This is the Zodiac speaking

Thursday, January 29th, 2026

Zodiac by Robert GraysmithI recently watched the 2007 Zodiac movie, based on the Zodiac book by Robert Graysmith, and I was struck by how pulp-fiction the real-life crimes were — and how they had nonetheless disappeared from pop culture after a decade. Only as an adult did I learn that the real-life Zodiac killer was the inspiration for Dirty Harry’s Scorpio.

Scorpio, in turn, inspired the Faraday School kidnapping in Australia, the Chowchilla kidnapping in California, and the Ursula Herrmann kidnapping in Germany.

The Zodiac literally shot and stabbed young couples in secluded places, wrote taunting letters to newspapers, opened the third letter with, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” included literal cryptograms in four of the letters, and signed his correspondence with crosshairs.

The only man ever named by the police as a suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who went on to die in 1992. In the movie they question him at his blue-collar job, where he’s nonetheless wearing his rather fancy Zodiac watch. Zodiac’s Sea Wolf was the first purpose-built dive watch.

Naturally I found it odd that a mechanic in coveralls would be wearing an expensive watch, and I expected the detectives to remark on it — beyond raising their eyebrows at the crosshair logo. The suspect is also left-handed, but ostensibly ambidextrous enough to write with either hand, and wearing the watch on his left wrist. This didn’t come up, either.

Zodiac Sea Wolf Ad

The instruments of war are more punitive than acquisitive

Wednesday, January 28th, 2026

Arms and Influence by Thomas C. SchellingThomas Schelling explains the diplomacy of violence in Arms and Influence:

Diplomacy is bargaining; it seeks outcomes that, though not ideal for either party, are better for both than some of the alternatives. In diplomacy each party somewhat controls what the other wants, and can get more by compromise, exchange, or collaboration than by taking things in his own hands and ignoring the other’s wishes. The bargaining can be polite or rude, entail threats as well as offers, assume a status quo or ignore all rights and privileges, and assume mistrust rather than trust. But whether polite or impolite, constructive or aggressive, respectful or vicious, whether it occurs among friends or antagonists and whether or not there is a basis for trust and goodwill, there must be some common interest, if only in the avoidance of mutual damage, and an awareness of the need to make the other party prefer an outcome acceptable to oneself.

With enough military force a country may not need to bargain. Some things a country wants it can take, and some things it has it can keep, by sheer strength, skill and ingenuity. It can do this forcibly, accommodating only to opposing strength, skill, and ingenuity and without trying to appeal to an enemy’s wishes.

[…]

There is something else, though, that force can do. It is less military, less heroic, less impersonal, and less unilateral; it is uglier, and has received less attention in Western military strategy. In addition to seizing and holding, disarming and confining, penetrating and obstructing, and all that, military force can be used to hurt. In addition to taking and protecting things of value it can destroy value. In addition to weakening an enemy militarily it can cause an enemy plain suffering.

[…]

Forcible action will work against weeds or floods as well as against armies, but suffering requires a victim that can feel pain or has something to lose. To inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only make people behave to avoid it. The only purpose, unless sport or revenge, must be to influence somebody’s behavior, to coerce his decision or choice. To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated. And it has to be avoidable by accommodation. The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.

There is a difference between taking what you want and making someone give it to you, between fending off assault and making someone afraid to assault you, between holding what people are trying to take and making them afraid to take it, between losing what someone can forcibly take and giving it up to avoid risk or damage. It is the difference between defense and deterrence, between brute force and intimidation, between conquest and blackmail, between action and threats. It is the difference between the unilateral, “undiplomatic” recourse to strength, and coercive diplomacy based on the power to hurt.

[…]

The purely “military” or “undiplomatic” recourse to forcible action is concerned with enemy strength, not enemy interests; the coercive use of the power to hurt, though, is the very exploitation of enemy wants and fears. And brute strength is usually measured relative to enemy strength, the one directly opposing the other, while the power to hurt is typically not reduced by the enemy’s power to hurt in return. Opposing strengths may cancel each other, pain and grief do not. The willingness to hurt, the credibility of a threat, and the ability to exploit the power to hurt will indeed depend on how much the adversary can hurt in return; but there is little or nothing about an adversary’s pain or grief that directly reduces one’s own. Two sides cannot both overcome each other with superior strength; they may both be able to hurt each other.

[…]

And brute force succeeds when it is used, whereas the power to hurt is most successful when held in reserve. It is the threat of damage, or of more damage to come, that can make someone yield or comply. It is latent violence that can influence someone’s choice—violence that can still be withheld or inflicted, or that a victim believes can be withheld or inflicted. The threat of pain tries to structure someone’s motives, while brute force tries to overcome his strength. Unhappily, the power to hurt is often communicated by some performance of it.

[…]

To exploit a capacity for hurting and inflicting damage one needs to know what an adversary treasures and what scares him and one needs the adversary to understand what behavior of his will cause the violence to be inflicted and what will cause it to be withheld. The victim has to know what is wanted, and he may have to be assured of what is not wanted. The pain and suffering have to appear contingent on his behavior; it is not alone the threat that is effective—the threat of pain or loss if he fails to comply—but the corresponding assurance, possibly an implicit one, that he can avoid the pain or loss if he does comply.

[…]

Coercion requires finding a bargain, arranging for him to be better off doing what we want—worse off not doing what we want—when he takes the threatened penalty into account.

[…]

It is also the power to hurt rather than brute force that we use in dealing with criminals; we hurt them afterward, or threaten to, for their misdeeds rather than protect ourselves with cordons of electric wires, masonry walls, and armed guards. Jail, of course, can be either forcible restraint or threatened privation; if the object is to keep criminals out of mischief by confinement, success is measured by how many of them are gotten behind bars, but if the object is to threaten privation, success will be measured by how few have to be put behind bars and success then depends on the subject’s understanding of the consequences.

Pure damage is what a car threatens when it tries to hog the road or to keep its rightful share, or to go first through an intersection. A tank or a bulldozer can force its way regardless of others’ wishes; the rest of us have to threaten damage, usually mutual damage, hoping the other driver values his car or his limbs enough to give way, hoping he sees us, and hoping he is in control of his own car. The threat of pure damage will not work against an unmanned vehicle.

[…]

To hunt down Comanches and to exterminate them was brute force; to raid their villages to make them behave was coercive diplomacy, based on the power to hurt. The pain and loss to the Indians might have looked much the same one way as the other; the difference was one of purpose and effect. If Indians were killed because they were in the way, or somebody wanted their land, or the authorities despaired of making them behave and could not confine them and decided to exterminate them, that was pure unilateral force. If some Indians were killed to make other Indians behave, that was coercive violence—or intended to be, whether or not it was effective.

[…]

The contrast between brute force and coercion is illustrated by two alternative strategies attributed to Genghis Khan. Early in his career he pursued the war creed of the Mongols: the vanquished can never be the friends of the victors, their death is necessary for the victor’s safety. This was the unilateral extermination of a menace or a liability. The turning point of his career, according to Lynn Montross, came later when he discovered how to use his power to hurt for diplomatic ends. “The great Khan, who was not inhibited by the usual mercies, conceived the plan of forcing captives—women, children, aged fathers, favorite sons—to march ahead of his army as the first potential victims of resistance.” 1 Live captives have often proved more valuable than enemy dead; and the technique discovered by the Khan in his maturity remains contemporary. North Koreans and Chinese were reported to have quartered prisoners of war near strategic targets to inhibit bombing attacks by United Nations aircraft. Hostages represent the power to hurt in its purest form.

