Sending in the Mossad stripper ninja assassins would be the preferred technique, then.

MAD implies a 50-megaton warhead, which is by definition, a bit on the “indiscriminate” side of things, even if you are using an Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein as your point of aim. The stripper assassins will likely hit only the target. The nuke…?

Collateral damage is an euphemism that I have always loathed.

Show me the moral calculus that reconciles killing “their” innocents to protect ours. There isn’t one–The Soviet Union ran on totalitarian terms, and those Ukrainian peasants had no real option but to participate in the whole nasty mess they were in. Same-same can be said for the Germans during WWII, but at least they’d had the facade of having voted in the stupid bastards that got them killed.

No, when you get down to it, the real deal is that there is no “moral” to be seen anywhere in the idea of MAD. It’s all thuggery, all the way down–You kill what I value, I’ll kill what you value, and never mind that the victims are essentially uninvolved in even the discussion. When you’re talking thermonuclear war, the people whose necks lay over the chopping block wouldn’t have even seen the blow coming–It wouldn’t have even been a hostage situation, where they knew they were in danger. The whole thing would have been like a drive-by shooting in a gang-run neighborhood where the mass of people living there just had to try to survive while the elephants danced.

I don’t object so much to the idea of MAD as I do the attempts to dress it in the clothes of morality. It is no such thing, and cannot be reconciled with any recognizable moral code in history. Although, it fits in nicely with the mentality of those who’ve had no moral code, whatsoever. Pirates, terrorists, bandits, and the like…

When nation-states start acting like that, it’s time to re-evaluate what the hell you’re doing, as a collective civilization.

Instead Communists killing of Ukranians did not saved lives.

See, here’s where I’m at–I don’t personally have a “moral objection” to either MAD or the killing of an enemy soldier. I’m really not all that “moral” a person, in that what I’ve done all my life is look around me at the people I see and interact with, trying to understand them, their “rules of operation”, and what makes them do what they do. I don’t, for whatever reason, have a very good instinctive grasp for most of what I observe, so I have to work my way through it from first principles.

So… People tell me that they’re moral human beings, and have ethical codes. Lots and lots of them point to the fact that they go to church regularly, and rub their bellies with blue mud along with the rest of the crowd.

Thing is, though… The actual “things they do” bear no relation to that set of espoused beliefs and ethics. It’s like most people just ape what they see their betters doing, as far as they want to, and then make up their own rules to gratify themselves and justify what they’ve done.

War is a perfect example of it all. You go back and look at WWI, and ask “Why’d they destroy their own civilization…?”, and the answer comes back, in the final analysis “‘Cos they wanted to”.

To a degree, I think I’m something of a high-functioning sociopath, because about 99% of what I observe other people doing in real life and the history books (which are two very different things, history being written by the literate and self-justifying… Churchill’s line about making sure he’d look good in the histories written about WWII because he’d write them springs most clearly to mind…) simply does not present as congruent in any way, shape, or form with the things people say they meant to do or why they did them. The fact that I don’t instinctively know the right moment to pivot a given direction in the dance of life means that I have to watch, try to learn, and then comply with the rules I think others are following.

Thing is, older I get? The more I think that there really are no rules; all y’all are just doin’ whatever turns you on, and the hell with any sort of overarching moral code or rulebook.

This thing with MAD is just a perfect example. Most of the people who saw no problems at all with Nuremberg later went on to take part in setting up the international order that relied on MAD, and apparently, suffered not a whit of cognitive dissonance as they did so.

Kill a million Ukrainian peasants with nice, clean fusion bombs? No problem… Kill a few million Ukrainian peasants with machine guns, gas chambers, and starvation…? Now we have a problem. Is the difference that the Nazis were up close and personal? Why don’t people remember the Mongols with the same sense of outraged moralization, after they killed enough people in Eurasia to actually change the climate? People romanticize the Mongolian conquests, despite the fact they stacked heads with the same sort of enthusiasm that the Nazis dead. Or, is the difference because the Mongols didn’t try to hide it all? After all, they were out and proud with the slaughter, depopulating and destroying entire regions by the sword, horse bow, and torch.

What. The. Actual. F**k.

I’ve about come to the conclusion that most of the human race is insane. How the hell you reconcile the two attitudes towards dead Ukrainian peasants, I’ll never fully understand–That, or what Stalin and his minions did during the earlier Holodomor. “Hey, everyone is starving under our brilliant new economic program… Ivan, do you think that maybe it’s not so brilliant? Could we have gotten this… Wrong?”.

