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Comment by prof_hobart | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it is unassailable.

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.

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I think his argument is based on the premise that the atomic bomb meant the war could be ended without protracted ground invasion and thousands of additional conventional bombing runs.

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.

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

Given an average of 100,000 [EDIT 100,000 per month since 1937] civilian deaths at the hands of the imperial army just in China alone (there were civilians being slaughtered in Indo-china and the Korean peninsula also), if the bombs ended the war just two months earlier than it would have ended (incredibly unlikely to the point of absurdity), it was a net gain in civilians saved.

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.

100,000 per... month I'm guessing?

Yikes, thanks. Yes it averages out to about 100,000 per month since the start of the mainland invasion in 1937.

Putting personal/national pride ahead of the health and safety of your citizens is certainly immoral.

The estimate for the overall deaths in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere were 250,000 per month, we'd only liberated the Philippines from it. Korea, which had been under their boot for half a century, Malaya as it was called back then, the populous Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, South East Asia, they had captured a lot of territory and people, all of whom they viewed as untermenschen.

That's an entirely valid point in relation to WWII (although as I'm sure I've seen research suggesting that Japan was already trying to mediate a peace, and that the US were aware of this, before the bomb was dropped so it may not be as clear cut as those figures suggest).

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.

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