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polymathwannabe comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong
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More exactly, the purpose of a weapon is to use pain to change behavior--which matches a general definition of "punishment." Sometimes the mere threat of pain suffices to change behavior. In cases of mutual deterrence (or less drastic, like everyday border patrols) that's the point: to make you behave differently from what you would otherwise, by appealing merely to your expectation of pain.
No, I don't think so. But to avoid the distraction of trying to define "weapons", let me assert that we are talking about military weapons -- instruments devised and used with the express purpose of killing other humans. The issue is whether nuclear weapons have any special moral status, so we're not really concerned with tear gas and tasers.
Why are nuclear weapons morally different from conventional bombs or machine guns or cannons?
Strategic nuclear weapons - the original and most widespread nuclear weapons - cannot be used with restraint. They have huge a blast radius and they kill everyone in it indiscriminately.
The one time they were used demonstrated this well. They are the most effective and efficient way, not merely to defeat an enemy army (which has bunkers, widely dispersed units, and retaliation capabilities), but to kill the entire civilian population of an enemy city.
To kill all the inhabitants of an enemy city, usually by one or another type of bombardment, was a goal pursued by all sides in both world wars. Nuclear weapons made it much easier, cheaper, and harder to defend against.
Tactical nuclear weapons are probably different; they haven't seen (much? any?) use in real wars to be certain.
What do you mean by "restraint"?
For example, the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki killed around 70,000 people. The fire-bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 (a single bombing raid) killed about 100,000 people.
Was the bombing of Nagasaki morally worse?
In addition to nshepperd's point, there's the fact that sending a bomber fleet to destroy an enemy city is very expensive - the costs of planes, fuel, and bombs add up quickly, not to mention pilots' lives. And if the defenders can destroy 50% of the planes before they drop their bombs, the bombing campaign becomes 50% less effective.
Whereas a strategic nuclear warhead only requires one plane to deliver it (or one ICBM). Much cheaper, much less risky, and much more stealthy. If you build a small fleet of nuclear bombers (or, again, a small stable of ICBMs), you can theoretically destroy all of the enemy's cities in one night.
If the atom bomb had by chance been developed a few years earlier, when the US still faced serious opposition in Europe, then quite probably they would have used it to wipe out all the major German and German-held cities.
German-held? Like Paris?
Not Paris, of course, which had a lot of diplomatic and sentimental value and little industrial value. I meant cities of high industrial value in occupied Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, and other countries the West didn't care as much about.
It's one thing to create a weapon that can be used to kill O(100,000) people at once (though, it's not really "at once" if you do it by dropping N bombs consecutively). It's another thing to create a weapon that can only be used to kill O(100,000) people at once.
Or something. Of course, if inventing nukes is evidence humans aren't very moral, the fact that people chose to kill a hundred thousand people in Tokyo with conventional weapons is a different kind of evidence for humans being not very moral.
That's not how Big O notation works: O(100,000) = O(1).
You presumably mean "in the order of 100,000", which is sometimes written "~100,000".
</pedantry>
Clearly a nuke is not that.
Given that both humans and moralities are quite diverse, I don't see any information content in the phrase "humans are not very moral". It's just trivially true and pretty meaningless.
I agree, and besides I'm not a moral realist. I was originally responding to people in this thread who discussed whether humans could be described as moral.
If the bombing of Nagasaki contributed more to the end of the war than the bombing of Tokyo, then we could easily say it was morally superior. That is not to say there weren't better options of course.
We can debate endlessly the wisdom of bombing Hiroshima, but does anybody have a defence for bombing Nagasaki? Since this is the quotation thread, I'll quote Dave Barry:
I'm seriously curious. (Reasonably rational arguments, of course.)
Recommend reading the actual history, rather than comedians.
I read that, amongst other WP articles, while researching my comment. That one doesn't even attempt to explain the reasons for dropping the second bomb. (The quotation from the comedian is not meant to be an argument either.)
This section seems relevant:
Emphasis mine.
OK, thanks, I must have missed that anticipating the immediately following section.
Looking over my posts, I see that I may have given the impression that I doubted that there was any rational argument in favour of dropping the second bomb. I only meant to say that I didn't know one, because the discussion (here and elsewhere) always seems to focus on the first one.
Well, the Japanese just barely surrendered even after Nagasaki.
It would be more accurate to say 'barely surrendered even after the simultaneous bombing of Nagasaki and their most feared enemy Soviet Russia declaring war on them'.
Many (most?) historians believe that the Soviet entry into the war induced the Japanese surrender. Some historians believe that American decision makers expected Japan to surrender soon and wanted to use atomic bombs before the end of the war, to demonstrate their power to the Soviets. Gaddis Smith:
A very small number of historians believe that the atomic bomb on net cost American lives. Martin Sherwin:
I favor this hypothesis, it seems to me the demonstration of the power of atomic bombs was as much for Stalin's benefit as it was for the Japanese leadership's. One can make a reasonable case that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the real reason why the battle-hardened Soviet army stopped in Germany and didn't just roll over the rest of Western Europe.
