
Dr. Seuss’ arms race allegory - mcone
https://www.dailyfig.com/2016/08/15/dr-seuss-satrical-lesson-on-nuclear-armament-and-the-absurdity-of-war/
======
daltonlp
Some fun facts and thoughts:

\- Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor
H. Krulak.

\- Like _The Lorax_ , the story is structured as a tale from an older
generation to a modern one, where the younger character is a stand-in for the
reader.

\- As much as Seuss was against transparent moralizing, he delighted in
obvious satire, and he wasn't afraid of being too on the nose. The Chief
Yookeroo, the back-room boys with their slide rules and spectacles, the
butter-up band. The "Your yookery" sign. The slavic-named antagonist VanItch.

\- This book is interesting to compare with Seuss' editorial cartoons decades
earlier, during WWII. At that time, he was producing unabashed anti-axis
propaganda. During his lifetime, he had not just observed the kind of wartime
fervor the Yooks subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it.
[http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/](http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/)

\- Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of
a challenge. _The Butter Battle Book_ is a masterpiece.

------
indubitable
One thing I think many people fail to consider is that, contrary to
perception, we have entered into one of the most peaceful eras in all of
humanity, and nuclear weapons are likely largely responsible for that peace.
It's easy to fail to see the peace amongst all the war, and the media anxious
to report for weeks on end about any violent event of significant scale.

However, look at things in terms of scale. 9/11 was considered an atrocious
and unprecedented event. 2,996 lives lost in a matter of hours. Look at
something like World War 2. In World War 2 the total death toll was around 75
million with a world population of about 2.3 billion. That's 248 million lives
lost scaled up to today's population. Think about that. That would be the
equivalent of a 9/11 event happening every single day for 83,555 days. Or a
9/11 event every single day for 229 years.

That sort of loss of life is completely unimaginable. And that doesn't even
scratch the surface of lives lost. The Mongol Invasions in the 13th century
killed off 35 million people. The colonization of America resulted in deaths
that are difficult to measure but it was also in the high tens of millions at
the minimum.

But today even if we look at places we ignore, like Iraq, the high end of the
death tolls there are around 1 million. And a big part of the reason for the
dramatic decline in war is because of nukes. If not for nuclear weapons we
would have long since had a World War 3 as Europe, China, and the US vied to
determine whose ideology would become the world ideology. And it's extremely
possible we could have seen the first war with a death toll in excess of a
billion. Instead we live in an era when a few hundred people being killed in
one act is something that shakes the entire western world for months.

Mutually assured destruction may be MAD, but it demonstrates quite clearly
peace sustained by self interest alone is vastly more effective than any peace
built on words and promises.

~~~
iskander
"Not as bad as WWII" isn't much of a standard for world peace.

If you total up casualties from the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Libya,
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia then you might be surprised at just how many
violent deaths have transpired in the past decade. What's more, many of these
conflicts have significantly outlived WWII in duration. Will the humpty dumpty
of Syria ever be put together again? Probably not as long as it's the proxy
battleground for regional powers.

What we might be seeing, rather than real peace, is a disparity of safety from
violence. Some countries will be bomb-wrecked hellscapes for decades, while
others fund those conflicts but don't think about them too much (except for
when terrorists show up to burst our bubbles).

~~~
philwelch
I don't think the world has ever seen a decade without any major armed
conflict. Immediately after WWII we had the conclusion of the Chinese Civil
War, the Korean War, the first Indo-Pakistani war, war in French Indochina--
and virtually all of those involved either major world powers or extremely
populous countries.

There hasn't been a direct conflict between two major powers since the Korean
War. Such a conflict would result in unprecedented levels of death and
destruction even without nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, it becomes
impossible. Sure, sometimes there are wars between tin-pot dictators and
insurgents in pickup trucks, but there have always been those wars. What we
don't have anymore are modern, industrialized nations killing millions of each
other's citizens in an attempt to press their respective claims on Alsace-
Lorraine.

And if anything, that's a sign of hope. If Alsace-Lorraine can move beyond
decades of being a bomb-wrecked hellscape, perhaps Damascus or Aleppo or
Kirkuk or Mogadishu can some day achieve the same peace. Just as (fingers
crossed) Sarajevo has.

------
Z1nfandel
Ohh man, the memories around this book. Lets just say it was required reading
for intel analysts at my base, and we found every way possible to reference it
in our reports/briefings.

For example, the SA-6 was known as a "three sling jigger"

~~~
fapjacks
Once upon a time we escorted an Air Force convoy whose commander referred to
the enemy as "butter-side-down people".

