Civilian President Kennedy is politically obliged not to override poor decisions made by President Eisenhower, the famous military general.
John F. Kennedy was a decorated military officer who served in World War II. He was vastly outranked by Eisenhower, of course, but it’s still frightening to imagine a political system where a President’s implicit authority on defense issues was so strongly related to their military rank that even another President who served in wartime couldn’t override them.
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Also, having read the book, do you have any thoughts on how we got so lucky?
There’s always anthropic reasoning, but given the number of terrible systems in place and the non-disastrous result, I wonder whether there were more anti-war incentives than we realized.
This could be at a system level; for example, maybe we don’t hear about the military’s unusually good security practices, only the bad ones. Or it could be at the individual level; even if military leaders didn’t know they were at risk of actually destroying the world, “not killing millions of people” might still be a more powerful motivation than we realize, leading to increased personal caution and a general reluctance to escalate. Maybe we’d have been safe even with a few more Petrov-like incidents, because almost no one would ever take that final step...
John F. Kennedy was a decorated military officer who served in World War II. He was vastly outranked by Eisenhower, of course, but it’s still frightening to imagine a political system where a President’s implicit authority on defense issues was so strongly related to their military rank that even another President who served in wartime couldn’t override them.
--
Also, having read the book, do you have any thoughts on how we got so lucky?
There’s always anthropic reasoning, but given the number of terrible systems in place and the non-disastrous result, I wonder whether there were more anti-war incentives than we realized.
This could be at a system level; for example, maybe we don’t hear about the military’s unusually good security practices, only the bad ones. Or it could be at the individual level; even if military leaders didn’t know they were at risk of actually destroying the world, “not killing millions of people” might still be a more powerful motivation than we realize, leading to increased personal caution and a general reluctance to escalate. Maybe we’d have been safe even with a few more Petrov-like incidents, because almost no one would ever take that final step...
...or maybe we did just get lucky. Any thoughts?