Re: The Effects of a Global Thermonuclear War in 1988 (Re: NuclearWar, 1980's)

"M. J. Powell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, zolota
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
> >
> >"Dave J" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> >news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>
> >> Robert J. Kolker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> >> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > Yang Li wrote:
> >> >
> >> > >
> >> > > Do you launch anther strike at Soviet cities and population at this
> >> > > time? Is it morally acceptable to kill innocent civilians and
destroy
> >> > > their society because your own has been condemned?  Justify.
> >> >
> >> > Because Revenge is Sweet. Didn't you know that. Don't get mad. Get
even.
> >> > The Main Thing is never to be the sucker or boob that is left holding
> >> > the bag. Better everyone should die, than that.
> >> >
> >>
> >> or you can say it in one of those well-modulated professional soldier
> >voices
> >> like in the Clancy movies "we need to eliminate their centers of
> >production,
> >> and their ability to continue to make war". We already proved we'd do
it
> >at
> >> Dresden and Tokyo.
> >
> >Dresden had nothing to do with war production and given that the war
ended a
> >few weeks later it's destruction had little effect on "ability to
continue".
> >It was either an experiment or a warning to the red army, that's all.
> >Unnecessary killings of civilians are war crimes, that raid was just the
> >most obvious.
>
> See:
>
> Letter to the Sunday Telegraph. I forgot to note the date.
>
...
>I heard and watched Stalin with his deputy Chief of Staff,
> General Antonov, urgently ask us to bomb roads and railways to stop
> Hitler tranferring divisions from the West. Antonov stressed the
> importance of Dresden as a vital rail junction, saying there was a "uzel
> svyazi" - literally, "communications knot".
...
> The study is a very lengthy document, but here are its conclusions:
>
> III. CONCLUSION
>
> The foregoing historical analysis establishes the following definitive
> answers to the
> recurring questions concerning the February 1945 bombings of Dresden by
> Allied
> strategic air forces:
> a. Dresden was a legitimate military target
> b. Strategic objectives, of mutual importance to the Allies and the
> Russians, underlay
> the bombings of Dresden.
> c. The Russians requested that the Dresden area be bombed by Allied air
> forces.
...
> g. The specific target objectives in the Dresden bombings were, for the
> RAF Bomber
> Command, the Dresden city area, including industrial plants,
> communications, military
> installations, and for the American Eighth Air Force, the Dresden
> Marshalling Yards
> and railway facilities.
...

Several points (which tend to split support on opposite sides of the usual
"pro-con" discussion of this raid):
1. The objective of disrupting rail traffic only required bombing the rail
and marshalling yard, not the city. This would have been just a routine
extension of the effective transportation campaign being conducted by the
USAAF. Citing the military necessity of rail interdiction cannot be used as
cover for the area bombing of the city center by the RAF, the two were
separate bombing operations.
2. The bombing of the city was a routine operation by the British, they had
done similar raids many times before in late 1944 and 1945. That this raid
might cause a fire storm, the British were well aware (in fact their urban
bombing raids were carefully designed to optimize the probability of mass
fires), but they didn't know that it would. Most similar raids did not cause
fire storms. Generally people who cite the Dresden fire raid as a war crime
focus on the outcome, something that was not known in advance, and was
something of a matter of happenstance. Logically, it would seem that those
holding that this raid was a 'war crime' should hold that most (or all)
urban bombing attacks late in the war were also war crimes (I know some do,
but the general tendency is to focus on this one raid).
3. The claims of 'war crime' for urban bombing in WWII is not supported by
international law. Such statements are really statements of moral outrage at
the attacks. Their is much to be outraged about for sure, but international
law (codified in the Hague conventions) and the tribunals following the war,
did not hold them to be illegal per se(obviously the allies weren't on
trial, but the Germans who also conducted such raids were).
4. On the other hand, the Hague conventions do point out that the right to
the use of force is not unlimited, and the responsibility for weighing
military necessity against civilian injury is well established in
jurisprudence (the lengthy US "Law of War" field manual makes this explicit
for example). Thus the fact that urban bombing was not (and is not) illegal
does not give carte blanche to conduct such attacks. Just because the raids
were not illegal in principle does not make them justified. By 1945 the
weight of necessity on the British had changed radically from the early
inception of urban area raids, when they had no other option to strike back
at Germany who was launching similar attacks against them. Justifications
based on necessity for planning and executing such raids in 1943 don't hold
for similar raids executed in 1945.