4 ms·

"when the US invented nukes, its enemies were stuck with normal bombs; there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city." I'm not an expert on

by ftxbro 4y ago

"when the US invented nukes, its enemies were stuck with normal bombs; there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city." I'm not an expert on what happened to Dresden but I heard it was ... a lot.

travisjungroth 4y ago
I was going to quote that exact sentence. A night of bombing Tokyo killed approximately as many people as the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
- ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
  I feel like the fact that that was 334 planes dropping 1665 tons of mostly 500lb bombs over the course of a night is an important distinction from a single bomb that does the same damage.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Not really as even with WWII tech the bombs could target specific areas. A nuclear bomb is more destructive for a few blocks around the blast, but get a couple miles out in the city and the damage is much less than a smaller bomb hit. Modern military doctrine is hitting a whole city is bad. You want to hit specific targets and not collateral damage to other things. Discredited WWII doctrine was killing civilians would make them surrender so hitting the whole city was good. Which lens you look at military doctrine says which is better.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    Obviously there are huge differences and it ushered in a new era of weaponry. What I want to point out is that atomic weapons were not an immediate step-change in destructive power. They’re actually not an exception to the greater point the author was making. The destruction caused by a single military operation was in the same league. The logistics were actually harder in some ways than traditional bombing. It would be months before the US would have more atomic weapons after the first two. So the one bomb versus hundreds doesn’t make a big difference when you have zero. This would all change dramatically over the coming years. But at the time of its first use, the atomic bomb was not as much of a leap forward in capability as you’d probably think.
thebooktocome 4y ago
Astral Codex Ten (or Slate Star Codex, or,...) would be a lot more compelling if one didn't always find some obvious historical error like this in the typical article. If only he could afford a fact-checker.
- pdonis 4y ago
  He shouldn't need to hire a fact checker. He just needs to realize that his error rate is too high when he just tosses off these historical claims based on his own background knowledge, and stop doing that. If the claim is really central to the argument, then take the time to check it. If it's not that important, then just leave it out. Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago), and no one else holds them to it either.
  - thebooktocome 4y ago
    He's not a public intellectual and he doesn't want to be. But people treat him like one regardless, because he happened to attain a little clout as a "Rationalist".
    - pdonis 4y ago
      He doesn't get to decide whether he's a public intellectual. If you publish your thoughts and ideas about issues that are of interest to the public, you're a public intellectual, whether you like it or not. Even more so if many people read what you publish, discuss it, and give it weight.
  - solveit 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago) Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!
- 4y ago
reaperman 4y ago
Not to mention that > there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city. Is itself false. The "Little Boy" that dropped on Hiroshima was the "slightly-worse-nuke" with a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 1.67 km. The Dong Feng 5, China's largest nuclear warhead currently deployed, has a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 24.5 km.
- danaris 4y ago
  But that's still a nuke. You still need to do every bit as much science and engineering to make it; the only difference is you need slightly less fissile material.
ianferrel 4y ago
It was possible to destroy a city pre-nukes with a dedicated bombing campaign, but it was not possible to destroy a city with a single plane/missile/bomb. Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them. I think his specific claim is not quite right here, but the thrust of his argument is. There's a reason that nuclear powers dare not enter direct conflict with each other in a way that major military powers used to casually do.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them. I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower. 500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way. .. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.
solveit 4y ago
Dresden took literally hundreds of thousands of bombs...
anon84873628 4y ago
He's not saying there weren't other technologies equally destructive as nukes at the time. Just that in the world of nuclear bombs there is no half version. Seems like other replies are trying to harp on this to undermine the entire article, when they are just deliberately misinterpreting the point. Maybe no analogy is perfect?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The paragraph is a bit muddled. I took it as pointing to American dominance at the end of the war, preventing Soviet over-reach or immediate direct confrontation with the Allies. After all, "Americas enemies" in the sense of Germany, Japan, and Italy never got The Bomb—they still don't have it, even if they could all likely get there pretty fast if they wanted to, these days—in the sense of building their own nuclear weapons, so he can hardly mean them as the enemies who got the bomb "soon after"—that's the Soviets, our wartime frenemy, and I expect nukes were a significant factor in shaping the wrap-up of that war, even if they played only a minor role in bringing the actual victory over the axis powers. But I do think the broader point of nukes being a "you have it, or you don't and can't even really approach the capability of those who do" sort of tech is accurate.
yamtaddle 4y ago
There is a bit of a difference between needing to commit dozens or hundreds of expensive bombers to kill a city, and only needing to commit one. You go from being able to knock out a city in a day (... and with, probably, weeks worth of munitions production) with an air wing, to being able to knock out all the cities in a country in a day with an air wing. With enough nukes and a modest number of bombers at one's disposal, all but overwhelmingly-strong air defenses become incapable of protecting a country from destruction—enough will get through to cause catastrophic damage (talking 40s and 50s tech here—as air defense tech got better, ballistic and cruise missiles overtook bombers in this kind of scenario). Concentrating the damage like that gives the enemy far less time to adapt or rebuild, and less capacity to do so—you can out-produce heavy damage that's spread out over a long period of time, you can adapt to it, you can shift tactics and resources around to reduce the rate of damage in the future, but such efforts are hopeless against nukes. It wasn't especially in-play during WWII since even the US couldn't (yet) build the bombs fast enough for them to really matter that much versus what could be done with conventional weapons, but it did matter soon after as stockpiles began to grow and production rate increased. Nukes represented a huge multiplier in the amount of destructive power a state could realistically stockpile and deploy in short order.
pdonis 4y ago
To emphasize the main substantive point, the US having access to nuclear weapons while the other side did not was not a factor in who won WW II. By the time the US had nukes, Germany had already surrendered and Japan was beaten. (And Japan knew it; they had been making peace feelers through various avenues for months.) WW II was won by conventional weapons. In other words, the basic historical claim being made here, that the US's "brief period of dominance" in nukes won WW II, is false. Not only that, it's "schoolboy error" false: the sort of mistake nobody who claims any sort of knowledge about the subject they're writing about should make.

