JF Ptak Science Books Post 1553
There are a number of posts on this blog relating to the post-nuclear-attack world, and they seem to cover all aspects of what to expect of society and government after devastating nuclear weapons exchanges. The posts are part of a long series (75+ posts) on the history of atomic and nuclear weapons, but also extend to Armageddon and fat thinking about survivability. A good example of the unusual aspects of covering all uncovered angles is Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Dept.: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awkwardness" of Holocaust, 1962 , as well as this one on job description and personnel issues post-attack. But what I'm edging for tonight is the taxman and the business of funding government and the military post-attack, which appeared in a very structured 1967 piece here. The issue of establishing and collecting taxes in the post nuclear weapons exchange world has come to life again, finding as I did an obscure reference to the nasty business in an attached note to a more formidable folder of other post-attack bureaucratic minutiae.
Its a simple thing, really--this is what struck me so heavily about it. Just a short note about moving mid-level people around for becoming expert in this and that simulation and so on, a little hand-written note, from 1964. But it suggests that a person from the "Tax Analysis Staff" of the post-attack studies world be the designated expertee, since "that staff is interested in post-attack GNP and tax base studies".
There's just so much expectation and projection in that last line that I'm not quite sure that it exists. In the real world.
I guess the simple explanation is that after the (radioactive) dust settles following the massive exchange, that people will pick themselves up, brush themselves off, and start all over again (as the song goes). And somewhere in that killer dust and devastated death a magnificent thing lurks--a GNP. And inside that GNP its guts--money and taxes--have survived the annihilation of almost everybody. Which perhaps disproves that old adage, and that in the end, the only thing you really can depend on is, well, taxes, because the dead go away, and the taxes remain.
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