~~~
Z1nfandel
Yes!

I wonder if they happened to come from Eielson AFB. (Not expecting you to know
that, but it makes me smile knowing that it stuck)

------
SCHiM
I agree with the premise halfway in the article. My generation has not grown
to fear the bombs as the previous generation did. When someone of my
generation is behind the buttons, I wonder if somewhere in the back of their
minds there isn't a part of them that says 'perhaps in this and this situation
it'd be okay to press the big red button?'.

I think the horror that war/these weapons cause will slowly drift from
collective memory in mainstream western society. The warnings of the previous
generation will be an endorsement of the destructive power of these weapons,
instead of a deterrent of their usage.

~~~
InclinedPlane
With nuclear war there isn't just one worst case scenario but two. On the one
hand even a small scale nuclear exchange with modern thermonuclear weapons
could be so incredibly devastating that it would set back human civilization
substantially, disrupting the entire global economy and
technological/industrial/agricultural infrastructure, perhaps even leading to
a cascading collapse of civilization. On the other hand, it might not. In
which case people might be encouraged to think (as was common during too much
of the Cold War) that nuclear weapons could just be shuffled into the military
toolkit, for occasional use in "ordinary" warfare.

I grew up in the '80s, and I well remember the omnipresent feeling of dread
that I'm sure most people from that generation experienced on a regular basis.
Everyone knew that global catastrophe was a moment away, that any moment of
any day a missile could be launched and only minutes later nuclear
annihilation would rain down. You can see that in the popular media at the
time, of course, the Terminator movies being a particular example, but
countless others expressing that feeling (some more direct than others). It's
difficult to explain what that feeling and that deep-seated knowledge is like
without having experienced it. At the end of the Cold War it felt like a great
weight was lifted from the world. But since then, especially most recently,
it's felt that that weight has been incrementally coming back.

------
beebmam
It's absurd to me that chemical and biological weapons are banned, but nuclear
weapons are not.

There is an international campaign to ban nuclear weapons, and I hope more
people learn about it. The organization won the nobel peace prize in 2017.

Many nations last year signed on to the ban. Let's encourage the rest to also
sign it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nuclear_Weapons)

~~~
indubitable
The 'rules of war' are written by those on top, and they tend to benefit them.
Chemical/biological weapons are relatively easy to make for smaller nations,
and their development can be disguised. Nuclear weapons are the opposite on
both accounts. As an aside, this is a recurring theme throughout history.
Chivalry, for instance, had a not coincidental effect of ensuring that knights
were very rarely killed in most battles.

Look for what can't be done in warfare and it tends to have a direct link to
strengthening (or sustaining) the established powers at the expense of
'lesser' forces.

~~~
taneq
> Chivalry, for instance, had a not coincidental effect of ensuring that
> knights were very rarely killed in most battles.

Which is the goal of any 'rules of combat' \- to formalize the process in a
way which reduces the actual damage done (or at least, the damage done to
those writing the rules).

It's no different to the way cats will hiss and growl and spit at each other
but will usually try and avoid actually fighting. Both sides have too much to
lose unless a fight is really necessary.

~~~
indubitable
It had nothing to do with reducing the actual damage done. Disemboweling an
unarmed and yielding infantryman was considered perfectly chivalrous.
Chivalric warfare only applied to the self preservation of those in power at
the time, which would be the knights and other ruling class individuals.

~~~
jacobush
Reducing the damage done to people who matter, i.e. knights...

------
lsc
I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely
shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes
against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the
previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human
nature.

I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother,
but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that
humans aren't completely self-destructive.

~~~
Brendinooo
> it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality

It's probably more of an affirmation that humans behave better when
accountable for their actions. Two nukes were dropped when the enemy of the
bomber had no way to retaliate in kind, and no more have been dropped since
that stopped being true.

~~~
paulddraper
US was the only nuclear power for several years though.

