It's nice to believe everyone is thinking their orders through but militaries exist to get people to do violence and they are often very good at their intended purpose. They explicitly seek to drive individualism out of people in order to ensure high discipline in uncertain circumstances when that discipline is most necessary.
> Unlike the other submarines in the flotilla, three officers on board B-59 had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch: Captain Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the chief of staff of the flotilla (and executive officer of B-59) Arkhipov.
Arkhipov had authority to veto the order. What's more, the captain was assuming war had begun and had no order from above to attack.
I don't think even Tiananmen is quite as cut-and-dry as you're making it out.
There were at least half a dozen generals who risked execution to publicly oppose the attack, and many of the commanders instructed their soldiers not to open fire on the crowds. The insubordination went down to the level of the individual soldier, and if more than a tiny minority of soldiers (namely the 27th army) had actually, genuinely been following orders then the casualties would be orders of magnitude higher than they were.
At least that's what I've heard from people who witnessed it.
I understood the point you are responding to differently than you - it is not about doing the (morally) "right" thing, it is about doing the self-preserving thing. I imagine there is always a lot of people willing to do horrible things when they can reasonably expect they will face no personal consequences (your Tiananmen Square massacre example, which would mean personal consequences for not doing it). The expectations are very different for officers hitting the launch button - they have to know that if they do it, it is very likely that they themselves and everybody they love will die or face horrible future in the post-apocalyptic world. I am not saying this means nobody will hit the button, I am just saying it makes doing it a lot harder and (hopefully) less likely.
Isn't violent repression nearly always triggered by protesters' violence (sometimes only by a fraction of them, sometimes by people acting up in order to trigger repression, sometimes through misinterpretation or some fake-flag operation...) ?
Isn't a well-rehearsed then conducted (in order to avoid and isolate provocations) peaceful protest efficient against it? Moreover even if it isn't efficient the net result (w/o any massive manipulation through mass-media) empowers the protesters through bystanders sympathy.
Of course not. In Russia peaceful protesters are routinely beaten for standing with a piece of paper. There wasn't much violence from protester's side for about a decade now because you get 3-7 years in prison for throwing a paper cup at a riot cop, or touching his helmet (not striking — simply touching). You can be peaceful all you like, it won't help you to get out of it unscathed. Just yesterday we got a few fresh examples (ironically from anti-war protests).
It can be more subconscious and insidious. Anger, hate, and violent action is incredibly contagious. Mob mentality hijacks brains, and spreads like wildfire among peers. It's likely part of our DNA and it takes a special awareness to escape its grip.
In short, we didn't stop using chemical weapons because of ethics (if thats the case, we should've given up landmines, which kill far more civilians).
Rather, chemical weapons are expensive to operate and ineffective weapons in modern battlefields.
Here is the relevant snippet from the blog:
"During WWII, everyone seems to have expected the use of chemical weapons, but never actually found a situation where doing so was advantageous. This is often phrased in terms of fears of escalation (this usually comes packaged with the idea of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), but that’s an anachronism – while Bernard Brodie is sniffing around the ideas of what would become MAD as early as ’46, MAD itself only emerges after ’62). Retaliation was certainly a concern, but I think it is hard to argue that the combatants in WWII hadn’t already been pushed to the limits of their escalation capability, in a war where the first terror bombing happened on the first day. German death-squads were in the initial invasion-waves in both Poland, as were Soviet death squads in their invasion of Poland in concert with the Germans and also later in the war. WWII was an existential war, all of the states involved knew it by 1941 (if not earlier), and they all escalated to the peak of their ability from the start; I find it hard to believe that, had they thought it was really a war winner, any of the powers in the war would have refrained from using chemical weapons. The British feared escalation to a degree (but also thought that chemical weapons use would squander valuable support in occupied France), but I struggle to imagine that, with the Nazis at the very gates of Moscow, Stalin was moved either by escalation concerns or the moral compass he so clearly lacked at every other moment of his life."