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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

He also said something like “if we can nuke them today, why wait till tomorrow?”, referring to the Soviets.

The historical context for that statement is it was made when America had a monopoly on nuclear weapons and Stalin's Soviet Union, a dictatorship of incomparable authoritarianism and delusion, was on the cusp of developing such weapons. Few would have predicted that a nuclear war would not occur once that happened. Under these circumstances, a first strike followed by occupation may have been rational. And given the complete insanity, cruelty and dehumanizing brutality of Soviet policy in the following 50 years, it's possible American occupation of the Soviet union would have saved many lives on net. See East vs West Berlin, for example. His position on first-strike was not very irrational given what was known at the time. Even in hindsight, it is hard to say either way.

It's a good thing that decisions to massacre hundreds of millions of people isn't made like this, then.

Many highly rational people get sucked into making decisions merely on math, ignoring the ethical aspects. Ironically, on HN that decision making process is often mirrored and so discussions tend to fall into the same trap.

You know, that's pretty much exact same argument for liberating those poor Iraqis, let's see how well it went.

(Except that liberating Russians would have gone a whole lot worse. You would end up liberating half of Eastern Europe, and probably the whole Germany, along the way.)

„John von Neumann was "violent anti-communist and much more militaristic than the norm", according to his own words from one of the Senate committee hearings. He was an advocate of the "preventive war" strategy (against USSR), and was quoted in 1950: "If you say why not bomb [the Soviets] tomorrow, I say, why not today. If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" ” https://www.quora.com/What-were-John-von-Neumanns-political-...

We forget that Khrushchev had literally said "We will bury you", banging his shoe on the table on international TV. He wasn't fucking around. Von Neumann knew many, many people tortured, killed, or sent to the gulag by the Soviets.

So the proposed solution to stop them being tortured, killed and sent to the gulag was to nuke the and hundreds of millions others so they'd be dead before that could happen?

Cut him some slack for having grown up with the Red Terror in Hungary.

Then he must also had lived through White Terror: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Hungary)

There is no slack to cut. There is literally nothing worse in human history than communism. He was simply right about it.

In Warsaw, after the war, when it fell under Soviet occupation, a popular opposition slogan was Truman, Truman, spuść ta bania, bo to nie do wytrzymania which roughly translates to Truman, Truman, drop the nukes, because we can't take this any more. Irradiated ruins were preferable to communism.

My grandparents lived through both communism and WWII. To them, the war was much worse.

I asked a friend what growing up under communism was like. She said 'shabby'

I don't think condemning millions the horrors of war is worth saving them from a shabby existence.

Have you considered that perhaps that was a rhetorical statement uttered by some, and killing them and their political opponents and millions of others may not have been actually what they wanted?

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