An Alternative History to 9/11 Options

[Hartmann]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14753927/site/newsweek/

Interesting read. I agree that some of the things should have happened differently but some of the proposed events are just implausible. (quick executions?)

[impala454]

Im just trying to say that we havent really blown a chunk out of the side of the planet yet because nuclear weapons havent been around that long. Thank God for that and I seriously mean that. I dont think any of us would be here today if that technology was centuries old. So its not really that our world is perse peaceful, but rather it is just new to the technology that could kill millions in a shorter amount of time. It took Hitler how many years to kill 11 million people? With technology advances, you could cut that time down to a couple of days.

well yeah they haven't been around that long compared to the full history of war, but the first nuke was dropped almost 65 years ago. and those bombs, while terrible, were babies. the ones we dropped on japan were something like 13-16 kilotons. we've lived in an era where we've had hundreds (maybe thousands) of ICBMs pointed at other countries who also have them pointed at us, tipped with bombs measured in the megatons. We're talking 13,000 tons vs 40,000,000, and much easier to deploy. And that's a single warhead... I think most missles have multiple warheads, and we have thousands of missles. The fact that we have lived the past 40 or however many years with this kind of firepower not getting used says something about how far our civilization has come in preserving peace. Sure there's been some wars & small countries battling, but nothing near as bad as we'd seen 30 years ago +.

Basically my point is, our ability to kill massive amounts of people has increased to an amount almost inconceivable, while the amount of killing that actually happens has decreased by just as much.

Check out these rough totals just in American deaths:

Civil War: 364,511
WW1: 116,516
WW2: 405,399
Korea: 36,574
Vietnam: 58,209
Persian Gulf: 382
Recent Iraq: 2,637

If the right people so desired, they could press a few buttons and kill 10x as many as all of those numbers totaled right now. But it hasn't happened. To me that says we're doing pretty damn well in staying peaceful as a whole.