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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking; it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality. It goes against everything else I think I know of humanity, especially against the previous history of the 20th century, against everything I know of human nature.

I mean, I'm not saying it's good we still have nukes pointed at oneanother, but we're still alive, and that's the best historical evidence I've found that humans aren't completely self-destructive.

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> I think the fact that we only dropped two nukes in anger is absolutely shocking

The United States of America was the world's sole nuclear superpower between July 16th, 1946 [1] and August 29th, 1949 [2]. Towards the end of that nuclear monopoly we had the means to vaporize the competition with minimal risk of retaliation. That we did not is the greatest testament I can think of to the natural temperance of our democratic institutions, ruddy and war-mongering as they can sometimes be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project

A good podcast about just this topic: https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-...

I love his analogy to a tightrope walker. Sure a tightrope walker can walk a rope for a very long time without falling off, but if the rope is infinitely long, he'll fall off eventually. Same with nuclear weapons. We've had 70 ish good years where no one fell off the rope. But we have an infinite number of years to go. Someone will fall off eventually. The better question is, will it happen in your lifetime?

Arguably, we didn't drop the two nukes "in anger", and that the decision saved lives. (We also warned them ahead of time that we would drop it too...)

In this context, "in anger" is a phrase that means "in combat". I've fired a gun, but never in anger. That would be still be true if I was angry while at the shooting range.

> it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality

It's probably more of an affirmation that humans behave better when accountable for their actions. Two nukes were dropped when the enemy of the bomber had no way to retaliate in kind, and no more have been dropped since that stopped being true.

US was the only nuclear power for several years though.

About four years from Hiroshima/Nagasaki to the USSR's first successful test. Soviets had the bomb before the Korean War.

True. (Though the USSR's first successful air drop wasn't until Oct 1951, well into the Korea War.)

Soviet nukes were not why the U.S. held back in Korea. It was the unpleasant prospect of a war with China (albeit a non-nuclear China).

https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-korean-war...

And it didn't use them in Vietnam because it was thought to require so many (dozens/hundreds) as to be the antithesis of reunification.

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In short, the US avoided nukes for decades in the hope of peace, not because there were any nukes sighted on D.C. (MAD).

My argument is that even this is a huge step forward.

All historical evidence before this was that state actors could not be restrained by the mere threat of overwhelming force; before this, it seemed that nation state, even the big advanced ones needed to 'give it a shot' and be restrained by the reality of devastation, even when it was pretty obvious from the outset that they were biting off more than they could chew (c.f. the Schleffen plan in World War One, Japan's attack on America in World War Two.)

Post world-war two? it seems humanity, or at least the big advanced nations, can be restrained by credible threats of devastation, which is a huge step forward over requiring actual devastation.

It's certainly better than the alternative, but some folks, who foresaw the coming cold war and the arms race, and the chance for complete annihilation, argued pretty hard for preemptively attacking while the US had a nuclear monopoly. That could have gone quite badly. After the end of the monopoly, the game theory around the world almost led to catastrophe more than once...

This time period also coincided with a huge amount of war weariness. WW2 was long and horrible.

That is the terrifying way of looking at it... what if we only exercised such restraint because our parents and grandparents lived the horrible experience of a major power war? What if the next generation in power doesn't have that same experience and restraint?

> it's an affirmation of human goodness and rationality.

only if it lasts. I agree and like to think the same way but the past 85~ years are not proof yet as we could still be proved oh-so-very wrong.

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