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Oppenheimer Movie Review

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Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: dietert1 on August 02, 2023, 08:05:35 am ---
--- Quote from: peter-h on August 01, 2023, 04:16:02 pm ---..
There are good reasons terrorists have not managed to get hold of these weapons. It is mostly the material but there is also a lot of detail. Fuchs for example gave the Russians a good start by supplying them with dimensioned drawings, and sure enough their first tested design was a copy.
..

--- End quote ---

You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.

Regards, Dieter

--- End quote ---

  I have thought about it and no, I don't consider them terrorists and I consider that view to be asinine.  Why would they be considered any more of a terrorist then anyone that ever bombed a town from the air, or shelled one with a piece of artillery or any of the other million and one ways of attacking a city? Or any target for that matter?

  You clearly have no idea of the definition of a terrorist.

helius:
A simple dictionary definition would hold a terrorist to be anyone who uses terror (a justified fear of mass torture, death, or worse) as a means to an end. That would include the French Jacobins of the 1790s, Napoleon's armies, the United States Army during the Indian Wars from the 1830s to the 1880s, the Bolsheviks in 1917, both sides of the Spanish Civil War, and many political movements, both hegemonic and subaltern, and various military forces since WW2.

Wikipedia refers to

--- Quote ---The term terror bombing is used to describe the strategic bombing of civilian targets without military value, in the hope of damaging an enemy's morale.

--- End quote ---

There have been attempts to defend the bombing of cities during WW2 as having "military value", but they don't stand up to much scrutiny. In some cases planners justified the presence of rail facilities, mainly used for civilian purposes, as "military targets".

David Hess:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on August 03, 2023, 01:12:09 am ---I have thought about it and no, I don't consider them terrorists and I consider that view to be asinine.  Why would they be considered any more of a terrorist then anyone that ever bombed a town from the air, or shelled one with a piece of artillery or any of the other million and one ways of attacking a city? Or any target for that matter?
--- End quote ---

Before the war, there was a general consensus that bombing civilian targets was a war crime.  This broke down when all sides discovered that strategic bombers could not reliability hit targets smaller than entire cities, and sometimes even missed those.

The allies committed many war crimes which were never prosecuted.  Often they were deliberately ignored or even covered up by higher authority.

TimFox:
Before WW II, the Italian general and military theorist Giulio Douhet was a driving force behind the massive use of aircraft in the bombardment of cities.
Douhet believed that bombing cities would totally paralyze industry and the power centers of society, and would decisively undermine the morale of civilians, who would stop supporting their leaders and force them to accept their enemy’s conditions.
During WW II, this didn't seem to work. 
Coventry, London, Dresden, Tokyo, and other strategic bombing campaigns did not appear to force surrenders.
Later, the bombing of North Vietnam had similar results.
Perhaps the only case where a bombing of a civilian target had the desired effect was the nuclear bombing of Japan, but revisionist historians dispute that.

Bud:

--- Quote from: David Hess on August 02, 2023, 11:46:15 pm ---
--- Quote from: dietert1 on August 02, 2023, 08:05:35 am ---You may feel uncomfortable with this, but shouldn't we consider people who used nuclear weapons on towns with hundreds of thousands of people terrorists? Think about it.
--- End quote ---

Luckily for those people, they were on the side which won the war.

--- End quote ---
Next time they may not be that lucky.

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