The one test I can’t run
I split-test everything for a living. Here’s the one I’d give anything to run, and history will never let me.
This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy.
I split-test headlines, buttons, whole pages for a living. There’s one test I’d give almost anything to run, even though it'd never be possible.
It begins on a river in Germany, 1945.
Two armies meet on the Elbe. The West looks across the water at Stalin and decides he’s a partner. It signs half a continent over to him on a promise of free elections nobody means to keep. It hands two million people back across the line at gunpoint, to be shot or worked to death, because a treaty says so. Then they go home and demobilize.
Stalin doesn’t.
Patton was standing right there and thought it was insane. We’re going to fight these people eventually, was his read. So fight them now, while the rifle’s already up and the army’s still in the field.
It makes me wonder, what would happen if we did?
In order to understand the significance of this theoretical, alternative timeline you have to look at the branch that actually shipped. Some highlights:
- Korean War
- A wall through Berlin
- Tanks in Budapest and Prague
- Vietnam, where we sent my grandfather
- Cambodia’s year zero
- The Great Leap, tens of millions starved
- A North Korea so total in its cruelty that Yeonmi Park had to cross a frozen river to tell us it’s real
- China gone red in ‘49 with Soviet arms in its handsAn ideology that killed some sixty million people in the forty-five years that followed, and the counter is still running.
Every line of it traces back to that day on the Elbe river. To tired men who wanted to go home, and a handshake with a man they should have known better than to trust.
So here’s the test I can’t run. Variant B. What happens?
At face value and without a lot of investigation, the simple answer is: we nuke Moscow into surrender.
The monopoly was real, we had more bombs coming and the Soviets had none until 1949.
After the successful detonation of the Trinity experiment and the wartime use of the Fat Man and Little Boy in 1945, Allied forces were ready to make bombs on end within months. Including a fourth bomb that was prepared in case the first two in Japan didn't bring surrender.
But an atomic bomb in 1945 erases a city. It doesn’t stop eleven million Red Army soldiers from rolling west, and our own war planners knew it. Their early plans all assumed Europe gets overrun and the bomb only punishes an abandoned
The real variant is quieter. We don’t sign Poland away. We make those free elections the price of the peace, backed by the only intact army left on the continent, and we treat the USSR as the enemy it already was, in 1945, when we had more leverage than we’d ever have again.
And maybe that branch is beautiful.
No Eastern Bloc. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltics, a free unified Germany, forty years early. Maybe no Korea, no Pyongyang. And maybe, this is the big one, no Mao.
Think about that. If the USSR was in a wrestling match wit h the allies, none of the Soviet branches ever sprout, especially China.
The proof behind the theory?
The Chinese Communists didn’t win in a vacuum. Moscow armed them with captured Japanese arsenals in Manchuria, bankrolled them, handed them the strategy and the model for propagating the proletariat.
Now picture a Soviet Union that can’t spare a bullet because it’s fighting for Moscow’s own survival against Patton and Churchill. A regime in a death-struggle with the Western advance has nothing left to midwife a revolution on the far side of the world.
Starve the CCP of its sponsor at the exact moment it’s fighting for the mainland, and the largest grave of the century might never get dug.
Except every piece of that beautiful branch hangs on one thread: that we could keep the Red Army too busy to do anything else. And a genuine question doesn’t get to rig its ending.
But, it's costly.
Could we have destroyed the Soviets? Probably, yes.
The USSR in ‘45 was a wrecked country, twenty-seven million dead, its industry in ash, and leaning on American trucks to stand up. Compare that with untouched American factories plus a bomb only we had at the time and the math favors us.
Favors, but doesn't leave unscathed.
The Red Army was the largest on earth and had just mowed down eighty percent of the Wehrmacht, our soldiers wanted home so badly the demobilization was a stampede, and when Churchill’s own generals war-gamed exactly this, they named it Operation Unthinkable.
The likeliest shape of variant B isn’t a clean win. It’s the Red Army overrunning France first then spending years burning Russian cities to take it back. We could have destroyed them. The question is whether we’d have survived it, and whether we’d still have been a bastion of liberty and freedom at the end.
And here’s what haunts me. The card variant B leans on hardest, the bomb, we didn’t have to imagine using. We played it for real, four straight years of atomic monopoly, and Stalin took Poland, seized Prague, blockaded Berlin, and armed Mao and Kim right through it, betting we’d never end the world over a map. He was right. Unless the only reason he called it is that we’d already sent the army home and proved we wouldn’t fight.
There’s one more thing I think about when considering this, and it turns a strategic mistake into a moral one. They didn’t really know how bad it would get.
In 1945 the West had an inkling Stalin was brutal, but not the full picture, the Gulag, the purges, engineered famines, and the scale of it all. That came out later, in Solzhenitsyn and the Siberian camps, decades after the handshake.
Not quite the cop-out that gives the alternative branch a pass, because they had the smoke. They were personally handing two million people back across that line to be shot, that same year, and they did it anyway. There was enough to infer that something evil was happening.
It was the same monster we’d just crossed an ocean to destroy, a purge of innocents sorted by category and fed to camps. We had spent millions of our own sons to put down the version that murdered eleven million. Then we stood on the Elbe, looked at the version that would kill five times that, and decided this one wasn’t worth the fight.
We understood the stakes perfectly when the guards were uniformed in swastikas. I wish the hammer and sickle invoked the same charge.
The numbers worth considering
You can’t split-test a century, but you don’t need the control group to read the ledger.
Put the two side by side, the real numbers, not the rhetorical ones.
Communism, in the forty-five years from that handshake in 1945 to the Wall coming down in 1990, killed near sixty million people... conservatively in a time of "peace." Sixty million.
The war we didn’t fight?
Nobody can hand you a clean figure for a war that never ran, and anyone who does is selling something. So take the worst honest case. The Eastern Front that had just ended, the same Red Army, killed around thirty million before the Axis forces surrendered. Even if Allied forces suffered casualties of the same measure, everything gone wrong, and it still lands at half of what we paid by not fighting. The likely number is far lower considering we lost less than 4 million allied troops excluding Soviet and Chinese troops.
That’s the whole bet. Sixty million certain against thirty million at its worst, probably a fraction of it. And Stalin read us exactly right.
He bet we’d rather keep the comfortable certainty than pay the smaller, uglier, uncertain price, and he got paid for reading us right for fifty years.
So here’s where I land, target on my back and all:
We should have made him prove that bet.
Not a cartoon march to Moscow, but we should have forced the question in 1945, while the army was still standing and the leverage was still ours, instead of handing him the winnings and going home. The men on the Elbe weren’t wrong that a fight would be terrible. They were wrong that the alternative was peace. The alternative was sixty million funerals on the installment plan, and we signed for it because signing was easier than fighting.
I can’t tell you it would have worked. It appears it would have been worth the shot.
Which is the one thing in here I’m sure of, and it has nothing to do with 1945.
When the hair on the back of your neck stands up, it is standing up for a reason. Patton’s stood up, as did Churchill's.
The tired men put their feet up anyway, and the back half of a century paid the interest on that relaxation.
So if some part of you already spots something you know will be a problem a year from now, and you can still do something about it today, do the thing. Investigate the inkling. Make the hard call while it’s still yours to make.
Don’t put your feet up next to a fire because naming it out loud would cost you a hard night.
Stalin’s whole bet was that we’d rather rest than be sure and take action if needed.
Handle it.
— Zach
