470 Physists Petition Nuclear Weapon Usage

Nuclear deterrence - not nuclear proliferation - has provided the world with 60 years of nuclear peace. No Middle Eastern nation has mounted a serious attack on Israel since that nation obtained its own nuclear deterent. The United States and the Soviet Union clashed many times, yet maintained a cold peace. There is nothing inherently "immoral" about nuclear weapons.

Any weapon designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people indiscriminately is immoral. That said, there is no way to stop nuclear proliferation. Any country that has the opportunity to become nuclear must for the very reasons Moose states above. Vainly wishing that we all hold hands, sing, and stop building nuclear bombs is the height of folly. There is no evidence in 5000 years of history that you can get everyone to all agree not to use a weapon because it's "immoral" (Please see WWI).

As for nuclear weapons being too powerful to ever be used, don't believe it. In 5000 years of written history, civilation has never chosen to not use a weapon. It's only been 60 years since nuclear weapons were invented.

What we should be doing is coming up with a defense against nuclear attack. It is only through tactical advantage that we can maintain the peace on our terms. We must continue to pursue our missle defense shield. I know it hasn't been terribly effective to date, but it will work eventually.

The U.S. is planning to drop its plans to develop a nuclear "bunker buster" bomb. I suspect that the administration's nuclear saber rattling is just that. The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) represented a tactical approach to nuclear warfare that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been seriously considered since the atomic cannons of the Eisenhower Administration.

I went to Basic Training at Ft. Sill. The cannon is truly a monster. They have a map beside it showing everything withing range of the gun. Seeing both Atomic Annie and the jail that Geronimo lived in in one day was the highlight of training.

High tech weapons tend to reduce the horrors of war. A bunker buster bomb could be used to decapitate the leadership of an enemy state while minimizing or avoiding civilian casualties. Low tech weapons have been more horrific in their use than high tech weapons. In WWII Japan's military killed more people with samuri swords than the U.S.A. killed in all of its aerial bombardments(including the two atomic bombs). It was mostly up close and personal slaughter of helpless prisoners. As horrific as the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan, 8,000 to 10,000 people a day were dying from low tech weapons and military actions every day the war continued when the atomic bombs brought an end to it. Similarly in the recent slaughter of hundreds of thousands to millions in Africa, most were beaten to death. We don't have to worry about democratic states, but fanatical revolutionaries that want to force their views on others, no matter what the cost in human lives. Some people have such a distorted perspective on reality that they can justify in their mind the killing of innocent civilians by suicide bombers, but think that considering using a high tech weapon to take out a despotic leader is morally wrong.

What you have just provided is a justification for using nuclear weapons. Within your justification you had two implicit assumptions:

1. We would only use our additional nuclear capcity to save lives lost during conventional warfare.

2. That morality depends upon justification.

1. Who decides who the fanatics are? You? Are you really qualified? Can you tell me how many Japanese died from painful radiation poisoning in the months following the end of the war? Do you know that the Machine Gun was invented with the belief that the horror of it's use would act as a deterrent for future wars. 2. You can justify anything. It's called Sophistry, and the ancient greeks built a whole school of thought around this idea. Morality is not proven or disproven by justification. Whether something is moral or not simply depends on the nature of the object being considered. Bombs are built to kill, indiscriminately, men and women, old and young alike. Nuclear bombs, when used, only result in destruction. If a person kill indiscriminately, and never did anything but destroyed, you would not dream of calling that person moral, regardless of how he was used. You might say the cause was just, but the man is still immoral. In the same way, a nuclear bomb is immoral, whether it is used justly or not.

A nuclear bomb is a weapon. Weapons can be used morally or immorally. A bomb designed to explode below ground, not emit any radiation and to target enemy leaders could be an ethical weapon. It usually is pretty easy to identify fanatics. A reasonable person can, but you have to try. A Country's leadership has a moral responsibility to protect its citizens. Without weapons this cannot be done. Ergo it would be immoral for a nation not to have weapons to protect itself. In WWII England left most of their army's weapons at Dunkirk. The British people themselves had been disarmed via social policies. If Germany had been able to cross the Channel, England would have quickly fallen. Luckily the RAF had just enough men and machines to thwart the Luftwaffe and the Germans did not have a good long range fighter, otherwise we would all be doing the goose step. In WWII, Britain could not operate their bombers during the day and developed the concept of area bombing where whole cities were targets. The U.S. in Europe continued with precision bombing at considerable loss to airmen and planes. Who is to say that either effort was more ethical as the allies were forced into a do-or-die war against fanatic maniacs. We are just lucky that Germany failed in their effort to develop the A-bomb and that Japan ran out of time developing their A-bomb (Japan had an advanced A-bomb program at the time of their defeat as well as the most advanced biological and chemical weapons development in the world - fortunately they did not develop a good delivery system). The machine gun pretty much ended the mass charges of cavalry and infantry characteristic of warfare until the 20th century. If you look at the tremendous casualties of the US Civil war (hundreds of thousands) with soldiers dying horrible lingering deaths from gangrene and infection, Hiram Maxim's invention probably did make warfare less lethal.

