What do you think about Kahn’s ideas after having read more of the article and having seen the film? Why do you hold these ideas?
I think that Herman Kahn's ideas were legitimate at the time. Many of my classmates found the idea of feeding potentially radioactive food to older citizens outrageous. They thought that everyone should have a right to good food and good health. I reminded some of my friends that in that time, people were very scared and the threat of a nuclear war was much more real. I theorized that at the point of a nuclear war, people would become less and less concerned about comfort and more and more about survival. This made the idea of feeding potentially poisoned food to older people much more bearable. If such a situation were to occur, it would make it much more logical...
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I must disagree with you. After all, humans base their decisions off of emotion much more than logic during wartimes. That's the whole purpose of military training, to teach people to control their emotions and be purely logic based. Normal civilians, even during war time, would act with a humane mind, attempting to maintain a sense of morality during in that troubled time.
ReplyDeleteEven if these are the circumstances that you would have to live under, would you even want to live? In the "Fat Man" it touches on this by asking who is better off, the survivors or the dead?
ReplyDeleteI don't exactly agree with the logic or the emotion that both you and saul argue about. Personally I think humans can't comprehend the idea of nuclear war. Yes we know fear and we know what happens to our emotions when we are scared, but what really counts is the actions that follow through. A good way to understand this is if you are put in a situation where others are in danger. Do you fly or fight? That is the question because we could talk about what to do or not do, but in the end, all that matters is what you actually do.
(I got a little unfocused at the end, but the idea took me to another direction.)