femmenietzsche:

One of the main takeaways from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the one that gave me a sense of enlightenment, is that there’s no particular reason why America nuked Japan or why they chose the targets they did. It’s just kind of something that the bureaucracy did, a semi-inevitable excrescence. You can list a number of general aims that fed into the process – end the war quicker, demonstrate our military-industrial superiority – and you can name the leaders whose approval was required, but the whole thing was ultimately a causal goulash and the endless debates over Why all miss the point. Makes all the arguments I read of the form “Government X Did Thing Y For Reason Z” seem dumb as shit, frankly. If this tightly controlled secret wartime program didn’t move as one, then nothing does. I don’t even believe in the unitary self, so there’s really no reason I should believe in a unitary bureaucracy, but it’s a hard instinct to shake unless you’re observing an organization with your nose right against the figurative glass. There’s probably some cognate to Gell-Mann amnesia about this; no matter how often you realize that a given group isn’t acting for any single purpose, you never apply that understanding to any of the groups you haven’t studied as closely.

Or at least I don’t.