Gotcha. I'm the author of that page, by the way (hence the little Professor Chaos profile picture in the corner).

Being a rogue or stalwartly determined doesn't make you a madman. Not thinking rationally makes you a madman.

Delivery system or not, U.S. bombs are mostly in the U.S. until delivered elsewhere. I don't feel threatened by U.S. nukes, since their purpose is to keep foreign nukes from coming here. Unfortunately the landscape has changed so that you no longer need to be a superpower to get a nuke, which is why Ahmedinejad and Kim Jong Ill are such threats.

Of course a human life is not a coin. But from a strategic standpoint, how can you account for life except by numbers? You have to use numbers to prioritize. If you can find a cure for one disease, would you cure the one that claims 100 lives each year, or the one that claims 10,000? Look at the numbers again on the blog post (I gave a source, I don't care to go farther than that; the numbers can be found in dozens of reports and books). Besides the total war aspect that makes civilians combatants (we don't do that, but our enemies do it regularly), would you rather kill 200,000 (supposedly) innocent Japanese civilians in two bombs impressive enough to bring about a quick end to a horrible war, or would you prefer to kill at least five million armed Japanese civilians in a prolonged bloody guerilla conflict, and American soldiers besides? Plus bringing an end to the massacring of tens of thousands of Chinese innocents by Japanese soldiers.

It was not a net profit in lives, but a difficult decision to kill a few to save many. Those that died in the bomb would likely have died in the invasion anyhow.

"Just another example of the beauties of what a Capitalist society can accomplish."
This is what I meant by cliché. It is a typical leftist statement blaming all the world's woes on capitalism. Also, your words constitute an argument.

I seem to remember you being more clear in your communication on the suggestion forums, months ago when I was last there. What happened?

Shocking!

A play on words. Rogues are sometimes classified as mentally ill. Delivering a nuke by hand into enemy territory is 'insane' in a positive sense.

Yes, Iran and North Korea are the ones feeling threatened by our nukes, not us. However, if that is reason for them to get nukes, then I do feel threatened by our nukes as a cause.

A soldier's life *is* coin. From a political standpoint however, treating civillians as soldiers to be killed anyways is nasty business because it's the first step towards greater crimes, such as genocide, especially when you make decisions for them, such as "well, they were going to become soldiers anyways!". Remember, the Nazi party didn't start gassing Jews unprovoked. They did it to save their crumbling nation.

A soldier is supposed to kill enemies to save innocents, not kill innocents to save his own ass.

Months ago, you were probably in my target audience, so I tailored my words to my understanding of your understanding.

Assuming you're not joking, SuperMegaMynt, no, combustion of gasoline, diesel, kerosene et. al. to move a reciprocating engine is not electric, it is chemical energy that you harness by having the expanding gasses move your pistons or fans.

Edit: Ergh, this got longer than intended ¬.¬ Shortened.

So when we're saying 'electric', we're not meaning the exchanging of electrons, if I get your meaning right. What then, like specifically batteries?

Batteries, fuel cells, generators driven by turbines. Exchange of electrons is, of course, part of it, as it is for ICE, but boiling everything down to a subatomic scale makes engineering impossible, and it is not very helpful to understand how stuff works.

Do I take it, then, that you believe that if the U.S. didn't have nukes, we wouldn't have to worry about an Iranian or Korean nuke? Do you really want to take that chance?

Genocide was one of the things carefully weighed and considered before bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese were committing genocide, and the quickest way to end it with the fewest innocents dead was by using our most potent weapon. It was really a psychological weapon (as it still is as long as no more are used aggressively), since no one had seen a city destroyed by a single bomb before.

And are you serious about that Nazi comment? I can see where you might get your reasoning. Germany was suffering from extreme depression, and this Hitler guy, with his optimistic and patriotic speeches, promised a way out to a nation desperate enough to cling to anyone who promised a good future. It adds profundity to Michael Caine's line in The Dark Knight (a great anti-terrorism movie, by the way), when he tells Batman that the mob had been pushed to the point of desperation, and in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand. Germany had become desperate, and turned to a man who was truly insane.

