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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

We faced this at work recently (at our decidely sub-Google scale) when sales guy refused to bid for an opportunity at a weapons manufacturer so we had some interesting discussions around the issue.

Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad. There are good times to use weapons.

An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.

And perhaps in our medium term future, as climate change becomes more and more real, a critical mass of people will decry the continued burning of fossil fuels. And if retrograde nations continue to poison our common resource, then maybe some global police force will need weapons to stop them.

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> Its a little hard to make blanket statements that weapons/warfare are bad.

In the case of the US it's usually the truth. The last 3 major US wars were not fighting Nazis; the last 3 major US wars were mostly imperialistic BS; the last 3 major US wars resulted in 20-30 million killed in 37 nations[1].

Or put another way, just because violent predator X(with a long history of unjustly attacking others) managed to take down another worse violent predator Y doesn't mean you should continue to arm and support violent predator X.

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

Your link attributes the 2.5 million victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide to the US. How does that make any sense?

The situation involving the Khmer Rouge is quite complex. They were initially associated with the "Communist" block, but closer to the Chinese side. So after the Soviet/Chinese split, they ended up opposite from the Vietnamese, who where aligned with the Soviet Union. That in turn led to the US supporting them when they went to war with Vietnam. The genocide was pretty much over at that point, since the Khmer Rouge had been in power for a while (those they wanted dead had already been killed) and lost control over most of Cambodia to the Vietnamese.

It was definitely a moral failure on the US side to support a known genocidal group based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-type reasoning, but I don't think you can hold the US directly responsible for the victims that were already dead at the time.

It's fairly obvious that if not for US military activity in the region, US backing of Lon Nol, and the massive covert US bombing campaign in Cambodia, that Cambodia would have never been destabilized to the point that a fanatical regime like the Khmer Rouge could have come to power. A lot of Cambodian people would make that connection too, just so you know.

So let me see if I got this right. The US is in a mighty struggle to stop the expansion of communism, a communist faction takes control of Cambodia and proceeds to kill one in four people, and this is US’s fault?

While I agree that the US has had some bad wars, that article seems a little ... absurd. First line in the tally:

> The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation.

Sure, the US did stuff, but you're denying the agency of the Soviet Union (and Afghanistan, for that matter) in actually doing all the killing.

The US has killed enough people directly without blaming it for all armed conflicts since WWII.

> An obvious one was at the time of WWII. If the clever people had refused to work on weapons, things would have finished up potentially a lot worse for mankind generally.

There is still debate about whether the use of nukes was at all justifiable, a lot of the motivation for researchers was to stop the Nazis from getting there first, not beating Japan into submission.

That said, this isn't WW2. The US has the largest military on Earth and the most advanced weapon systems. US drone strikes are killing targets in civilian areas without repercussions. The POTUS has the authorisation to wage war against whomever he chooses as long as he can somehow relate them to someone who was involved in 9/11. Heck, the invasion of Iraq even violated international law with no repercussions.

The US military (CIA included) can pretty much do what it pleases and kill people whenever and wherever it wants. Don't want to kill right now? Off to Guantanamo they go. If they happen to be a US citizen just say they're an enemy combatant and make sure they never see a domestic court of law. Even torture is permissible.

If you're worried the US might not be sufficiently equipped to become a dictatorial global authority, you haven't been paying attention.

Mad respect to sales guy. I'm doing the same and avoiding arms companies (my background is very useful for military research).

I acknowledge some warfare may be legitimate (having been bombed myself), but arms companies don't stop at selling to your personal favorite army which you consider morally right, they keep looking for more business abroad.

I don't want to be the one realizing I'm sitting in a cozy air-conditioned office and having made money from the messed up warfare in some distant far-away country, having a large financial incentive to cause more conflict there.

There's also an argument to be made that remaining on the cutting edge of military science is a form of national security. Being one of the first, or only, nations to develop and test a new kind of weapon means that you'll also be among the first nations to be able to fully assess its practical viability and evaluate its countermeasures.

How many thermonuclear weapons do we need to be secure? Secure from what? Invasion? No one is invading a nuclear power.

I'm not sure I see the relevance of your question since what you're asking for is a necessary quantity not a necessary level of innovation. There could be lots of reasons to develop a better thermonuclear weapon even if it's never put into use. Innovation in that area would help us to gauge the difficulty of miniaturizing such a device and, if it turns out to be difficult but possible, whether or not modern technology makes such a feat possible for a hostile non-nation group such as a terrorist organization. In the situation being discussed in the article, the argument would be that remaining on the cutting edge of drone technology allows us to evaluate the threat that drones could pose to our navy if a situation like the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis ever happened again.

There's also an argument to be made that remaining on the cutting edge of military science is a form of national security.

Your words, I’m asking who’s security? Our security while we pretend to own the world? Our security against invasion? How secure do we need to be, when we can already end all human life in 45 minutes?

If you don't agree with a part of what I've said then you're more than welcome to articulate your objections instead of asking a series of rhetorical questions. It's clear that you have strong feelings on the topic but at this point you're not trying to have a discussion you're just being belligerent.

I’m asking a question you seem unwilling to answer. You invoked national security as a motivation to stay on the cutting edge of military science. I’m asking just what your definition encompasses, and pointing out that it’s clearly not just the sanctity of our borders. Traditionally national security is about the security of a nation, not securing its dominance; the latter goes by a different name. Our vast nuclear arsenal secures the former, but not the latter.

And if you read my replies you'll notice that I gave two examples. In response to your fixation on nuclear weapons I pointed out that developing better designs could be helpful with regard to maintaining an awareness of if modern technology has made some producing some version of the weapon, in my example it was a miniaturized version of the weapon, possible for a terrorist organization. I don't feel like it's asking too much to expect you to realize why that might be a useful thing to know for protecting the nation. In my other example I highlighted that having a cutting edge understanding of drone technology could be useful for defending our navy in the event that we another crisis similar to the time we sent ships to guard Taiwan. Given that the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis happened well within recent history I don't think it's unrealistic to suggest preparing for an analogous situation could be beneficial in the event that it should happen again but escalate this time.

Would you please stop using HN for ideological arguments? They're predictable, off topic, and not ok.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You've posted such a huge number of low-quality comments to Hacker News that I've banned this account.

You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly after we asked you not to, and went into ideological flamewar repeatedly after we asked you not to. I have to conclude that this is not an account that wants to use HN as intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You've posted so many low-quality comments and skirted the site guidelines consistently enough that I've banned this account.

Accounts that post prodigious low-quality comments, especially ones that specialize on all the grandiose themes, are particularly damaging to signal/noise ratio, and that is what we care about here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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