Is it immoral to use nuclear weapons in war?

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Funny, I’ve not had to resort to personal insults.

And while we’re at it, what “installations” are you referring to? Do you doubt that a nuclear strike eliminating, say, New York; Washington; Miami; Atlanta; Houston, Denver, LA and Seattle would effectively wipe out the USA?
 
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PetraG said:
Again–the 450 kt bomb would be used for that?
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It was done once by accident.
And it did not result in lives lost.
There was no fallout. The blast happens in low orbit. EMP hits earth and electrical. Radiation stays in orbit.
 
Just have some sympathy for men with limited knowledge being forced to choose between options, every one of which results in hundreds of thousands or millions of civilian deaths. Conditional armistice? Japan continues committing genocide against the occupied territories, and starts another war 20 years later for revenge, this time being armed with nuclear weapons. Blockade them? Rather than surrender as their people starve, Japan uses kamikazes to try to force the sea lanes open. Millions starve to death in the winter of 1946 before the Japanese government is forced to capitulate. Invade? The US government is only now using up the Purple Hearts minted in anticipation of Operation Downfall. Japan’s casualties would be far worse, both from starvation and the fact that when children are handed knives and told to banzai charge the US Marines, the Marines are left with no choice but to mow them down, because those propagandized children will kill them if given the chance. Use nuclear weapons? You destroy an entire city in seconds, killing tens of thousands without warning. You can’t guarantee the hypocenter is even within a mile of the primary target, because you have to put a parachute on the bomb just to give your plane time to escape, and there’s no telling when a gust of wind will occur.
 
PetraG said:
OK, well, there is a lot of natural radiation in orbit, so I can believe it in concept.
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Like was said before…there is more than one way to use a nuke. Legitimate military uses are numerous.
One just has to be creative.
 
Setting off a nuke in the upper atmosphere takes out electronics without blast or any significant ionizing radiation reaching the surface. That said, the civilian casualties from such an attack would most likely far exceed those from airbursting a nuke over a population center, as it would destroy life-sustaining infrastructure on a national scale. The immediate fatalities will be limited to ICU patients and planes falling out of the sky, but within weeks, infectious disease becomes a major killer.
 
What do you mean by “takes out” and why wouldn’t that have CNS effects?
 
IWantGod said:
Drop it on a city full of civilians? They’ve got some nerve.
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tafan2 said:
It is immoral to target civilians and non-combatants in a just war.
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By law there were no civilian noncombatants in Japan, and the Japanese government made a point of broadcasting that to the world. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets, there were no non-manufacturing areas of either city, and conventional bombing sufficient to do the same damage to Japan’s military output would have resulted in similar casualties without providing a similar incentive to surrender.
 
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The ionizing radiation is blocked by the atmosphere, but in the process, it causes a cascade of electrical activity that shorts out any circuits that are not protected. Result: The entire power grid is fried, gasoline engines won’t start, and communications are disabled. Relatively few immediate deaths, but so much infrastructure is destroyed that famine and pestilence are inevitable.
 
VonDerTann said:
Funny, I’ve not had to resort to personal insults.

And while we’re at it, what “installations” are you referring to? Do you doubt that a nuclear strike eliminating, say, New York; Washington; Miami; Atlanta; Houston, Denver, LA and Seattle would effectively wipe out the USA?
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We’ve 600 intallations worldwide.

No, you’ve not wiped out our ability to respond by destroying 8 cities.
 
The Pentagon was a legitimate military target. The atrocity was the fact that they hijacked a civilian airliner to conduct the attack.
 
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It’s a movie that explores the different factors leading up to Hiroshima from both perspectives.

We, a war-weary nation, might have lost a million men if we had a land invasion of Japan. The ends don’t justify the means, maybe but leaders also have to make decisions.
neophyte said:
It was no more imprecise than the targeting of conventional bombs was in WWII.
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This is true, scores died in the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo.
 
Victoria33 said:
It’s a movie that explores the different factors leading up to Hiroshima from both perspectives.

We, a war-weary nation, might have lost a million men if we had a land invasion of Japan. The ends don’t justify the means, maybe but leaders also have to make decisions.
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Interestingly, Japan was already organizing articles of surrender when we set the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on fire.

The Soviets had invaded their northernmost islands and they knew that the war was impossible to win at that point. They were trying to organize the logistics of getting the relevant persons together when the bombs fell.
 
mythbuster1 said:
Relatively few immediate deaths, but so much infrastructure is destroyed that famine and pestilence are inevitable.
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Not quite.
Something like that over north Korea would not have much effect.

Which means north Korea could use that type of attack against others in the area.

Assuming they ever get the tech necessary to achieve low earth orbit.
 
Which is why any nation so attacked would regard it as the same as a ground-level nuclear strike.
 
Hume said:
Interestingly, Japan was already organizing articles of surrender when we set the women and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on fire.
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Not at all true. There were instances of particular embassy officials abroad making rogue overtures, but they did so totally on their own initiative and when they were discovered they were recalled home (and never heard from again, at least in most cases).

Don’t forget the torpedo and explosives factories, the headquarters of the 2nd Army and the Marines, and the Mitsubishi steel and arms works.
 
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neophyte said:
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Hume:
A nuclear weapon is too imprecise a weapon.
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It was no more imprecise than the targeting of conventional bombs was in WWII.
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Given the dead from 1 bombing run from both the kinetic effects of the explosion and then those from fallout, this is wrong to the point of being asinine.

To reach 100,000 dead in Tokyo, how many bombing runs did it take and how many bombs dropped?

How many dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from 2 bombing runs from the explosions and the fallout? From 2 runs, 1 bomb apiece?
 
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