Free The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson

of the covering law model reply to its various critiques by stating that it is irrelevant whether historians actually use the model or not; the fact remains that they should . If they do not, then an event like “the bottle fell off the table” could be explained by either “the cat’s tail brushed it,” or “the cat looked at it cross-eyed,” and there would be no basis for choosing between the two explanations. Historical explanation is not just a matter of the practice of historians, but of the nature of reality. And in reality, physical events are constrained by general laws—or if they are not laws, they are at least extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the links between an event and those that follow it, allowing predictions that, if not deterministically exact, are still accurate enough to give us enormous power over physical reality. That, for anyone but followers of David Hume, serves as law enough. And humans, as part of the stuff of the universe, are subject to the same physical laws that control all the rest of it. So it makes sense to seek a science of history, and to try to formulate some general historical laws.
    What would these general laws look like? Some examples:
    â€¢ If two armies are equally well-led and well-armed, and one has an enormous numerical superiority, the other will never win.
    â€¢ A privileged group will never relinquish privilege voluntarily.
    â€¢ Empires rise, flourish, fall and are replaced, in a cyclical pattern.
    â€¢ A nation’s fortunes depend on its success in war.
    â€¢ A society’s culture is determined by its economic system.
    â€¢ Belief systems exist to disguise inequality.
    â€¢ Lastly, unparalleled in both elegance and power, subsuming many of the examples listed above: power corrupts.
    So there do seem to be some quite powerful laws of historical explanation. But consider another:
    â€¢ For want of a nail, the battle was lost.
    For instance: on July 29th, 1945, a nomad in Kirgiz walked out of his yurt and stepped on a butterfly. For lack of the butterfly flapping its wings, the wind in the area blew slightly less. A low pressure front therefore moved over east China more slowly than it would have. And so on August 6th, when the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima, it was covered by ninety percent cloud cover, instead of fifty percent. Colonel Tibbetts flew to the secondary target, Nagasaki; it was also covered. The Enola Gay had little fuel left, but its crew was able to fly over Kokura on the way back to Tinian, and taking advantage of a break in the clouds, they dropped the bomb there. Ninety thousand people died in Kokura. The Enola Gay landed at Tinian with so little fuel left in its tanks that what remained “wouldn’t have filled a cigarette lighter.” On August 9th a second mission tried Hiroshima again, but the clouds were still there, and the mission eventually dropped the bomb on the less heavily clouded secondary target, Nagasaki, missing the city center and killing only twenty thousand people. The Japanese surrendered a week later.
    On August 11th, 1945, a child named Ai Matsui was born in Hiroshima. In 1960 she began to speak in local meetings on many topics, including Hiroshima’s special position in the world. Its citizens had escaped annihilation, she said, as if protected by some covering angel (or law); they had a responsibility to the dead of Kokura and Nagasaki, to represent them in the world of the living, to change the world for the good. The Hiroshima Peace Party quickly grew to become the dominant political movement in Hiroshima, and then, in revulsion at the violence of the 1960s in Vietnam and elsewhere, all over Japan. In the 1970s the party became a worldwide movement, gaining the enthusiastic support of ex-President Kennedy, and President Babbitt. Young people from every country joined it as if experiencing a religious conversion. In 1983 Japan began its Asian Assistance