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No, I think pretty much every situation since then the side that has engaged in the aerial mass slaughter of civilians have been the bad guys. It was true in Vietnam, and it's true ofWickedHate posted:It's not exact, but modern Israel's pretty close. that situation.
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Sep 22, 2014 06:11
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Just made a quick search, but I can't find another conflict considered a 'Total War' past WWII. We had MAD take over as the scary replacement, so it looks like there won't be a mobilization like that (let's hope) again, or at least for another 100 years. Can you make bullets? You are a combatant. Can you build a ship? Yep, you are definitely a target. How about sewing a uniform? Yep, you are dead too. Live within 50 miles of any of the above? Bad news for you and your family. This is one of the ways you get to 55 - 70 million dead folks, mostly 'civilians'. The fact that it took teams of scientists, businessmen, politicians, generals, and airmen all working as a team to achieve that result... how to kill 100,000 people... the most economically... blows my head. Reading the memoirs of the scientists and logistic experts as they grapple with each side of the coin while 'doing their job' will chill the blood a bit.
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Sep 22, 2014 06:15
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Herv posted:Just made a quick search, but I can't find another conflict considered a 'Total War' past WWII. Herv posted:blows my head. Oh, no wonder you speak like one.  E: This post just a joke because of the "blows my head" quote set it up and because of the derail about wartime atrocities which won't end up nicely. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 07:56 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 07:48
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Fo3 posted:It's not 'can', but actively doing so, ie, labouring for the war effort. You're speaking like a terrorist. I don't think they're advocating for this mindset, dude. E: oh it's a joke I guess?
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Sep 22, 2014 07:56
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Moving along from the unnerving concept of Logical Insanity. This guy is one of my heroes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov quote:Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov is a retired lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. On September 26, 1983, he was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile was being launched from the United States. Cooler heads... There are a few incidences where we could have accidentally invoked MAD. Scariest poo poo right there. There were NO direct diplomatic relations between the US and the USSR around this timeframe, to make things even dicier. e: Another Cool head, this event was probably even closer to kicking off a nuclear war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov Herv has a new favorite as of 08:44 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 08:17
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Herv posted:Moving along from the unnerving concept of Logical Insanity. I'm really glad somebody else knows Petrov by name. The guy basically saved the entire world, more or less.
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Sep 22, 2014 08:49
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Not to mention the whole reason whyDusty Baker 2 posted:I'm really glad somebody else knows Petrov by name. The guy basically saved the entire world, more or less. Saved the world on the justification of "who the gently caress only sends five nukes? It would take way more than that to glass us." Dude had balls, I'll give him that.
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Sep 22, 2014 09:12
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Herv posted:Before anyone flips about using nukes, here's Tokyo after a 'conventional' use of total war's logical insanity. Not you specifically but I've seen a few people talk about nuclear attacks like Hiroshima as if they were "better" than firebombing, etc. because of this idea that everyone just gets vaporized, but nuclear war has some awful poo poo all its own that you don't always hear about. Like the so-called "ant-walking alligator" people of Hiroshima: quote:In his book, Last Train to Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino combed through thousands of eyewitness statements. Among the horrors of radiation poisoning and the initial firestorm, he uncovered one ‘creature’ unique to the atomic wasteland: the ‘ant-walking alligators’. The article is here (includes possibly  photo of a scarred survivor for anyone who's squeamish).
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Sep 22, 2014 11:51
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Small Frozen Thing posted:The scary and unnerving thing is that as recently as 70 years ago, there was a situation where people could willingly engage in the mass immolation of tens of thousands of innocents and still be considered the good guys. That's the entire history of the human race, though. Remember that history is written by the winner; if our side burned an entire nation to the ground it was just the price of victory. If the enemy burned everything down and we won they're horrible, hideous monsters. Pearl Harbor is considered a dastardly, awful violation of America but lighting the entire drat island on fire in the Japanese theater? Pfft, whatever. Had to win the war somehow.