[…]

For many years the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus could hurt each other indefinitely but neither could quite take or hold forcibly what they wanted or protect themselves from violence by physical means. The Jews in Palestine could not expel the British in the late 1940s but they could cause pain and fear and frustration through terrorism, and eventually influence somebody’s decision. The brutal war in Algeria was more a contest in pure violence than in military strength; the question was who would first find the pain and degradation unendurable. The French troops preferred—indeed they continually tried—to make it a contest of strength, to pit military force against the nationalists’ capacity for terror, to exterminate or disable the nationalists and to screen off the nationalists from the victims of their violence. But because in civil war terrorists commonly have access to victims by sheer physical propinquity, the victims and their properties could not be forcibly defended and in the end the French troops themselves resorted, unsuccessfully, to a war of pain.

Nobody believes that the Russians can take Hawaii from us, or New York, or Chicago, but nobody doubts that they might destroy people and buildings in Hawaii, Chicago, or New York.

[…]

We have a Department of Defense but emphasize retaliation—“ to return evil for evil” (synonyms: requital, reprisal, revenge, vengeance, retribution).

[…]

War appears to be, or threatens to be, not so much a contest of strength as one of endurance, nerve, obstinacy, and pain. It appears to be, and threatens to be, not so much a contest of military strength as a bargaining process—dirty, extortionate, and often quite reluctant bargaining on one side or both—nevertheless a bargaining process.

[…]

The principle is illustrated by a technique of unarmed combat: one can disable a man by various stunning, fracturing, or killing blows, but to take him to jail one has to exploit the man’s own efforts. “Come-along” holds are those that threaten pain or disablement, giving relief as long as the victim complies, giving him the option of using his own legs to get to jail.

[…]

Similarly on the battlefield: tactics that frighten soldiers so that they run, duck their heads, or lay down their arms and surrender represent coercion based on the power to hurt; to the top command, which is frustrated but not coerced, such tactics are part of the contest in military discipline and strength.

[…]

Ancient wars were often quite “total” for the loser, the men being put to death, the women sold as slaves, the boys castrated, the cattle slaughtered, and the buildings leveled, for the sake of revenge, justice, personal gain, or merely custom.

[…]

When Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders in 1099 the ensuing slaughter was one of the bloodiest in military chronicles. “The men of the West literally waded in gore, their march to the church of the Holy Sepulcher being gruesomely likened to ‘treading out the wine press’ . . . ,” reports Montross (p. 138), who observes that these excesses usually came at the climax of the capture of a fortified post or city. “For long the assailants have endured more punishment than they were able to inflict; then once the walls are breached, pent up emotions find an outlet in murder, rape and plunder, which discipline is powerless to prevent.”

[…]

Violence is most purposive and most successful when it is threatened and not used. Successful threats are those that do not have to be carried out. By European standards, Denmark was virtually unharmed in the Second World War; it was violence that made the Danes submit. Withheld violence—successfully threatened violence—can look clean, even merciful. The fact that a kidnap victim is returned unharmed, against receipt of ample ransom, does not make kidnapping a nonviolent enterprise. The American victory at Mexico City in 1847 was a great success; with a minimum of brutality we traded a capital city for everything we wanted from the war. We did not even have to say what we could do to Mexico City to make the Mexican government understand what they had at stake. (They had undoubtedly got the message a month earlier, when Vera Cruz was being pounded into submission. After forty-eight hours of shellfire, the foreign consuls in that city approached General Scott’s headquarters to ask for a truce so that women, children, and neutrals could evacuate the city. General Scott, “counting on such internal pressure to help bring about the city’s surrender,” refused their request and added that anyone, soldier or noncombatant, who attempted to leave the city would be fired upon.)

[…]

Surrender negotiations are the place where the threat of civil violence can come to the fore. Surrender negotiations are often so one-sided, or the potential violence so unmistakable, that bargaining succeeds and the violence remains in reserve. But the fact that most of the actual damage was done during the military stage of the war, prior to victory and defeat, does not mean that violence was idle in the aftermath, only that it was latent and the threat of it successful.

[…]

Colonial conquest has often been a matter of “punitive expeditions” rather than genuine military engagements. If the tribesmen escape into the bush you can burn their villages without them until they assent to receive what, in strikingly modern language, used to be known as the Queen’s “protection.” British air power was used punitively against Arabian tribesmen in the 1920s and 30s to coerce them into submission.

[…]

When Caesar was pacifying the tribes of Gaul he sometimes had to fight his way through their armed men in order to subdue them with a display of punitive violence, but sometimes he was virtually unopposed and could proceed straight to the punitive display. To his legions there was more valor in fighting their way to the seat of power; but, as governor of Gaul, Caesar could view enemy troops only as an obstacle to his political control, and that control was usually based on the power to inflict pain, grief, and privation. In fact, he preferred to keep several hundred hostages from the unreliable tribes, so that his threat of violence did not even depend on an expedition into the countryside.

[…]

In 1868, during the war with the Cheyennes, General Sheridan decided that his best hope was to attack the Indians in their winter camps. His reasoning was that the Indians could maraud as they pleased during the seasons when their ponies could subsist on grass, and in winter hide away in remote places. “To disabuse their minds from the idea that they were secure from punishment, and to strike at a period when they were helpless to move their stock and villages, a winter campaign was projected against the large bands hiding away in the Indian territory.”

[…]

The Indians themselves totally lacked organization and discipline, and typically could not afford enough ammunition for target practice and were no military match for the cavalry; their own rudimentary strategy was at best one of harassment and reprisal. Half a century of Indian fighting in the West left us a legacy of cavalry tactics; but it is hard to find a serious treatise on American strategy against the Indians or Indian strategy against the whites.

[…]

For the most part, the Civil War was a military engagement with each side’s military force pitted against the other’s. The Confederate forces hoped to lay waste enough Union territory to negotiate their independence, but hadn’t enough capacity for such violence to make it work. The Union forces were intent on military victory, and it was mainly General Sherman’s march through Georgia that showed a conscious and articulate use of violence. “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war . . . If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war,” Sherman wrote. And one of his associates said, “Sherman is perfectly right . . . The only possible way to end this unhappy and dreadful conflict . . . is to make it terrible beyond endurance.”

[…]

General Sherman’s attempt to make war hell for the Southern people did not come to epitomize military strategy for the century to follow. To seek out and to destroy the enemy’s military force, to achieve a crushing victory over enemy armies, was still the avowed purpose and the central aim of American strategy in both world wars. Military action was seen as an alternative to bargaining, not a process of bargaining.

[…]

The reason is apparently that the technology and geography of warfare, at least for a war between anything like equal powers during the century ending in World War II, kept coercive violence from being decisive before military victory was achieved. Blockade indeed was aimed at the whole enemy nation, not concentrated on its military forces; the German civilians who died of influenza in the First World War were victims of violence directed at the whole country. It has never been quite clear whether blockade—of the South in the Civil War or of the Central Powers in both world wars, or submarine warfare against Britain—was expected to make war unendurable for the people or just to weaken the enemy forces by denying economic support. Both arguments were made, but there was no need to be clear about the purpose as long as either purpose was regarded as legitimate and either might be served. “Strategic bombing” of enemy homelands was also occasionally rationalized in terms of the pain and privation it could inflict on people and the civil damage it could do to the nation, as an effort to display either to the population or to the enemy leadership that surrender was better than persistence in view of the damage that could be done. It was also rationalized in more “military” terms, as a way of selectively denying war material to the troops or as a way of generally weakening the economy on which the military effort rested.

