Uggh... Barbie looks awful (and Oppenheimer is too long) by 6IXSTRINGJACK

CINEMA

Uggh... Barbie looks awful (and Oppenheimer is too long)

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, February 20, 2024 18:54
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Wednesday, July 26, 2023 11:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
"Japan Was Already Defeated": The Case Against the Nuclear Bomb and for Basic Morality

By Timothy P. Carney

July 26, 2023

“I was against it on two counts,” Dwight Eisenhower, supreme allied commander, five-star general, and president of the United States, said of dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities. “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

This certainly cuts against the common argument these days: that dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, certainly the lives of American soldiers, and maybe even Japanese lives on net.

Since the movie Oppenheimer came out, I have had occasion to opine against the nuclear bombings based on straightforward moral principles. I have repeatedly been told that I am being too precious.

Many view the question of whether to kill the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an example of the “trolley problem.”

The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths?

The implication is that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima is flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.

It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life for a million reasons because, in real life, things don’t run like an automated trolley on a track. We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.

Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.

People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender.

Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Adm. William Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief military adviser, agreed with Eisenhower. “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” Leahy wrote. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

Again, you can believe other people besides Leahy or Eisenhower. I can’t adjudicate the various claims. But I can conclude that there was lots of uncertainty about where this war was going. There certainly weren’t just two possible paths.

When we are deeply uncertain about the consequences of our actions, where do we turn? We turn to moral principles, including the principle that it is immoral to kill innocent women and children.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/japan-was-already-defeated-the-case-against
-the-nuclear-bomb-and-for-basic-morality/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Get fucked, Carney. Yeah. You are to precious. But only when your "I hate America" is hanging out.

Where's your "moral principals" about drone strikes killing women and children when you've got the President you want in office?

I bet that article doesn't exist. Because people like you don't have any moral principals.

You people are loathsome.

And go bounce on your trolley problem.

--------------------------------------------------

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Thursday, July 27, 2023 6:24 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Where's (correction: where are) your "moral principals" (correction: principles) about drone strikes killing women and children when you've got the President you want in office?

I bet that article doesn't exist. Because people like you don't have any moral principals. (correction: principles)

You people are loathsome.

Joe Biden has all but ended US drone warfare

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-joe-biden-has-all-but-ended-us-dron
e-warfare/

In the second year of President Joe Biden’s administration, the number of US airstrikes fell to a historic low
https://airwars.org/research/us-airstrikes-fell-to-historic-low-in-202
2-despite-fresh-operations/

6ixStringJack, your signature reads: "How you do anything is how you do everything."
6ix, you and every Trumptard I know (without even one exception) do everything in a half-ass manner, just exactly how you did this particular comment claiming Democrats are killing people with drone strikes. That is why your lives are "difficult", "unfulfilling", "disappointing", or whatever single word describes your feelings. Your feelings are not caused by Democrats. Your feelings are caused by you and how you live and screw up everything you touch.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, July 27, 2023 7:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The tragedy of the Manhattan Project
Framing nuclear as a military-first technology has been disastrous for mankind

by Matthew Yglesias, Jul 27, 2023

If you were writing a Manhattan Project movie as a work of fiction, you would tell a different story than any of the contested versions of reality.

The fictional version might go something like this: the United States starts way behind in nuclear physics, with fission having been first demonstrated in Berlin in December of 1938 and the world’s premier quantum scientist, Werner Heisenberg, leading the German effort. But Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two Jewish refugees from Hitler’s dictatorship, write to FDR that the United States needs to explore the creation of a fission bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, leads a team that features critical contributions at every level from exiles and emigres. They beat Heisenberg to the bomb — in part because Niels Bohr refuses to help the Nazis and in part because Hitler thinks quantum mechanics is “Jewish science” — and, because of this nuclear breakthrough, win the war.

As the movie “Oppenheimer” shows, this is more or less the narrative the Manhattan Project protagonists thought they were living out.

But they were wrong. Their work was incredibly impressive from a technical standpoint, and it did end up getting used in the war. But Germany had already surrendered, and despite the endless debates over the validity of its use on Japan, no one thinks the United States wouldn’t have won the war without nuclear bombs. Instead, the causal importance of the Manhattan Project for the world was all about its influence on the postwar era. Again, as detailed in the film, the American government was initially optimistic about obtaining a monopoly on nuclear weapons, but that proved short-lived in part thanks to Soviet espionage.

