What I’m about to say won’t win me any popularity contests. Not that I’d want to. But, first, have a look at this.
Hold the phone! Since when is 1% of anything relevant at all? What’s that, the chance of winning the multi-million dollar jackpot in Vegas? This is some kind of popular movement? I had to re-read the thing because I thought it was a joke. But, no, when 1 out of 100 Americans do something, it must mean a majority approves, right? But why do they think this? Because the media is used to reporting on special interest groups’ various whine-fests as if they reflected a majority opinion.
What if SHAEF was told back in 1944 that, “Gosh, fellas, we’ve crunched the numbers again. This D-Day invasion only has a 1% chance of success…”? They’d have been cabling Stalin the next day, saying, “Sorry Uncle Joe, but the second front you wanted is going to have to wait. We can’t afford the risk. We’ve got less of a chance than you had at Stalingrad and, besides all of this, we don’t have to block troops to force advance at gunpoint.” Right, we’d have been looking at D-Day sometime around 1947 when we finally had a way to repeatedly nuke the Germans with enough left over to threaten the Soviets with. Then we wouldn’t have had to invade France, we could have just vaporized German cities instead.
For that matter, what if the atomic bomb only had a 1% chance of success? Think they’d have wasted a dice roll on that thing? “Well, if it works, it’ll be great. If not, we’ve poured money and resources into a rathole that would have been better used turning radar into a beam weapon to cook Japan.” However, in all fairness, I understand there was well over a 1% chance that the first test of the hydrogen bomb would ignite the…