From: Gene McAloon 

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003 17:58:27 -0500, "John Beamish"
 wrote:

>"just another weapon" -- hardly.

It is indeed just another weapon. On one night in Japan some 100K Japanese
lost their lives in Tokyo as a result of American bombing. All they did was
drop incendiary cluster  bombs. But who remembers that when only
conventional weapons
were used?  When similar mass killings occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the weapon was new and different and very photogenic in the mushroom cloud
structure
it produced.

I am sure the pictures of all those badly burned survivors would have been
as ghastly as anything produced by the nuclear bombs, but where are those
pictures?
Well, the media didn't see anything really headline grabbing in that, but did in
the new, exciting stuff of atom bombs and all that. Because they did is why
the world has since attached an importance to them out of all proportion to
their reality. There was even fantasizing about nuclear winters and all
that garbage which Hollywood then latched onto until now it has become part
of the conventional wisdom about what would happen in an all-out nuclear
war.

Would the destruction and aftermath of such a war be worse than use of more
conventional weapons?  Of course. That has been true of every major advance
in weaponry. But much more than that? No.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5