On Fri, Nov 23, 2001 at 02:48:10PM -0500, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> The US was the first to acquire nuclear weapons, and
> then immediately used them, in war, against a nonnuclear opponent's
> cities.
I think the US was right (well, right as a state can be) to use
atomic bombs to force Japan's surrender. The "hard way" would've
resulted in much more misery on both sides. Japan would probably
be an impoverished third world country today, and a year or more
of continued war would have posed serious threats to domestic
freedom.
I just learned of a shocking example of the latter last night while
reading David Henderson's <http://www.davidrhenderson> "The Joy of
Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey". In early 1945 Roosevelt proposed
a law giving the Director of War Mobilization the power to prevent
workers from quitting their jobs or taking new jobs without
permission, punishable by a year in prison and/or a $10k (nearly
$100k in today's dollars) fine. The bill passed in the house, but
was defeated in the senate 46 to 29 after the Director admitted
that the law was "needed" not only far war production, but also
for civilian goods and post-war reconversion (I hear a ratchet in
the background) and another official said that the manpower situation
was in excellent shape.
However, the US made a grave mistake in a-bombing Japanese _cities_.
Total destruction of some relatively open space would have sufficed
to demonstrate overwhelming destructive capacity.
This goes against what I wrote above, but I have to wonder what
the world would be like today if the US hadn't also immediately
a-bombed the Soviet Union into submission, thus freeing Eastern
Europe, ending communism and empire in the USSR/Russia, and possibly
averting 50 years of communism in China and 45 years of cold war
(at least the cold war that we experienced).
-- Mike Linksvayer http://gondwanaland.com/ml/
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