To the first nuclear blast.

They should have launched 20 or 30 at the same time.

They used all they had. They even threatened to drop a third one that didn't exist.

I'm pretty thankful we have 66 years of precedence for not using nuclear weapons against people.

conventional warfare is just more fun.
I love a quality carpet bombing.

War is the product of greed and ignorance. The best I can say for it is it provides an acceptable game theme. Otherwise it's a bunch of young men dying because old men got angry.

the firebombing of Tokyo killed far more than the 2 nuclear bombs combined. why arnt people talking about the firebombing?

its because all the fluffers are actually tarded and just recite party taglines while trying to sound concerned for humanity.


"10 March 1945: 334 B-29s dropping incendiaries destroy ~267,000 buildings; ~25% of city[3] (Operation Meetinghouse) killing some 100,000"

that was just one mission



edit: i almost forgot about the British firebombing Dresden, killing an absurd ammount of a single city as well.

"In March 1945, the Nazi regime ordered its press to publish a death toll of 200,000 for the Dresden raids. Death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have been given.[7] An independent investigation commissioned by the city council in 2010 reported a maximum of 25,000 victims"

i don't know, ford, why aren't you mentioning the massive scale of the genocide both parties were responsible for?

(and they carpet bombed both tokyo and dresden, i've seen the footage many, many times)

acceptable game theme and incredible historical footage, terror :P

I'm not a historian. I teach math. I was ignorant of the firebombing, but it certainly does not earn my tacit approval. I suppose the fact that 100,000 people could be killed with one bomb made it more newsworthy, but death is death. My ignorance of the death of many people unjustly killed does not mean I condone it.

you shouldn't need to teach history to approve defeating nazi germany and imperial japan.

the people who firebombed tokyo or dresden, neither of them started either fight. if there is anybody to blame, blame the aggressor.

Japan defined their role quite clearly with the subjugation of the Chinese and their attack on Pearl Harbor. I do not fault my country for defending itself.

That was a different era. I can hope improved communication produce better future results.

I'm certainly not going to don sack cloth and ashes and beat my breast to pay penance for something that they asked for when they initiated the hostilities.

I feel badly that it came to that, but you must deal with fanatics in some fashion, when you can't live with them, you gotta kill them, or fix it so that they can do you no harm.

i feel terrible for this. sorry.

simple math is the 180,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a mere drop in the bucket compared to the epic loss of life that would of been if the United Stated was forced to invade mainland Japan.

another thing that is lost is that the bombs were no where NEAR as powerful as the thermo devices of today. the Hiroshima bomb was 0.02 megatons. there are 50 and 100 megaton devices today.

It's another reason to be thankful for 66 years of precedence on not using nukes.

Some people fear nuclear weapons. I personally fear a world without them.

That is rather cryptic.

For 6 decades nuclear deterrent and mutually assured destruction have prevented the worlds powers from going at each other directly. As terrifying as the thought of nuclear weapons may be it is still far less terrifying then the large scale conventional warfare that so defined the first half of the twentieth century.

Combined the two world wars left almost 90,000,000 soldiers and civilians dead. Any way you stack it peace enforced through MAD is preferable to that. Sure it may not be a perfect peace all the time, but wars where casualties are measured in the thousands or even the tens of thousands is a hell of an improvement over measuring them in the millions or the tens of millions. This is why I fear a world without nukes more then I fear a world with them.

I don't have an issue with having a handful of nukes in the world, but we have more than necessary for a deterant. It's a waste of money and resources.

The largest nuclear bombs have an explosive energy of several tens of megatons, or about 10^17 Joules, whereas the Earth's rotational energy is around 10^29 Joules. The amount of fault-moving ("Earth-slimming") energy from the 2004 Tsunami earthquake (magnitude 9.3) was estimated at more than 10&^22 Joules, or roughly 100,000 times that of the biggest nuclear bombs. Russia and the United States have the potential capacity to release 2.6^22 Joules — or approximate 25% of the energy of the 2004 tsunami-causing earthquake.

That's just shear energy without looking at tactical strikes it is more than enough to sterlize the Earth.

Mutually Assured Destruction depends on both sides having enough nukes to completely destroy each other. If both, or even just one, side(s) only have a handful of nukes then mutually assured destruction losses the "assured" part. At the point nukes actually become a viable battlefield weapon. To maintain the proper balance of terror both sides need at least a few hundred weapons each, though 1,000 - 2,000 would be preferable. The biggest problem with MAD is making sure it doesn't just become a fluff measuring contest like it did during the Cold War. The solution to that is treaties that limit the number of devices each side can possess while still giving everyone enough devices to ensure the "mutual" part of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Essentially MAD is a circular firing squad writ large.

EDIT:

on second thought Mexican standoff might be a better description.

this

i need to see if my account on that naval forum you got me to join is still active.

We've detonated 2,000+ nukes since the first.. roll tide

2053 as of 1998

cool little vid I found

http://www.youtube.com/...nIkZkk4keQJ9Q&index=1

Your data is interesting Mapleson but sterilizing the earth might well require enough energy to vaporize the oceans so that the deep sea bacterial colonies that do not depend on the sun are also destroyed.

This would take about 5*10^28J--which is still 2 million times the energy of the full release of nuclear weapons.

Don't get me wrong, life would get pretty hard for multicelualar organisms like humans, but I think life is a little tougher than you think.

Aye, fair enough, I was thinking land masses when I said "the Earth".

i am a retard

that can't tell the difference

between the quote and edit buttons.