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Comment by voidUpdate | Hacker News Reader

Depends, do you consider death by burns and smoke inhalation to be worse than death by having your skin stripped off by the blast, your appendages completely burned off in an instant, people completely losing their mind, pregnant women dying and having their unborn children exposed to the open air? I've heard all of those in testimonies from survivors.

Yes, both of those events are terrible and shouldn't have happened, but which is "worse" probably depends on if you consider more deaths or worse deaths to be "worse"

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> I've heard all of those in testimonies from survivors.

You've read the testimonies of those that survived Dresden and Tokyo then?

Again, dead is dead, injured by temperatures that melt flesh is the same regardless of heat source.

Is there any reason to elevate death by atomic weapon above death by carpet bombing HE's and incendiaries?

I've not heard testimonies by those survivors, no, but I have heard about a lot of other burn victims and survivors in mass casualty events.

How about we both don't have nuclear weapons and also don't carpet bomb people?

None of the ways of dying in wars sound particularly appealing to me; instant disintegration doesn't sound like the worst of them

If we're going to move the goalposts, why don't we just move them to the logical endpoint and proclaim "why don't we just not have wars"

Which, by the way, perhaps it's of interest to compare the frequency and severity of war before and after the invention of atomic weapons

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear your ethical solution to the trolley problem? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem)

Hmm yes there are multiple reasons. If you were to survive a nuclear explosion you are probably going to go through a slow and painful death that can go from minutes to years.

Depending on how affected you are, you can become literally poisonous to touch. And that's just for people affected by the explosion. Then there are the people that won't be able to go back home because of radiation. That's a different kind of pain. And yes, bombs also can bulldoze cities, but at least you can recover and reconstruct

You might have watched too much Chernobyl. It's not true that an irradiated person becomes itself radioactive. Once a potential radiation contamination (radioactive dust and material) is cleaned from a person, independently of how much radiation they were exposed to, they don't become radioactive themselves. You can easily look it up online to verify

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