Some fun facts and thoughts:<p>- Seuss sought input on the book from his acquaintance, marine General Victor H. Krulak.<p>- Like <i>The Lorax</i>, 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.
<a href="http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/" rel="nofollow">http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/</a><p>- Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. <i>The Butter Battle Book</i> is a masterpiece.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>For example, the SA-6 was known as a "three sling jigger"
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?'.<p>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.
It's absurd to me that chemical and biological weapons are banned, but nuclear weapons are not.<p>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.<p>Many nations last year signed on to the ban. Let's encourage the rest to also sign it.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abolish_Nuclear_Weapons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Campaign_to_Abol...</a>
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.<p>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.
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 <i>Halloween</i> costumes...).
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.<p>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.
I think this book elucidates something that I miss in most popular discussions, which is <i>fragility</i>. As the two sides escalate, the entire system becomes more fragile.<p>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 <i>everything</i> on <i>both</i> 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.<p>Is this a studied phenomenon? For example, does the auto industry measure fragility wrt putting networked self-driving cars on the highway?
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).
We read this to our kids from early on, they understand - there are even more lesser known Seuss books ...<p>His 'adult' "The 7 Lady Godivas' with, shock! nudity ....<p><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady-godivas/" rel="nofollow">https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/03/02/dr-seuss-seven-lady...</a><p>And my favourite - 'The Kings Stilts':<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800826/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Stilts-Classic-Seuss/dp/0394800...</a>
It was also turned into an animated short, directed by Ralph Bakshi[0]:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MNNl-oOI7I</a><p>[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Television_special" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book#Televis...</a>
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.