scenario you outlined would be more likely to occur when command and control in or both sides collapsed, leaving it up to local commanders to fight on not. Or even just the lower ranking officers who commanded individual missile silos. I can imagine rage and despair making some of these officers keep on hitting and hitting with all the nukes they, no matter how pointless that might have been. In fact, I think that possibility was mentioned in "Wildcat".
Sean
Sean,
The premise I meant was the sudden increase in intelligence, however explained.
Paul.
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