All y’all are basically nuts, I’m afraid. I may be a sociopath with no real internal compass to work off of, navigating the shoals and depths of social conduct, but the rest of you seem to be actually worse off, because you’re not even trying to work out the rules. And, observedly, don’t have any that seem to keep you from self-gratification and doing whatever the hell you like.

Aliens ever show up to judge the sentient occupants of this planet, I’m gonna be going up to them and I’m gonna be very, very clear that I’m not with the rest of you. Y’all can simply do your own thing, trying to explain it all to the nice near-godlike beings, ‘cos I’m pretty much done trying to understand you as a group or individually.

I really don’t do “morals”, but at least I try. The rest of you just seem to use them as a cudgel to beat other people up with, while you’re doing whatever you like, anyway.

Practical matter — the individual soldier is an a kill-or-be-killed situation; the only way to survive is to be the better shot. Moral situation — the enemy soldier is simply some poor sod who was born on the opposite side of the line and is merely following orders, same as our soldier.

That is why the most moral response is to make killing the people who give the orders for violence the top priority. That is why the current situation where Hillary Clinton is safe & warm while she makes decisions which result in the death of Libyans is very immoral.

Still, as a practical matter, it seems that the best way to avoid violence in this world is to make it very clear that we won’t hit first — but if anyone hits us, the response will be extremely disproportionate and targeted at the leadership who issued the order for the attack on us.

And if that approach leads us to think twice about why we are putting aircraft carriers on the other side of the world — so much the better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4

Odds are pretty good that any “leadership” in a nuclear exchange will have taken appropriate protective measures before starting things off, and you’ll just be killing a bunch of civilians that didn’t have very much at all to do with the theoretical sinking of a a capital ship…

MAD might have been a little justifiable when you could only go after a country’s leadership cadre by destroying the city they were theoretically in, but once you recognize that you’re just killing potentially millions of people that effectively had nothing to do with the attack on your nation, the whole thing goes out the window inasmuch as the morality of it all. It’s like a judge in a murder trial saying “OK, you killed so-and-so, who was X’s mother, so now we’re gonna kill your mother…”.

Many of those populations, like in North Korea, are just as much prisoners/victims of the regime as the theoretical dead here in the US, so killing them in order to get at the regime’s leadership…? Is that what we’re reduced to? Is that moral?

Strikes me that it’s about like the Germans and their Francs Tireurs policies during WWI and II. If it’s reprisals-against-the-law-of-war to do what they did to an Ouradour-sur-Glane or Lidice, how is it possible to say that what amounts to a deliberate policy of extermination is A-OK?

I don’t think that there is really a workable moral answer to someone like China nuking or dropping a biowarfare agent on a major city. I think you just have to write off morality, accept that you’re a monster when you do it, and let the fur fly, hoping that the fact you’re a monster will dissuade people from engaging you on those terms.

Doesn’t change the fact that you’re still a monster, though. And, in a thousand years or so, any justifications you make that you “had to do it” are going to sound a lot like Cato the Censor’s “Carthago delenda est…” speeches. I’m not sure that MAD will stand the test of time, TBH.

As a practical matter of pragmatism, however? I am unsure what other option there is. I just don’t think it’s a particularly moral option. I mean, seriously–What has that random million or so residents of Shanghai really done to deserve sudden immolation, should some no-doubt well-protected member of the leadership cadre in Beijing decide to fling a missile at Los Angeles?

Not to mention, what if it wasn’t China that did unto Los Angeles before we visited immolation on Shanghai? What does MAD look like, in terms of morality, when there’s been a mistake?

Of course, one of the assumptions of MAD is that it’s an end-of-the-world as we know it sort of proposition, one that includes us all going to assless chaps as a fashion statement, but… I think the point still remains, you’re holding China’s population hostage against the chance of their leadership nuking us.

Which, when you’re talking about a totalitarian state, ain’t something I like the idea of. Smacks of shooting the hostages, to my mind…

That is a defensible point of view — probably the majority point of view of which Political Correctness approves.

There is the other point of view — Mutual Assured Destruction was the ultimate in morality.

In conventional war, the grunts die and the civilians (quaint concept!) get raped, starved, used as slave labor; but the leaders who give the orders stay far away, safe & warm. Accurate ballistic missiles (+/- nuclear weapons) put the leaders — the decision makers — on the front line. Now the leader who gives soldiers the order to go to war knows that he (or these days, more likely she) is likely to die.

That takes us back to the days when the King had to ride into battle at the head of his army, putting his own life on the line — a highly moral situation where war is concerned.