Comment by mrshadowgoose
3 years ago
The first nuclear power (the United States) chose to not. Had they decided to be completely evil, they certainly could have used the threat of nuclear annihilation (and the act of it for non-compliers) to achieve that goal.
They didn't have strategic ICBMs from the get go. At the start they only had tactical nukes enough to scare the japanese into submission. And not enough to completely nuke someone like russia. Their nukes also required accessibility because they didn't have rockets. Deploying nukes over a country they were already heavily firebombing was a walk in the park compared to deploying them in places where another power has air superiority.
Even if they wanted to - they would definitely fail on that mission. Soviets had nukes just 4 years after Americans, and in these 4 years US just wouldn't produce enough fission materials to annihilate USSR, not talking about UK and France.
The people (and even military personnel) of the United States wouldn't have tolerated capriciously dropping atomic bombs on Moscow three years after we helped them defeat the Nazis. But perhaps something in the nature of AGI will allow its "discoverers" to act more unilaterally evil and with fewer fetters. An army of amoral robots would certainly remove a lot of checks on certain kinds of behavior.
Not sure I would take that lesson away from history. There were quite a few voices in the US military at the end of WW2 that recognized that peace with the soviets was tenuous at best and wanted to push the nuclear advantage right then. The US was unmatched for 4 years until the Soviets had their first nuclear test. Had they chose to use nuclear weapons, they could have become a global empire and no one could have stopped them.
US didn't need nukes to obliterate USSR in 1945. Just cut it off the lend-lease program and attack on European and Pacific theaters at the same time. They didn't do it because US public won't tolerate attack on yesterday's ally against Hitler.
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General Patton and a ton of other military generals wanted to invade Russia. The way Russia treated it's army, prisoners of war, the ideological differences and many other factors led to a potential alternate history where the US invades Russia after WW2.
It wasn't just Patton, there were a lot of other psychotic generals high up in the U.S. command structure like Curtis LeMay (inspiration for Jack D. Ripper) who wanted to go fully off leash in fighting communism, use nukes in Korea, etc. In the end we did use biological weapons and kill 5% of North Korea's civilian population, so one could argue that besides "no nukes" there wasn't all that much restraint in the end after all.