But as terrorism—as violence intended to coerce the enemy rather than to weaken him militarily—blockade and strategic bombing by themselves were not quite up to the job in either world war in Europe. (They might have been sufficient in the war with Japan after straightforward military action had brought American aircraft into range.)

[…]

Hitler’s V-1 buzz bomb and his V-2 rocket are fairly pure cases of weapons whose purpose was to intimidate, to hurt Britain itself rather than Allied military forces. What the V-2 needed was a punitive payload worth carrying, and the Germans did not have it.

[…]

The great exception was the two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. These were weapons of terror and shock. They hurt, and promised more hurt, and that was their purpose. The few “small” weapons we had were undoubtedly of some direct military value, but their enormous advantage was in pure violence. In a military sense the United States could gain a little by destruction of two Japanese industrial cities; in a civilian sense, the Japanese could lose much. The bomb that hit Hiroshima was a threat aimed at all of Japan. The political target of the bomb was not the dead of Hiroshima or the factories they worked in, but the survivors in Tokyo. The two bombs were in the tradition of Sheridan against the Comanches and Sherman in Georgia. Whether in the end those two bombs saved lives or wasted them, Japanese lives or American lives; whether punitive coercive violence is uglier than straightforward military force or more civilized; whether terror is more or less humane than military destruction; we can at least perceive that the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented violence against the country itself and not mainly an attack on Japan’s material strength. The effect of the bombs, and their purpose, were not mainly the military destruction they accomplished but the pain and the shock and the promise of more.

[…]

Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capacity to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many populous parts of the world. Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick. And it would not have strained our Gross National Product to do it with ice picks.

[…]

Nuclear weapons can do it quickly. That makes a difference. When the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem they sacked the city while the mood was on them.

[…]

To compress a catastrophic war within the span of time that a man can stay awake drastically changes the politics of war, the process of decision, the possibility of central control and restraint, the motivations of people in charge, and the capacity to think and reflect while war is in progress. It is imaginable that we might destroy 200,000,000 Russians in a war of the present, though not 80,000,000 Japanese in a war of the past.

[…]

Earlier wars, like World Wars I and II or the Franco-Prussian War, were limited by termination, by an ending that occurred before the period of greatest potential violence, by negotiation that brought the threat of pain and privation to bear but often precluded the massive exercise of civilian violence.

[…]

With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other’s. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetrations were so destructive of military organization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.

Nuclear weapons make it possible to do monstrous violence to the enemy without first achieving victory. With nuclear weapons and today’s means of delivery, one expects to penetrate an enemy homeland without first collapsing his military force.

[…]

Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt.

[…]

Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war has been won, and perhaps hurt decisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do.

[…]

It is not “overkill” that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain “kill”—the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest but just two parallel exercises in devastation.

[…]

Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gunfight—only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, permitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy’s capability to shoot back.

[…]

In World Wars I and II one went to work on enemy military forces, not his people, because until the enemy’s military forces had been taken care of there was typically not anything decisive that one could do to the enemy nation itself. The Germans did not, in World War I, refrain from bayoneting French citizens by the millions in the hope that the Allies would abstain from shooting up the German population. They could not get at the French citizens until they had breached the Allied lines. Hitler tried to terrorize London and did not make it. The Allied air forces took the war straight to Hitler’s territory, with at least some thought of doing in Germany what Sherman recognized he was doing in Georgia; but with the bombing technology of World War II one could not afford to bypass the troops and go exclusively for enemy populations—not, anyway, in Germany. With nuclear weapons one has that alternative.

[…]

Almost one hundred years before Secretary McNamara’s speech, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (the first of the great modern conferences to cope with the evils of warfare) in 1868 asserted, “The only legitimate object which states should endeavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.” And in a letter to the League of Nations in 1920, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote; “The Committee considers it very desirable that war should resume its former character, that is to say, that it should be a struggle between armies and not between populations. The civilian population must, as far as possible, remain outside the struggle and its consequences.”

[…]

In the present era noncombatants appear to be not only deliberate targets but primary targets, or at least were so taken for granted until about the time of Secretary McNamara’s speech. In fact, noncombatants appeared to be primary targets at both ends of the scale of warfare; thermonuclear war threatened to be a contest in the destruction of cities and populations; and, at the other end of the scale, insurgency is almost entirely terroristic. We live in an era of dirty war.

[…]

From about 1648 to the Napoleonic era, war in much of Western Europe was something superimposed on society. It was a contest engaged in by monarchies for stakes that were measured in territories and, occasionally, money or dynastic claims. The troops were mostly mercenaries and the motivation for war was confined to the aristocratic elite. Monarchs fought for bits of territory, but the residents of disputed terrain were more concerned with protecting their crops and their daughters from marauding troops than with whom they owed allegiance to. They were, as Quincy Wright remarked in his classic Study of War, little concerned that the territory in which they lived had a new sovereign.

Furthermore, as far as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were concerned, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Bohemian farmer were not decisive considerations. It is an exaggeration to refer to European war during this period as a sport of kings, but not a gross exaggeration. And the military logistics of those days confined military operations to a scale that did not require the enthusiasm of a multitude.

Hurting people was not a decisive instrument of warfare. Hurting people or destroying property only reduced the value of the things that were being fought over, to the disadvantage of both sides. Furthermore, the monarchs who conducted wars often did not want to discredit the social institutions they shared with their enemies. Bypassing an enemy monarch and taking the war straight to his people would have had revolutionary implications. Destroying the opposing monarchy was often not in the interest of either side; opposing sovereigns had much more in common with each other than with their own subjects, and to discredit the claims of a monarchy might have produced a disastrous backlash.

[…]

This was changed during the Napoleonic wars. In Napoleon’s France, people cared about the outcome. The nation was mobilized. The war was a national effort, not just an activity of the elite. It was both political and military genius on the part of Napoleon and his ministers that an entire nation could be mobilized for war. Propaganda became a tool of warfare, and war became vulgarized.

Many writers deplored this popularization of war, this involvement of the democratic masses. In fact, the horrors we attribute to thermonuclear war were already foreseen by many commentators, some before the First World War and more after it; but the new “weapon” to which these terrors were ascribed was people, millions of people, passionately engaged in national wars, spending themselves in a quest for total victory and desperate to avoid total defeat. Today we are impressed that a small number of highly trained pilots can carry enough energy to blast and burn tens of millions of people and the buildings they live in; two or three generations ago there was concern that tens of millions of people using bayonets and barbed wire, machine guns and shrapnel, could create the same kind of destruction and disorder.

That was the second stage in the relation of people to war, the second in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the first stage people had been neutral but their welfare might be disregarded; in the second stage people were involved because it was their war. Some fought, some produced materials of war, some produced food, and some took care of children; but they were all part of a war-making nation. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, the Poles had reason to care about the outcome. When Churchill said the British would fight on the beaches, he spoke for the British and not for a mercenary army. The war was about something that mattered. If people would rather fight a dirty war than lose a clean one, the war will be between nations and not just between governments. If people have an influence on whether the war is continued or on the terms of a truce, making the war hurt people serves a purpose. It is a dirty purpose, but war itself is often about something dirty.

[…]

“Surrender” is the process following military hostilities in which the power to hurt is brought to bear. If surrender negotiations are successful and not followed by overt violence, it is because the capacity to inflict pain and damage was successfully used in the bargaining process. On the losing side, prospective pain and damage were averted by concessions; on the winning side, the capacity for inflicting further harm was traded for concessions. The same is true in a successful kidnapping. It only reminds us that the purpose of pure pain and damage is extortion; it is latent violence that can be used to advantage. A well-behaved occupied country is not one in which violence plays no part; it may be one in which latent violence is used so skillfully that it need not be spent in punishment.

