Distruzio wrote:Blazedtown wrote:
Yes, I am, if it wasn't for the advent of nuclear weapons we would've seen an armed conflicted between the Warsaw Pact and NATO by the 70s if not sooner, and maybe even another major war after that one. It was very very very rare until the 20th century because we didn't have the technology. Americans got our first taste of industrial scale warfare during the American Civil War, with the scenes of slaughter around Petersburg providing an eerie foreshadowing of the Western Front. Europe during the Crimean and later Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The fact remains is that even though the men who led the world into its most destructive conflict had largely seen firsthand what the horrors of modern warfare could do and yet they still plunged head first into hell.
The last time the great powers went head to head, our technology allowed us to kill each other in such numbers that we lost track to the nearest 10 million. That's more than the population of New York City. Nuclear weapons are the only thing that have prevented us from going at it at least once more in the 20th. If neither America or Russia had ever had nuclear weapons, we would probably be fighting them right now over their annexation of Crimea.
Nuclear weapons have prevented more deaths than any human invention short of vaccinations.
Yeah... that kind of thinking is needlessly black and white, homeboy/girl(?). Maybe I take the anti-WMD position because I'd rather offensive regimes be directly targeted. You know, instead of murdering 150,000 innocent Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Truman could have, I don't know, extended an offer for a negotiated surrender? You know, showing the Japanese he was willing to be a human fucking being to them and their Emperor? I don't know, maybe part of the negotiation could have involved American intervention against the actual threat post-Nazism.
Those were legit military targets. Hiroshima was a major port and the headquarters of a large Japanese Army Group, Nagasaki was was a secondary target the original target was home to the largest munitions manufacturing center in Japan, while Nagasaki was home to Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed something like 90% of the cities labor force, making it a vital military target. The American equivilent cities during the period would've been like bombing Detroit, or Philadelphia or Norfolk, all would've been acceptable targets due to their strategic value.
