The US also has a long standing tradition of overkill in warfare. It has little to do with our lack of respect for life, rather the assumption enemies might not me keen to surrender or may believe in the cause for which they're engaged in hostilities enough to put up an honest fight.

Shaun on YouTube makes a pretty strong case the US didn't need to drop atom bombs on Japan to secure its surrender, but the US has been really good about not resorting to nuclear attacks since then even when officials wanted to use them, as per Reagan and Trump. Human civilization continues to close on eighty years without a nuclear war.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 4 points 8 months ago

Everyone forgets the Korean war, but MacArthur begged for the use of nukes when he fucked up and gave the Chinese an excuse to get directly involved. This is especially notable because while the USSR had tested a nuke at that point, they didn't have many, and they didn't have the ability to deploy them en masse against the US directly. The US still had an effective monopoly on deploying nukes, and it still didn't use them.

Oh, and fuck MacArthur.