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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

I think nuclear weapons are the wildcard here. They make it difficult to extrapolate from wars in the last 500 years to wars in the future.

In 1914-18, although the outcome was quite a lot more terrible than what everyone expected going in, it wasn't as if Europe ended up as a radioactive wasteland for hundreds of years.

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They did pretty well creating a wasteland without atomic weaponry. 460 square miles of France in 1918 were declared "Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge). Hundreds of tonnes of unexploded munitions are still unearthed in the soil of Belgium and France every year; hundreds of people have been killed or injured by them.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest).

A nuclear weapon can do that in seconds, at a tiny fraction of the monetary cost.

That's not really the point. We accomplished the same effect (albeit over a smaller area) already, and it clearly didn't stop WWII from happening.

No nuclear weapon has ever been built that can do that to 460 square miles.

> No nuclear weapon has ever been built that can do that to 460 square miles.

460mi ^2 = 1192km^2

sqrt(1192km^2 / pi) = 19.5km

Tsar Bomba (largest one), from Wikipedia: 'total destruction _radius_ 35km.'

So, yes, such a single weapon surpassing that several times has been built. And it can as well be argued that a MIRVed ICBM is in a way a single weapon.

I don't know if "wildcard" is the right word. Nuclear weapons were developed with the explicit purpose of preventing wars as terrible as the World Wars. With the help of economic sanctions, they've succeeded so far.

This is revisionist thinking, applying current knowledge to the motivations of those 75 years ago.

Nuclear weapons were developed because they could be. More specifically, it was feared that Germany was already researching them.

During the Manhattan Project and for the next several years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they were thought of as just another weapon of war, different perhaps in scale but not in essential character (certainly by the US Army brass, anyway). It wasn't until later in the Cold War that the deterrent value of nuclear weapons was emphasised.

It did take quite some time for the full power and destructiveness of atomic weapons, let alone the later fusion bombs, to be appreciated. At one point, it was a serious idea to fire atomic shells from the standard 155mm field howitzers. Or, for even greater insanity, from over-sized crew-served bazookas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

This wasn't because the power of nukes was unappreciated, it was because Soviet conventional superiority in the European theater was seen as an existential threat to Western Europe for which the cost of using that kind of nukes was acceptable in order to mitigate.

This is a message similar to the promotion of World War I involvement using the "war to end all wars" argument.

In the end though, it's just a way to either expand one power's reach at the cost of another, or a way to halt the ascension of a young world power (Germany) into a dominant position.

Nuclear weapons were certainly NOT developed to "create and keep the peace in the world". Nuclear weapons were developed with the intention of using them. The US intended to use them on Germany, but Germany capitulated before "the gadget" was ready. The US intended to keep using nuclear weapons on Japan after the first two strikes[1]. The US maximized the civilian and economic damage of their nuclear bombings, intentionally maximizing the firestorms and incapacitating civilian fire fighting efforts [2].

Of course, it is argued (and to some extent, documents back this up) that the lasting radiation damage was not well known or understood at the time. People, including the scientists and engineers working on the bombs, considered them to be the super-sized equivalent of conventional bombs.

Nuclear weapons were developed as an ace card, which would grant its sole wielder (at that time, the US) a serious advantage at any international negotiation table.

[1]: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/25/weekly-document-th... [2]: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/08/the-height-of-the-...

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