alt Hacker News> By that logic, we should skip the depleted uranium and head straight to thermonuclear weapons
Yes, actually.
(With a massive caveat being if the opponent does not also have nukes.)
I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
The estimated losses for the invasion of their main islands were 1 million. Would you kill 1 million of your countrymen, some of those your relatives and neighbors or would you rather kill a couple hundred thousand civilians of the country that attacked you?
Ironically, this time the math works out even if you give each life the same value. If you give enemy lives lower value, how many of them would you be willing to nuke before you'd prefer to send your own people to die?
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Ew
>I mean, why do you think the US nuked Japan at the end of WW2? Because it was the most expedient and economic way to kill enough people to break the government's will to fight and make them surrender.
Except that's not really true. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had little to do with "ending the war more quickly"[0]:
"The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies began at midnight on August 8, sandwiched between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was, indeed, the death blow U.S. officials knew it would be. When asked, on August 10, why Japan had to surrender so quickly, Prime Minister Suzuki explained, Japan must surrender immediately or "the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States."
As postwar U.S. intelligence reports made clear, the atomic bombs had little impact on the Japanese decision. The U.S. had been firebombing and wiping out Japanese cities since early March. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the U.S. could and would wipe out Japan's cities. It didn't make a big difference whether this was one plane and one bomb or hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs."
[0] https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-27/its-time-...