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by dragonwriter 3033 days ago
> Wars always have casualties. Technology helps to reduce them. In WW2 it was normal to wipe whole cities using bombs.

Large scale aerial bombardment of cities in WWII was enabled by advances in technology in the period shortly before that period, so it's really not a good thing to bring up to support a blanket “technology helps reduce them” claim about casualties.
1 comments
riku_iki 3033 days ago
Still I believe it is hard to ignore improvements in modern weapons precision.
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IntronExon 3033 days ago
Oh for sure, you can get much more bang for your buck out of a swarm of MIRV’ed ICBMs carrying megatons of hydrogen bombs than bayonets and muskets. I mean, just try ignoring intersecting blast waves and thermal pulses! And chlorine gas? Pffft, piss on your socks and you can breathe through them but try that shit with VX!

Get it?

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riku_iki 3033 days ago
because superpowers have ICBMs, we don't see large scale wars with 10s millions of casualties for 70 years.
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dragonwriter 3033 days ago
> we don't see large scale wars with 10s millions of casualties for 70 years.

The long amorphous war(s) in Indochina alone seems to likely be on that order of magnitude.

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IntronExon 3033 days ago
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...

That’s tens of millions, and I’m being generous in ignoring how you’ve moved the goalposts. Your thesis is simply unsupportable, sorry.

Besides, we don’t know what the future holds, but in terms of raw possibilities we can now end all human life on Earth thanks to technology. That’s also new in the last 70 years. Hopefully we’ll never do it, but we could. Thst also flies in the face of the “technology reduces casualties” business. Of course, so does all of human history for thousands of years, but hey, let’s keep it simple.

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riku_iki 3033 days ago
> That’s tens of millions

It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens". Now imagine death toll if US would directly fight war with USSR over Europe.

And yes, it includes Vietnam and Korean wars, where high precision weapons weren't used yet.

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dragonwriter 3033 days ago
> It says "This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths ", which is not "tens".

The total casualties in the wars between the superpower-led coalitions substantially exceed the casualties caused by the US military in those wars. (And, in any case, yes, in the normal way terms of scale are used, a number ≥ 10^7 and < 10^8 is usually described as “tens of millions”.)

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