Comment by defrost
1 day ago
The difference being that it cost a lot more to destroy those two Japanese cities alone than it did in total to destroy 72 other Japanese cities to the same degree.
Later on, that type of weapon became cheaper and several thousands were created and became the basis for a long window of relative peace.
Strictly speaking, the first city cost a whole lot of money, the second was basically free, through the magic of not amortizing the cost of R&D to win an online argument.
It's my understanding that the two bombs used were not the same technology so you can't just amortize the whole research costs from one to the other.
win?
Moreover, what's the argument here as you see it?
The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population. "Terrorists have hidden a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan" is one of the unthinkable nightmare scenarios routinely portrayed in US films, and yet that's exactly what the US did to Hiroshima.
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