by ftxbro 4y ago

travisjungroth 4y ago

I was going to quote that exact sentence. A night of bombing Tokyo killed approximately as many people as the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

ToValueFunfetti 4y ago
I feel like the fact that that was 334 planes dropping 1665 tons of mostly 500lb bombs over the course of a night is an important distinction from a single bomb that does the same damage.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Not really as even with WWII tech the bombs could target specific areas. A nuclear bomb is more destructive for a few blocks around the blast, but get a couple miles out in the city and the damage is much less than a smaller bomb hit. Modern military doctrine is hitting a whole city is bad. You want to hit specific targets and not collateral damage to other things. Discredited WWII doctrine was killing civilians would make them surrender so hitting the whole city was good. Which lens you look at military doctrine says which is better.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Obviously there are huge differences and it ushered in a new era of weaponry. What I want to point out is that atomic weapons were not an immediate step-change in destructive power. They’re actually not an exception to the greater point the author was making. The destruction caused by a single military operation was in the same league. The logistics were actually harder in some ways than traditional bombing. It would be months before the US would have more atomic weapons after the first two. So the one bomb versus hundreds doesn’t make a big difference when you have zero. This would all change dramatically over the coming years. But at the time of its first use, the atomic bomb was not as much of a leap forward in capability as you’d probably think.

thebooktocome 4y ago

Astral Codex Ten (or Slate Star Codex, or,...) would be a lot more compelling if one didn't always find some obvious historical error like this in the typical article. If only he could afford a fact-checker.

