Under certain circumstances, the bombing could create a phenomenon known as a firestorm, which can happen when there are many blazes in a given area - in this case, a city - and they merge into one huge inferno. When that happens, a giant updraft of heat pulls the air upward, and all the the cooler air on the ground gets sucked into the vortex, creating hurricane-force, superheated winds.
The British aviator James Spaight pointed out that when it came to bombing, the rules of war had loopholes you could pilot a B-17 through. The number-one loophole was the question of military installations. Everyone agreed that it was permissible to use airpower to hit military targets. The problem was that the accuracy of the technology at the time didn’t allow aircraft to reliably hit military targets. British tests right before the Second World War showed that fewer than two-thirds of bombers placed their bombs within five miles of an intended target. With accuracy like that, allowing bombing in civilian areas in order to go after military targets was the same as saying it was legal to kill civilians.
And if the Germans crossed the channel and started splashing up on British beaches, Churchill planned on using poison gas. Is anybody going to cry “war crime” if the Nazis are landing fifty miles from your house?
A descendant of ours reading a history in the future would be justified in thinking us to be the functional equivalent of the stereotypical reckless and childish “barbarians” that the Romans wrote of, although in possession of absurdly strong weapons they couldn’t hope to control. It would be unfair, though, if they thought us evil. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and if a nuclear holocaust had happened, or ever eventually occurs, evil was never why people poured their lives and reputations into such endeavors. So many who helped pave the way to this reality, rather than being murderous Adolf Eichmann-type monsters, were instead hoping their efforts would lead to better outcomes.
“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your (peace) congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” His sentiment that modern war would be so terrible it might make war impossible is also how many viewed what the new technologies and weapons might do. Such a rationale helps explain why good, ethical people could find themselves part of such a potentially catastrophic outcome. It can also make all softs of horrible things sound like good ideas.
How much would it affect your feelings about a murderous event from history if you found out that you were alive today only because of it? How many strangers’ lives from the past is your life today worth? There is no answer to this question, but feeling uneasy about it might not be a bad thing.
If you had been an American or British general in WW2 and had continually ordered your ground forces to destroy the structures and rip up the infrastructure of enemy cities while deliberately yet indiscriminately killing large numbers of the civilian noncombatants, you would have been removed from command. The Allied armies did not engage in this sort of deliberate conduct, but aerial bombing, which accomplished the same thing, was considered acceptable, even routine. In fact, if an air commander could get such results reliably, he very well might have been promoted.
Ethical lines that might be respected in a limited war get crossed with impunity in Total War. The stakes are so high that the lens through which everyone begins to view things is a simple one: life or death.
“How could I have been so stupid?” was his way of asking why he had been so gullible. He puzzled over the fact that he had not asked harder questions and had allowed the so-called collective wisdom of all these experienced national security officials to persuade him to go ahead. He had assumed that “the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” The experience taught him “never to rely on the experts.” He told Ben Bradlee: “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”
Kennedy said the summit meeting had been “the roughest thing in my life. He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas, we won’t get anywhere with him.”
But with the extraordinary power of this new bomb came new problems. Thermonuclear weapons are so powerful that they effectively work against the idea that you can use them as a deterrent, because the bigger they get, the less likely your adversary is to think you’ll use them.
Tactical nuclear weapons are those which are small enough to be used in situations that have a potential battlefield utility. Nuclear artillery shells fired from cannons or nuclear minds are two example. But tactical nuclear weapons actually opened up the door to a very quick escalation to the very big bombs that Oppenheimer hoped would never be used. Rather than one instead of the other, experts worried that you would likely just get both.
One might think that in a situation as important to humanity’s future as potential global nuclear war, the modern equivalent of philosopher-kings would meet, together with the most intelligent physicists and ethicists and others, in some sort of unprecedented global forum, where they could quietly and wisely (one hopes) discuss how to meet this potentially existential challenge. Instead, the reality of normal life and pedestrian concerns intervened. Politics was an obvious element that affected decision making, but matters like budgetary concerns and inter-service rivalries within the military also influenced the outcomes. Indeed, there is a pretty good argument to be made - and many have made it - that one of the primary reasons for adopting the atomic blitz strategy in the first place was budgetary - it was a cost-saving move. If you have an air force with lots of atomic bombs, maybe you don’t need to keep buying all the other expensive military equipment like tanks or cannons.
