There’s a lot of threads going on at the moment as to how various country’s military groups operate, and some of them are getting into the area of how acceptable innocent deaths, or the putting at risk of innocents, are. A nuclear warhead is, in all cases*, going to result in huge amounts of civilian deaths. Add into that the fallout which will result in you not being able to claim the location bombed, and they just seem…well, useless, really.
I’ve heard the case made that, if someone were to fire a nuclear weapon (or several, which would be more likely) in an attack on another nuclear-equipped country, then a retaliation in kind is the only possible answer that can be done in time. Thus nuclear weapons are a good deterrent - you don’t bomb us, we don’t bomb you.
I honestly don’t see how this works. Say Country A attacks Country B. Country B fires it’s missiles back. Both capitals and many major cities of each country are destroyed, the surrounding landscape is destroyed or made unfit for life, plus innocent countries may get their share of the fallout thanks to good ol’ wind.
Basically it comes down to - you kill us, well, we’re gonna kill you back. An eye for an eye, plus we’ll screw all the countries around you, plus your civilian population.
Can someone make a case on moral grounds for nuclear weapons?
Er… just wanting to let you know that the “Nuclear Option” most often talked about right now is a Senate procedural issue, not a plan to blow up the world.
Oh, yes, I know that. Filibusters by senators and all. I mean it in the sense of huge, unwieldy containers of unpleasant gas with the potential to explode.
It’s called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). They won’t bomb us because we’ll bomb them back. But, if it’s NK, say, that can only target one city of maybe just a few, then we can still wipe them off the map. It’s good to be the big guy on the block… except that you’re also a big target. Maybe it’s best to be Switzerland.
You are thinking of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)…i.e. if you attack me with nukes I’ll retaliate in kind and we’ll both go down together you frigging vodka drinking swine…
What don’t you understand exactly? Basically if I threaten you with total destruction and you threaten me with the same thing then unless one of us is totally wacked the weapons will never be used. This strategy pretty much ensures that they WON’T be used, at least against another major power who also has similar weapons. In fact, these weapons also ensure that two nuclear capable powers who CAN destroy each other will tend to avoid ANY kind of major and direct conflict…after all, once you start bombing each others infrastructure and field armies its a short step from conventional weapons to nukes.
And by and large this strategy worked between the US and USSR for the entire cold war. Without nukes I don’t think its a very large stretch to envision the US and the USSR going at it hammer and tongs. Certainly the threat of massive retaliation is all that kept the USSR from rolling its tanks through Western Europe (IMHO anyway). That seems moral reason enough for HAVING them, especially considering that once the genie was out of the bottle there was no way the major powers weren’t going to start making nuclear wishes.
Switzerland is in the middle of Europe, they’d get major fallout and refugees. New Zealand (the most isolated nation on Earth) is the place to be during WWIII.
If you’re interested in an academic read on the subject, might I suggest Schelling’s “Strategy of Conflict”? It deals with game theory economics in nuclear war. Mr. Schelling won himself a Nobel this year.
Well, the thriving, modern cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would probably disagree with you on this. Nukes are hugely destructive, but they do not necessarily result in the target area being uninhabitable for a hundred generations. One single bomb capable of flattening a city or taking out an entire division is a VERY handy thing to have. If a likely enemy has a few, then having some of your own to threaten retaliation with becomes a necessity. It’s when there are hundreds and hundreds of the things in circulation that they enter into Doomsday Device territory.
If the US had remained the only nation with nukes for the last 50 years or so, I think they would have been used several times. It’s only deterrence and the desire to retain their ‘last-resort’ status that has kept them out of conflicts so far.
Because, hopefully, people are moral to the extent that they will refuse to deliberatly target innocents (which is what a nuclear and up bomb would do, even if the epicentre of the attack in on a military base). Are you saying that, if you were the leader of the only country wil nuclear missiles, you’d feel comfortable using them against a country? Even if their massive invasion fleet is on your doorstop, and you’re about to lose, you’d feel comfortable destroying their major metropolitan areas…for what? Revenge?
Slippery slope. While it can be argued that once you were up to the bombing stage, which will undoubtably kill many innocents (by accident or not), it’s still a huge step to nuclear warfare, in which there can be no cover of “Oh, we’re just attacking your military”, or even “we’re just targeting insurgents”.
They did, at least via allies and aiding countries fighting each other. And the closest that the US and USSR came to actual, physical warfare was when nuclear weapons were directly involved - the Cuban missile crisis, the Stanislav Petrov incident.
Oh, and not the fact that they were pretty much beaten themselves at this point? Without nuclear weapons, they’d just have met the other allies in Berlin and continued fighting?
True, once the USA had them everyone wanted them (and many countries had them in development during the war, too). That doesn’t make it moral.
Many – probably most – people would say that revenge, from a truly aggreived party with no other recourse, is indeed a moral act. “Turn the other cheek” is not a universally respected maxim.
Its a nice thought but humans really don’t work this way when they go to war. Have you not seen the bombed out hulks of cities during WWII…or Vietnam for that matter? If the US and the USSR went at each other in a WWIII scenerio and one side had nukes but the other didn’t you can bet your bottom dollar that the side with nukes would use them…especially if they thought they might lose.
You shouldn’t be asking ME what I think btw…I’m not the president nor am I likely to become one (since I wasn’t born in the US). Speaking personally I find the damn things evil and wish that genie had never been unleashed from its bottle. That said, once it was I’m glad that at least our side had them…and I think the whole MAD thing, stupid as it may seem, prevented a major conflict from happening between the US and the USSR which would have torn Europe apart a 3rd time in the last century…and probably more than just Europe.
