"when the US invented nukes, its enemies were stuck with normal bombs; there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city."
I'm not an expert on what happened to Dresden but I heard it was ... a lot.
I'm not an expert on what happened to Dresden but I heard it was ... a lot.
Concentrating the damage like that gives the enemy far less time to adapt or rebuild, and less capacity to do so—you can out-produce heavy damage that's spread out over a long period of time, you can adapt to it, you can shift tactics and resources around to reduce the rate of damage in the future, but such efforts are hopeless against nukes.
It wasn't especially in-play during WWII since even the US couldn't (yet) build the bombs fast enough for them to really matter that much versus what could be done with conventional weapons, but it did matter soon after as stockpiles began to grow and production rate increased. Nukes represented a huge multiplier in the amount of destructive power a state could realistically stockpile and deploy in short order.
Modern military doctrine is hitting a whole city is bad. You want to hit specific targets and not collateral damage to other things. Discredited WWII doctrine was killing civilians would make them surrender so hitting the whole city was good. Which lens you look at military doctrine says which is better.
The destruction caused by a single military operation was in the same league. The logistics were actually harder in some ways than traditional bombing. It would be months before the US would have more atomic weapons after the first two. So the one bomb versus hundreds doesn’t make a big difference when you have zero.
This would all change dramatically over the coming years. But at the time of its first use, the atomic bomb was not as much of a leap forward in capability as you’d probably think.
Seems like other replies are trying to harp on this to undermine the entire article, when they are just deliberately misinterpreting the point. Maybe no analogy is perfect?
But I do think the broader point of nukes being a "you have it, or you don't and can't even really approach the capability of those who do" sort of tech is accurate.
In other words, the basic historical claim being made here, that the US's "brief period of dominance" in nukes won WW II, is false. Not only that, it's "schoolboy error" false: the sort of mistake nobody who claims any sort of knowledge about the subject they're writing about should make.
Nuclear powers can credibly threaten to not just destroy a single city, but to wipe a modern nation off the map. That's something you can't do with conventional bombers, even a lot of them.
I think his specific claim is not quite right here, but the thrust of his argument is. There's a reason that nuclear powers dare not enter direct conflict with each other in a way that major military powers used to casually do.
I think the key insight here is rate-of-production (measured in, say, tons of TNT equivalent, ready for delivery to a target), ease of stockpiling huge levels of destructive power, and cost of delivering that destructive power. The first two are incredibly higher for nukes vs. conventional weapons, and the last, far lower.
500 late-WWII Allied heavy bombers couldn't wipe out all the major cities in, say, the Soviet Union in a couple days. Impossible. The logistics simply don't work, there's no halfway-plausible scenario in which they could even get close to achieving that, there are tons of obstacles standing in the way.
.. with a few hundred nukes, though? Now it's totally possible.
> there is no slightly-worse-nuke that can only destroy half a city.
Is itself false. The "Little Boy" that dropped on Hiroshima was the "slightly-worse-nuke" with a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 1.67 km. The Dong Feng 5, China's largest nuclear warhead currently deployed, has a moderate blast damage radius (5 psi) of 24.5 km.
You still need to do every bit as much science and engineering to make it; the only difference is you need slightly less fissile material.
Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force.
Conventional strategic bombers and high explosives would never have given us MAD. The raw destructive force is absolutely relevant, it was (and remains) infeasible to do anything like wipe out a whole country in a day or two with conventional weapons, that'd take months or years and enormous dedication of resources. With nukes? Now it's possible.
I'm really not getting the reading of this as "LOL we could blow up cities with regular bombs, he's wrong!" Like, WTF was all the worry over nukes in the cold war, then? They're extremely obviously a major game-changer. A functioning nuke program means multiplying the max plausible destructive power a country can deploy inside a week by a very large number—no later developments in conventional weapons have really closed that gap, it's a whole other category of weapon, and you either have it, or you don't.
Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago), and no one else holds them to it either.
Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!