And what I think is really interesting is that while the Manhattan Project indisputably accelerated nuclear science, I think that by turning nuclear research into a military-first undertaking, in the longer run it probably retarded the development of nuclear electricity for civilian purposes. This is the kind of thing that’s by nature inherently speculative. But as a person who loves counterfactual historical speculations, I think it’s correct — if World War II had somehow not happened, commercial nuclear reactors would have been built later but in a more sustainable way that eventually led to their more widespread adoption.

The Manhattan Project didn’t accomplish its goals

People continue to debate the morality of the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in important ways there never was a “decision” in the way that people often think about this. Harry Truman established presidential control over the use of nuclear weapons after the bombing of Nagasaki. That’s not to say he was somehow out of the loop on the earlier bombings; he always accepted responsibility for them as part of the overall ethic of “the buck stops here.”

But on an operational level, no distinction was drawn between nuclear weapons and other forms of ordinance. The United States was at war with Japan, and the military commanders were empowered to deploy available weapons in order to try to defeat their enemy.

The interesting high-level policy decision was the decision to build the bombs in the first place. This was a monumental undertaking that cost $2 billion relative to the 1940 GDP of $200 billion. Importantly, the bulk of that money did not go to Oppenheimer and his famous team of scientists at Los Alamos. Everything you see in the movie in the New Mexico desert — the town built from scratch, the international all-star team of physicists, the testing site, etc. — accounted for about 10% of the program’s budget. The bulk of the expense was building the multiple nuclear reactors and supportive infrastructure required to manufacture the quantity of fissile material needed to build the bombs. In other words, it wasn’t just a very expensive science project (though it was that), it was also an even more expensive manufacturing program.

Having achieved success, General Leslie Groves and the even higher-level officials who authorized the program obviously weren’t going to say “well, this bomb isn’t even that useful.” They used it in hopes of ending the war faster, and in this case it worked.

But a separate question from the wisdom of using the bomb, now having built it, was whether it made sense ex post to have built it in the first place. A science project that wasn’t useful against Germany isn’t just disappointing from a narrative standpoint; the entire strategic concept of the Unites States from 1940 onward was “Europe First.” If you’d proposed a very expensive and difficult undertaking that wasn’t helpful in beating Germany, it would have been rejected. But it’s hard to predict the future, and ex ante it seemed like a good idea, given the purported threat of the Nazi Bomb. And the sheer sunk cost ended up shaping postwar history.

A world without Hitler

But what if Hitler had never come to power? One way of generating that counterfactual outcome involves assuming something different happened in World War I. Those WWI counterfactuals are near and dear to my heart, but a little wacky for these purposes.

Instead let’s posit that the center-right Brüning Cabinet inaugurated in 1930 embarked on a program of fiscal and monetary stimulus that successfully fought the Great Depression. The likely upshot would be that in the 1932 federal elections, the various non-Nazi rightist parties gain vote share rather than losing it. The non-Nazi right of the Weimar era was not a particularly friendly or admirable group of people, but they wouldn’t have launched a huge war, provoked an exodus of scientists from Europe, or compelled left-wing American scientists to push for a crash military physics program. Germany itself would have settled down into something resembling “normal” left-right politics, the United States would continue to be somewhat isolationist in its outlook, and Britain and France would have been focused on imperial issues.

In this context, nobody is looking at the early fission experiments of 1938–1939 and saying the government needs to throw money at this.

And without military funding, nuclear reactor construction proceeds much more slowly (it’s expensive!) and primarily for pure scientific research. In real history, Chicago Pile-1 was the world’s first reactor and it was built for research, but immediately after that the U.S. government started building reactors to manufacture fissile material. Counterfactually, we’d have seen multiple research reactors rolled out over a period of years. These reactors would have posed the question “is there a cost-effective way to use this technology to make electricity?” and work would have proceeded over time on trying to find positive answers to that question. And of course, as is often the case in peacetime, there would have been military spinoffs as civilian technology advanced. The internal combustion engine was not developed in order to power tanks, but once ICE vehicles were around we got military designs.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-tragedy-of-the-manhattan-project

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, July 27, 2023 8:59 AM