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I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nucle
by jessaustin 6y ago
I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiations on that topic in 1946. The rest of the world would have fallen in line. Humanity would have been so much safer. It's possible FDR would have been wise enough to do this, and Henry Wallace probably would have been. Truman, though, was over his head. The evil bastards led him around by the nose. We've never had an actual representative government since then.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 6y agoI don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.
- jessaustin 6y agoThat's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't easy to build nuclear weapons in 1946. Only one nation had done it. Sure one can imagine that a nation could decide to take a flyer on nukes and thereby suffer global opprobrium, but most of the nations we'd imagine in that role didn't exist in 1946 in the way that they exist now. That included Israel, which didn't actually exist at all then.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThey don't need a bomb in 1946 though, presumably nuclear power will eventually spread and suddenly it's 1963 and Israel is performing an underground test.
- jessaustin 6y agoAnd? Would the Israel of that world have escaped somehow all the consequences that would have been in place for decades? Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust? This is a sort of magical thinking: sure it's good to have less nukes, but only up to a point. After that, less nukes actually means more nukes! Good grief. Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. The war pigs have a different lie for every different constituency, and "nukes are green" has somehow been swallowed by a small number of very vocal (on HN anyway) internet environmentalists.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>Would the Israel of that world have escaped somehow all the consequences that would have been in place for decades They would essentially be UN consequences, they don't have a great track record of enforcing things like that. >Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust Looking only at nukes, dropping one more on a populated area is worse than reality so far. And it's impossible to guess what kind of warfare a world without MAD would gave faced. >Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. Nuclear power obtained without the focus placed on weapons would be a completely different economy. Not only are design choices often made allowing more bombs to be created, the control of information and resources drives the price up.
- jessaustin 6y agoDefinitely, nuclear power has been developed with bomb production in mind. Now, that's what we have. Lots of bombs and a nuclear power industry that costs more than renewables and endangers the public. I'm not happy about either aspect of our situation. No more of that please.
- 082349872349872 6y agoBeing cynical, I suspect the reason "demonstration" of the bomb had not seriously been discussed as an option is because in a way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations, if one considers the target audience to have been Stalin instead of Hirohito. I kind of wonder about the timeline in which Kennedy and Khrushchev hadn't been cancelled by their respective hardliners. Would we have wound up with a world of laws, in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved? Would the US and the USSR have converged on market economies with strong safety nets? Would we all now be celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve with pantomimes?
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoDemonstrating to the soviets was a fringe benefit at best. If you read the accounts from any person at the time. Regardless of the theater or the nationality the overwhelming consensus was that the priority was to get the war over with ASAP so that everyone could go home. Anything else was just a side benefit.
- DuskStar 6y agoHumanity might have been safer without nukes. I think it's more accurate to say that humanities safety would have been less variable without nukes. No chance of nuclear war, but almost a certainty of WW3, and WW4, and... It's not quite as much of an unalloyed good as you're suggesting.