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Discussion on: What's your atomic bomb?

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Spencer Sutton

The atomic bomb allowed for the end of a war with less lives lost than otherwise. Had there been no atomic bomb the US would've invaded Japan leading to much much more destruction.

Since then wars have been on a much smaller scale arguably because of nuclear weapons.

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Dian Fay • Edited

You can maybe make that argument for Hiroshima, although it was far from settled even without the benefit of historical hindsight: Dwight Eisenhower himself commented in 1945 that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing". And there's no excuse whatsoever for Nagasaki. But regardless, the real or imagined necessity of a "necessary evil" does not actually make it less evil.

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Spencer Sutton

"If the military had its way, we would have fought until all 80 million Japanese were dead. Only the atomic bomb saved me. Not me alone, but many Japanese, ironically speaking, were saved by the atomic bomb." nytimes.com/1983/08/10/world/augus...

Anyways, still an interesting question to ask and something software engineers should be aware of.