Nuclear War Part 4: Nucear War Is Over?...

Nuclear war Part 4.  Part 1

"History once a Tragedy is Now A Farce" K. Marx

"In War Truth is The First Casualty" Aeshelus

The first half of the blood soaked 20th century had finally ended, with the conclusion arriving in the ghastly form of nuclear fission bomb detonations on the civilian polulations of Nagaski and Hiroshima. The unparelled devestation of World War II had finished. In it's closure WWII had earned two unique, unsurpassed and justifiably repulsive distinctions. The first observation of note, is the sickening new world record for the number of people killed during a war. 1939-1945 resulted in 50+ million deaths, their corpses left rotting across Europe, Africa and Asia. This dwarf's any of the deaths tallied up during our species curiously homicidal history of engaging in wars.

The previous World War, WW I, had less than 20 million people murdered and it did not have nuclear weapons. Predicatably in my view, the combatants were not too reluctant, but instead, often all too eager, to employ new chemical weapons, as well as the relatively new rapid fire, automatic, recoil machine gun - these are two technologies I will return to, for use in analogies for nuclear weapons, the latter will be in Part 4 (II). The former (chemical weapons) I will only breifly touch upon as it is a theme in my closing remarks on how to resolve or avoid nuclear war.

World War II also eclipses any war that has since occured. That is if we are using the grisly yard-stick of number of people slaughtered. The next war that came close to WWII was the complicated wars in the Demoncratic Republic of the Congo, peaking in the late 1990's-2000's, whose dead are estimated at some 5 million - who know's if the Hutu's fleeing Rwanda into the Cogno, after commiting their serveral hundred thousand person genocide, would have hesitated to use fusion bombs - assuming they had access to them - I for one do not know. The fact that I do not know, is frankly alarming.

The second unnerving distiction of World War II was that it was, and still is, the only war to go nuclear - it set the dangerous precedent that our species is actually capable of dropping nuclear weapons on civilian cities during a war. Needles to say this is a pathetic example of what we can do to one-another. It is offensive to both our common decency and to our shared humanity. It is a frightening lowpoint in human history, it tells us that we are capable of directly using nuclear weapons on eachother. We can only hope that the rule of "history repeating itself" will make an exception in the case of nuclear fusion weapons. The optimist and the pessimist both will reach plausible and different conclusions on whether fusion bombs will be the exception to, or another confirmamation of, this rule.




Thanks Brady. 3fs.org