The deal-breaker was that Hitler so vocally provided the Jews as a scapegoat. This does not mean the Jews provoked the Nazis, and your statement to that effect is highly offensive and irresponsible.

"A soldier is supposed to kill enemies to save innocents, not kill innocents to save his own ass." This is why we fought in World War II, and this is why we fight in Iraq. This is why we dropped the atomic bombs. We killed enemies to save innocents, namely the Chinese civilians who were victims of genocide. And, dare I say it, our American soldiers were innocents as well, brave volunteers risking their lives for their country and for peace. Our world is governed by the aggressive use of force. There will always be an aggressor, and if no one stands up to that force, it will cover the world and cause innocent people to suffer. Peace is achieved only through military victory. The faster military victory comes, the less suffering is caused by the conflict. The atomic bomb brought about a swift victory after years of bloody war, and I count that a good thing.

Again, if you could choose between saving 5,000,000 lives or 200,000, which would you choose? I'm glad Harry Truman was strong enough to make that difficult decision.

It's helpful when considering global resource management. How do we charge these batteries, fuel cells, and turbines? With power plants that run on gasoline perhaps?

Either we get our energy from the electron, via carbohydrates or whatever other fuels we can find, (and those other kinds of fuels are what I'm interested in), or we get it from the neutron and proton via fission, and mebbeh fusion.

Edit: More clearly then--> What fuel do we use to create the charged batteries?

No. I want humanity to miraculously lose the knowledge of weapon *delivery* systems.

Our fire bombing of Tokyo was as justified as the Nazi party's genocide. It was nothing more than killing strangers to preserve your neighbors. (Notice how carefully I'm avoiding saying "YES IT'S ALL GOOD DURRR" or "NO IT'S ALL BAD DURRRR". That's because I honestly don't care.)

Now that U.S. has broken the code of war which says you're not supposed to attack civilians, there's no reason other than our own military for why others shouldn't do the same to us. We're swiftly making it an 'us versus the world' scenario. You see, violating the rules of warfare could potentially be a greater threat than all of Japan.

I'm happy that soldiers got to keep their lives. However, in the end it might cost the country the lives of its civilians in turn. By then the soldiers will be dead of old age anyways, but something even worse will have happened; they will have died in vain because they failed to do the one thing a soldier does; protect the civilians.

Well, I can't exactly state any more ways than I have that those bombs saved five to ten million Japanese lives and millions of innocent Chinese civilians (the same number as died in both atomic bombs was being massacred in China each month!), because you will only focus on the 400,000 to 800,000 soldiers lives that were saved.

Comparing the justification of firebombing Tokyo to the Holocaust is extremely offensive, but logic can't trump that kind of irrational thought. I am always amazed that we win wars at all, since we are the only ones who seem to be at all interested in the so-called "rules" of warfare.

And wouldn't it be better to not have weapons than not have delivery systems? I think we're both speaking English, but I honestly don't understand your line of thought, try as I might.

Oh, a prophet are you?

Heehee, down to ad hominem... Well, you did last longer than most of the others. Congrats.

Killing eachother is an important human tradition. Over repetitive iterations it helps us evolve. Remove that, and we'd might as well all jump off cliffs now. Destroying every last human however is a little too far, since it prevents the next iteration.

Nobody in their right mind would develop a bomb without the delivery system. And nobody in their right mind would let someone develop a bomb.

The day that anybody can go anywhere on the world will herald the suicide of humanity. Oh, not directly of course. Traveling per se never killed a soul. It doesn't matter though. The strange thing is I think that's been the goal all along.

And damnit, quit trying to understand me! I'm speaking like a deranged lunatic FFS, and they're only words anyways. If you can't find your own understanding, you don't deserve to breath. And since you clearly are breathing, some part of you has an understanding. Listen to that.

