When you mentioned 280mm field artillery, I immediately realized this meant a tactical nuke, since I'm not aware of any wide issue conventional field artillery piece this huge. The Germans had some one-off guns this big in WWI (e.g. "Big Bertha"), but they didn't have much on an impact and were too impractical to deploy in meaningful numbers.

In any case, after I read the rest of your comment, it occured to me--and thus is pure speculation on my part--that one possible explanation of some of these neocons' and chickenhawks' aggressive militarism and desire to see our military might unleashed on the world is that, after living through the cold war and seeing that military might be used mostly in deterrence--we never did fire off a nuke against targets, thankfully--perhaps they have this pent-up anxiety about all those unused nukes, that can only be released in their minds by their finally being deployed. I.e. delayed gratification, never actually gratified. It's like they had these cool toys guns and never got to actually fire them, and want someone to finally fire them, dammit! Quite juvenile--not to mention sociopathic, of course--but a certain portion of the population is bound to operate along such demented lines.

Basically, boys with toys, whose mamma won't let them go out and play. And they really, really want to play. It's all about their egos and ids, their superegos being underdeveloped and the real-world human consequences of their GI Joe fantasies being merely abstract and annoying irrelevencies that only liberal pussies care about. C'mon, dude, nuke are like so cool!

Just a theory.

Your ad hominem attack on me proves my assertions.

Posit dishonest, rediculous and inflammatory comments that are clearly meant to elicit angry responses and personal insults, and then selectively refer to these responses as "proof" of the supposedly personal and ad hominum nature of the other side's positions, without addressing the substance of such responses in the slightest.

A classic setup, which only fools can't see through as the transparently adolescent nonsense that it is, and that only liars will deny.

(Come to think of it, this is pretty much the gist of half of congressional Repubs' talking points these days--but then again, what are they if not elected trolls?)

Such disappointingly and consistently uninteresting people these trolls are. Sigh.

Points well taken, and quite scary of course. But I was referring more to the military's civilian leaders, Cheney and his administration within an administration, the neocon "theorists" from whom they get many of their ideas and schemes, and the chickenhawk armchair warrier segment of the GOP "base" that cheers them on, as opposed to the military's uniformed leadership, whom I suspect are for the most part still a lot more "conservative" (in a little "c", non-political sense, i.e. loath to use military force except when absolutely necessary, a la the Powell doctrine) than these others.

These assorted non-military war hawks just strike me as being motivated, in large part, by pent-up anxiety over not having been allowed to use all these awesome weapons for so many years, with a few notable exceptions (they are the same people who viewed the first gulf war as an emotionally gratifying exercize in blowing people away and asserting American might than as the regional police action that it was), and the irresistable (in their diseased and malformed psyches) desire to finally unleash them, in an almost orgiastic and ejaculatory manner.

I.e. they really, really want to kill and harm people and destroy things, for the sake of it in and of itself, apart from any geopolitical factors, simply because they can, and feel like it, because it makes them feel alive and essential and manly as does nothing else. In fact, the obvious sexual parallels if not subtext of such urges and impulses almost resembles what one might imagine to be some of the motivating factors that cause people to rape and torture.

And in case you think my views extreme, I refer everyone to the reaction that many of these people had to Abu Ghraib, which Glenn has masterfully documented over many, many postings--these are some seriously fucked up sickos, posing as patriots and serious geopolitical thinkers. And I think that we need to view and treat them as such, and not as people who simply have different opinions than ours. Yes, I am "demonizing" these people, because they are, clearly, demons--demons within our midst, with power, influence and respect that is utterly undeserved, and, obviously, extremely frightening, disturbing and dangerous.

I really do think that we need to play up the "Cheney and his followers are literally crazy and evil" meme more. Because it's true. And Godwin would totally agree.

And speaking of Robert Graves, he's worth (re-)reading for Memorial Day.

Yes, I think I spotted him with a copy of Goodbye to All That tucked under his flak jacket on his way to his undisclosed Memorial Day retreat--along with The Guns of August and the Collected Works of Wilfred Owen. I might even have seen Slaughterhouse 5 there, but I'm not sure.

NOT.