The Dish

Adam Rawnsley and David Brown share the the incredible story of the B-54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), otherwise known as the “backpack nuke”:

Soldiers from elite Army engineer and Special Forces units, as well as Navy SEALs and select Marines, trained to use the bombs, known as “backpack nukes,” on battlefronts from Eastern Europe to Korea to Iran – part of the U.S. military’s effort to ensure the containment and, if necessary, defeat of communist forces [during the latter half of the Cold War]. … Cold War strategy was filled with oxymorons like “limited nuclear war,” but the backpack nuke was perhaps the most darkly comic manifestation of an age struggling to deal with the all-too-real prospect of Armageddon. The SADM was a case of life imitating satire. After all, much like Slim Pickens in the iconic finale of Dr. Strangelove, American soldiers would strap on atomic bombs and jump out of airplanes as part of the opening act of World War III.

The convenient thing about backpack nuke was that you could take them, well, almost anywhere:

Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces were trained to reach their targets by air, land, and sea. They could parachute behind enemy lines from cargo planes or helicopters. Teams specializing in scuba missions could swim the bomb to its destination if necessary. (The AEC built an airtight, pressurized case that allowed divers to submerge the bomb to depths of up to 200 feet.) One Special Forces team even trained to ski with the weapon in the Bavarian Alps, though not without some difficulty. “It skied down the mountain; you did not,” said Bill Flavin, who commanded a Special Forces SADM team. “If it shifted just a little bit, that was it. You were out of control on the slopes with that thing.”

Previous Dish on nuking the Cold War fridge here, here, and here.

More readers offer their nominations:

My vote goes to Alexandra David-Néel: explorer, opera prima donna, anarchist, spiritualist, and author. She was an acquaintance of the 13th Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, studied Buddhism at the Royal Monastery of Sikkim (becoming the Maharaja’s lover), trespassed into Tibet disguised as a pilgrim, traversed China, traveled through the Soviet Union during WWII, completed a circumambulation of the holy mountain Amnye Machen. She died in France at age 100, having written over 30 books about Eastern religion, philosophy, and her travels. Her ashes were mixed with those of her lifelong traveling companion and dispersed in the Ganges.

Another:

As a general rule, the women featured on the site Badass of the Week (especially the real-life ones) are pretty damn interesting. Some examples include a Somali gynecologist who gets terrorists to stand down with stern dressing down (Hawa Abdi) and the “Joan of Arc” of India (Rani Lakshmibai). Plus, I need to throw in a nomination for a personal heroine of mine, Dr. Francis Kelsey, a.k.a the woman who saved the United States from the ravages of thalidomide.

Another:

Thank you for this. I find myself needing to search for interesting and inspiring people, to renew my faith in humanity. I have two nominees who may be unknown to many Dish readers:

Celia Sánchez and Emily Hahn.

Alice Walker, at the beginning of her article on Sánchez, wrote: “Nothing makes me more hopeful than discovering another human being to admire”:

My wonder at the life of Celia Sánchez, a revolutionary Cuban woman virtually unknown to Americans, has left me almost speechless. In hindsight, loving and admiring her was bound to happen, once I knew her story. Like Frida Kahlo, Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Luxemburg, Agnes Smedley, Fannie Lou Hamer, Josephine Baker, Harriet Tubman, or Aung San Suu Kyi, Celia Sánchez was that extraordinary expression of life that can, every so often, give humanity a very good name.

Hahn was a free spirit, an adventurer, and a book-lover who said, “I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the choice.” She was called “Ms. Ulysses” in her obituary in the New Yorker. She lived in the Congo in the 1930s, “young and impulsive, because I’d always wanted to.” She lived in China in the 1930s and 1940s, immersing herself in writing and politics and love (with a touch of opium addiction). After the war, after her lover, a British intelligence officer, was released from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, they married and lived in England, when “she called herself a ‘bad housewife’ since, in reply to his concern about money, she said: ‘Then let’s not spend money on anything else, except books.‘”

This little search has made my day.

(Photo of Alexandra David-Néel in Tibet circa 1933 via Wikimedia Commons)

Rebecca Schwarzlose surveys research about how children develop a theory of mind, or “the ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and emotions”:

Studies have shown that when mothers refer more often to mental states (thoughts, emotions, and desires) in conversations with their young children, these children tend to perform better on theory of mind tests a few years down the line. But is this effect just a matter of learning a few keys words a little sooner or can it lead to long-lasting differences in theory of mind ability? Rosie Ensor, Claire Hughes, and their colleagues at University of Cambridge tackled this question by testing children over the course of eight years. … They found that the number of times mothers used ‘thought words’ with their two-year-olds predicted the children’s performance on theory of mind tests at six and ten years of age. …

Will talking to a two-year-old about others’ thoughts and beliefs make a child better at social reasoning down the line? It’s hard to say. These latest results are based on correlations and can’t prove that one thing causes another. Still, they are intriguing and suggestive. Encouraging young children to think about others’ beliefs and feelings may strengthen theory of mind abilities or simply get children into the habit of considering others’ thoughts in ways that persist into their middle-school years.

