Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Two thoughts:

1) Why do we continue playing the blame game with something that happened 65 years ago? I for one, no matter how bad I feel about what happened then, am not going to apologize. Seeing as my parents had not yet been born, I don't think I'm especially responsible, and I think it's pretty much the same across the board.

2) What is with this postulating about how "maybe nuclear weapons are not as good of a deterrent as we thought"!? They were certainly a good deterrent for... I don't know... the entire Cold War!? It doesn't really matter if they deliver the destruction we fear. As a deterrent, the only thing that matters is how much we fear them, which we obviously do! (Just look at the folks wringing their hands over Fukushima)

P.S. As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys. The US had a bomb of 25 megatons in 1961. Little Boy was 15 kilotons. May be wise to consider this when claiming nuclear weapons are no more consequential than some firebombing- leaving aside the part where one can be delivered from a submarine hundreds of miles away, and the other requires an entire squadron of bombers to do a flyover.

> As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look like toys.

They mostly look oversized: high-yield systems were all the rage when bomber was the only means of delivery (culminating with the Tsar Bomba test at 50MT), because it was expected most bombers would fail to deliver and the aim would likely be off, so each and every hit had to "count".

With the rise of ICBMs, yields went way down and systems deliver multiple warheads instead (per-head yield got down to 50~100kT e.g. W62, W76, W80) although it went up again following SALT and SORT agreements (which reduce the number of warheads the US and Russia "can" own, and thus makes it interesting to push yields back into higher range and use less warheads per missiles)

I didn't mean in terms of size, but destructive potential.

Do you not agree that a salvo of 100kT devices would make 1x 15kT look pretty tame?

> Do you not agree that a salvo of 100kT devices would make 1x 15kT look pretty tame?

There are still 15kT warheads out there, and a 100kT device does not make a 15kT device "look like a toy".

So no.

It's not a factual blame issue. Are then only those that dropped the bomb responsible? It's a mentality problem, people feel guilty because they don't think anything changed in their society and feel powerless and afraid that something like that could happen again, which is also why they keep writing about it, to keep awareness high and try to change society.

And with this I'm not saying that you should feel responsible instead. I'm simply saying that dismissing this by saying "My parents weren't around 60 years ago" without including an analysis of the context and environment is a pretty weak argument. For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?

For example, would you have made the same decision in the same circumstance in 1945?

I have absolutely no way of knowing. Not in the least because I don't know what I would have known, and that is often my issue with this sort of hindsight-criticism. Besides the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-dont aspect of these types of huge decisions (I'm quite sure Truman would have received plenty of criticism if he decided NOT to drop the bomb), they often assume- this one somewhat included- perfect knowledge. Sure, the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria. Did the President know that? Sure, Japan was secretly hoping to use the USSR as leverage in negotiations with the USA. Did Truman know THAT? It goes on.

I suppose perhaps I do dismiss it a little too quickly, but I wish more revisionist criticism would focus a little less on what is right from the grand, 20/20 all-knowing-birds-eye-view and a little more on individual knowledge and perspective.

However I think most of the criticism doesn't come from trying to picture Truman as a killer or as someone who has vaporized a city for lust of violence.

Criticism comes from the fact that today we know what nuclear warheads are capable of doing, and yet these are still a viable weapon. This means that somebody still considers the possibility of using them, and this creates the need to do something to stop it (and makes people still feel guilty).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com