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pcm comments on Against easy superintelligence: the unforeseen friction argument - Less Wrong
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What information was unavailable about the damage that would be caused by a given amount of bombing?
My guess is that people overreacted to the complacency that led to WW1, and thought it safer to overstate the harm done by war in order to motivate efforts to avoid it.
I think it was partially the effect of the (relatively tiny) Zeppelin/Gotha raids on the UK in WW1, and the somewhat exaggerated stories from Guernica.
While this may be true, I don’t think this is relevant for ICBMs replacing bombers. ICBMs are effective because of nukes (compact high power). Compare how many bombers were used in the last half century with how many ICBMs were used. Without nukes (and other game-breaking things like that), ICBMs would not be at all useful. With nukes, the resilience of cities is mostly irrelevant (once a single nuke gets there, it doesn’t matter how).
(It’s hard to build a good example scenario, since the nukes changed strategy completely and we’d probably have many more and different kinds of wars than we do now without them. But I think if nukes weren't discovered/possible the bomber would still be "the king".)
(ETA: I’m not arguing against your post, just pointing out that it would be a bit stronger without that line.)