This might end up in GD but we’ll try it here first. Suggestions anyone? I’m thinking that despite our mirror neurons, we don’t quite have the natural biological capacity to truly comprehend the death of large numbers of people (say larger than the number of people we are naturally inclined to keep track of personally). So we, the USA, should modify our weapons of mass destruction such that there are multiple “are you sure?” firewalls to mass murder in multiple sensory modes - visual (are you sure? you might end up killing X millions of people, flashing lights), auditory (loud klaxons, loud “WARNING!”), olfactory (perhaps bottled smell of dead people), taste (can be bundled with olfactory), sensory (vibration? The auditory frequency that naturally causes the feeling of dread?).
What about non US? What’s effective and/or practical?
There might be some value to that feature amongst the politicians. And the rabble rousers.
But soldiers of all flavors are out there to do the job they’re told to do. Not second guess what they’re told at every step. Yes, there are laws of war, international treaties, and each country has some manner of law or regulation covering when orders from above have gone too far and the soldier has a duty to disobey. In short, this is when their obligation to the established law of the land exceeds their obligation to their immediate superior.
And if told, that’s exactly what I would have done. At the moment of truth, it’s one man, one machine, a doomed city or facility visible all around you outside the canopy. And one button push. Mass killing doesn’t get too much more personal than that.
The author Richard Bach had the same job & faced the same thoughts 30 years before I did. He put it well. Paraphrasing: I am the lens through which the power of my government is focused to accomplish its goals.
You don’t want the people making the launch decisions to lose sight of what their true goals are, or ought to be. It would have been a terrible tragedy had we in fact incinerated a large part of Eastern Europe, while the Soviets did whatever it was they had planned to do to wherever they’d planned to do it.
But in extremis, the last thing you want is to have your military degenerate into an armed mob full of “just say no” ideas.
The police exist to deal with the uncivilized messes which occur on the edge of every civilized society. And dealing with those messes requires behaviors and attitudes from the police which would be ill-applied to civilized people behaving civilly.
The military exists to deal with the uncivilized messes that exist at the edges of civilization itself. And dealing with those messes requires behaviors and attitudes from the miltary which would be ill-applied to civilized states behaving civilly.
You’d have the same number of people dying (although in balance probably more tilted toward American soldiers,) since they would still do the job they needed to do, they would just do it less effectively. But the biggest downside would be a huge increase in PTSD, which you might find acceptable if it came with a decrease in innocent casualties, but it wouldn’t, because american soldiers are professional enough to put their lives and their comrade’s lives above being exposed to the horrors of war.
The OP seems to have conflated WMD with genocide. Those are two very different ideas. With two very different legal & treaty histories & two very different moral dimensions.
Until we build the first Death Star, genocide is done one killing at a time, using relatively low tech tools like mass starvation (Armenia & Nazi Germany), machetes (Rwanda), AK-47s (Darfur, Bosnia), etc.
Except for very very small populations, nukes are not real suitable for genocide. Any current nuclear power could easily wipe out the universally-despised Pitcairn Islanders with one or two shots.
Making all of a small country like Israel uninhabitable would be logistically feasible (as we say in the trade) for a major power, but even that wouldn’t kill 100% of the residents there, and certainly wouldn’t kill off worldwide Jewry.
The entire US arsenal would not be enough to kill off the Indians in India, much less those living around the world.
Other WMD, i.e. chemical or biological or radiological all are even less effective for use in committing genocide.
The real risk of genocide in the world today doens’t come from big governments and big weapons; it comes from weak or absent governments, armed bands, rabble-rousing radio / internet, and goons with AK-47s (or equivalent) and a strong Us vs. Them mentality, aided and abetted by ignorance of the outside world and strong religious feelings.
I’d be curious to have the OP expand a bit on what he really meant.