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Sep 22, 2014 12:24
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Kimmalah posted:Not you specifically but I've seen a few people talk about nuclear attacks like Hiroshima as if they were "better" than firebombing, etc. because of this idea that everyone just gets vaporized, but nuclear war has some awful poo poo all its own that you don't always hear about. Like the so-called "ant-walking alligator" people of Hiroshima: It's always interesting to hear survivor's accounts of this stuff. As much as nuclear weapons are talked about and used in fiction, there's only one nation at one singular point in time that's ever experienced nukes actually being used against them. They're the only ones that know. I can scarcely think of any weapon more devastating, more horrific. What's most hosed up is, even given that, it still may have been the right choice to drop those bombs. War is that awful, that doing these things to other people can be preferable to other options. Yet, people still rally for it and insult those who would shy from it. It is the most absurd thing.
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Sep 22, 2014 13:12
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Small Frozen Thing posted:The scary and unnerving thing is that as recently as 70 years ago, there was a situation where people could willingly engage in the mass immolation of tens of thousands of innocents and still be considered the good guys. Worth noting that even some of the top brass at the time (like Eisenhower) thought it was unconscionable. And it may matter that the actual victimized nation is now a close US ally. For a while, I wondered why -- despite the fact that a major world power razed two of its cities and set fire to hundreds of thousands of its civilians -- Japan does not seem to hold a collective grudge against the US, at least not in the way a country like, say, Korea or China holds a grudge against Japan. From what I understand, it's because of the occupation, a time when the Japanese people were absolutely beaten down physically and spiritually and expected to be treated the same way that Japan (as a conquering military) had treated large swaths of Asia. But as it turns out, the US wasn't interested in sowing the seeds for a World War III, so the occupation was designed as a genuine rebuilding effort. I know there were instances of rape and theft by US soldiers, but by and large the occupation was unexpectedly benevolent. Also, from what I've read, Japanese schools don't obsessively hammer in every detail about the atrocities committed by imperial Japan, like the way Germany does, so to keep that "sweep it under the rug" charade going, I suppose you also don't want to bring up anything another nation may have done in retribution. But this is the scary/unnerving thread, so here's a related horrific fact: More people died in a single night during the firebombing of Tokyo than have ever died in any similar span of time in human history.
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Sep 22, 2014 13:51
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Wildeyes posted:Also, from what I've read, Japanese schools don't obsessively hammer in every detail about the atrocities committed by imperial Japan, like the way Germany does, so to keep that "sweep it under the rug" charade going, I suppose you also don't want to bring up anything another nation may have done in retribution. I don't know that it's so much that they don't go into detail about it. There's been a lot of controversy about Japanese textbooks being edited in ways to minimize, whitewash or completely omit WWII atrocities.
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Sep 22, 2014 14:04
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Speaking of radiation, how about Human Radiation Experiments by the United States? Albert Stevens was "misdiagnosed" with stomach cancer so that he could be "treated" with plutonium. He did live 20 years with plutonium in his system, though. Six employees at a Chicago plant were given water infested with plutonium so it could be shown how it's dealt with in the digestive tract. More than 800 pregnant women were given "vitamin drinks" laced with radioactive iron, to see if it would cross the placenta. And of course the retarded children given radioactive mush to eat. Of course the whole article is depressing.
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Sep 22, 2014 14:12
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Wildeyes posted:Worth noting that even some of the top brass at the time (like Eisenhower) thought it was unconscionable. And it may matter that the actual victimized nation is now a close US ally. Anecdotally there were a ton of Japanese soldiers who were also thankful the war was ended by the nukes and not a ground invasion. A lot of Asia still dislikes the Japanese due to the whole not really apologizing for everything that happened.
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Sep 22, 2014 14:19
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bean_shadow posted:Speaking of radiation, how about Human Radiation Experiments by the United States? Yeah that was the amazing time in history when pretty much every health or technology related issue would be solved with "Hmm, can we somehow blast it with radiation or strap a nuke on it?"
