From: brabuhr@... Date: 2010-06-18T05:43:32+09:00 Subject: Re: Why, oh why, _why? On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Rick DeNatale wrote: > On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Colin Bartlett wrote: >> For some reason I'm reminded of the SAC chief who allegedly said that if >> after a nuclear war there were two americans and one russian left "we win" > > That sounds like a line from a movie, maybe Dr. Strangelove? http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/12/26/william_kaufmann_90_mit_political_scientist_reshaped_kennedys_defense_strategy/?page=2 General Thomas S. Power, commander of the Strategic Air Command, interrupted Dr. Kaufmann two minutes into his four-hour briefing: "Why do you want us to restrain ourselves?" Power bellowed, according to people who recalled the episode to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. "Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards!" After several more minutes of the briefing, Power finally said, "Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" Dr. Kaufmann retorted: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman." http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1693 “Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. . . . Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”[i] Everyone who knew Power seems to have thought he was crazy. Even the man he replaced as SAC commander, General Curtis LeMay, regarded him as unstable—and everybody knew that LeMay himself was, as Dr. Strangelove’s Group Captain Lionel Mandrake would have put it, “as mad as a bloody March hare.” After LeMay left his command at SAC, he became Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force in 1957 and Chief of Staff in 1961. He is most often remembered as a tireless advocate of an all-out, nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union and its allies, and as the most likely inspiration for General Buck Turgidson in Strangelove. Either Power or LeMay might have served as a model for the Strangelove character General Jack D. Ripper, whose own nuclear first strike on the Ruskies came straight out of the LeMay-Power playbook. [i] Power as quoted in Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, [1983] 1991), p. 246.