## Metadata - Author: [[Ron Rosenbaum]] - Full Title: How the End Begins - Category: #books ## Highlights - Hitler’s Holocaust has shaped Israeli awareness of history, and the implications of the past failure to take Hitler’s exterminationist rhetoric seriously will affect Israelis current reaction—or overreaction—to the exterminationist rhetoric and the real threats that rain down on their sliver of land. ([Location 2276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=2276)) - Abandonment of proportionality is the essence of the so-called Samson Option in all its variants. A Samson Option is made possible by the fact that even if Israel has been obliterated, it can be sure that its Dolphin-class nuclear missile submarines cruising the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, at depths impervious to detection, can carry out a genocidal-scaled retaliation virtually anywhere in the world. ([Location 2280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=2280)) - It would be the ultimate irony if the atomic bomb was only invented because of misplaced fears Hitler might get one. A bomb that might ultimately nonetheless serve to finish off Hitler’s Final Solution if detonated in Israel. ([Location 2303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=2303)) - “What would serve the Jew-hating world better,” Perlmutter asks, “in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter? Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination while the world either cackles or looks away—unlike the Armenians, Tibetans, World War II European Jews or Rwandans—have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?” Justice or vengeance? Or just pure rage at the world’s unconcern about incitement to genocide. It may be wrong, not proportional. But it’s there, that emotion. What role should emotion play in nuclear decisions? Isn’t the entire deterrent system designed to be based on an emotional dynamic, that of fear? Fear of attack leads to threatening a more fearsome retaliation that is designed to inspire fear of attacking in the first place. ([Location 2393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=2393)) - On a congressional junket to NATO installations in the 1970s, he found himself in conversation with one of the Air Force wing commanders in charge of what were then our most forward-based hair-trigger weapons, the fighter jet squadrons in Europe that carried nuclear bombs and could reach Moscow in minutes. They would be the first, most vulnerable target of any Soviet first strike. The commander told Nunn that when he got an order to send his jets east to deliver their nuclear payloads in what would inevitably be the beginning of a cataclysmic global nuclear war, he estimated he had forty-five to seventy-five seconds to make the decision to verify and validate the takeoff order before his jets would likely be destroyed on the ground. A hair trigger’s hair trigger. The potentiality for catastrophic, planet-destroying error in that thinnest of decision windows shocked Nunn. From that moment he began a lifelong personal investigation and legislative intervention into nuclear deployment and strategy questions. The endpoint was his advocacy of Zero: the hair-trigger problem had not been solved. Now the decision window was minutes rather than seconds, but seven, ten, fifteen minutes at most, and vulnerability to hackers spoofing an attack made those minutes even more precarious. ([Location 3480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=3480)) - Nunn suggested he had been given assurances that the NPR would make practical de-alerting suggestions, but that the Pentagon overrode them. He theorized that part of the problem was semantic: the phrase “de-alerting” grated on military culture; military men were trained all their careers that everything depended on maximum alertness. Nunn argued that abandoning the word “de-alerting” and speaking instead about “increasing warning and decision time” might make a difference. ([Location 3490](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=3490)) - I suspect that for Nunn it is the impossibility of solving the nuclear deterrence paradox—that we must give the impression we will commit genocide to avoid genocide—that has forced this plain-spoken moral man to be afraid to say he won’t commit genocide. For that reason alone nuclear weapons must go. ([Location 3507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=3507)) - The Zero advocates adopt this no nukes posture because they say deterrence has failed and yet depend at the end of it for some unnamed international body to have the deterrent force to prevent de-nuked superpowers from renuking, restocking their arsenals, or preventing smaller powers from renuking their deterrent stock. What are you going to threaten them with? The nukes you took away from them? Then assuming they’d ever do it—you’ve created a nuclear-powered world government that derives its legitimacy from… the nuclear threats of a nuclear monopoly. ([Location 3803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=3803)) - “The seemingly impossible collision of two subs in a large ocean should remind us of the fallacy by which we assume nuclear weapons will never be used. Because the threat of global nuclear war is not zero, even a small chance of war each year, multiplied over a number of years, adds up to the likelihood that the weapons will be used. Like those two subs stalking through the Atlantic, the odds will begin to align. Mathematically, they are destined to.” ([Location 4017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=4017)) - The terrible wrong turn in nuclear policy that was signaled by the Air Force land-based missile triumph over Burke’s sub-based “finite deterrence” can and must be reversed. It is far more important than reducing the number of land-based missiles to 1,000 or 1,500 by 2018. It must be done now. ([Location 4130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003UYUOPE&location=4130))