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Sep 22, 2014 14:21
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The age of the Peaceful Atom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace It's unnerving because of how much faith people placed in atomic energy and technology. I believe that cold fusion, if a sustaining reaction can ever be created and harnessed, will be a huge panacea to a lot of society's energy needs and will be the only thing that can truly make the world get off of fossil fuels. But the Atoms for Peace campaign was nuclear everything.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:06
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bean_shadow posted:Speaking of radiation, how about Human Radiation Experiments by the United States? Hey now, those kids got pizza and free tickets to a ball game! More than fair compensation for the likely early and painful death from cancer.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:11
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Jack Gladney posted:Hey now, those kids got pizza and free tickets to a ball game! More than fair compensation for the likely early and painful death from cancer. To be fair, most people wish for death by the seventh inning anyway.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:32
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HonorableTB posted:The age of the Peaceful Atom: Cold fusion isn't a thing. It refers specifically to a hoax paper by previously-respected electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that managed to get published in a respected journal. Pons and Fleischmann thought that palladium, a metal which absorbs hydrogen, could be forced to absorb so much hydrogen that fusion occurs within it. They couldn't get it to work in the laboratory but thought they had something revolutionary on their hands nonetheless so they falsified the results and published the paper anyway in the hopes that someone else could make it work while they got to keep all the credit. No one could make it work, though, and they were disgraced after the deception was uncovered. What's scary and/or unnerving about this affair is that cold fusion caught on with pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists as an example of oil companies/the government/big pharma/the pope/the new world order suppressing non-fossil fuel energy research. Adherents now call it "low energy nuclear reactions" in order to sidestep the stigma behind cold fusion (it's still an identical process though) and sometimes it catches on with a reputable scientist who doesn't know better; if I recall correctly, there's a guy at NASA who thinks he can make it work.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:58
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:To be fair, most people wish for death by the seventh inning anyway. Well yeah, they stop serving alcohol in the 7th.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:59
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bean_shadow posted:Speaking of radiation, how about Human Radiation Experiments by the United States? Speaking about radiation, I submit 'The Demon Core'. Nothing but a Flathead Screwdriver between you and a horrible death. Oh and some of the folks around your dumb rear end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core quote:As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, scintillation counters measured the relative activity from the core. Allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.  On the Atoms for Peace (Where we gave out a nuclear reactor that ran on weapons grade fuel to Iran when 'our boy' was in power) thing. I bet we could dig up a plan for Nuclear Powered Roller Skates if we looked hard enough.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:52
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BattleMaster posted:Cold fusion isn't a thing. It refers specifically to a hoax paper by previously-respected electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that managed to get published in a respected journal. Pons and Fleischmann thought that palladium, a metal which absorbs hydrogen, could be forced to absorb so much hydrogen that fusion occurs within it. They couldn't get it to work in the laboratory but thought they had something revolutionary on their hands nonetheless so they falsified the results and published the paper anyway in the hopes that someone else could make it work while they got to keep all the credit. No one could make it work, though, and they were disgraced after the deception was uncovered. If cold fusion isn't a thing, then how would we be able to use nuclear fusion power for energy purposes? Theoretically speaking, of course. I am in no way qualified to actually give an opinion on this and have the barest amount of nuclear physics knowledge a person can reasonably have and still know what nuclear weapons and atoms are.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:11
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:It's always interesting to hear survivor's accounts of this stuff. As much as nuclear weapons are talked about and used in fiction, there's only one nation at one singular point in time that's ever experienced nukes actually being used against them. They're the only ones that know. I can scarcely think of any weapon more devastating, more horrific. Apparently after the bombs fell top Japanese brass tried to contact the places that were hit and just got nothing. They figured whoever was in charge there was being lazy, negligent, or a butt so they sent somebody out to visit in person. The guy was like "the cities are just...gone. They just plain aren't there anymore." The top brass didn't believe him because destruction on that scale wasn't possible, was it? Next thing they know they're all standing in the shattered shell of what was a pair of major cities going "well...gently caress." Wildeyes posted:Worth noting that even some of the top brass at the time (like Eisenhower) thought it was unconscionable. And it may matter that the actual victimized nation is now a close US ally. In a lot of ways that was learning our lesson after WWI. One of the big issues that influenced WWII happening was the fact that the winners (i.e., everybody that wasn't Germany) forced the Germans to sign the world a blank check for reparations and rebuilding, which hosed up Germany pretty hard. The nation being a disaster helped the Nazis get into power and left Germany as a whole rather pissed off at the rest of the world. The rest of the world's message to Germany after the war was "get hosed, go eat a cabbage or something." Interestingly enough the U.S. was one of few nations telling the rest of the world "this is a bad idea and will cause Bad Things to happen." Part of the reason it impresses a defeated nation to not totally raze, pillage, and bankrupt them is because in that sort of situation you very easily could but are choosing not to. Japan was totally at the mercy of the U.S. and America's response was to help Japan up, dust him off a bit, and say "now don't do it again." Turns out if you kick some nation's rear end, give them a stern talking to, and then help them rebuild and you can be total bros later. Which is interesting in that Russia did basically the opposite and in the process destabilized much of Eastern Europe, pissed off the western world, and led to people literally being erased from history. Speaking of horrifying wiki pages...wow...Stalinists took "brutal dictatorship" to a whole new level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purges_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union "We don't like you, get out. And by get out I mean loving die." Or worse... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov "This man never existed. Remove him from official photos and pretend he was never even here."
