The major premise of the statement, that war was a given, is effectively 'unassailable' in this case, but it isn't difficult to imagine such a calculus being ab

The major premise of the statement, that war was a given, is effectively 'unassailable' in this case, but it isn't difficult to imagine such a calculus being abused. I think it was especially a danger when one compares the apparent flight of talent from the public sector when you compare the people working for the federal government in the 30s and early 40s to the personality types and intellectual capacity of people behind the red scare in the 50s. Furthermore there are even worse imaginable scenarios than occasional use of nuclear weapons, namely, complete compliance from everyone else without nuclear weapons. In my opinion, many of the people in government in the 50s and 60s really were motivated by an anger toward people who they thought were their inferiors displaying insufficient deference, and I think tools to demand greater compliance can have a self-reinforcing effect—"these animals don't respond to x level of force, so we use y level, which is much softer than z level" et cetera. And yet with hindsight we see that after ending the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons were a significant factor in keeping the Cold War "cold" long enough for the relative strengths of the two systems to matter as much as how the balance of military power happened to lay at the end of WWII. So my point isn't that I think the end didn't justify the means in this case, but that it is because of the specifics rather than the value of the rule. As a general rule, it is a horrible one. Just as sometimes fighting a war is better than not, the opposite can also be true, and whether or not its important to insist on supremacy, even when there is little cost, is a discussion that should come long before the analysis of different weapons' impact. The danger is the implied generality of the rule. It is tempting to shift the conversation to quantifiable metrics like lives lost, because it is easier than the very difficult, soft discussions about whether pursuing various policies do anything to create the world we want to live in.