~~~
Brendinooo
About four years from Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the USSR's first successful test.
Soviets had the bomb before the Korean War.

~~~
paulddraper
True. (Though the USSR's first successful air drop wasn't until Oct 1951, well
into the Korea War.)

Soviet nukes were not why the U.S. held back in Korea. It was the unpleasant
prospect of a war with China (albeit a non-nuclear China).

[https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-korean-
war...](https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-korean-war-almost-
went-nuclear-180955324/)

And it didn't use them in Vietnam because it was thought to require so many
(dozens/hundreds) as to be the antithesis of reunification.

\---

In short, the US avoided nukes for decades in the hope of peace, not because
there were any nukes sighted on D.C. (MAD).

------
larrik
Wait, is this book not well known? My kid dressed up as one of the lab guys
for his "literacy day" character (since we can't just have _Halloween_
costumes...).

------
korethr
I was surprised to learn that the book had been banned in some libraries,
although in hindsight, perhaps I shouldn't have been. It would explain why I
didn't know about the book until sometime in my late 20s.

Reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that it was a cold war allegory,
which was a bit of a surprise to me. I didn't recall Dr. Seuss books having
much in the way of sociopolitical commentary, and I still don't, outside
stories like Yertle the Turtle or The Lorax. If the politics apparent in
Yertle the Turtle went over my head as a child, it's possible that other
allegories went over my head as well. I should go back and read those books
again.

~~~
doomslice
I happened to read this to my 4 year olds a few weeks ago after finding it at
my Mother-in-law's house. I can tell you that at least for 4 year olds, it's
just a book about buttered bread.

My son asked for butter side down bread at lunch and my daughter asked for
butter side up.

~~~
korethr
Indeed. To the degree that Dr Seuss' books had a sociopolitical moral, whether
or not I picked up on it depended how old I was when I (re)read it and what i
was aware of in the world at the time. I picked up on the environmental
message in the Lorax the first time through. But then again, "Save the
envrionment, kids!" was very much a part of the zeitgeist from the late 80s
into the mid-late 90s. The anti-discrimination message of the Sneetches on
Beaches didn't hit me until I was old enough to realize that having different
skin color was an intrinsic thing that people cared about only if they wanted
to be meanies, and not simply people who'd gotten more sun tanning time than
me.

------
jancsika
I think this book elucidates something that I miss in most popular
discussions, which is _fragility_. As the two sides escalate, the entire
system becomes more fragile.

E.g., the dude at the beginning uses a slingshot which has the consequence of
breaking one other dude's stick. Not so fragile. But by the end neither dude
can use their weapon at all without destroying _everything_ on _both_ sides of
the fence. And the capabilities to use the weapon is put directly in the hands
of the two dudes and no one else. Extremely fragile.

Is this a studied phenomenon? For example, does the auto industry measure
fragility wrt putting networked self-driving cars on the highway?

------
Quarrelsome
I'm amazed that given the depth of Dr Seuss's work its stuff like Cat in the
Hat that is the most exposed. Ever since I went through his work to read to a
small child I know i've been amazed at how useful and framed in reality the
less known stories are (e.g. Sneeches at Beaches, Yrtle the Turtle).

~~~
guskel
The "Voom" in the Cat in The Hat Comes Back is thought to be a metaphor for
the bomb.

~~~
korethr
By whom? To me, it was always a fun noise to say as loud and dramatically as
possible, so to annoy my younger sister when I read the story to her. I'd
always read it as a silly bit of deus ex machina employed to end the story, as
we'd run out of letters in the alphabet.

Metaphor for a bomb? Maybe. But I doubt Dr. Seuss was trying to put forward
the lesson to children that when you're out of ideas, the thing to do is blow
it all up. I honestly think he was being silly for the sake of whimsy and
amusement.

~~~
jpfed
By me? As far as I know it's the most powerful object in any Seuss book and it
derives that power from something so small it's invisible.

It's where my thoughts immediately went on first reading.

------
Taniwha
We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more
lesser known Seuss books ...

His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity ....

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-
lady...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady-
godivas/)

And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts':

[https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-
Seuss/dp/0394800...](https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-
Seuss/dp/0394800826/)

------
AdmiralAsshat
It was also turned into an animated short, directed by Ralph Bakshi[0]:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-
oOI7I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I)

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Televis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Television_special)

------
iamwil
I wonder if he changed his mind after the war. During the war, he drew a lot
of anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda.

------
Theodores
What I find amazing is how that it was so hard for people to just say no to
nuclear weapons. So we have literature that aludes to the topic rather than
speak about things directly. It is cowardly to write some allegorical tale
about how wicked the rulers are, setting everything in a fanciful animal
kingdom. Authors should write up rather than down for children, most ten year
olds may not have adult reading ability but plenty do. They can be told the
truth about the world.

~~~
cortesoft
If I am given the choice between 'A world with nuclear weapons' and 'A world
without nuclear weapons', I would choose the latter every time.

However, no person or nation is ever given THAT choice. The choice is always
between 'A lot of countries have nuclear weapons, and yours does, too' and 'A
lot of countries have nuclear weapons, but not yours'.

Given that choice, I would probably pick the former. It doesn't make you
immoral to not want to be the country without nuclear weapons when others have
them.

