On Friday, January 13, 2017 at 1:48:56 AM UTC-5, Stuf4 wrote:
From Scott Kozel:
On Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 12:41:41 PM UTC-5, Stuf4 wrote:
snip
And even is someone has the full plan explained to them, it's easy to picture them giving all kinds of reasons why such a plan would not work.
Consider these trick plays in football:
"Greatest Trick Plays in Football History"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj8G9dGuNkU
There was a coach somewhere who dreamt up these plays. And there were
probably people around that coach saying why these plays will never
work. Yet they were tried. And they worked.
I have seen that video in the past, and there is no comparison between a
football play designed to score 6 points, and some kind of one-shot
nuclear trick against a nuclear superpower who will rain down thousands of
A-bombs and H-bombs all over your nation. You would be committing
suicide, national suicide.
A huge amount of effort was put into first strike planning.
And I am sure that a lot of creativity went into some of them.
As for the lack of viability, that would be the easiest explanation as to why it never happened.
But regarding the dismissal of comparing to football trick plays, that would be like me offering an analogy of a football defensive strategy to rolling columns of armored tanks to use the element of surprise to overrun a neighboring country.
One might be inclined to dismiss this to say that "there is no comparison of football plays to the maneuver of armored columns." Yet the NFL still sees fit to refer to the onslaught across the line of scrimmage immediately at the whistle as "The Blitz".
Football analogies to military strategy are firmly entrenched as the norm..
Look at that term used right there. 'Entrenched'. Football war analogies come from both WWI and WWII. I extend that to the Cold War, and suddenly it is seen as unkosher.
Rhetoric and language is different from reality. There are several orders of magnitude difference in scale between a football play and a putative national strategic military attack against a nuclear superpower. As another poster pointed out, there is no cobalt bomb that will blow up 1/3 of the world.