[…]

If the pain and damage can be inflicted during war itself, they need not wait for the surrender negotiation that succeeds a military decision. If one can coerce people and their governments while war is going on, one does not need to wait until he has achieved victory or risk losing that coercive power by spending it all in a losing war. General Sherman’s march through Georgia might have made as much sense, possibly more, had the North been losing the war, just as the German buzz bombs and V-2 rockets can be thought of as coercive instruments to get the war stopped before suffering military defeat.

In the present era, since at least the major East–West powers are capable of massive civilian violence during war itself beyond anything available during the Second World War, the occasion for restraint does not await the achievement of military victory or truce.

[…]

The Korean War was furiously “all-out” in the fighting, not only on the peninsular battlefield but in the resources used by both sides. It was “all-out,” though, only within some dramatic restraints: no nuclear weapons, no Russians, no Chinese territory, no Japanese territory, no bombing of ships at sea or even airfields on the United Nations side of the line. It was a contest in military strength circumscribed by the threat of unprecedented civilian violence. Korea may or may not be a good model for speculation on limited war in the age of nuclear violence, but it was dramatic evidence that the capacity for violence can be consciously restrained even under the provocation of a war that measures its military dead in tens of thousands and that fully preoccupies two of the largest countries in the world.

A consequence of this third stage is that “victory” inadequately expresses what a nation wants from its military forces. Mostly it wants, in these times, the influence that resides in latent force.

[…]

The judgment that the Mexicans would concede Texas, New Mexico, and California once Mexico City was a hostage in our hands was a diplomatic judgment, not a military one. If one could not readily take the particular territory he wanted or hold it against attack, he could take something else and trade it.

[…]

Military strategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, if not more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and deterrence. The instruments of war are more punitive than acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence.

The power to hurt is a kind of bargaining power

Monday, January 26th, 2026

Arms and Influence by Thomas C. SchellingBefore Thomas Schelling wrote his new preface for 2008 edition of Arms and Influence, he of course wrote the original preface:

One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create. A house that takes several man-years to build can be burned in an hour by any young delinquent who has the price of a box of matches. Poisoning dogs is cheaper than raising them. And a country can destroy more with twenty billion dollars of nuclear armament than it can create with twenty billion dollars of foreign investment. The harm that people can do, or that nations can do, is impressive. And it is often used to impress.

The power to hurt—the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy things that somebody treasures, to inflict pain and grief—is a kind of bargaining power, not easy to use but used often. In the underworld it is the basis for blackmail, extortion, and kidnapping, in the commercial world for boycotts, strikes, and lockouts. In some countries it is regularly used to coerce voters, bureaucrats, even the police; and it underlies the humane as well as the corporal punishments that society uses to deter crime and delinquency. It has its nonviolent forms like the sit-ins that cause nuisance or loss of income, and its subtle forms like the self-inflicted violence that sheds guilt or shame on others. Even the law itself can be exploited: since the days of early Athens, people have threatened lawsuits to extort money, owed them or not. It is often the basis for discipline, civilian and military; and gods use it to exact obedience.

The bargaining power that comes from the physical harm a nation can do to another nation is reflected in notions like deterrence, retaliation and reprisal, terrorism and wars of nerve, nuclear blackmail, armistice and surrender, as well as in reciprocal efforts to restrain that harm in the treatment of prisoners, in the limitation of war, and in the regulation of armaments. Military force can sometimes be used to achieve an objective forcibly, without persuasion or intimidation; usually, though—throughout history but particularly now—military potential is used to influence other countries, their government or their people, by the harm it could do to them. It may be used skillfully or clumsily, and it can be used for evil or in self protection, even in the pursuit of peace; but used as bargaining power it is part of diplomacy—the uglier, more negative, less civilized part of diplomacy—nevertheless, diplomacy.

There is no traditional name for this kind of diplomacy. It is not “military strategy,” which has usually meant the art or science of military victory; and while the object of victory has traditionally been described as “imposing one’s will on the enemy,” how to do that has typically received less attention than the conduct of campaigns and wars. It is a part of diplomacy that, at least in this country, was abnormal and episodic, not central and continuous, and that was often abdicated to the military when war was imminent or in progress. For the last two decades, though, this part of diplomacy has been central and continuous; in the United States there has been a revolution in the relation of military to foreign policy at the same time as the revolution in explosive power.

I have tried in this book to discern a few of the principles that underlie this diplomacy of violence.

This taboo is an asset to be treasured

Saturday, January 24th, 2026

Arms and Influence by Thomas C. SchellingThomas Schelling opens the 2008 edition of his Arms and Influence with a new preface:

The world has changed since I wrote this book in the 1960s. Most notably, the hostility, and the nuclear weapons surrounding that hostility, between the United States and the Soviet Union—between NATO and the Warsaw Pact—has dissolved with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. A somewhat militarily hostile Russia survives the Cold War, but nobody worries (that I know of) about nuclear confrontations between the new Russia and the United States.

The most astonishing development during these more than forty years—a development that no one I have known could have imagined—is that during the rest of the twentieth century, for fifty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the world’s first nuclear bombs, not a single nuclear weapon was exploded in warfare. As I write this in early 2008, it is sixty-two and a half years since the second, and last, nuclear weapon exploded in anger, above a Japanese city. Since then there have been, depending on how you count, either five or six wars in which one side had nuclear weapons and kept them unused.

[…]

Nuclear weapons were not used in the United Nations’ defense of South Korea. They were not used in the succeeding war with the People’s Republic of China. They were not used in the U.S. war in Vietnam. They were not used in 1973 when Egypt had two armies on the Israeli side of the Suez Canal. They were not used in the British war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. And, most impressively, they were not used by the Soviet Union when it fought, and lost, a protracted, demoralizing war in Afghanistan.

This “taboo,” as it has come to be called, is an asset to be treasured. It’s our main hope that we can go another sixty years without nuclear war.

The nonproliferation program has been more successful than any student of the subject would have thought likely, or even possible, at the time this book was written. There are, in 2008, nine, possibly going on ten, nations that have nuclear weapons. When this book was being written, serious estimates suggested that three or four times that number would have nuclear weapons within the century. This outcome partly reflects successful policy and partly reflects the loss of interest in nuclear electric power, especially after the explosion in Ukraine of the Chernobyl reactor complex in 1986.

[…]

Smart terrorists—and the people who might assemble nuclear explosive devices, if they can get the fissionable material, will have to be highly intelligent—should be able to appreciate that such weapons have a comparative advantage toward influence, not simple destruction. I hope they might learn to appreciate that from reading this book.

[…]

Actually, I found the first sentence of the original preface to be even more portentous than I could make it in the 1960s. “One of the lamentable principles of human productivity is that it is easier to destroy than to create.” That principle is now the foundation for our worst apprehensions.

I had to coin a term. “Deterrence” was well understood. To “deter” was, as one dictionary said, to “prevent or discourage from acting by means of fear, doubt, or the like,” and in the words of another, “to turn aside or discourage through fear; hence, to prevent from action by fear of consequences,” from the Latin to “frighten from.” Deterrence was in popular usage not just in military strategy but also in criminal law. It was, complementary to “containment,” the basis of our American policy toward the Soviet bloc. But deterrence is passive; it posits a response to something unacceptable but is quiescent in the absence of provocation. It is something like “defense” in contrast to “offense.” We have a Department of Defense, no longer a War Department, “defense” being the peaceable side of military action.

