Comment by seabass-labrax
3 days ago
> You're welcome to go to the front lines and attack the Russian tanks with your own preferred tools!
By that logic, we should skip the depleted uranium and head straight to thermonuclear weapons, and throw in some Sarin for good measure. No, the purpose of prohibiting such weapons is for wartime, and whilst it is true that some countries are backsliding on previous commitments, that comes out of cowardice; it should not be reinterpreted as pragmatism. The rules of war weren't idealistic, they were prompted by very real horrors that were witnessed on the ground, especially during the Great War.
I don't believe that's historic; the landmine convention was drafted in 1997, and the cluster bomb one in 2008. The European nations that dominated these movements (USA signed neither) were in peacetime, and had known nothing other than peace for a very long time.
The treaties they're withdrawing from today aren't the post-WW1 Geneva conventions; they are modern treaties that were in actuality products of eras of peace.
> I don't believe that's historic; the landmine convention was drafted in 1997, and the cluster bomb one in 2008
Not historic in the sense of 'old', but still motivated by real horrors that Europe witnessed. The Bosnian War occurred only a couple of years prior to 1997 and left the region with over a thousand square kilometres of land contaminated by live landmines, which are still being cleared today. I don't know about cluster bombs specifically, but I would imagine that the (widely televised) Second Gulf War and the conflict between Israel and Lebanon had something to do with changing European perception of the weapons.
Certainly, the treaties are always drawn up in peacetime - it would be impractical to do so during an active conflict. However I believe that all of them have been prompted by some violent, horrific conflict in the years immediately beforehand.
> However I believe that all of them have been prompted by some violent, horrific conflict in the years immediately beforehand.
And in the cases of most of the European signatories, either the blinding naivete that they would never need to fight a "real war" again, or the disingenuous belief that while _they_ could take the moral high ground by signing and abandoning those weapons, the US would show up and use them in their defense if the time came. It also allowed these countries to coach more of their defense cuts in moral terms, rather than simply as saving money.
Now, of course, those illusions have been rightfully shattered, and these countries have been reminded that cluster weapons and mines are used on the battlefield because they _work_. And modern cluster munitions with low dud rates and mines with automatic neutralization go a long way towards reducing the collateral damage.
Europe has been dealing with unexploded ordinance from the fallout of European wars for over a century.
Of the countries you listed, its the US that has not actually known war. A few of its cities being reduced to rubble and a few thousand of its children losing limbs to land mines might convince some more of its people that war isn't quite the swell adventure they think it is.
The problem is that it is both pragmatic and cowardly. The unfortunate logical consequence of this is that as a race we will likely cease to exist as a result of a nuclear weapon(s) being used for any number of reasons including political expedience.
I genuinely agree with you and I am glad you are pushing back on those arguments, but our tendencies does not put me in an optimistic mood.
The main reasons those weapons aren't used is not idealism, it's because they're not actually that effective in a battlefield scenario.
Strategic nukes in particular are a hilariously bad example here. In most cases in war, the objective is to take ground, and making the ground uningabitable is counter productive. MAD, aka "pragmatism", is the main factor that prevents their use in general.
Chemical weapons, well, let's hope MAD holds there too, to some extent. But the US to my knowledge never signed any treaties banning them. We took them out of inventory because they're not that useful to a modern, mobile military.
Nuclear weapons don't make territory uninhabitable. (Nuclear reactor meltdowns do, but they are very different.)
More precisely, ground that receives fallout is deadly for 2 or 3 weeks. Ground that has been in actual contact with a nuclear fireball might stay deadly longer than that, but that will be only a tiny fraction of the area of the attacked country.
Ok, but the basic point stands that there is nothing there left worth holding.
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> By that logic, we should skip the depleted uranium and head straight to thermonuclear weapons
Yes, actually.
(With a massive caveat being if the opponent does not also have nukes.)
I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
The estimated losses for the invasion of their main islands were 1 million. Would you kill 1 million of your countrymen, some of those your relatives and neighbors or would you rather kill a couple hundred thousand civilians of the country that attacked you?
Ironically, this time the math works out even if you give each life the same value. If you give enemy lives lower value, how many of them would you be willing to nuke before you'd prefer to send your own people to die?
>I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
Except that's not really true. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little to do with "ending the war more quickly"[0]:
"The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies began at midnight on August 8, sandwiched between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was, indeed, the death blow U.S. officials knew it would be. When asked, on August 10, why Japan had to surrender so quickly, Prime Minister Suzuki explained, Japan must surrender immediately or "the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States."
As postwar U.S. intelligence reports made clear, the atomic bombs had little impact on the Japanese decision. The U.S. had been firebombing and wiping out Japanese cities since early March. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the U.S. could and would wipe out Japan's cities. It didn't make a big difference whether this was one plane and one bomb or hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs."
[0] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/its-time-...
The emperor's surrender speech made direct reference to the atomic bombs.
Following the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, and the Soviet declaration of war and Nagasaki bombing on August 9, the Emperor's speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945, and referred to the atomic bombs as a reason for the surrender.
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast
And while the Prime minister at the time said that, the military was preparing to fight to the death and took steps to prevent surrender.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
I've read this too but it doesn't disprove what US was thinking at the time.
People think others think like them. US being a democratic country and considering the value of a life to be high, I have no trouble believing that the US government did think the Japanese government would consider the cost of continued fighting to be too high.
> The "prompt and utter destruction" clause has been interpreted as a veiled warning about American possession of the atomic bomb[1]
We now largely know strategic bombing does not work [2] but it still doesn't stop some from trying now, it certainly did not back then.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration
[2]: https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
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Ew