That is no reason to drop the bomb on a city though; there are plenty of non-living targets that can be blown up to demonstrate destructive power. I suppose doing so wouldn't signal the will to use the atomic bomb, but in a time when hundreds of thousands died in air raids I would think such a thing would be assumed.
I suppose this highlights the fundamental problem of the era: the assumption that targeting civilians with bombs was the best course of action.
If you drop a nuke on a Japanese city you kill three birds with one stone: you get to test how it works for intended use (remember, it was the first real test so uncertainty was high); you get to intimidate Japan into surrender; and you get to hint to Stalin that he should behave himself or else.
True. Some sources indicate that some Japanese cities were left intact precisely so the American military could test the effects of a nuke!
They can. One of the problems that America had, going into the 80s, was that its ICBM force was becoming vulnerable to a potential surprise attack by the CCCP. This concerned them because only the ICBM force, at the time, had the sort of accuracy necessary for taking out hardened targets in a limited strike - like their opponent's strategic forces. And they were understandably reluctant to rely on systems that could only be used for city busting - i.e. the submarine force.
If you're interested in this, I suggest the - contemporary with that problem - documentary First Strike.
You mean СССР?
</pedantic joke>
What I think places the atom bomb on its own category is that its potential for destruction is completely out of proportion with whatever tactical reason you may have for using it. Here we're dealing with destruction on a civilization level. This is the first time in human history when the end of the world may come from our own hands. Nothing in our evolutionary past could have equipped us to deal with such a magnitude of danger. In the Middle Ages, the Pope was shocked at the implications of archery--you could kill from a distance, almost as effectively as with a sword, but without exposing yourself too much. He thought it was a dishonorable way of killing. By the time cannons were invented, everyone was more or less used to seeing archers in battle, but this time it was the capacity for devastation brought by cannons that was beyond anything previously experienced. Ditto for every increasing level of destructive power: machine guns, bomber airplanes, all the way up to the atom bomb. But the atom bomb is a gamechanger. No amount of animosity or vengefulness or spite can possibly justify vaporizing millions of human lives in an instant. Even if your target were a military citadel, the destruction will inevitably reach countless innocents that the post-WW2 international war protocols were designed to protect. Throwing the atom bomb is the Muggle equivalent of Avada Kedavra--there is no excuse that you can claim in your defense.
Er, archery's been around since at least the Mesolithic and has been used to kill people for almost as long, if skeletal evidence is anything to go by. That's actually older than the sword, which originated as a Bronze Age weapon.
Canon 29 of the Second Lateran Council under Pope Innocent II is often cited as banning the use of projectile weapons against Christians, but as the notes through the link imply it's not clear that a military prohibition was intended in context. In any case, deadly novelty is unlikely as a motivation; crossbows had been known in Europe since Classical Greece, bows and slings far longer. And their military use, of course, continued even after the council.
Why? Your arguments boil down to "it's very destructive". Note that during WW2 at least two air raids using conventional bombs killed more people than atomic weapons (Tokyo and Dresden).
Why not? It's just like saying there's no excuse for killing. That's not correct, there are lots of justifications for killing. Again, I don't see what makes nukes special.
From a strategic perspective the initial significance of the atomic bomb was to skew air warfare even further toward the attacking side. As early as the Thirties, strategic bombing had been understood to favor attackers -- the phrase at the time was "the bomber will always get through" -- but the likes of Tokyo and Dresden required massive effort, hundreds of bombers flying near-concurrent sorties. After the invention of the atomic bomb, that was no longer true -- bomber groups that earlier would have been considered trivial now could destroy cities. Suddenly there was no acceptable penetration of air defenses.
Still, defensive efforts continued. Surface-to-air missiles were a great improvement over anti-aircraft gunnery, and nuclear-armed missiles like the AIM-26 were intended to provide high kill probabilities in a defensive role or even take out entire formations at a shot. The development of ICBMs in the late Fifties and early Sixties may have led to more extensive changes in strategy; these could not be effectively stopped by air defenses (though anti-ballistic missile programs continued until the START treaties killed them), leaving mutually assured destruction as the main defensive option.
That was before the radar, though.
ABM programs are alive and well at the moment. The US withdrew from the ABM treaty with Russia in 2002.
The radar changed tactics and contributed to some successful defenses, but I don't think it had much long-term effect on the overall strategic balance. We can use the strategic bombing of Germany during WWII for comparison: before the Axis possessed radar, bombers had been distributed as widely as possible so that few could be predictably intercepted. After, bombers were concentrated into a stream to overwhelm local air defenses. This proved effective, although Allied air superiority had largely been established by that time. The development of long-range radar-guided air-to-air or surface-to-air missiles, or for that matter better fire control radars, would have changed things back in the defenders' favor, but by that point nuclear weapons had already made their mark.
Quite, but I didn't want to clutter an already long comment with post-Cold War development.