But what do we call the threatening action that is intended not to forestall some adversarial action but to bring about some desired action, through “fear of consequences”? “Coercion” covers it, but coercion includes deterrence—that is, preventing action—as well as forcing action through fear of consequences. To talk about the latter we need a word. I chose “compellence.” It is now almost, but not quite, part of the strategic vocabulary. I think it will be even more necessary in the future as we analyze not just what the United States—“ we”—needs to do but how various adversaries—“ they”—may attempt to take advantage of their capacity to do harm.

We have seen that deterrence, even nuclear deterrence, doesn’t always work. When North Korea attacked the South, it wasn’t deterred by U.S. nuclear weapons; nor was China deterred from entering South Korea as U.S. troops approached the Chinese border (and the United States was not deterred by Chinese threats to enter the fray). Egypt and Syria in 1973 were not deterred by Israeli nuclear weapons, which they knew existed. Maybe Egypt and Syria believed (correctly?) that Israel had too much at stake in the nuclear taboo to respond to the invasion by using nuclear weapons, even on Egyptian armies in the Sinai desert with no civilians anywhere near.

But “mutual deterrence,” involving the United States and the Soviet Union, was impressively successful. We can hope that Indians and Pakistanis will draw the appropriate lesson. If this book can help to persuade North Koreans, Iranians, or any others who may contemplate or acquire nuclear weapons to think seriously about deterrence, and how it may accomplish more than pure destruction, both they and we may be the better for it.

This is not our trash

Thursday, January 22nd, 2026

I Have Known the Eyes Already by Morgan WorthyIn his memoir, I Have Known the Eyes Already, Morgan Worthy mentions a traumatic event from his childhood:

The day was Tuesday, December 2, 1941. I was five years old. The time was between noon and 1p.m. That, I learned later. I want to stick to just what I remember. I came out into our front yard and saw a pint milk bottle that someone had thrown into the shallow ditch that separated our small front yard from the street. I also saw that the little boy next door, Tommy Pearson, was in his front yard. I picked up the milk bottle and said to Tommy something like, “This is not our trash. It must be your trash,” and threw the bottle into their front yard. Tommy said it was not and threw it back into my yard. We kept throwing that milk bottle back and forth. I felt good. I was going to win this battle. Tommy must have been getting more and more frustrated because he said, “I will just get a gun and shoot you.” He went into the house and when he came back, he had what I thought was a toy gun. I was standing at the edge of our yard. He came over to where I was, pointed the pistol at me and said, “Now I am going to kill you.” He tried to pull the trigger. Nothing happened. He moved back toward his house as he continued to manipulate the pistol. I stood in the same spot between our two houses watching him. Suddenly there was an explosion that I will never forget or entirely get over. The bullet went into his face and up through his head. To say that I saw an explosion is the right way to say it. I must have stood looking no more than a split second. My next memory is of running between the two houses and into the back door of my house. I could not find my mother. (She had been inside working at her sewing machine; she had heard the shot and went out the front door to check on me.)

I remember only one other thing. I looked out the back window, or back side window, and saw men coming toward the scene, running on a path that ran to the street behind us. One was my father; he was wearing high top brogans. It is the only time I can ever remember seeing him or a group of workmen run like that. It was terrifying. I have no more memories of that day.

When my mother could not find me outside, she went back in our house and found me sitting on the floor in a back room playing. She assumed that I had come back into the house when Tommy had gone back into his house. I did not tell her or anyone else that I had been there when it happened. It was my secret. My world changed on that day.

Then, a couple years later:

One day when my mother was at the farm, she took my brother and me with her to visit neighbors, the Long family, who lived on a nearby farm. My brother and I went with one of the sons about our age, Henry Long, to his bedroom. He showed us his 410 shot gun. He assured us it was unloaded and started pretending he was hunting. As he swung the gun around, he said, “Yonder goes a rabbit,” and pulled the trigger. Again, I saw and heard an explosion. This time it was only a wall that suffered the damage. Before his mother or our mother could get there my brother and I were out the front door and ran all the way home.

And then:

The third gun accident involved an “unloaded” air rifle, which my cousin aimed at my face and pulled the trigger. The BB came through a windowpane and just missed my left eye. He was more upset than I was. We managed to cover the hole in the window such that it would not be noticed by my aunt and uncle. At least this time I had someone who shared in the guilty secret.

Genetic markers of stress, resilience and success

Wednesday, January 21st, 2026

To qualify for training as elite U.S. Army Special Forces (SF) soldiers, candidates must complete the extremely stressful 19–20 day Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) course:

At SFAS, soldiers must excel at stressful cognitive and physical challenges including team problem solving, foreign language testing, land navigation, timed loaded road marches, timed runs, and challenging obstacle courses. Approximately 70% of soldiers who attempt SFAS fail.

To investigate genetic factors associated with cognitive and physiological biomarkers of resilience and success at SFAS, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; n = 116) from 47 genes associated with psychological function, resilience, circadian rhythms/sleep, and biomarkers of stress (cortisol and C-reactive protein [CRP]) were examined. Study volunteers were 800 males enrolled in SFAS (age=25±4y; height=178.1 ± 7.5 cm; body mass=82.5 ± 9.2 kg; mean±SD).

Genes associated with resilience and their functions included: tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2; serotonin synthesis); catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT; catecholamine catabolism); corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor1 gene (CRHR1; resilience to stress); Period3 (PER3; circadian rhythmicity); FK506 binding protein5 (FKBP5; steroid receptor regulation).

In summary, several genetic variants are associated with cognitive function and resilience in healthy volunteers exposed to 19–20 days of severe physical and cognitive stress designed to select the best candidates for several years of training. This study extends findings of research on resilience genetics to a novel population and situation, mentally and physically stressed soldiers competing for the opportunity to be trained for an elite unit. The findings indicate that several genes known to be associated with resilience exert their effects on the resilience phenotype under very difficult circumstances than usually studied.

Own the night or die

Monday, January 19th, 2026

Own the night or die, John Spencer says:

In three major conflicts involving forces that range from professional to semiprofessional—the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and Israel’s campaign against Hamas after October 7, 2021—large-scale night operations have been notably rare. Outside of highly specialized units conducting limited raids, most decisive fighting has occurred during daylight. At night, both sides tend to pause, reorganize, and recover. In effect, the night is ceded rather than dominated.

That reality stands in sharp contrast to what the US military demonstrated in Operation Absolute Resolve. US forces executed a complex, high-risk mission deep inside a dense capital city at night. The operation required joint and interagency integration across air, land, sea, and cyber domains and fusing intelligence, special operations forces, and other capabilities. Power was cut. Targets were overwhelmed. The mission concluded with zero American casualties and zero loss of equipment. It was a near-flawless demonstration of a capability that takes decades to build and years to sustain.

That success is even more striking when viewed against earlier US experience. Operation Eagle Claw remains a cautionary case of what happens when night operations exceed institutional readiness. The 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran required unprecedented joint coordination and depended on a complex, multiphase plan involving long-range infiltration, helicopters, and clandestine ground movement deep inside hostile territory, much of it planned for execution under conditions of limited illumination and degraded visibility. Mechanical failures, severe dust storms, and navigation challenges reduced the assault force below the minimum required to continue the mission. During the withdrawal from Desert One—a staging area where the mission was aborted—a helicopter operating in degraded visibility collided with a transport aircraft, killing eight US servicemembers. Eagle Claw exposed serious deficiencies in joint planning, rehearsal, and integration. Strategically, it revealed the limits of American power projection in denied environments and directly drove sweeping reforms, including the creation of US Special Operations Command.