Its not such a huge step when you consider where the military targets may be. Cities are often logistic or strategic junctures that allow for the movement of supplies and troops to the front. Manufacturing facilities for war materials are often in and around cities (thats where the workers are after all). All these things have a huge impact on a nations ability to move troops and supplies and to wage modern war. Its not a huge stretch to see that once tactical nukes are in use on the battlefield that someone decides to take out a critical supply juncture with a low yield nuke…and the city around that juncture. After that, the other side retaliates in kind and next thing you know multiple cities on both sides are going into the flames. All perfectly logical in the calculus of warfare in the modern age. Again, one has only to look at the bombed out cities in Europe during WWII. Certainly it took multiple raids instead of a single warhead…but in the end the destruction was fairly similar.
I’ve got to run to a meeting…I’ll try and address your other points later if you wish.
Country A and Country B begin a conventional war over their long and disputed border. Country A begins winning, with B’s defensive line weakening. Country A masses its troop for a final offensive to break through B’s lines. B hits A’s concentration of forces with a nuclear weapon (or more likely a bunch of small nuclear weapons), stopping the offensive. Stalemate ensues as neither side can concentrate sufficient forces to break through the enemies lines without making a juicy target for the enemy to annhilate with nukes. In this way the nuclear weapon is the ultimate backstop - a nuke armed country can’t lose a conventional war (at least not in the sense of being completely overrun militarily). Granted, once both sides have them the temptation to use them as other than a backstop will be quite large, and the potential for escalation to annhilation rather frightening.
And if one feel’s sufficiently outclassed conventionally than one can minimize one’s own conventional forces and declare that if attacked/invaded ,conventionally or not, that one will retaliate massively with all means available one could conceivably forestall any attacks at all.
In a “total war” situation there is no such thing as innocents. While it’s not accepted to go around executing civilians, civilian targets are to be considered legitimate when it comes to bombing campaigns or targets for nuclear attack. As the goal of total war is not just military victory but the complete destruction of any ability of the opponent nation to resist.
The allies deliberately bombed Axis factories, loaded with civilian workers, because in total war that is a legitimate target. They also bombed civilian housing centers, because in total war, that is a legitimate target. A military is fed through manpower and the manpower comes from the civilian base.
In the middle ages sometimes warring lords would kill all of the opponents serfs. This left that lord in an impossible position because then he could no longer provide food or other basic goods for his military.
Setting aside the tautology that we bombed civilians in WW2 because they were legitimate targets, and they were legitimate targets because we bombed them, I disagree that total war legitimizes the deliberate targeting of civilians. International law formulated since WW2 is very clear on this subject.
From a purely self-interested American perspective, I believe that deliberate targeting of civilians in military operations is largely a thing of the past, in the same way that lining up soldiers and having them march within 50 paces of each other before the shooting beings is no longer done. Even if one believes that the deliberate targeting of civilians has any any time served any useful military purpose, I fail to see how it does not. Considering our considerable technological capability to bomb precise locations with overwhelming efficiency, what sense does it make to return to carpet bombing cities? It’s just a waste of good TNT. And immoral, too.
And speaking of morality, I agree with the others who have stated that nuclear war is inherently immoral. But that does not mean that the concept of MAD is immoral: it is simply the most practical way to insure that general nuclear war does not break out, which is a moral end in and of itself.
The trouble is that there isn’t all that much difference, in a lot of cases, between “deliberately targetting civilians” and 'deliberately targetting the enemy country’s ability to wage war". If you bomb a building because it has a lot of civilians in it, that is illegitimate. If it is a munitions factory, it is legitimate even though you kill the same number of civilians.
I think xtisme’s point is that, in a total war, most of the people who make it possible to fight a war are civilians. Rosie the Riveter in WWII was a civilian. The people who worked in the oil refineries were civilians. The kids in WWII who collected fats from their moms’ cooking to make into explosives were civilians. And much of the reason the Allies won WWII was because the US was able to supply tanks and planes and ships and food not only for herself, but for the British and the USSR as well while fighting a war in the Pacific at the same time.
I think this is true. Fortunately.
The danger is then twofold-
[ul][li]That people will assume that, because we can reduce the number of casualties greatly, that we can reduce it to zero and that any number greater than that makes a war immoral, and [*]that the number of civilian casualties will be reduced so far that we are less reluctant to go to war than we should be.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Right. And most of that is due to the fact that we had an untouched industrial base with brand-spanking new capital equipment, not because we had a heck of a lot of labor to help the war effort. China had a hell of a lot of labor, and look where that got 'em.
The idea that we will, at some time in the future, target civilians (as opposed to machines in factories) because they are part of the war effort is, IMHO, a canard used to legitimize civilian deaths. Marx was right in a sense: in a factory, the people are the most easily replaced parts. There’s no way that intentionally bombing civilians simply because they go to work can have an impact on a war effort unless you’re willing to kill massive numbers, and there’s a pretty good term for those sort of military action: genocide.
It reminds me of the apocryphal story of Lincoln upon getting a report that the Confederates had killed 20 horses and several generals. Lincoln regretted losing the horses more than the generals, because he could just put a star on someone’s shoulder and they’re a general; where would he get more horses?
Welcome to post-modern warfare. Those have been the realities of war for decades now, and those are lessons that are avoided at the peril of those who would send us to war, necessary or no.
Have you ever played Rise of Nations, or Age of Empires or even one of the Warcraft games?
While there are specific units designed to wage war, there are also civilian units that are incredibly important to your ability to wage war. I know it may seem a bit stupid or even abominable to make this a computer game reference, but I like computer games and think they make a good analogy here.
Civilians are a part of the war machine. And if we are ever engaged in a total war again, we will probably target civlians again as we see fit.
The reason they were legitimate targets is not because we bombed them, but because they were part of the war effort.
I don’t see why it should be any other way. Civilians are aware they are supporting the war effort by working the factories and etc.
