My late friend Jack Arnot had an idea he would only discuss with me as he thought anyone else would think he was crazy. I never did ask if he thought I were intellectual or insane, knowing the answer I would get. Jack never missed a chance to give me a “zinger.” He addressed me as “Cochise” for my Indian blood.
The essence of the the Arnot Hypothesis was that events are controlled by a clockwork mechanism in time and space. He postulated wars were points in time determined by a formula he wanted me to derive from data he had abstracted.
In this reality wars are posts in time. The Revolutionary War and that of 1812, which was an extension, was our beginning and we waited 85 years, from onset to onset, to get into our next conflict.
The Civil War was stupid and could have been settled with a $3.2 billion bond issue to repay slave owners for property they purchased legally. The south would have been awash with capital in a place ripe for development, instead we killed 600,000 young men, made that many young widows, ruining their lives as well as those for at least 2,000,000 children and set an evil engine in motion. Something beyond good sense created our Civil War.
World War I, “The war to end all wars,” did not and wrote the contract for WWII in a rail car in Versailles, France by saddling Germany with a war debt they could never repay without another war in which they were victorious. Enter Adolph Hitler, stage right.
Hitler could have won WWII as he had 20 of the 30 people on the planet who understood nuclear fission, but he hated Jews and when all the Jewish scientists got out he was left with a physicist who either could not compute the fissionable mass or faked it out of conscience telling Adolph it had to weigh 14,000 pounds instead of 14. No plane could carry it so Hitler killed the project and the remaining scientists.
World War II broke out everywhere virtually all at once, favoring, if not causing, the Arnot Hypothesis. The eastern quadrant of World War II was caused by mindless constriction of Japan by China and the United States. Japan is a rock with virtually no resources save quick, capable people. They took parts of China in anger, raping, pillaging and murdering unforgivably; a very big mistake.
FDR knew Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor, a fact confirmed by my son’s math tutor who had been a code clerk in the basement of the White House where a captured Japanese “Purple” encryption machine was kept to decipher every Japanese military signal captured by an Hawaiian monitoring station. FDR, a man very hip in matters navel sent our carriers to sea to avoid the coming attack and left the battleships in place as they were strategic dinosaurs and good fodder to get us into the fray by panicking the people.
Meanwhile back at a desk we explored quantum mechanics on paper realizing 99.999% of all matter is empty space and our perception of solids is an illusion! We also knew we orbit the Milky Way galaxy at incredible speed and are perhaps only waves in space. If an airplane propeller were spinning as fast as an electron moves we would perceive it to be solid! We could touch it, pound on it, weigh it, measure it as a solid but it would only be an illusion, like us! This is our reality. We are not much more than images on TV screens! We are only in a greater number of dimensions and think we are real! Our reality could be a construct without a script, but Jack’s ideas would at least put us on an event schedule!
We ended WWII with Hiroshima in 1945. The pattern Jack saw was 85 years between the 1776 Revolutionary and 1861 Civil war, then 53 years to 1917 WWI, then 27 years between 1917 and 1941 WWII, nine years to 1950 Korea followed by only five years to Vietnam! Every period between wars was divided by an average of two to the next war! The period after Korea we resolved with the fact the Korean war has never been settled we are technically at war with North Korea today. No declaration is needed to nuke them now!
When Korea broke out in 1950 General MacArthur was in Japan as the Regent and Commanding General of the Eastern Forces. He recommended nuking Pyonyang to bring the conflict to quick and decisive end as well as demonstrate our role geopolitically. Russia had just set off their first atomic bomb in 1949, but probably did not have a deliverable weapon. The shame of it all is that for four years, between 1945 and 1949 we were the only nuclear power and could have outlawed war on Earth.
President Truman could have announced “War is over on Earth. If any nation invades another we will cover it with nuclear bombs and erase it.” That would have ended wars, but Joseph Stalin working through Soviet spies instructed American spies Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White to impose on Alger’s good friend Eleanor Roosevelt to press Harry Truman to declare, “Nuclear weapons are too horrible to use,” saying in essence we never would use them and thus disarm America! Harry Truman, while the only man who could play the piano in the White House, was not the sharpest knife in the block.
Was Jack’s hypothesis correct? Is there a diabolical engine in our dimension creating such patterns? And the question of the moment: May we satisfy the equation by nuking Pyonyang in 2017 instead of 1950? They certainly seem to be a country asking for a place in the sun of Jack’s hypothesis. It likely millions of North Koreans would accept the action to bring to an end an insane regime that has caused such misery and challenged the Arnot Hypothesis.
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