A decade later, Operation Just Cause marked significant progress but also underscored how darkness magnifies the challenges of identification, control, and coordination. The 1989 invasion of Panama involved approximately twenty-seven thousand US troops and successfully dismantled the Panamanian Defense Forces within days. The operation deliberately began at night, with major assaults initiated around midnight and continuing through hours of darkness, requiring near-simultaneous airborne and ground attacks against multiple objectives across Panama. During the opening night of the operation, including the seizure of Torrijos-Tocumen International Airport and other key sites, fratricide occurred amid limited visibility, compressed timelines, and the rapid convergence of aircraft and ground forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff history of the operation highlights the extraordinary command-and-control demands created by this nighttime tempo, illustrating how darkness, density of friendly forces, and speed of execution strained identification and coordination even within an increasingly capable joint force. Just Cause demonstrated growing US proficiency in large-scale night operations, but it also showed that darkness punishes even small lapses in control, communication, and situational awareness.

The difference between those operations and more recent successes was not technology alone. It was mastery earned through relentless training, professionalization, and a force-wide expectation that fighting at night is not exceptional. It is preferred.

This tactic pairs two tanks with continuous drone support

Tuesday, January 13th, 2026

Recent statements from the Russian Ministry of Defense indicate that Russia is adopting a new tank tactic:

This tactic pairs two tanks with continuous drone support. One tank operates from a standoff position to deliver fire, while the second conducts a rapid forward maneuver toward the line of contact. Drones help coordinate movement and fires by providing target detection, fire correction, and battlefield awareness. The two tanks switch roles frequently to avoid becoming stationary targets, while still laying down a significant amount of fire against adversarial lines. This approach emphasizes desynchronizing enemy sensors and strike systems while pushing forward to achieve immediate, decisive penetration.

[…]

Large movements are quickly detected by reconnaissance drones and subsequently targeted. In the urban terrain where many of these units operate, natural bottlenecks are common, such that a single destroyed tank can block movement and bring an assault to a halt. Once immobilized, the remaining tanks become easy targets, as seen during a tank assault near Pokrovsk in early 2025.

[…]

While dismounted assaults have achieved limited penetration into Ukrainian lines, they generally lack the firepower required to hold captured positions. The new tank deployment tactic has the potential to provide this additional firepower, enabling dismounted troops to penetrate more deeply and retain control of seized terrain.

Ukrainian tactics are starting to prevail over Russian infantry assaults

Monday, January 12th, 2026

Russian pro-Kremlin blogger Alexei Chadayev concedes that Ukrainian tactics are starting to prevail over Russian infantry assaults:

The enemy is increasingly mastering the ‘playing second fiddle’ strategy — a situation where Russian forces are constantly advancing almost everywhere, and their task is to make our offensive as difficult, bloody, and resource-intensive as possible. And this is not just about the ‘drone line’ anymore.

For example, we are now seeing tactical techniques like this: their artillery is positioned deep in their battle lines, beyond the reach of our main drones, and they keep their own forward positions and key objects on it well-fortified with well-positioned fire.

Accordingly, as soon as our forces start moving, they knock out an enemy stronghold with drones and go to capture it. The enemy then waits for our forces to enter and eliminates them along with the incoming troops.

Their drone operators, in turn, not only habitually scavenge on supply and reinforcement routes, but also catch our forces engaged in any activity near ‘formerly ours’ objects.

Add to this constant mining, including remote detonation, and the active use of ‘ambushers’ on the few (and well-monitored) logistical lines.

If our forces try to quickly deploy a second echelon – for example, drone operators – the enemy immediately launches a local tactical ‘offensive’ and, even at the cost of losing equipment and personnel, achieves its goal: preserving the ‘kill zone’ between our forward positions and the nearest rear areas. In Kupiansk, for example, they successfully applied this tactic several times – which led to the current situation there.

Since this situation repeats itself not once or twice, our forces, at all levels, are increasingly less willing to advance at all, and they can be easily understood – it’s an inevitable trade-off of kilometers covered for lives, and very valuable lives of soldiers: those who actually know and are able to act in this very kill zone (the untrained ones will simply die without any result). Therefore, the problem of ‘map coloring’ is not just about headquarters’ lies.

It’s also about the difficult moral choice that commanders make: if I really go all out in an unprepared offensive now, I’ll lose many people, but if I just send a few teams forward to plant flags and report on the drone footage about the physical presence at the necessary positions – I’ll save lives and equipment.

However, as a result, this leads to situations where it’s impossible to request strikes on already ‘colored’ (i.e., ‘our own’ on the headquarters’ maps) positions — neither by artillery, nor by the Aerospace Forces, nor even by drones. Everything there is already ours! And as a result, we still have to pay with lives.

It was Purnell who had first advanced the belief that two bombs would end the war

Thursday, January 8th, 2026

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesAdmiral Purnell and General Groves had often discussed the importance of having the second blow follow the first one quickly, as General Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project), so that the Japanese would not have time to recover their balance:

It was Purnell who had first advanced the belief that two bombs would end the war, so I knew that with him and Farrell on the ground at Tinian there would be no unnecessary delay in exploiting our first success.

Good weather was predicted for the ninth, with bad weather to follow for the next five days. This increased the urgency of having the first Fat Man ready still another day earlier. When the decision to do so was reached, the scientific staff made it clear that in their opinion the advancement of the date by two full days, from the eleventh to the ninth, would introduce a considerable measure of uncertainty. I decided, however, that we should take the chance; fortunately all went well with the assembly, and the bomb was loaded and fully checked by the evening of August 8.

Six Pumpkin-carrying planes were assigned various targets in Japan for the eighth, but because of weather only two of them reached their primary targets; three of them reached secondary targets, and one aborted and returned to Tinian. In the field order for the second atomic mission there was nothing to indicate the extraordinary nature of the bomb, although anyone reading it would realize that this was by no means a routine assignment.

There were only two targets designated this time: Kokura, primary; and Nagasaki, secondary. Niigata was not made a third target because of its great distance from the other two cities.

[…]

The Kokura arsenal was one of the largest war plants in Japan. It produced many different weapons and pieces of war equipment. It extended over almost two hundred acres and was supported by numerous machine shops, parts factories, electric power plants and the usual utilities.

Nagasaki was one of Japan’s largest shipbuilding and repair centers. It was important also for its production of naval ordnance. It was a major military port. The aiming point was in the city, east of the harbor.

[…]

It was not possible to “safe” the Fat Man by leaving the assembly incomplete prior to take-off, as had been done in the case of the Little Boy. There was considerable discussion among the technical staff about what would happen if the plane crashed, and possibly caught fire, while it was taking off. They realized that there would be a serious chance that a wide area of Tinian would be contaminated if the plutonium were scattered by a minor explosion; some thought that there was even a risk of a high-order nuclear explosion which could do heavy damage throughout the island’s installations. Of course, we had gone into all this at length during our preliminary planning, and on the basis of my own opinion, as well as that of Oppenheimer and my other senior advisers, that the risk was negligible I had decided that the risk would be taken.

As happens so often, however, there was constant interference by various people in matters that lay outside their spheres of responsibility. Throughout the life of the project, vital decisions were reached only after the most careful consideration and discussion with the men I thought were able to offer the soundest advice. Generally, for this operation, they were Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Penney, Parsons and Ramsey. I had also gone over the problems at considerable length with the various groups of senior men at Los Alamos, and had discussed them thoroughly with Conant and Tolman and with Purnell and Farrell and to a lesser degree with Bush. Yet in spite of this, some of the people on Tinian again raised the question of safety at take-off at the last moment. Their fears reached a senior air officer, who asked for a written statement to the effect that it would be entirely safe for the plane to take off with a fully armed bomb. Parsons and Ramsey signed such a statement promptly though with some trepidation, possibly with the thought that if they were proven wrong they would not be there to answer. Ramsey then advised Oppenheimer at once of the various design changes that must be made to ensure that future bombs would in fact be surely safe.

