8 ms·
Insofar as it is objectively true, it is irrelevant to his point; insofar as it is relevant to his point, it is historically false. Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how m
by thebooktocome 4y ago
Insofar as it is objectively true, it is irrelevant to his point; insofar as it is relevant to his point, it is historically false.
Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force.
- yamtaddle 4y ago> Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force. Conventional strategic bombers and high explosives would never have given us MAD. The raw destructive force is absolutely relevant, it was (and remains) infeasible to do anything like wipe out a whole country in a day or two with conventional weapons, that'd take months or years and enormous dedication of resources. With nukes? Now it's possible. I'm really not getting the reading of this as "LOL we could blow up cities with regular bombs, he's wrong!" Like, WTF was all the worry over nukes in the cold war, then? They're extremely obviously a major game-changer. A functioning nuke program means multiplying the max plausible destructive power a country can deploy inside a week by a very large number—no later developments in conventional weapons have really closed that gap, it's a whole other category of weapon, and you either have it, or you don't.
- thebooktocome 4y agoNuclear warheads on ICBMs are wildly different from what the Allies had during WWII, and far beyond the scope of this debate. They also represent an incremental advance in the state of the art, and not the quantum leap Scott is failing to invoke here.