SMM: That's just it, if we are able to store the energy in batteries (electrochemical), molten NaCl (thermal) or other salts, water (potential energy), metal (electrochemical), we do not need to care where the energy comes from and can employ different means of obtaining it, like solarthermic power plants, offshore 'windmills', tidal power plants, fuel cells, photovoltaic panels...

All of them use (on a global, not universal scale) renewable (or virtually renewable) energy sources, and not fossil fuels.

Chaos, did you mean the NATO by saying 'we', or just the US? Because I do believe other countries care about waging war correctly, as well.

SuperMegaMynt, I fail to see the ad hominem remarks in Chaos' posts. He's been very civil so far, in my opinion.

There's one good thing I see about burning fossil fuels; once we run out of them, we can finally quit worrying about running out of them and get on with the next stage of our technology!

Edit: He called me offensive. =(

Blech, I can't help but comment!

No, my comment was not ad hominem. I honestly cannot follow your train of thought, and I really do believe it is irrational. I didn't call you a retard or anything, I claimed that your arguments are irrational, and as such, I can't debate it with facts and logic. That is not ad hominem.

Killing each other is not an important human tradition! How can you say that dropping the bomb was bad, then say killing is an important tradition! This is what I mean by irrational. That does not make sense! If Chewbacca is a wookie, the jury must acquit.

If you believe in God, then you must believe that murder is immoral. If you don't believe in God, then nothing matters at all, and what do you care if we nuke the world or not? The only time when fighting a war is just is when the cause is the prevention of further loss of life, and preserving freedom. Freedom is more important than life, because what kind of life is it if you're not free?

"The day that anybody can go anywhere on the world will herald the suicide of humanity. Oh, not directly of course. Traveling per se never killed a soul. It doesn't matter though. The strange thing is I think that's been the goal all along." What in Hell are you talking about? It is not ad hominem to say that this statement makes no logical sense, and is completely irrational. Shouldn't universal easy travel help to unify the world? Of course mobility aids military action, but it aids peaceful action as well! I can use my hands to make art or build a house, or I can use them to wield a weapon and kill another person. This does not make my hands evil, rather my choice on how I use my hands is good or evil. Transportation is not evil, what is good or evil is whether we fly or drive or sail to another place to build or to destroy.

The use of atomic weapons is a bad thing, since it killed 100,000 to 200,000 people; but not using them on Japan 63 years ago would have been a greater evil, since five to ten million more would have died had the war continued.

EDIT: Thank you toshiro. And no, I did not mean to exclude anyone, of course we are not the ones who care to be civil. It is a thin line to walk on between defeating evil and becoming evil (another theme handled beautifully by The Dark Knight), which is why using nukes on Japan was such a difficult decision.

EDIT AGAIN: I called your statement offensive, because it was.

Chaos, I do not believe in God, but I believe that civilization is an important thing. But I'm at work and can't write articles :(

As for SMM's comment that we should burn all fossil fuels: I hope you were joking, because we need many fossil fuels, such as oil, for the production of critically important things like colour, medication, materials; coal for filtering purposes (first example that came to mind). That is why we should, ideally, immediately stop burning them.

Edit: I am such a fool, I forgot steel production as use for coal (heat is not used fro energy production there, but melting... fundamentally different).

Here's the thing Chaos... Guns pwn art 9 times out of 10.

You are right, Mynt! We find common ground at last.

It would be ideal for us all to be creative rather than destructive, but someone at some point will act aggressively, and the rest of us must be prepared to do what is necessary, unpleasant as it may be, to contain the aggression and discourage further aggression. That is why we have a military, so that we don't end up with another Nazi or Japanese Imperialist army bent on world domination and oppression.

"It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two... And those who have not swords can still die upon them. Would you have the folk of Gondor gather you herbs only, when the Dark Lord gathers armies?"
- Éowyn from Return of the King

Or, more concise: Si vis pacem, para bellum. But that's a commonplace :(

Yes, that's it exactly (I had to look it up :) )

Easy for Éowyn to say... he still has borders to defend. He only has to worry about swords. He lives in a world where if two armies fight, atleast one will win.