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Sep 22, 2014 18:19
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Herv posted:Speaking about radiation, I submit 'The Demon Core'. For whatever reason this part has always been really unnerving to me, there's a list of people in the room with the when and how they died, and then there's this guy. Theodore Perlman: "alive and in good health and spirits" as of 1978. 
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Sep 22, 2014 18:34
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HonorableTB posted:If cold fusion isn't a thing, then how would we be able to use nuclear fusion power for energy purposes? Theoretically speaking, of course. Today? By using that big fusion reactor in the sky. In fifty yearsTM by using magnetic confinement most likely, i.e. by using insanely strong magnets to keep the insanely hot plasma from touching the walls. That's the way(  ) ITER is going, but ITER itself will not produce energy for commercial use.Here's a nice article about ITER: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle?currentPage=all Another way would be by shooting a tiny flying capsule so that it implodes and fusion occurs in it (inertial confiment) while well away from everything, but that's probably more complicated to scale up to commercial is probably only done at the NIF to further atomic weapons research without outright violating various treaties.
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Sep 22, 2014 18:35
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wyoming posted:For whatever reason this part has always been really unnerving to me, there's a list of people in the room with the when and how they died, and then there's this guy. This image of the event scares the poo poo out of me.  Would rather take my chances in a Tiger cage.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:18
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I remember reading a story about an american pilot that was shot down after the bombs were dropped, and he was interrogated about them. Having no idea what they were, he just made up a story about new superweapons and how there were 100s of them in stock, in the hope of not getting killed and tortured too badly. So they sent a Japanese scientist, to get more technical details out of him. The scientist saw through his story right away, but wanted the war to end, so he just confirmed everything the captive said. Anyone remember this?
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Sep 22, 2014 20:23
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I'm pretty sure I read something like that fairly recently -- I think it may have been in a graphic novel about the history of the A-bomb. I wouldn't know the details you would need to Google it though.
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Sep 22, 2014 20:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's the entire history of the human race, though. Remember that history is written by the winner; if our side burned an entire nation to the ground it was just the price of victory. If the enemy burned everything down and we won they're horrible, hideous monsters. Pearl Harbor is considered a dastardly, awful violation of America but lighting the entire drat island on fire in the Japanese theater? Pfft, whatever. Had to win the war somehow. "Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." -Tacitus
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Sep 22, 2014 20:39
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kanonvandekempen posted:Anyone remember this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki quote:Jerome Hagen indicates that War Minister Anami's revised briefing was partly based on interrogating captured American pilot Marcus McDilda. Under torture, McDilda reported that the Americans had 100 atomic bombs, and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be the next atomic bomb targets.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:10
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That's actually a good case study on why torture doesn't work. In the end though the entry of the Soviet Union to the war against Japan had more to do with their surrender than anything else; the US blowing away entire cities in a single day was just business as usual whether it came from one bomb or thousands.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:24
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BattleMaster posted:That's actually a good case study on why torture doesn't work. In the end though the entry of the Soviet Union to the war against Japan had more to do with their surrender than anything else; the US blowing away entire cities in a single day was just business as usual whether it came from one bomb or thousands. That is an argument against the bombs. However, there is evidence both that it both is and isn't legitimate. If we're going to have this argument, then we should make our own thread thought, it's one of those topics that can get tempers going and would massively derail this thread if it got started in earnest.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:27
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nucleicmaxid posted:That is an argument against the bombs. However, there is evidence both that it both is and isn't legitimate. If we're going to have this argument, then we should make our own thread thought, it's one of those topics that can get tempers going and would massively derail this thread if it got started in earnest. The only argument I would make against the bombs is that it was actually the strategic bombing of Japanese cities by any type of bomb that contributed to the end of the war. I think people give way too much credit to the Manhattan Project. Without nuclear bombs the US would have kept up the firebombing campaign to similar results. (Also, the Soviet Union entering the war was the tipping point because even with cities burning the leadership thought they could hold out until they brought their vast reserves of weapons and manpower to the home islands. With the Soviets fighting them on the mainland those hopes were dashed)
