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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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War is weird.
Firebombing wooden cities night after night? All good carry on.
Poison gas? Whoa WTF are you some kind of monster.
There was a weird little side note in a debate about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Someone in the Pentagon on the pro side said, more or less: War is total. People die. If you're killed in a war, it makes absolutely no difference whether it was from being shot, or stabbed, or blown up by a nuclear bomb. People die and that's the end for them. That's war, that's what we're talking about, don't get all squeamish about it now.
I don't agree with bombing Vietnam obviously, but I do feel like there's an essential point about war there that is often papered over; people become horrified by some things about war while remaining fine with other things.
War is weird, but ultimately the concern is generally escalation/normalization of weapons. If nukes get normalized, then every military worth its salt needs one, and can use them, and that means suddenly warfare becomes much, much more bloody as a matter of averages, not just as a matter of a bomb or two vaporizing a few hundred thousand people in the occasional high-intensity war.
Yeah, agreed. I think it's by far a good thing that we've been lucky enough so far that they haven't been used beyond that one time.
I actually think there's an unspoken factor that is why people actually treat nuclear weapons so differently: There is no way in the modern day that any leader anywhere in the world can start a nuclear war and be sure it won't come back and impact them and their family. Unlike other war things, it's never safely insulated in some faraway place happening to other people.
It would be nice to think that the taboo is because of the horrible consequences, but we're doing things with horrible consequences every day. I think it's because of the pure calculus of what might happen to me and people I care about, right away.
I feel that reaching your conclusion on that basis would have been all but impossible without the benefits of hindsight.
Also, long-term effects were not known then
I meant in reference to the post-war attempts at nuclear restraint, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I think the non-use of nuclear weapons was a bigger deal in the Korean War. For various reasons, both sides chose to not use nuclear weapons. This included the one President that chose to deploy nuclear weapons in World War II.
The Korean peninsula could have easily become an irradiated wasteland.
I mean, the problem with nuclear weapons are for the survivors. I assume getting turned into physics by a nuclear bomb isn't really painful. Then there's dying from the shockwave which is probably considerably worse already.
And then there's the radiations...