[ExI] better than Google

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Well is there anything between nuclear and the conventional bombs?  It
> would be nice, in a gruesome kind of way, to have bombs capable of killing
> the same number of whatever as nuclear ones but no radiation.  Has a total,
> all out war, sparing nothing, been fought in modern times?
>

Not even WWII was as total as all out nuclear war would be.  And that gets
to the problem: while some may see it as a nice fantasy, in practice there
has never been nor will there likely ever be a situation wherein complete
nuclear annihilation of the enemy will be the best approach, at least not
for any country able to manufacture and launch long-range nuclear weapons.

Iran and North Korea might be close - and certainly, their ideologies blind
them to the reality that their regimes (and quite possibly most of their
countries) would be annihilated if they conducted a nuclear first attack -
but that same fundamentalism has diminished their technical capability: see
what has actually happened when they have tried so far.  For countries that
do have the technical capability, they are well aware that the only
guaranteed result if they struck first would be nuclear reprisals from
enough of the world that, no matter what happens to their foes, they would
lose.

MOAB and similar are the largest bombs for which an actual use in modern
war has been identified - and even then, it's been rare.
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