One very serious problem came up just before take-off, which placed Farrell in the difficult position of having to make a decision of vital importance without the benefit of time for thought or consultation. Despite all the care that had been taken with the planes, the carrying plane was found at the last moment to have a defective fuel pump, so that some eight hundred gallons of gasoline could not be pumped to the engines from a bomb bay tank. This meant that not only would the plane have to take off with a short supply of fuel, but it would have to carry the extra weight of those eight hundred gallons all the way from Tinian to Japan and back. The weather was not good, in fact it was far from satisfactory; but it was good enough in LeMay’s opinion, and in view of the importance of dropping the second bomb as quickly as possible, and the prediction that the weather would worsen, Farrell decided that the flight should not be held up. Just before take-off Purnell said to Sweeney, “Young man, do you know how much that bomb cost?” Sweeney replied, “About $ 25 million.” Purnell then cautioned, “See that we get our money’s worth.”

Because of the weather, instead of flying in formation, the planes flew separately. To save fuel, they did not fly over Iwo Jima but went directly to the coast of Japan. Their plan was to rendezvous over the island of Yokushima, but this did not work out. The planes were not in sight of each other during their overwater flight and only one of the observation planes arrived at the rendezvous point. The missing plane apparently circled the entire island instead of one end of it, as it was supposed to do according to Sweeney’s plans. Although Sweeney had identified the one plane that did arrive he did not tell Ashworth. Unfortunately, because it did not come close enough, Ashworth was unable to determine whether it was the instrument-carrying plane, which was essential to the full completion of the mission, or the other, which was not. Sweeney’s orders were to proceed after a short delay of fifteen minutes but he kept waiting hopefully beyond the deadline. The result was a delay of over half an hour before they decided to go on to Kokura, anyway.

At Kokura, they found that visual bombing was not possible, although the weather plane had reported that it should be. Whether this unexpected condition was due to the time lag, or to the difference between an observer looking straight down and a bombardier looking at the target on a slant, was never determined.

After making at least three runs over the city and using up about forty-five minutes, they finally headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. On the way they computed the gasoline supply very carefully. Ashworth confirmed Sweeney’s determination that it would be possible to make only one bombing run over Nagasaki if they were to reach Okinawa, their alternate landing field. If more than one run had to be made they would have to ditch the plane—they hoped near a rescue submarine.

At Nagasaki, there was a thick overcast and conditions at first seemed no better for visual bombing than at Kokura. Considering the poor visibility and the shortage of gasoline, Ashworth and Sweeney decided that despite their positive orders to the contrary, they had no choice but to attempt radar bombing. Almost the entire bombing run was made by radar; then, at the last moment, a hole in the clouds appeared, permitting visual bombing. Beahan, the bombardier, synchronized on a race track in the valley and released the bomb. Instead of being directed at the original aiming point, however, the bomb was aimed at a point a mile and a half away to the north, up the valley of the Urakami River, where it fell between two large Mitsubishi armament plants and effectively destroyed them both as producers of war materials.

On the way to Okinawa warning ditching orders were announced; but the plane made it with almost no gas left. Sweeney reported there wasn’t enough left to taxi in off the runway.

The Nagasaki bomb was dropped from an altitude of 29,000 feet. Because of the configuration of the terrain around ground zero, the crew felt five distinct shock waves.

The missing observation plane, which fortunately was the one without the instruments, saw the smoke column from a point about a hundred miles away and flew over within observing distance after the explosion. Because of the bad weather conditions at the target, we could not get good photo reconnaissance pictures until almost a week later. They showed 44 per cent of the city destroyed. The difference between the results obtained there and at Hiroshima was due to the unfavorable terrain at Nagasaki, where the ridges and valleys limited the area of greatest destruction to 2.3 miles (north-south axis) by 1.9 miles (east-west axis). The United States Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated the casualties at 35,000 killed and 60,000 injured.

While the blast and the resulting fire inflicted heavy destruction on Nagasaki and its population, the damage was not nearly so heavy as it would have been if the correct aiming point had been used. I was considerably relieved when I got the bombing report, which indicated a smaller number of casualties than we had expected, for by that time I was certain that Japan was through and that the war could not continue for more than a few days.

To exploit the psychological effect of the bombs on the Japanese, we had belatedly arranged for leaflets to be dropped on Japan proclaiming the power of our new weapon and warning that further resistance was useless. The first delivery was made on the ninth, the day of the Nagasaki bombing. The following day General Farrell canceled the drops, when the surrender efforts of the Japanese made any further such missions seem ill-advised.

This was the real feeling of every experienced officer

Tuesday, January 6th, 2026

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesGeneral Marshall expressed his feeling that we should guard against too much gratification over our success, as General Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project), because it undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties:

I replied that I was not thinking so much about those casualties as I was about the men who had made the Bataan death march. When we got into the hall, Arnold slapped me on the back and said, “I am glad you said that — it’s just the way I feel.” I have always thought that this was the real feeling of every experienced officer, particularly those who occupied positions of great responsibility, including General Marshall himself.

Directed Infrared Counter Measures use a sophisticated laser to disrupt the incoming missile’s infrared “heat-seeking” sensor

Monday, January 5th, 2026

Early MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defence Systems) would lock onto the exhaust plumes of aircraft and were countered by deploying flares. Modern Directed Infrared Counter Measures (DIRCM) use a sophisticated laser to disrupt the incoming missile’s infrared “heat-seeking” sensor:

With a laser energy source embedded in a highly agile enclosed turret system, a DIRCM can be infinite in duration and provide protection for the whole mission, keeping aircrews safe even in dense threat engagement environments.

[…]

Whereas flares are omnidirectional, a DIRCM focusses a beam of light directly at an incoming missile. However, that beam of light needs to:

  • Be able to have line of sight to the missile — a DIRCM with a twin or triple turret system allows for multiple threats to be countered simultaneously, no matter how the aircraft may be manoeuvring
  • Be able to track and engage in a very short space of time — MANPADS can be supersonic in less than a second after firing
  • Emit significant laser energy power to disrupt the missile seeker for long enough so the missile is unable to acquire, re-acquire or track the aircraft

Not so blinding as New Mexico test because of bright sunlight

Sunday, January 4th, 2026

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. Groves At about 4:30 a.m. the Duty Officer delivered General Groves the detailed hoped-for cable from Farrell, as Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project), which had been dispatched after the bomber returned to Tinian. It read:

Following additional information furnished by Parsons, crews, and observers on return to Tinian at 060500Z. Report delayed until information could be assembled at interrogation of crews and observers. Present at interrogation were Spaatz, Giles, Twining, and Davies.

Confirmed neither fighter or flak attack and one tenth cloud cover with large open hole directly over target. High speed camera reports excellent record obtained. Other observing aircraft also anticipates good records although films not yet processed. Reconnaissance aircraft taking post-strike photographs have not yet returned.

Sound—None appreciable observed.

Flash—Not so blinding as New Mexico test because of bright sunlight. First there was a ball of fire changing in a few seconds to purple clouds and flames boiling and swirling upward. Flash observed just after airplane rolled out of turn. All agreed light was intensely bright and white cloud rose faster than New Mexico test, reaching thirty thousand feet in minutes it was one-third greater diameter.

