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Comment by gozur88 | Hacker News Reader

I would think it would be pretty easy to verify the absence of villages within a mile. And this isn't the type of weapon that causes cancer.

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How would you verify it then? Do you have the coordinates for where the bomb dropped and recent maps of the area? A year ago we said that all ISIL soldiers had been removed from the area, verification seems tricky.

You don't think blowing bits of a building in a twenty mile radius would cause cancer?

> You don't think blowing bits of a building in a twenty mile radius would cause cancer?

No; why would it? You cause cancer by damaging the DNA of cells. A mere explosion isn't going to do that.

Buildings are made of things like lead and asbestos, blowing small bits of a building over a huge radius seems like a likely hazard. Plus, whatever the hell the bomb is made of.

Ah, I see. Well, that's kind of true, but it's like saying that earthquakes cause cancer, because when the building collapses in an earthquake, it also spreads things like asbestos into the air. I mean, it's still true, but it's so much a smaller effect than the other problems, it's pretty much ignored.

Do you think letting ISIS operate freely in the region is better than the speculative notion that building debris will cause cancer someday? Do you think the US should merely inform the local governments and hope they will do something?

Regardless, I agree that the US should never get involved in the Middle East militarily. There is NO way to prevent civilian deaths, there is no way to prevent people on the Left from reducing ALL military action to American imperialism.

I didn't realize dropping this bomb or doing nothing were the only possible options, the whole 26 day campaign with two wounded US soldiers they did last year led me to believe there may be more options.

What reason is there for a war of aggression beyond imperialism?

I don't think it's reasonable to characterize the war in Afghanistan as "imperialism".

So what do you call a war who's aim is to install a friendly government and take over some amount of the nation's sovereignty?

I suppose I would call it that if that were the aim of the war.

Our goal was removing the Taliban, and taking the right to police residents of the country, particularly Bin Laden, without the need of jurisprudence. Set up a friendly government, take over sovereign right. What am I missing here?

Okay. What does that have to do with "war of aggression" and "imperialism". We weren't there on a lark.

Starting the war for those aims is a war of aggression, removing the Taliban is setting up a friendly government, removing their right to police is a removal of sovereignty.

Really confused what you're going on about, you keep saying I'm wrong but don't try to say why.

>Starting the war for those aims is a war of aggression...

No it isn't. That's not at all true.

Yeah, it is. There's millennia of precedent here and I'm not going any further to argue against "nuh-uh."

Precedent? This isn't a court case. I begin to see the problem here: You're misapplying a historical template. This isn't 19th Century British Empire - the US had an iron-clad casus belli in Afghanistan, and to ignore that is to completely mischaracterize the situation.

"This isn't a court case, they had an iron-clad case for war." The only point of a cassus belli is to justify your war of aggression, if someone declares war on you the case for it is clear.

And no, the cassus belli was not iron-clad. There are only three legal ones under current law. Defense, defense of an ally, and a UN approval. First two don't work, Afghanistan hadn't declared any wars, and the third never happened.

So you wouldn't classify Napoleons invasion and the creation of Westphalia as a war of aggression?

How about Ceasars invasion of Gaul? He had a casus belli.

What makes you sure it doesn't cause cancer...because it's not an atomic weapon?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/14/iraq.military

"The amount of DU used during the Iraq war has not been revealed, although some estimate it was more than a thousand tons."

Why are you bringing up DU?

DU is used in warheads >> DU releases radiation >>> radiation causes cancer. Therefore, you could link the bombs that use DU to cancer.

In this case, maybe they didn't have DU, but there are still other nasty contaminants that come with 22,000 pounds of explosives dropped in a relatively small area (not to mention the 10s of thousands of smaller bombs being dropped throughout that country and other war zones).

>DU is used in warheads >> DU releases radiation >>> radiation causes cancer. Therefore, you could link the bombs that use DU to cancer.

All that is true and totally irrelevant, since DU is used almost exclusively in anti-armor kinetic rounds. This is just a really big firecracker.

>In this case, maybe they didn't have DU, but there are still other nasty contaminants that come with 22,000 pounds of explosives dropped in a relatively small area...

Are there? Do you have some reason to think that's true?

Read the article linked to in my earlier comment.

What does it have to do with the subject article? Again, there's no DU in this bomb.

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