No, it’s not genocide. Genocide is when you’re specifically trying to eliminate a given ethnicity or national group. That’s not what carpet bombing was. Carpet bombing intended to break industrial centers both by killing the workers and by destroying the factories the workers operated in.
If you destroy a city’s power plants, infrastructure, commercial and residential centers, then that city is basically no longer an asset for the country, it is in fact a liability as they will have to spend considerable resources to get it back up and running.
The bombing that occurred was, by today’s standards, indiscriminant because we did not have the means of targeting more accurately. A hell of a lot of smart minds – Robert McNamera, for one – put a hell of a lot of effort into finding ways to make bombing more efficient in WW2. But in those days, the CEP for a bomb was what – 1,000 feet? Something like that? Massed bombardment inflicting large civilian deaths was the only way to blow up this factory or that rail yard.
Carpet bombing today would serve no other purpose than to kill massive numbers of civilians. The CEP of modern munitions are what – inside of 10 meters? A return to carpet bombing would be a deliberate decision to target civilians, period.
On the other issue you raised, I perhaps should have stated my case slightly better: deliberate, premeditated murder of large numbers of noncombatants is the moral equivalent of genocide, if not the legal definition.
We were talking about a hypothetical escallation to nuclear weapons in a total war scenerio…not the realities of limited war post-Soviet era. The OP was questioning how nukes could or would be used at all and I tried to explain how this could happen. Basically you don’t even need to specifically target civilians to rack up a huge civilian death toll. Legitimate military targets could include something like logistics and transport centers, large manufacturing centers, command and communications centers…all of which are generally located smack dab in the middle of civilian areas.
If you are in a total war scenerio against someone like the Soviets and you get intelligence that they are moving several divisions worth of armor and supplies through a logistic hub city on the way to the front…and if you are desparate enough, if you feel your back is to the wall…then nuking the logistic hub (thus denying it to the enemy for future use, as well as taking out those several divisions and those supplies) isn’t such a monsterous thing to do from your perspective. Not if it staves off defeat, or saves your own civilians or military personnels lives. It becomes especially attractive if you have nukes and the other side does not (which was what I was originally addressing).
Thankfully we are no longer in the world of MAD, and the prospects for a knock down, drag em out fight to the death are more remote. Total war is probably (gods, hopefully) a thing of the past. In limited war the prospects for using nukes, especially against civilian targets is extremely remote…even with mad Bush at the helm.
Anyway, hopefully the OPs question has been answered at this point.
1- To stop a war (neither side can win afterwards)
2- To prevent a loss
3- To equalize forces (if you are on the side of the lesser force)
4- To destroy enemys industrial base if superiour to yours and you must take it out to prevent loosing
5- To go out in a bang
6- If you have a defense against nukes (i.e. SDI)
7 - If you are going to loose anyway, just see if the dam thing works.