It mushroomed at the top, broke away from column and the column mushroomed again. Cloud was most turbulent. It went at least to forty thousand feet. Flattening across its top at this level. It was observed from combat airplane three hundred sixty-three nautical miles away with airplane at twenty-five thousand feet. Observation was then limited by haze and not curvature of the earth.

Blast—There were two distinct shocks felt in combat airplane similar in intensity to close flak bursts. Entire city except outermost ends of dock areas was covered with a dark grey dust layer which joined the cloud column. It was extremely turbulent with flashes of fire visible in the dust. Estimated diameter of this dust layer is at least three miles. One observer stated it looked as though whole town was being torn apart with columns of dust rising out of valleys approaching the town. Due to dust visual observation of structural damage could not be made.

The Trump administration has long accused Maduro of running a criminal narco-trafficking organization called Cartel de los Soles

Saturday, January 3rd, 2026

The U.S. is one of many Western countries who see Maduro’s government as illegitimate, citing widespread fraud in the 2024 election:

The Trump administration has long accused Maduro of running a criminal narco-trafficking organization called Cartel de los Soles, which experts say is shorthand for a system of corruption rather than a single hierarchical group. The U.S. declared it a foreign terrorist organization in November.

On Saturday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro, Flores, and senior Venezuelan face charges related to alleged “drug trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracies,” according to an unsealed indictment Bondi posted on X.

The indictment alleges that, starting in 1999, Maduro and others partnered with international drug trafficking organizations to transport thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States.

[…]

The Trump administration claims that Venezuela “stole” oil and assets from the U.S., after its government nationalized them in the late 1990s, which Maduro’s government denies.

Last month, Trump ordered a blockade against Venezuelan oil and sanctioned tankers. And on Saturday morning, Vice President JD Vance tweeted that Trump had been clear to Maduro: “the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States.”

[…]

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said. “The biggest beneficiary are going to be the people of Venezuela.”

Despite Trump’s announcement that Vice President Rodríguez has been sworn in, it’s unclear who will take over Maduro’s duties long term.

“I’m not sure there’s going to be a power vacuum, because so many of his cronies apparently were left behind,” Todd Robinson, former acting U.S. ambassador to Venezuela during President Trump’s first term, told NPR.

“There are a lot of questions about what exactly is left behind now, and what more the United States is willing to do to ensure that a potential legitimate person takes over,” Robinson added.

Trump on Saturday did not outline a clear plan on next steps but said that the U.S. will run Venezuela until a “proper transition can take place.”

“We’re going to run the country right. It’s going to be run very judiciously, very fairly,” he said during Saturday’s press conference after Maduro was captured.

Visible effects greater than New Mexico tests

Friday, January 2nd, 2026

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesAugust 1, 1945 came and passed, General Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project), and the weather was not favorable over Japan. General LeMay did not think that it would be wise to undertake the mission under those conditions:

The six crews that might be used were given special instructions on the procedures they were to follow, and at another briefing on August 4, Parsons explained the effects they could expect when the bomb exploded. Most of them knew by now that they were dealing with a special type of bomb, but Parsons’ statement that the force of the explosion would be equivalent to that of twenty thousand tons of TNT came as a complete surprise.

During the period of waiting, the special air-sea rescue plans were settled. They emphasized that no other aircraft would be permitted within fifty miles of the target during a period of from four hours before until six hours after strike time. Not even for rescue operations would this restriction be lifted. Special air-sea rescue facilities were to be provided by both Army and Navy planes and by submarines, and in spite of the necessary restrictions we had placed upon it, rescue coverage in this operation would be far better than average.

[…]

Other air attacks on Japan were to be carried out on the same day as our mission, to divert any Japanese defense actions that might endanger our operation. Hiroshima would be the primary target, with Kokura Arsenal and Kokura the secondary targets, and Nagasaki the tertiary target. The aiming point for Hiroshima was close to the Japanese Army Headquarters.

Hiroshima was a highly important military objective. The Army Headquarters was located in a castle. Some 25,000 troops were in its garrison. It was the port through which all supplies and communications passed from Honshu to Kyushu. It was the largest city, excepting Kyoto, that was still undamaged by American air raids. Its population was believed to be over 300,000, and it was a beehive of war industry, carried on in moderate-sized plants and in small shops as well as in almost every home.

We would use a total of seven planes. One would be sent to Iwo Jima to serve as a spare in case the bomb-carrying plane developed mechanical troubles on the flight from Tinian. Three planes would go ahead, one to each target area, to appraise the local weather and to relay the information back to the bomb-carrying plane, which would be accompanied by two observer planes to the general vicinity of the target. One of these carried special measuring and recording instruments, including some that would be dropped near the target to radio back their readings.

Radar was to be used as an aid but the actual bombing was to be accomplished visually. If this proved to be impossible, the bomb was to be brought back, probably to Iwo Jima, as the plane’s gas supply might not permit the return to Tinian. We were anxious to avoid having it come down at other air bases, for in case of a landing accident we wanted personnel on the ground who would be aware of the special precautions that would have to be taken.

[…]

Provisions were also made for the strike photographs to be taken by the 3rd Photo Reconnaissance Squadron and two photo crews were briefed on their assignment by the 509th’s intelligence officers.

[…]

Parsons had decided with Farrell’s approval to complete the final assembly of the bomb after takeoff. His purpose was to minimize the hazards of a crash on Tinian. I had previously said that I was opposed to this as unwise, because it was unnecessary and because it would be very difficult to do it in cramped conditions in the plane. I was not informed of the plan until it was too late to interfere.

[…]

The original scheduled time was 0915. Thus, in a flight of some seventeen hundred miles taking six hours and a half, Colonel Tibbets had arrived on target only one-half of a minute off schedule.

The 20th Air Force order covering the operation prescribed a turn of 150° after the bomb was released in order to gain a maximum distance from the point of explosion; such a turn, our studies indicated, could be made without undue risk to the plane and its crew.

Immediately after the bomb was dropped from 31,600 feet, the plane began its getaway maneuver. The flash was seen during this turn and fifty seconds after the drop, the shock waves hit the plane. There were two of these, the first the direct shock wave and the second the reflected wave from the ground. By that time the plane was fifteen miles away from the burst.

[…]

The crews of the strike and the two observation aircraft reported that five minutes after release a dark gray cloud of some three miles in diameter hung over the center of Hiroshima. Out of the center of this grew a column of white smoke which rose to a height of 35,000 feet, with the top of the cloud being considerably enlarged.

Four hours after the strike, the photo reconnaissance planes found that most of the city of Hiroshima was still obscured by the smoke cloud, although fires could be seen around its edges.

[…]

Pictures taken the following day showed that 60 per cent of the city was destroyed.

The area devastated at Hiroshima was 1.7 square miles, extending out a mile from ground zero. The Japanese authorities estimated the casualties at 71,000 dead and missing and 68,000 injured.

The most important result achieved by the Hiroshima bombing was not the physical damage, although over 50 per cent of the buildings were totally destroyed, nor was it the fifteen to twenty thousand Japanese soldiers who were killed or severely wounded, nor was it the thousands of other people killed and injured. The important result, and the one that we sought, was that it brought home to the Japanese leaders the utter hopelessness of their position. When this fact was re-emphasized by the Nagasaki bombing, they were convinced that they must surrender at once.

Parsons reported (in special one-time code, of course):

Results clearcut, successful in all respects. Visible effects greater than New Mexico tests. Conditions normal in airplane following delivery.

Received at the same time was this message relayed from the plane:

Target at Hiroshima attacked visually. One-tenth cloud at 052315Z. 3 No fighters and no flak.