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I'll argue that the surviving people on the pointy end of the stick haven't thoroughly considered how pointy conventional aerial bombardment gets.

mikeash 8y ago
People who ended up on the pointy end of that stick in the next war still didn't make it taboo, even though they did with the weapon of mass destruction made famous by that war. I see the argument that it ultimately doesn't make much difference how a vast bunch of civilians end up indiscriminately dead, but the people who actually experienced it seem to think differently.
- funAtParties 8y ago
  There's obviously a difference because people differentiate. Sorry, but I'm not buying it. In exactly the same way I don't differentiate between being maimed by a flamethrower, versus being maimed by battery acid. The presumptive idea of innate wisdom of the crowd doesn't sway me. Ask most people choose between burning their face off with a chemical or fire, and they'll likely choose fire, but getting your face burned off is categorically bad. Why distinguish.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I’m not saying they must be right. But they were there, they experienced it, and we did not. They may be wrong, but it would take a really strong argument to convince me of that. I’m going to start from the assumption that the people who experienced these weapons and came away with the belief that they should never be used again had some good reason for that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - funAtParties 8y ago
      What I really come away from the impression veterans and civilians of the time give of, is simply that it was unsporting, undignified, and unfair. That, much more than it was punishingly cruel, in excess of death and dismemberment by other means. They say, yeah, it's okay to zip a supersonic bullet through soft tissue such that it shreds with cavitation, and smash it through bone that splinters and explodes, so people lose whole limbs. And that's okay. It's like a deer hunt. But hey, you don't hunt animals by mutilating their lings with bug spray. That's no fair. You wouldn't consume an elk carcass tainted with persistent organic pollutants. No fair. We can't even bury our dead. But, you know what? You aren't going to bury your dead, when they're incinerated by high explosives. And hey, what's fair about war at all? What's fair about several hundred planes unloading kilotons of conventional munitions, indiscriminately, to break an apparatus of geopolitics. Gee, unfair, undignified, unsportsmanlike, in the pain, injury and slow death (leaving a contaminated corpse) department. When you piece those explicit details together, the real problem is that it deals a degree of harm to the perception of gallantry, duty and honor of service. It's pretty much impossible to pat a chemical burn on the back, and say "there, there, thanks for defending the country" but, you can still pull that off, when sharing the room with an amputee that lost a limb to ballistics. Exchanging chemical weapons for aerial bombardment exhibits "differences" but nothing that makes me say "wow, one is okay, and the other isn't." Both are essentially equally bad, and neither is remotely good, or an improvement over the other. People have their preferences, but in the same way that they rationalize the side effect of rampant smog and pollution as bad, but millions of fatal car accidents as normal, and a calculated risk. The real choice being put on the table though, is: Would you choose between an air war that includes both regular explosions and chemical attacks, or just a regular air war only? At that point, the choice becomes more rational. We say: "Hmmm, well, at least I can take some of the destruction out of the equation. I get to make one kind of misery go away. I can choose X = A as an alternative to X = (A + B + C). A never goes away, and nothing can be done about that, but at least I don't have to think about B and C anymore." So, it's not about incediaries and high explosives being okay. Or aerial bombardment being different, and better. It's just that they can't be taken off the table, under any circumstances, no matter whatever else gets negotiated. I guess it's just a fundamental characteristic of destruction, that if destroying things is on the table, the basics of destruction get to keep their scalar qualities. You can limit the method of destruction but not the quantity.

mikeash 8y ago

People who ended up on the pointy end of that stick in the next war still didn't make it taboo, even though they did with the weapon of mass destruction made famous by that war. I see the argument that it ultimately doesn't make much difference how a vast bunch of civilians end up indiscriminately dead, but the people who actually experienced it seem to think differently.

funAtParties 8y ago
There's obviously a difference because people differentiate. Sorry, but I'm not buying it. In exactly the same way I don't differentiate between being maimed by a flamethrower, versus being maimed by battery acid. The presumptive idea of innate wisdom of the crowd doesn't sway me. Ask most people choose between burning their face off with a chemical or fire, and they'll likely choose fire, but getting your face burned off is categorically bad. Why distinguish.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’m not saying they must be right. But they were there, they experienced it, and we did not. They may be wrong, but it would take a really strong argument to convince me of that. I’m going to start from the assumption that the people who experienced these weapons and came away with the belief that they should never be used again had some good reason for that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - funAtParties 8y ago
    What I really come away from the impression veterans and civilians of the time give of, is simply that it was unsporting, undignified, and unfair. That, much more than it was punishingly cruel, in excess of death and dismemberment by other means. They say, yeah, it's okay to zip a supersonic bullet through soft tissue such that it shreds with cavitation, and smash it through bone that splinters and explodes, so people lose whole limbs. And that's okay. It's like a deer hunt. But hey, you don't hunt animals by mutilating their lings with bug spray. That's no fair. You wouldn't consume an elk carcass tainted with persistent organic pollutants. No fair. We can't even bury our dead. But, you know what? You aren't going to bury your dead, when they're incinerated by high explosives. And hey, what's fair about war at all? What's fair about several hundred planes unloading kilotons of conventional munitions, indiscriminately, to break an apparatus of geopolitics. Gee, unfair, undignified, unsportsmanlike, in the pain, injury and slow death (leaving a contaminated corpse) department. When you piece those explicit details together, the real problem is that it deals a degree of harm to the perception of gallantry, duty and honor of service. It's pretty much impossible to pat a chemical burn on the back, and say "there, there, thanks for defending the country" but, you can still pull that off, when sharing the room with an amputee that lost a limb to ballistics. Exchanging chemical weapons for aerial bombardment exhibits "differences" but nothing that makes me say "wow, one is okay, and the other isn't." Both are essentially equally bad, and neither is remotely good, or an improvement over the other. People have their preferences, but in the same way that they rationalize the side effect of rampant smog and pollution as bad, but millions of fatal car accidents as normal, and a calculated risk. The real choice being put on the table though, is: Would you choose between an air war that includes both regular explosions and chemical attacks, or just a regular air war only? At that point, the choice becomes more rational. We say: "Hmmm, well, at least I can take some of the destruction out of the equation. I get to make one kind of misery go away. I can choose X = A as an alternative to X = (A + B + C). A never goes away, and nothing can be done about that, but at least I don't have to think about B and C anymore." So, it's not about incediaries and high explosives being okay. Or aerial bombardment being different, and better. It's just that they can't be taken off the table, under any circumstances, no matter whatever else gets negotiated. I guess it's just a fundamental characteristic of destruction, that if destroying things is on the table, the basics of destruction get to keep their scalar qualities. You can limit the method of destruction but not the quantity.