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Sep 22, 2014 21:34
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BattleMaster posted:That's actually a good case study on why torture doesn't work. In the end though the entry of the Soviet Union to the war against Japan had more to do with their surrender than anything else; the US blowing away entire cities in a single day was just business as usual whether it came from one bomb or thousands. You're right to the extent that the Soviet invasion destroyed one of the last illusions that the diehards were hanging their hopes on, but the atom bombs certainly terrified them and helped push Hirohito towards the decision to surrender. The lot of them were under so much stress and so scared of the future that they spent a lot of time fiddle-loving around with imperial ceremony and interservice rivalries and trying to find a way out of dying a "glorious" death.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:35
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BattleMaster posted:The only argument I would make against the bombs is that it was actually the strategic bombing of Japanese cities by any type of bomb that contributed to the end of the war. I think people give way too much credit to the Manhattan Project. Without nuclear bombs the US would have kept up the firebombing campaign to similar results. (Also, the Soviet Union entering the war was the tipping point because even with cities burning the leadership thought they could hold out until they brought their vast reserves of weapons and manpower to the home islands. With the Soviets fighting them on the mainland those hopes were dashed) Yep. Broiled of Boiled? How would you like it? I am surprised at how far that debate goes, when if you take a step back it really didn't matter in the end. Show someone on either side of the debate a picture of Tokyo and Hiroshima and unless they know the pics by heart it's a coin toss on picking the city. Someone else said this, but you have to come to grips with total war being moral or immoral, then apply it to the nukes. (they are both immoral) Anyway... NORAD False Alarms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command#False_alarms Someone get Broderick in here STAT to talk to Joshua!
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Sep 22, 2014 21:49
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Small Frozen Thing posted:No, I think pretty much every situation since then the side that has engaged in the aerial mass slaughter of civilians have been the bad guys. It was true in Vietnam, and it's true of On the other side: Unit 731. quote:Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners also were repeatedly subject to rape by guards. quote:Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results.The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants. Oh god... Luckily the monsters behind this were exposed and swift justice was delivered after Japan's Surr... ptfh haha no, they were protected from war crime charges because the Americans thought they might have had some useful data(they didn't really). khwarezm has a new favorite as of 00:03 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 23:57
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spinst posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Delano_Floyd e: don't forget the part where he forces her to be a stripper and prostitute, then beats one of her friends to death in front of her so she'll be too afraid to leave him. And the child pornography of her the police found in his truck after he disappeared. Rabbit Hill has a new favorite as of 00:29 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 00:20
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khwarezm posted:On the other side: Unit 731. There's a Chinese film called Hei tai yang 731 (The Men Behind the Sun is the English title) about the Unit 731 atrocities. I think the whole thing is on YouTube, it's from the 80s, and it's seriously nightmare fuel.
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Sep 23, 2014 01:20
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An earlier iteration of this thread is where I learned about Unit 731. To this day it's one of the most horrifying things I have ever read, and believe me, I've read a lot of horrifying poo poo.
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Sep 23, 2014 01:49
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Rabbit Hill posted:No joke, I saw a Forensic Files episode on this case and it was the final blow of a spiritual crisis that left me unable to believe in God. That girl's entire life was absolute hell, not one person helped her, and she ends up dead at 25, her body dumped in the middle of a highway. It makes me sick to think about it. Reading this thread and that case specifically made me really terrified when I saw an old man holding hands with a little girl at a store today. I'm sure it was most likely her grandfather or something, and it's horrible to judge something like that because someone doesn't seem like a "typical" guardian, but I still got really scared because what if it's something like that, you know? Should I run up to the girl and ask her or something? What if I don't but she really is being put through hell? Terrifying.
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Sep 23, 2014 02:04
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