You say many things here. I will choose a couple of things that you said that jumped out at me the most. The first is that you say it

"is usually pretty easy to identify fanatics".

I'd like to know what your criteria is for a fanatic? Often one mans fanatic is another mans hero. What facts will you use to determine if a person is indeed a fanatic?

"A reasonable person can". Tell me, if you feel someone is a fanatic, say the legally elected communist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende. Can I not be a reasonable man and disagree. Am I not reasonable for thinking that the murderous Pinochet was a bad idea and Chile was better off with a highly educated, socially conscience leader? URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochet>

You also say "if you look at the tremendous casualties of the US Civil War.... Hiram Maxim's invention probably did make warfare less lethal"

I'm afraid you've been miss informed on the number of casualties in WWI. 9 million soldiers died in WWI. I suspect you forgot to count the non-American casualties. Compare that to the 700,000 casualties of the Civil War. Over 10 times more people died in WWI. In WWII, 22 million soldiers died. About 40 million civilians died. I disagree with your statement.

You said "Who is to say that either effort was more ethical as the allies were forced into a do-or-die war against fanatic maniacs."

Everything isn't right and wrong, evil versus good. Your suggesting killing women and children is ethical. I disagree. I might be convinced that it was necessary, it was a terrible time when terrible decisions had to be made, but not ethical or moral.

When you choose between the lesser of two evils, you are not making an ethical or moral choice. You're choosing an evil choice, an immoral choice which just so happens to be justified given the particular situation.

Wasn't it Dave Barry who said 'that for every crisis the world faces a man will come along who has the solution. That man is usually insane.' To deny that it is possible to identify fanatics will doom us to an exciting but unpleasant future. When it comes to the Civil War I am mister informed. Combatant casualty rates exceeded WWI and WWII, except when old generals steeped in the previous century's tactics ordered mass assaults on machine gun emplacements. The world wars were much bigger conflicts. It is not ethical to deliberately target civilians in a terror war. Developing tactics and weapons that would minimize human suffering and collateral damage when confronted with an unavoidable war is ethical. To state otherwise means that virtually every countries' government is evil because they all either maintain a military and/or depend on allies for their defence.

I'm not sure I agree with your figures here. In terms of combatant casualties, the accepted American Civil War numbers are 618,000. World War II military casualty rates are generally accepted at over 22 million. Yes, the US had less military casualties in WWII (405,000) than in the Civil War, but remember every soldier on both sides killed during the Civil War was an American so it kind of bends the numbers. The First World War is an interesting case as US soldiers were deployed less than a year before the war ended, yet still suffered 116,516 military casualties (out of the 8.6 million). This, the result of antiquated battle tactics in the face of new weaponry, poor equipment (the US actually kept the BAR machine gun out of the hands of most grunts because they were afraid the Germans would get and copy them), and of course, disease.

I think the Russians had the highest military casualties during the war. However, Stalin used the war to purge potential dissidents through war attrition by putting them in special brigades for such duties as suicide charges and as expendable aircraft gunners without parachutes. Estimates are that millions were deliberately sacrificed. Did you hear how they cleared mine fields? It also did not help the Russian effort that the Germans tricked Stalin into killing off his command structure just before the war (by creating false reports that made it look like they were conspiring with Germany to overthrow Stalin). But getting back to the original point. The machine gun (as well as the repeating rifle) did make massed charges obsolete and in my opinion probably resulted in lower battlefield casualties rates as compared to conflicts such as the American Civil War.

The machine gun did make massed charges obsolete. I'll give you that. Unfortunately, it took most of World War One for European generals to figure that out.

Don't know if this will go through, but regarding the bunker busting nuclear bomb, I just read about the reason behind its "development" in George Friedman's book "America's Secret War". The development of the technology was to discourage rogue 3rd world nations from using underground facilities to develop nuclear weapons or other WMD's. In particular it was directed toward Pakistan which up through 2001 had been irresponsible in proliferating nuclear technology. You would have to read the book to understand the reasoning behind this. The weapon will probably never be built, the threat of building it is probably all the deterrent needed. It is less about technology and more about the diplomacy being used to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

I've enjoyed this debate and would like to chime in again. Intent is a reasonable standard for judging the goodness or badness of a person or thing. In fact, courts use this standard all the time in determining whether to charge an alleged criminal with manslaughter or murder. So let me pose a hypothetical question, if you will. Is a nation "evil" if it develops nuclear weapons for the purpose of preventing its destruction at the hands of a larger, more powerful adversary that is armed with conventional weapons? Granted, the weaker nation's nuclear weapons are built to kill; however, the ultimate purpose of building the nukes is to maintain the peace - not to slaughter women and children. Nuclear deterrence is a planetary game of Russian roulette that works. If it fails in our war on "terror", it will be because those who attack us know that we will not and cannot respond with our nuclear arsenal.