Is it ever ethically alright to use nuclear weapons?

I think killing is wrong for any reason. A bunch of wimps can drop a bomb from a plane and kill 100k. A murder is a murder. A nuke is the same as a million soldiers shooting bullets. Both are fucked up.

No, but it’s fun.

This essentially boils down to the ethical dilemma, is it alright to kill a perfectly innocent infant baby to save other lives

Bentham says yes
Kant says no
I says… I hope I never have to decide

The true enemy in a nuclear war is war itself (quote by Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide).

No, not even a little, it’s sick

Well, as soon as war starts morality is out the window. Does it matter how they/we are killed?

That’s an American way of viewing war

How do you mean it’s an american way of viewing war?

It’s never ethically or morally right to use nuclear weapons. Additionally, the same goes for biological and chemical weapons also. All of them can create horrific damage, injury, and death on an unimaginable scale and just knowing that should be reason enough not to employ them, ever.

I don’t get you. How can there be an ethical way of killing people? Whats the moral difference if you are nuked, blown up by a claymore, or slashed with a machete.

Is a nation immoral if they have nukes? The thing with nukes is that if more than one country has it, it seizes to be an offensive weapon. No one wants or really can attack with nukes, but what it does is, it keeps you from getting invaded.

Keeps you from being invaded? Hahaha! You high dude?

Tell me one country with nukes that has been invaded.

Iraq? Oh wait, turns out that was a lie. Why stop at nukes, maybe we should use more chemical weapons like anthrax and agent orange, oh wait, vietnam….

What we were talking about is that there are unethical ways of killing people. I still wonder, what is an ethical way?

There is no ethical way, but some methods can affect an area for genarations, like the radio active fallout from a nuclear bomb, or birth defects caused by using agent orange in Vietnam

@Bluefreedom and @oratio – I agree that NBC warfare is unethical. But it was also unethical not to go to war in Rwanda and Darfur. Mass murder happens when war is avoided at all cost. But WMDs are not needed to stop mass murder. It requires the courage of soldiers.

Well said mattbrowne

I would say no, in my opinion it’s not.

Absoutely, WMD are awful. We cant have a world without them though. I would welcome it. If you have any idea how we could get rid of WMDs in the world I would like to hear it.

It is not really possible to start an offensive nuclear war against a nuclear nation without being destroyed yourself. The danger of nukes is terrorists getting hold of some.

What I was questioning was how there could be a more or less ethical way of killing. Agent orange wasn’t a weapon. It was a herbicide to deforest areas. You don’t kill people with it, but it deforms fetuses.

Mass murder happens for a number of reasons. If we could know beforehand what should have been done, i’m sure support for actions would be stronger. Invading Iraq proved to be the ignition of mass murder. Could we have known that? In Rwanda and Burundi, who would have gone to war? The US, UN, AU or should neighboring countries intervene? Who is responsible? So… the Congo war claimed 4 million peoples lives in a few years. Where was the intervention? Was there any talk about that we should do something?

Also, I have been up for 36 hours and am beginning to feel mutant. I suspect we believe the same things and this is breaking down to semantics. I fold, the pot is yours.

Nice one, I love pot

Sure it’s ethically ok. I just used a tactical nuke on my next door neighbor because his damn dog was barking all night!

Ethics in wartime are different from ethics in regular life. Ethics while defending a country are also different from ethics while defending yourself.

If I were the prime minister of Canada, and there was a 100% chance of us being critically attacked by another country (in where a large percentage of our population was killed immediately), I would certainly use nuclear weapons in order to dissuade the attacking country from continuing.

@MCBeat – I strongly object to your baseless claim that the Japanese were ready to arm their children and use them as troops to kill US soldiers.

@oratio – Who is responsible? Tough question. My answer would be, humanity as a whole. Have we found a better judge than the UN? The approach of taking unilateral decisions failed miserably. This should be obvious to everyone by now.

im not a big fan of the words “never” and “always.” Most of the time I think nuclear weapons are not so good, but then again they seemed useful in the movie Armageddon. Just leave Bruce Willis’s finger on the red button.

I think another question to ask is if violently killing someone is ever moral. Other than the slow, painful way, all other ways seem to me to be a mute point.

..armed children..oh well, germany did it too right ? and we didn’t nuke berlin…

@iwamoto – The so-called Volkssturm was a German national militia of the last months of World War II. It was founded on Adolf Hitler’s orders in October 1944 and conscripted males between the ages of 16 to 60 years who were not already serving in some military unit as part of a German Home Guard. So if you consider a 16-year-old person a child…

No. Things with such devastating and long term health / safety consequences should never be used.

Just finished a good read regarding a soldier’s education and experience with combat in Afghanistan. When asked what he would have done differently he replied that the best thing we could have done was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai, focus less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends.

koldblue, that makes so much sense. Those few words seems so obvious when you read it, and yet, it seems like a lesson that is hard learned.

However, I reckon it takes a lot of courage to get out of that Humvee and to build friendships rather than pointing a gun at them. Not an easily made decision.