Nuclear war

World War III!  As a young lad, a seventh grader, I read with fascination a prediction of how such a war might occur and be fought, and how it might end.    A war that would result in horrific casualties on all sides, but would end up with the U.S.S.R. under United Nations occupation.  The good guys won, if  -- considering the casualties -- you could call anyone the winner.

The entire October 22, 1952, issue of Collier's Magazine -- a general interest magazine similar to its competitor, the Saturday Evening Post -- was dedicated to describing the war that no one wanted.  The cover showed a redrawn map of Europe, following the war, with the Soviet Union's Eastern European satellites, the Baltic republics, and the Ukraine -- as well as the city of Moscow -- under U.N. occupation.  Always a lover of maps, it is this map on the cover that I remember most about the issue.

This week's issue of The Economist reminds me of that long ago doomsday Collier's issue. The magazine has dedicated much less space (three pages) to a scenario of how, in 2019, we might blunder into a nuclear war in Korea. North Korea is not the Soviet Union -- it is far smaller and less populated.  But relative to its size -- or maybe even in absolute terms -- its nuclear capacity is far greater than the Soviet Union's was in 1952.  Both the Collier's war and the Economist's war were "accidental" -- as always feared, the parties drifted into all-out
war by a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings of each other's intentions and conduct.

In the Collier's war, the United States sustained nuclear attacks, from missiles fired from submarines, against Chicago, New York, Washington and Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Norfolk and other US cities.  America responded by dropping multiple nuclear bombs on Moscow, and sending 10,000 suicide paratroopers into the Urals to destroy Moscow's remaining nuclear stockpile.  The war ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1955, after three years of warfare.

In the Economist's scenario, the United States escapes nuclear attack.  After sustaining enormous initial damage, and realizing he and his nation are doomed, Kim Jong Un decides to fire everything he has left, ending the war in as much destruction as possible.  But his last two ICBMs are destroyed on the ground, and American Patriot missiles shoot down North Korean intermediate range missiles aimed at Tokyo and Okinawa before they can reach their targets.

Seoul had been nuked, with 300,000 deaths -- and many more doomed to die from radiation exposure.  Military losses were in the hundreds of thousands.  North Korea was in total chaos, facing starvation.  China was facing a critical Korean refugee problem, together with radioactive fallout crossing the border.

The article ends with China's reaction still unknown.

President Trump tweeted:

Nuke attack on Seoul by evil Kim was BAD!  Had no choice but to nuke him back.  But thanks to my actions, America is safe again.

The world reeled economically, on the brink of a worldwide recession.

In both the Collier's and Economist nuclear war scenarios, war came through miscalculation, and victory was won at an awful price.  Such victories bring to mind King Pyrrus's lament: "If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined."

In 1952, the Collier's war seemed like a reasonable forecast of the future.  Through common sense by both American and Soviet leaders, it never happened.  Do today's American and North Korean leaders possess similar common sense?

As the Economist likes to end provocative articles, "Only time will tell."