The Nuclear War that Never Was

Making up History to Justify Failure: Part 2

One of the more depressing (if probably predictable) aspects of the way the war has been discussed since February 24, 2022, has been the desperate attempts of failed analysts and policy makers to justify their failures. Instead of trying to understand why they might have been wrong, and to correct the problems with their understanding and policies, these groups have resorted to re-writing history; to create an entirely different reality in which they were really right and their failures became triumphs. For the analytical community one of the great examples of this is what I termed earlier, the infamous Hostomel Counterfactual.

In the Hostomel Counterfactual, the Russians do everything perfectly when the full-scale invasion starts. They seize Hostomel airfield at the start, which alloews them to proceed to magically enter and capture Kyiv—showing that the Russians were the awesome military force the analytical community said they were before February 24. Its a fascinating and nonsensical way for people to justify failure. See—I change just a few small details in history and, voila, I was right even though in reality I was wrong. Its nonsense of course—because once you start changing history to suit your needs, you are admitting failure (and the possibility that history might also be changed to make your analysis even worse), but that has not stopped it from happening.

Now however, we have another very similar re-writing of history . Basically both the US and Germany prevented a nuclear war—the only problem being there is no evidence that the nuclear war was ever going to occur.

The Nuclear War that Never Was