Is there an ethical way to fight a nuclear war? Is there a way to bomb cities and civilians with atomic weapons and have it square with American values and the values the Cold War West was trumpeting as a hallmark of its moral superiority over the “godless Communists”? In the view of the time, Stalin was as bad as Hitler had been. He was ruthless, and “the Reds” were on the move globally. But if you kill tens of millions of civilians to thwart the perceived evils of a totalitarian superpower, how much evil do you get splashed onto you in the process? And to complicate the ethical dilemma ever more, what if the side that purports to occupy the moral high ground strikes first?
Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.
Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars.
If there’s one thing WW2 proved, it was that it doesn’t matter how many arms treaties nations sign or what limits countries impose during peacetime - when societies are in the midst of a Total War, with their survival at stake, there’s nothing ethically sacrosanct in the arsenal. The bombings of cities that so horrified the world when the war first started were now so commonplace that the moral outrage fo 1939 seemed a quaint remnant of a prewar mentality. And to some, this new bomb just seemed like a more efficient and economical way to do with one airplane what was currently being done in raids with hundreds and hundreds of them.
“Germany” is a modern creation. Territories that include people or cultures often identified as “Germanic” encompass a much larger area than that occupied by the modern nation-state we now as Germany. For much of ancient history, most of this area was off the known map, the terrestrial equivalent of the dragons and sea monsters that inhabited the oceanic edge of the world.
So much of war is about nerve and morale and avoiding panic, and it’s interesting to speculate how many of the units in front of such an oncoming assault stood their ground to await the collision.
If you were born in Greece in 1000 BCE, did you know (or care) that there was a greater age before yours? It’s hard to now what you’re missing after it’s been gone for a couple of lifetimes.
Maybe we are looking at this entirely wrong. If we lived in an era when our history books taught us that Ben Franklin’s eighteenth-century Revolutionary War generation had landed a spacecraft on Mars and could completely cure cancer, would we care? Of course we would want the things of the past that seemed like improvements, but would we want the rest of the package that came along with it?
There are multiple ways that any account or story can be viewed, but it’s helpful to be reminded from time to time. Certain narratives, such as “golden ages” and “rise and falls” are so ingrained in our thinking that it’s easy to forget there might be other ways to see things. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter said that in some regions the Roman Empire taxed its citizens so highly and provided so few services in return, that some of those people welcomed the “conquering barbarians” as liberators.
When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down. Plagues can cause the same problems if they’re bad enough. Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.
Lots of things can cause famine. Insects can eat or spoil food; rivers and water sources can dry up or change course, or complex irrigation systems can be destroyed; poor farming practices can deplete the soil. Usually, though, the weather itself is the greatest threat. Even in the modern age, the utter dependence of agriculture on the right range of favorable climatic conditions is humbling. No nation is immune.
History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant. The “sudden appearance” of a new tribe of people into ancient history may have actually occurred over many lifetimes. What history has called “invasions” may sometimes have been more like migrations, and what history has termed “migrations” and portrayed as entire peoples simultaneously on the move may in many cases have been more like gradual long-term immigration.
Iron’s main value had less to do with its hardness than with its abundance.
Children could also be seen much more like a commodity than a family member. Selling children was a profitable business. Children were also farmed out for labor. This wasn’t seen by parents as a form of punishment or abuse, but more like an internship in which the child would learn valuable foundational skills necessary for later adult success. And farm families since agriculture began have used every strong hand available to work the land and keep food on the table. But seeing children as nothing more than easily exploitable low-wage labor was all too common. It wasn’t until the late 1930s in the US that child labor in such dangerous industries as mining and manufacturing was outlawed. It makes on wonder why our ancestors - many of whom were perfectly smart people - didn’t see how damaging these practices were. Yet perhaps our concept of what constitutes “damage” is different from theirs. They were raising kids to live in their world, a world alien to us. Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices? Maybe our best practices now will be deemed abusive or damaging to children by future standards. In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know how - but that’s also probably what our ancestors would have said.
One common practice throughout much of human history was to give children liquor or opium to relieve teething pain or to help them sleep.
Once upon a time, it was considered good parenting to teach your children a moral lesson in right and wrong by taking them to witness public executions. To make the lesson really stick, parents sometimes beat their children as they watched, forever linking the spectacle with physical pain.
DeMause believes that most children up until recent times would likely have met modern criteria as child abuse victims, which he and others like him believe may help explain why, for example, eras like the Middle Ages were so barbarous.