Comment by wredcoll

> 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.