Thanks for detailed reply. My rebuke may have been hyperbolic itself. Agree with you and the others who noted it’s a conceivable outcome and an interesting coun

Thanks for detailed reply. My rebuke may have been hyperbolic itself. Agree with you and the others who noted it’s a conceivable outcome and an interesting counterfactual. I was most acutely replying to the “no way he would…” framing. Top objection (besides the real, if pedestrian, point about certainty) is that, whatever a leader’s public messaging and/or bluster might include, the decision to kill millions as an organizational cover-up doesn’t seem like something one could easily project. Especially when retaliation risk would include the possibility of further detonations on home soil. I’m not well versed in military history, but I understand LeMay’s story to be more complex than ‘bloodthirsty war criminal’ (and that’s including his own comments ~ “if we lost, I suppose I’d be a war criminal”). The Pacific theatre was nightmarish on all sides.