The speed of war

Alex Wellerstein has a good post detailing the runaway improvements in speed and efficiency in war:

The first atomic bombs did with a single plane, in a single instant, what would have taken hundreds of bombers loaded with conventional munitions the work of many hours […]

In less than ten years, the bomber forces of the Strategic Air Command had so swollen that it was possible to imagine the complete destruction of the Soviet bloc in a matter of hours. By the 1960s, the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) meant that thermonuclear payloads could be delivered from one side of the globe to the other in around half an hour.

The way nuclear weapons accelerate the process of human-led global destruction is craaaaaazy:

• Thousands of planes loaded with millions of pounds of traditional munitions can destroy a city in a few days.
• One plane loaded with one atom bomb can destroy a city in a few hours (time it takes plane to fly to location).
• Multiple planes with multiple atom bombs can destroy multiple cities in a few hours.
• Multiple planes with multiple thermonuclear bombs can destroy multiple nations in a few hours.
• Thousands of missiles with multiple thermonuclear bombs can destroy the world in minutes.

Fast! Efficient! Automated! I guess you call that — progress?

[we made systems to be] able to order up the deaths of half a billion people in less time than people typically get for a lunch break.

A glimpse at how war planners saw it all working:

An SLBM launches. About a minute later and a half later (95 seconds), NORAD gets the alert. If the missile was on a “depressed” trajectory, you now have between 135 seconds […] and 645 seconds […] before the detonation, depending on the SAC target. If it is on a “nominal” trajectory, you get between 245 seconds […] and 755 seconds

We’re talking about (seemingly) rationale human beings designing systems capable of hundreds of millions of deaths and thinking, “It’s probably best to communicate this in seconds rather than minutes because of how fast we’ve made it all.”