Comment by stavros
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
I'm looking back several hours here and not seeing where this is laid out.
I'm also curious as to why what the US did to Hiroshima is an unthinkable nightmare scenarios whereas what the US did to Tokyo is not (and nor is what the US did to 71 other cities in Japan also not that).
18 replies →
> 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
The cost of causing death isn't the atrocity. The atrocity is the death happening. If "terrorists" somehow managed to create 1000+ b52s and drop 10,000 tons of "regular bombs" on manhattan, it would be just as atrocious as a nuclear weapon going off. Obviously the single nuke is a slightly more realistic threat, but that's not the point.
If you want to argue that anybody dying ever is an atrocity, that is one thing. If you want to argue any civilian dying during a war is an atrocity, that is a different thing and, among other things, would require you to define civilian in a useful way.