Laszewski criticizes the GOP’s Obamacare alternative:

The problem for Republicans is that they have such a visceral response to the term “Obamacare” that they just can’t bring themselves to fix it. The notion that Obamacare might be fixed and allowed to continue as part of an Obama legacy and as a Democratic accomplishment is something they can’t get past. So, the only way Republicans can propose an alternative to Obamacare is to first wipe the health insurance reform slate clean and start over. There is a problem with that strategy. Have you heard the one about, “If you like your health insurance you can keep it?”

He believes “we will ultimately see a bipartisan agreement to fix Obamacare––most likely after the 2016 elections”:

But by putting a repeal and replace plan on the table, rather than focusing on a fix from the point we are at today that creates obvious losers, Republicans may have handed the Democrats a big political gift.

Bernstein looks on the bright side:

[E]ven if the Coburn/Hatch/Burr plan doesn’t go anywhere, and even if it’s not really quite at the legislative stage, and even if real legislators are still vastly outnumbered in Republican ranks by the clown show, it’s still a lot healthier to have moved to a (still-small) group of serious legislators than it was when the only Republicans trying to draft policy were a handful of bloggers and wonks who were constantly at risk of being excommunicated for their heresies. Given the Republican decline over the past few years, if Coburn, Hatch, and Burr are merely defeated (or ignored), rather than branded as RINOs, that’s a solid step in the right direction.

Earlier Dish on the proposal here and here.

Steven Beller suggests that the “main difficulty in combating antisemitism is that the two main strategies for doing so are increasingly at cross purposes”:

The first sees antisemitism from the perspective of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), for which the answer to antisemitism is Israel, as the political expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination. From this perspective attacks on Israel are against the national rights of the Jewish people and hence are antisemitic because anti-Zionist. This linking of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, conceptualized most recently in the theory of “the new antisemitism”, has garnered strong support in the world’s Jewish communities, and is also written into the European Union’s working definition of antisemitism. If we approach antisemitism as a Jewish problem alone, this has a certain sense. It makes little if any sense from the perspective of the second strategy, which sees antisemitism as the ultimate expression of the exclusionary logic of nationalism.

The Zionist perspective actually undermines the most powerful arguments of antisemitism’s main antidote: liberal pluralism. In this view, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously suggested, antisemitism is not a problem for Jews but rather for non-Jews, indeed for all of us. It is representative of a universal moral evil: the exclusion, fear and, ultimately, destruction of the other in society simply because of difference. “Never again” becomes a promise not about preventing Jewish genocide, but any genocide. It is the refusal or inability to accept and embrace difference within a society that is the root of the problem. The solution is to throw over the apparently modern, but actually primitive “either/or” logic of nationalism, and replace it with the more complex, but more supple, inclusionary “both/and” logic that underpins liberal pluralism, the ability “to agree to disagree”, to comprehend, and embrace difference.

Allahpundit examines the House Republicans’ claim, articulated by Paul Ryan in the interview seen above, that maybe they won’t pass immigration reform because Obama can’t be trusted to enforce new border security laws:

The thing is, though, if you’ve concluded as a caucus that Obama’s gone rogue and can’t be trusted to dutifully carry out federal law, the answer isn’t to boycott immigration reform, it’s to boycott new legislation of all kinds. … Blaming Obama’s executive power grabs is a convenient way for Boehner, Ryan, Rubio et al. to dodge the real problem within the caucus, which is that conservatives don’t trust their own leadership to demand real, measurable border security improvements as an absolute prerequisite to legalizing illegals.

Weigel yawns:

The Obama-won’t-obey-the-law theory has always been a sort of chimera when it comes to talk of immigration reform.

Say the Senate bill was passed in the House tomorrow, conferenced, and signed by the president. He’s got three years left in office. The legalization component of the Senate bill depends on a border security standard that’s going to be determined by a panel of state governors. They have five years to sign off. If you think about the timing of the Affordable Care Act—passed in 2010, implemented at the end of 2013—there’s no real danger of Obama using a new immigration law to grant more amnesty. He could do that right now.

So, file these talking points under “Republicans Looking Busy.”

Sargent thinks Ryan’s comments are a distraction from the real debate:

The important thing to understand about Ryan’s quotes is their strategic vagueness. When Ryan says security and enforcement — the meeting of border metrics, E-Verify, etc. — must be “verified before the rest of the law can occur,” he’s deliberately fudging the dilemma Republicans face. Will the 11 million get some sort of temporary or provisional legal/work status before all these conditions are met? Or is even that automatically “amnesty” and therefore a nonstarter?