pdonis 4y ago
He shouldn't need to hire a fact checker. He just needs to realize that his error rate is too high when he just tosses off these historical claims based on his own background knowledge, and stop doing that. If the claim is really central to the argument, then take the time to check it. If it's not that important, then just leave it out. Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago), and no one else holds them to it either.
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  He's not a public intellectual and he doesn't want to be. But people treat him like one regardless, because he happened to attain a little clout as a "Rationalist".
  - pdonis 4y ago
    He doesn't get to decide whether he's a public intellectual. If you publish your thoughts and ideas about issues that are of interest to the public, you're a public intellectual, whether you like it or not. Even more so if many people read what you publish, discuss it, and give it weight.
- solveit 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago) Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!
4y ago

reaperman 4y ago

Not to mention that > there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city. Is itself false. The "Little Boy" that dropped on Hiroshima was the "slightly-worse-nuke" with a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 1.67 km. The Dong Feng 5, China's largest nuclear warhead currently deployed, has a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 24.5 km.

danaris 4y ago
But that's still a nuke. You still need to do every bit as much science and engineering to make it; the only difference is you need slightly less fissile material.

ianferrel 4y ago

It was possible to destroy a city pre-nukes with a dedicated bombing campaign, but it was not possible to destroy a city with a single plane/missile/bomb. Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them. I think his specific claim is not quite right here, but the thrust of his argument is. There's a reason that nuclear powers dare not enter direct conflict with each other in a way that major military powers used to casually do.

yamtaddle 4y ago
> Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them. I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower. 500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way. .. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.

solveit 4y ago

Dresden took literally hundreds of thousands of bombs...

anon84873628 4y ago

He's not saying there weren't other technologies equally destructive as nukes at the time. Just that in the world of nuclear bombs there is no half version. Seems like other replies are trying to harp on this to undermine the entire article, when they are just deliberately misinterpreting the point. Maybe no analogy is perfect?

yamtaddle 4y ago
The paragraph is a bit muddled. I took it as pointing to American dominance at the end of the war, preventing Soviet over-reach or immediate direct confrontation with the Allies. After all, "Americas enemies" in the sense of Germany, Japan, and Italy never got The Bomb—they still don't have it, even if they could all likely get there pretty fast if they wanted to, these days—in the sense of building their own nuclear weapons, so he can hardly mean them as the enemies who got the bomb "soon after"—that's the Soviets, our wartime frenemy, and I expect nukes were a significant factor in shaping the wrap-up of that war, even if they played only a minor role in bringing the actual victory over the axis powers. But I do think the broader point of nukes being a "you have it, or you don't and can't even really approach the capability of those who do" sort of tech is accurate.

yamtaddle 4y ago

There is a bit of a difference between needing to commit dozens or hundreds of expensive bombers to kill a city, and only needing to commit one. You go from being able to knock out a city in a day (... and with, probably, weeks worth of munitions production) with an air wing, to being able to knock out all the cities in a country in a day with an air wing. With enough nukes and a modest number of bombers at one's disposal, all but overwhelmingly-strong air defenses become incapable of protecting a country from destruction—enough will get through to cause catastrophic damage (talking 40s and 50s tech here—as air defense tech got better, ballistic and cruise missiles overtook bombers in this kind of scenario). Concentrating the damage like that gives the enemy far less time to adapt or rebuild, and less capacity to do so—you can out-produce heavy damage that's spread out over a long period of time, you can adapt to it, you can shift tactics and resources around to reduce the rate of damage in the future, but such efforts are hopeless against nukes. It wasn't especially in-play during WWII since even the US couldn't (yet) build the bombs fast enough for them to really matter that much versus what could be done with conventional weapons, but it did matter soon after as stockpiles began to grow and production rate increased. Nukes represented a huge multiplier in the amount of destructive power a state could realistically stockpile and deploy in short order.

pdonis 4y ago

To emphasize the main substantive point, the US having access to nuclear weapons while the other side did not was not a factor in who won WW II. By the time the US had nukes, Germany had already surrendered and Japan was beaten. (And Japan knew it; they had been making peace feelers through various avenues for months.) WW II was won by conventional weapons. In other words, the basic historical claim being made here, that the US's "brief period of dominance" in nukes won WW II, is false. Not only that, it's "schoolboy error" false: the sort of mistake nobody who claims any sort of knowledge about the subject they're writing about should make.