Comment by stavros

1 day ago

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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stavros

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defrost  1 day ago

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).

  • stavros  1 day ago

    Do you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs over months?

    • defrost  20 hours ago

      > with thousands of bombs over months?

      Say what now?

        Tokyo was bombed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) ..

  The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.[1] Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.

      ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

      > Do you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs

      Tokyo vs. Hiroshima - https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/

      Do you?

      (Aside from thousands of conventional bombs being significantly cheaper and lower tech than a nuclear bomb).

      2 replies →

    • wredcoll  6 hours ago

      One bomber is considerably harder to defend against, otherwise, I don't think the people who died really cared.

wredcoll  6 hours ago

> 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.