random compendium mas o menos

More strange dreams. I think I was swimming with dolphins trying to negotiate a peace treaty with some aliens or something in the last one. Less history reading on international relations would be helpful. Fortunately even that dream was apparently like the Simpsons' episode with the dream quest that was spiced up with Homer's search for Lincoln's gold. There appeared to be a side event with some guy trying to scam a corporation to steal the alien ship or some such. And he got left in the middle of the ocean for his trouble. Strong work.

Anyway, since I got a new monitor, I decided the best way to test it out was to play a non-graphic intensive strategy game. So I fired up Civilization. I promptly found the widescreen high resolution very useful...but not much better than what I had before (not nearly as much of an improvement as I saw with spreadsheets, DVDs, and L4D). What I did find by playing this round was a confusing set of ethical boundaries that didn't quite apply in the game and I don't think they do in real life much either (at least, not anymore, but they could have for many years). Late in the game, I was bordered by the Dutch to my south and Romans to my East. The Romans had been basically aligned with the Dutch since they ended up at war with virtually the entire world and I took several cities from them.

The game gave a side event to build a large navy and the reward was a pile of nukes or some unit bonuses (uh...duh, get the nukes..). But this was on a map with one giant continent, so a navy was pretty useless. I built one anyway, but lost out on the reward by a couple turns to the Dutch I think. The result was now I had this huge army massed on my borders, more than enough to hold off their combined army and strike back into their territories, but a now nuclear threat that could vaporize it when it moved out. So I did the most logical thing I could think of with this army, I invaded the Zulu/Ottoman alliance to the south-east, behind the Roman/Dutch frontier, with my entire offensive force and my huge navy in support along the coast, well behind the initial front lines. The result was actually pretty interesting.

I managed, of course, to crush the Zulu empire down to scattered bits (which I was still in the tedious process of mopping up). But they screamed for help and got the Roman/Dutch alliance to declare war on little old me. The game provides a missile shield project to build, which I had, and the Romans had, which shoots down about 75% of incoming missiles. But the Dutch hadn't built theirs. And I had, since I didn't need more troops, stockpiled ICBMs. The Dutch-Roman army had "tactical" nukes, which do just about as much damage in game but have limited range (basically one state to the next). The result was they nuked a couple border towns, managed not to take over any of them in the chaos that creates (seeing them vaporizing several dozen units at once is not a pleasant experience) and I replied with a full nuclear strike on their core cities. Not on their border towns with troops in them, which I could counter by moving around armies to places they couldn't reach with their own pitiful, but numerous nukes. The 3 biggest Dutch cities each got a nuke. The Romans did try to lob a couple ICBMs at two of my bigger cities (with token garrisons, no troops basically), but they got shot down. I'm not sure how this was ethically sensible, but it did have the necessary side effect of cutting down the Dutch's ability to win the game in the cheap "culture victory", by amassing culture in 3 major cities. Killing several million people and coating the surrounding terrain in fallout will do that. This isn't very common to occur in the game because usually the computer creates a non-nuclear proliferation treaty through the game's UN and nobody builds nuclear bombs. So it was different in that I was bored enough to share.

Anyway, after this whole scenario was painted out (and I had won the game, something not really possible with a nuclear war involved in real life), I got to thinking about our own nuclear strategy starting back in the 50s, that basically crafted an all-nothing war system for conventional forces (which we attempted briefly to suggest nuclear bombs were simple conventional weapons, or at least that some of them, non-H-bombs maybe, were). That game scenario was basically what that would have resulted in, in the appropriate crisis. We kept using the "we have NUCLEAR WEAPONS, obey or die" threat in serious foreign relations and occasionally it worked. Eventually somebody might have been crazy enough to say, you know what, we're going to go ahead and invade anyway in this country here and you're not going to stop us (that somebody would have been me in this case, invading and crushing the hapless Zulu/Ottoman frontier with a huge conventional army, in real life it might have been Russia or China invading some territory we didn't want them in, one such threat was issued over Vietnam in the mid-50s to China). If that someone had nuclear weapons of their own, they very well might feel that those weapons give them some measured impunity from useful international scrutiny. And the result was a full nuclear exchange devastating huge cities and regions of the world, vaporizing millions of people.

Thus far, American policy has basically been to use conventional forces (we have uesd "unconventional forces" more often than this) only to pick on countries without the nukes, or at least, countries without the range to attack us directly (we have picked on Pakistan since they joined the nuclear club). But what this basically reads like to our potential enemies is "Get nukes". That's why we have this eternal situation with Iran and enriched uranium, the threat for many years of Saddam doing so (even though he wasn't able to, and the public was greatly overblown in its fear), the DPRK doing missile tests and occasionally blackmailing others by building a nuclear reactor to produce weapons grade material, Syria and Iraq having a reactor bombed by Israel, that sort of thing. It seems like the cheapest option is still to pay off people not to build the weapons, but it might also be cheaper to cut down what we have. This seems like the policy we've pursued since the mid 80s when there were 3 times as many warheads out there (and fewer countries with them). Seems like, for once, it makes sense.