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nshepperd comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong
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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?
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.