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DanArmak comments on Rationality Quotes September 2013 - Less Wrong
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Consider what the last big "hot war" would have been like if the atom bomb had been developed even a couple of years earlier, or by another side.
The war would have been over faster, with possibly lower total number of casualties?
The war might have been over faster, but I think with a much higher number of casualties.
That's not obvious to me. Consider empirical data: the casualties from conventional bombing raids. And more empirical data: the US did not drop a nuke on Tokyo. Neither did it drop a nuke on Kyoto or Osaka. The use of atomic bombs was not designed for maximum destruction/casualties.
The actual use of the atom bomb against Japan was against an already defeated enemy. The US had nothing to fear from Japan at that point, and so they didn't need to strike with maximum power.
On the other hand, imagine a scenario where use of the Bomb isn't guaranteed to end the war at one stroke, and you have to worry about an enemy plausibly building their own Bomb before being defeated. What would Stalin, or Hitler, or Churchill, do with an atom bomb in 1942? The same thing they tried to do with ordinary bombs, scaled up: build up an arsenal of at least a few dozen (time permitting), then try to drop one simultaneously on every major enemy city within a few days of one another.
WW2 casualties were bad enough, but they never approached the range of "kill 50% of the population in each of the 50 biggest enemy cities, in a week's bombing campaign, conditional only on getting a single bomber with a single bomb to the target".
Given that neither Hitler nor Churchill choose to use the chemical weapons that they had on the enemy I don't see the argument for why they would have used atom bombs the same way as conventional bombs.
I don't know the details of why they didn't use chemical weapons, and what they might have accomplished if they had. But I'm not sure what your argument is here. Do you think that they thought they could achieve major military objectives with chemical weapons, but refrained because of the Geneva Protocols, or because of fear of retaliation in kind?
The point is that the war in Europe wasn't waged with a goal of creating a maximum numbers of casualties.
Many bombing campaigns were indeed waged with an explicit goal of maximum civilian casualties, in order to terrorize the enemy into submission, or to cause the collapse of order among enemy civilians. This includes the German Blitz of London and the V-1 and V-2 campaigns, most of the British Bomber Command war effort, US bombing attacks against German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, Japanese bombing of Nanjing and Canton, and US fire-bombing of Japanese cities including Tokyo. That's not taking the Eastern Front in account, which saw the majority of the fighting.
Wikipedia has a lot of details (excepting the Eastern Front) given and linked here.
If any of the combatants had had the atom bomb, possibly including the US when they were not yet confident of being close to victory, they would surely have used them. After all, dead is dead, and it's better to build and field only one plane and (expensive) bomb per city, not a fleet of thousands. Given the power of even a single bomb, they would surely have gone on to bomb other cities, stopping only when the enemy surrendered.
If Germany would have wanting to maximize causalities they would have bombed London with chemical weapons. They decided against doing so.
They wanted to destroy military industry and reduce civilian moral. They didn't want to kill as many civilian's as possible but demoralize them.