Is it immoral to use nuclear weapons in war?

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VonDerTann said:
Keeping a powerful weapon is no more threatening a crime against humanity, than it is a crime against humanity to own a gun and post a sign on your house, “This property protected by Smith & Wesson.”
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Well, no, that analogy isn’t quite right, because there are certainly legitimate ways in which someone could use a firearm in self-defense.
VonDerTann said:
Not that many years later - largely thanks to Reagan and Pope John Paul II with some backup by Maggie Thatcher - the Soviet Union was no more, in large part because it couldn’t compete economically with a US military buildup and basically spent itself into oblivion.
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This version of history has always made sense to me–that is, that our economy was capable of taking on the tax burden of an arms race, and the economy of the USSR was not.
VonDerTann said:
I’ve often wondered whether the Japanese would have bombed Pearl Harbor at all if, in 1941, the US had an army of 2 million men; modern tanks; and a modern navy - none of which it possessed on December 7, 1941.
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Don’t you think they’d hitched their wagon to getting themselves some colonies to exploit for natural resources? Sure, if we had beaten them to colonizing more of the Pacific…

That consideration is a little far afield from whether the marginal case that can be made for dropping a 15-25 kt nuclear bomb on an opponent who has declared “total war” could even begin to excuse dropping a 450 kt bomb on anybody.

This has actually been the argument for the current Administration’s decision to make “low yield” weapons: that is, nobody believes the US will use a bomb in the hundreds of kilotons: those are “too big to use.” If it was OK to drop the 15 kt “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, why not have a 8 kt “tactical” nuclear weapon that the President could actually consider using?

It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, that’s what.
 
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Cicada_3301 said:
Hi everyone. I believe that it is immoral to use nuclear weapons in war and it can never be justified. I would like to know y’all’s opinion on the matter. If I had the choice, snuffing out hundreds of thousands of lives in a matter seconds at the touch of a button is something I would rather not want to answer to God for.
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Been to Hiroshima. Saw the memorial.

Wars are actions between governments. A nuclear weapon is too imprecise a weapon. The faces of the children burnt beyond recognition as human belonged to people that were not part of the government.

Ban 'em all.
 
But who’s going to do the banning? The US, unilaterally? Russia? North Korea?
 
We’re just going to unilaterally scrap every atomic weapon in our arsenal?
 
Why not? No one wins a nuclear war. A completely decapitating strike on the US would render the entire northern hemisphere radioactive in a day and a half. Your own citizens would die from the fallout and literally every country would, at minimum, initiate a complete trade embargo against you.

The pressure from the fallout and the absence of outside aid would collapse your own government in quick fashion.

If the initial strike wasn’t “all out”, we could shoot most if not all of them down. And our world leading conventional military would be incoming.
 
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But does that mean we have to suffer genocide rather than use nuclear weapons? Israel, for example, has contingencies for using nuclear weapons against a conventional attack because they have legitimate reason to believe that such an invasion has the object not of conquering territory but of exterminating their people.
 
Do you really believe the world is a safer place with the US scrapping its nuclear arsenal, at a time when both Russia and China are updating theirs, and building new delivery systems? And at a time when North Korea has nuclear capabilities as well?

Are you aware that Russia has nuclear missiles that can strike the US and which the US has no technology to shoot down?
 
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Yes I do.
The more of them there are, the greater the chance some zealous, ignorant moron might actually use one.
 
I can actually think of a legitimate use of a very large nuke. It would take a 1 megaton nuclear warhead set for a groundburst and dead on target, to take out any one pf the hardened and dispersed silos located in the northern U.S. That would be a legitimate military target in a sparsely populated area. The same would apply to similar targets in Russia, China, or North Korea.

In practice though, no one would be targeting a single silo or even a single launch control center. If that were to happen it would be a full blown nuclear war.

Also I believe that under current targeting strategy, the US at least does not target cities bit rather military targets which would not usually require such large warheads.

As for accuracy, ICBM’s are regularly fired at practice targets near the Marshall Islands from Vandenberg AFB, with dummy warheads. Accuracy is measured, and it is very good.
 
A weapon that you will never use under any circumstances is not a deterrent; it’s just a liability.
 
I think the development of countermeasures has rendered the era of the ICBM effectively over since the late 80s. I just don’t think anyone’s really mentioned it because we don’t want to keep the arms race going.

Unless they launched literally thousands of them, the ones that will get through are the smaller ones fired from destroyers and subs and frigates.
 
That is a dangerously naive view of things.

Has it occurred to you that if the US does not possess a single nuclear weapon, any “zealous ignorant moron” (like maybe, Kim Jong Un) could use his on the US with no fear of retaliation?
 
PetraG said:
I can’t.
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This speaks more to a lack of creativity than it does their immorality.

Have you considered a well placed large blast can disable permanently electronics over several hundred miles… without taking a single life?
 
Hume said:
Unless they launched literally thousands of them, the ones that will get through are the smaller ones fired from destroyers and subs and frigates.
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Or the new generation of Russian hypersonic missiles which do not use ICBM trajectories but can fly within the atmosphere.
 
The US would have zero fleets if they were targeted by, say, Chinese nuclear weapons.

Is it possible that the Chinese might launch, say, a small-scale nuclear attack of US fleets at sea (with little fear of collateral consequences, if we have no such weapons to use on them and hence deter such an attack)?

So let me get this straight – they can use nuclear weapons on us…and we’ll respond with conventional weapons?

What if those conventional weapons are targeted?
 
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Whoever told you that has no clue what he’s talking about. Land-based MIRVs have been banned since the 80’s, and the largest nuke ever built, the Tsar Bomba, was so big they had to replace depleted uranium tampers with lead so that it wouldn’t vaporize the plane that was dropping it. A nuke big enough to take out France in one blow would be too big to move.
 
Then that would be a decapitation strike that had to obliterate our military capability to respond. The fallout should arrive in their countries as well as many previously uninvolved countries in hours.
 
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