Apologies for coming to this party a bit late. Particularly as I find my own answer really, really frustrating. While I wouldn’t say it was an origin per se, getting into reading Overcoming Bias daily a few years back was what crystallised it for me. I’d find myself constantly somewhere between “well, yeah, of course” and “ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Guess the human brain doesn’t tend to do Damascene revelations. We need overwhelming evidence, over a long period of time, to even begin chipping away at our craziest beliefs, and even then it’s a step-by-step process.
The analogy I sometimes go over is something most people find fairly obvious like egalitarianism. You don’t find many people who would attest to being pro-inequality. But all the same, you find very few people who have genuinely thought through what it means to be in favour of equality and really try to fit that into everyday life. The first step to becoming a rationalist is to admit how irrational everyone is without monumental efforts to the contrary.
BTW, I am totally on the road to de-Catholicising my mother. This is on the order of converting Dubya to Islam, so if I can manage that I’m awarding myself an honorary brown belt.
I can think, straight away, of four or five reason why this would have been very much the wrong thing to do.
You make an enemy of your biggest allies. Nukes or no, the US has never been more powerful than the rest of the world put together.
You don’t react to coming out of one Cold War by initiating another.
This strategy is pointless unless you plan to follow through. The regime that laid down that threat would either be strung up when they launched, or voted straight out when they didn’t.
Mutually assured destruction was what stopped nuclear war happening. Setting one country up as the Guardian of the Nukes is stupid, even if you are that country. I’m not a yank, but I believe this sort of idea is pretty big in the constitution.
Attacking London is a shortcut to getting a pounding. This one’s just conjecture.
Yeah I think the clue is in there. Better to be about the good of humanity, and ruthless if that’s what’s called for. Setting yourself up as ‘the guy who has the balls to make the tough decisions’ usually denotes you as a nutjob. Case in point: von Neumann suggesting launching was the right strategy. I don’t think anyone would argue today that he was right, though back then the decision must have seemed pretty much impossible to make.