That's a pretty unassailable statement.
More quickly doesn't always equal less casualties, for instance. And even where more quickly does equal less casualties for your side, it could mean vastly more for the other side, or less military deaths but more civilian one. Or how about the potential for ongoing damage to both environment and survivors health.
This isn't to say that a nuclear attack, or any other weapon that could bring a war to a swift close, is automatically worse - just that's not automatically and unassailably better either.
You can still dispute that premise -- and while I don't, many people do. But if you accept that premise, then yeah, it's a war. End (win) it as soon as you possibly can.
I also think that in a war, unless you think you are on the wrong side or perpetrating immoral aggression towards an underserving enemy, you should optimize for more deaths on the opposing side than on yours.
Also, I live in Tokyo (though I am American) -- and the sustained, conventional firebombing of Tokyo produced more devastation and casualties (though perhaps not horror) than Hiroshima or Nagasaki[1].
Of course dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations is a terrible thing to do, but to me the key point of Beser's lecture is that he reminds you that it was done in the context of a completely fucking horrific world war. Which really does radically change the equation.
And it can be well argued that the Japanese civilian deaths should be blamed on the imperial army for not capitulating when it was obvious the war was lost.
However, my point was that even if it is true for WWII, it doesn't make it automatically true for any war as the quote seemed to be suggesting. The quickest way to finish a war isn't always the best.
One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused.
Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question.
"Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity. Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question."
What I'm getting from these two comments is that it's good we dropped two bombs on civilians because it taught us that we shouldn't do that and that, also, there was some scary science fiction about worse ways for nuclear weapons to be introduced to humanity so our way wasn't that bad. Is that what you're intending, because I can't really read it any other way.
"Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point" It's hard to argue hypotheticals, but really, you wouldn't change anything about history up to that point? Perhaps not strangling Germany quite as hard as we did after WWI? You wouldn't change that even if it'd completely erase the climate where the Nazis could rise to power?
Its a form of victim blaming, little different from saying "if you didn't wear such revealing clothing, then rapists wouldn't bother you".
No the point is we used the weapons when they were way less destructive and found them reprehensible. Imagine finding this out at the megaton level. When these weapons were used we had lots of uncertainty. There was lots of ignorance. Some involved in their development were not sure they'd consume the atmosphere or not. We simply were ignorant about a lot of things regarding them.
On balance though I think they resulted in more good than bad, given the alternative and in addition to the lessons learned.
Furthermore there are even worse imaginable scenarios than occasional use of nuclear weapons, namely, complete compliance from everyone else without nuclear weapons. In my opinion, many of the people in government in the 50s and 60s really were motivated by an anger toward people who they thought were their inferiors displaying insufficient deference, and I think tools to demand greater compliance can have a self-reinforcing effect—"these animals don't respond to x level of force, so we use y level, which is much softer than z level" et cetera.
And yet with hindsight we see that after ending the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons were a significant factor in keeping the Cold War "cold" long enough for the relative strengths of the two systems to matter as much as how the balance of military power happened to lay at the end of WWII.
So my point isn't that I think the end didn't justify the means in this case, but that it is because of the specifics rather than the value of the rule. As a general rule, it is a horrible one. Just as sometimes fighting a war is better than not, the opposite can also be true, and whether or not its important to insist on supremacy, even when there is little cost, is a discussion that should come long before the analysis of different weapons' impact.
The danger is the implied generality of the rule. It is tempting to shift the conversation to quantifiable metrics like lives lost, because it is easier than the very difficult, soft discussions about whether pursuing various policies do anything to create the world we want to live in.
It's a pretty sane opinion to hold: basically, it boils down to "in war times, value(civilian) == value(soldier)". But I wouldn't call it "unassailable", and I'm sure many will disagree with it.
The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. The question you need to be concerned over is, "What would we do in this day and age faced with a similar situation?"
All that said, I'm not judging any actions, I'm not sure where you got that from. The GP said that the remarks made by the pilot were "unassailable". I just pointed out that that's nonsense because while it's a sane argument, there's also a sane argument against it. It's been many years and there's been no US bashing in this thread up until now, but absolute statements on the morality of what happened, in either direction, just don't seem to make sense anymore.
Plenty of people in the day opposed it as well. Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc: http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
You could basically factor out all the soldiers on both sides, and the total casualty count (just civilians) would have been higher.
That's the argument, anyway. I am not any sort of military expert, so I leave you to make your own judgement. But it isn't like they had the equivalent of twitter @dronestream highlighting civilian casualties back then.
In the non-nuclear regular-old B-52 firebombing of Tokyo, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, and the entire sprawling city was quite literally burned to the ground.
https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=firebombing+of+tokyo&clien...
Those pictures don't look like reduced civilian casualties to me.
Was there any military value in bombing Tokyo, or were the civilian casualties the primary object?
Maybe the emperor was scared they'd drop one on him? I know the US military discussed that option.
There might be a modern analogy to be drawn: "It's more moral to torturously murder a few enemies on internet video, such that the rest of your enemies are sufficiently scared to engage, than it is to try to engage them all in battle."
(Although I do think there is still a point in there somewhere to be made about the underlying reasons the conflict is occurring in the first place. If you started it to implement your vision of a religious caliphate, revive the slave trade, etc... how does that change the morality of it?)