"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
>
> I think that if the United States had realized, that far back in time, how
> much the threat of nuclear war - and later, nanotechnological war and
> biological war - would hang over the heads of future generations, the
> correct decision would have been to spend the lives necessary to subdue
> Japan the hard way. The US was the first to acquire nuclear weapons, and
> then immediately used them, in war, against a nonnuclear opponent's
> cities. This is not a good precedent if some country other than the US is
> the first to acquire military nanotechnology. This does not help the US's
> argument for nuclear nonproliferation.
I thoroughly disagree. The fact is that WWII was to be a war against
fascism. In 1945 we chose to avoid further use of nuclear weapons
against the last two adherents of fascism (the Soviet Union and
Communist China) in favor of a long period of low intensity conflict. We
demonstrated the lethality of the weapons on two targets to shorten the
war on Japan specifically and cheapen the cost of turning that
archipelago into a base of operations in the cold war on the remaining
fascist powers. Without this demonstration of the destructiveness of
nuclear weapons, I think that we would have wound up in a full scale
nuclear conflict with the USSR by the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis
specifically because the lack of those examples in Japan would have
caused both the governments and the people of both sides to severely
underestimate how terrible nuclear weapons truly are. Both sides would
have convinced themselves that nuclear war was fightable and winnable in
the context of the sort of high intensity conflict experienced during
WWII.
Thus, our bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki served great purpose to
humankind.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:21 MDT