[Politics] The Atomic Bomb - Good Thing or Bad Thing

[LesMTS]

Reading Oppenheimer's biography just now (Which is amazing, by the way. Read it.), and been thinking: is/was the atomic bomb a force for good or a force for evil? I'll leave out "it's more complicated than that" on the poll. Vote for which side you lean to.

Shallow starting points for debate:

Bad Thing: makes it horrifically very easy for humanity to destroy itself and almost everything else we know

Good Thing: ended the second world war in the pacific with nowhere near the number of casualties or suffering we would have expected had it continued in the same vein; arguably has kept large-scale peace over the sixty years since its invention and tempered the desire of potential warmakers

Anyway...

[ladysavage]

dear lord you've picked the wrong night to try and have a high brow debate haven't you? most of the internet will be drunk/full of sugar/covered in blood/all of the above by now surely?

[Kenny Macca Doo]

It'll be good for when aliens try and invade us.

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by ladysavage

dear lord you've picked the wrong night to try and have a high brow debate haven't you? most of the internet will be drunk/full of sugar/covered in blood/all of the above by now surely?

Haha, I just got back from work, no fun times for me. Although it's a suitably horrific topic for Hallowe'en.

YouTube - "Hiroshima" BBC Documentary...

I see a couple of folk have voted "bad thing". In the interests of debate, what do you think the world would now be like had it not been invented? Do you think the cold war would have remained cold without the threat of atomic annihilation?

[karbon14]

good thing, for the reasons mentioned. you've kinda covered my points already.

[endless psych]

The idea that it stopped the war in the pacific, thus sparing rather then ending lives, is not as clear cut as it might appear. There are those who suggest that the desire to test an atomic device in a combat situation was greater then the will of the Japanese army to fight on.

Sure the emperor might be all about the "fight to the death" thing but all the troops on the front line? It's perhaps a big ask to accept that they would have fought to the death on a bigger scale then the civillian casualties of the atomic bomb.

That said it's likely the reason the cold war was cold was mutually assurred destruction.

On balance of potential casualties probably a good thing. Even if Nagasaki and Hiroshima were tests more then efforts to end conflict.

However my real answer would be indifference. As an atomic bomb is neither good nor bad. That I suppose is a concesion to the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

[djtoast]

Originally Posted by LesMTS

Good Thing: ended the second world war in the pacific with nowhere near the number of casualties or suffering we would have expected had it continued in the same vein;

that reads to me like "is issuing the met with firearms a good thing? yes, because otherwise they would have had to beat jean charles de menezes to death with truncheons, which would have been more brutal"

it seems to me that there's a gap between the logical answer to your question and the moral one that can't be bridged - or at least it's phrased in such a was as to make answering it difficult. "is nuking 250,000 people less bad than killing 500,000 with converntional incendiary bombs?" - yeah i guess. does that in turn make the invention of nuclear bombs a good thing? - weeelllll... i can't quite make the leap to saying yes, i've just got a roadblock in my mind that doesn't allow the flow of the argument to take me to allowing either.

[MarkMono]

I don't think it's possible to conclusively weigh questions of moral courage of this magnitude without being a touch sociopathic.

More bad than good, just.

[metallideth]

An atomic bomb is designed solely to kill other human beings, therefore it cannot be good by most people's standards (I would hope). The reason there's arguably been 'peace' over the past 60 years is because all the large Western militarised nations have shared roughly the same economic model in that time. As for the Cold War? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Hungary, Czechaslovokia, El Salvador, Iraq, Iran and Palestine among others will contain people who probably disagree with the assessment that the USA and the USSR were peaceful countries in the latter half of the 20th century.

[LesMTS]

Originally Posted by metallideth

An atomic bomb is designed solely to kill other human beings, therefore it cannot be good by most people's standards (I would hope). The reason there's arguably been 'peace' over the past 60 years is because all the large Western militarised nations have shared roughly the same economic model in that time. As for the Cold War? Vietnam, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Hungary, Czechaslovokia, El Salvador, Iraq, Iran and Palestine among others will contain people who probably disagree with the assessment that the USA and the USSR were peaceful countries in the latter half of the 20th century.

That wasn't the assessment I made.

[metallideth]

arguably has kept large-scale peace over the sixty years since its invention and tempered the desire of potential warmakers

I accept that proxy invasions may not match the definition of 'large scale' but suffering can be measured in other ways than numbers.

[I'm Your God Now]

Good thing, it created Godzilla.