The Ethics of Nuclear Warfare

Today is August 6th, the anniversary day of the Hiroshima Bombing on August 6th 1945. I suppose that Firaxis is not releasing a developer video on the Atomic Bomb in Civ6 today for obvious reasons.

The Hiroshima Bomb killed around 20.000 soldiers and 70.000 - 146.000 civilians, about 70.000 persons were killed instantly by the blast and the firestorm and most others died from injuries, burns and radiation sickness in the following months ...
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki) In a documentary film it was mentioned that those who survived Hiroshima/Nagasaki and did not die in 1945, even when they did not have radiation sickness/cancer, were often doomed to a life in social isolation due to a wide spread fear of genetic mutations in the Japanese post-war society, so most of them did not marry nor got children ... (I think they also showed some of the mutated, nonviable embryos from surviving women in the film collected by US military scientists ...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions

The bomb was thrown at a time when Japan's (military and merchant) Fleet was already destroyed, Japan's influence was mostly reduced to the Japanese Islands and the occupied pre-war territories in China, Korea and Manchuria with a pending Soviet invasion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria), most of Japanese cities were destroyed by LeMay's Firebombing Raids killing up to a million Japanese civilians (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan) and Japan had long ceased to be a threat to the United States territory. Main focus of the bomb was to force Japanes government into "unconditional surrender" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration).

The Atomic Bomb is a feature of all Civ versions, everybody knows how an atomic explosion looks from a distance and Civ usually uses this idealized harmless view in the game.

However the close view on the real victims was completely different.


It is often noted by Civ players that they use nuclear weapons to stop other players from building/launching the SpaceShip to win the game ... well neither the United States nor the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons to win their Space Race in the 60s. (I usually play Civ on a level where I can win without using the atomic bomb.)

Throwing an atomic bomb on an enemy city in Civ6 should probably damage/destroy/pollute not only the center but also most of the surrounding tiles with districts/improvements in the 1st, 2nd and maybe also the 3rd ring. Even when pollution from fallout is cleared, there should be a massive effect on population growth for maybe 50 turns (a generation) due to effects of radiation disease/mutation ... fallout may have global impact on health as well as agricultural production worldwide if a full scale nuclear war is waged ...
(Depending on the degree of Enlightenment of human society, usage of nuclear wepons should have a major impact on all diplomatic relations (crime against humanity) if used in an unnecessary case. )

I mostly agree with what you say (though I find your comment on the US not using nukes to win the space race hilarious - of course they didn't, I'm glad real-life diplomacy is not quite like in Civ because we would have needed many new planets already).

historix69 said:

(Depending on the degree of Enlightenment of human society, usage of nuclear wepons should have a major impact on all diplomatic relations (crime against humanity) if used in an unnecessary case. )

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In IV (never played V) you get a diplomatic malus for every nuke you drop on an AI (don't know if I only get it if they are Pleased or above with the AI I nuke). I would easily get to -150 attitude (where without nukes it's already hard to get more than -15) with EVERYONE this way.

I would be interested in what you consider an "unnecessary" case - in civ every use of nukes is necessary since you are trying to win the game, and in real life it is hard to imagine a case where other means aren't better.

Here is what we know so far about nukes in civ6:
- we know there is a separate fission and fusion bomb (from tech tree screenshots)
- we know that damage is inversely proportional to distance. ie more damage in center than a couple tiles away (from devs)
- we know nukes are extremely powerful (Ed B's own words)
- Devs have said that with new district system that players will not necessarily drop nuke on city center but may choose to drop nuke on a nearby district instead. If you drop the nuke on the city center, you will kill a lot of population but districts might survive depending on distance from center of blast. So if you want to target the enemy's economy/science/industry/culture etc, you can drop nuke directly on districts to obliterate them but leaving city centers less affected depending on how far they are from blast.

I had Russia drop 6 nukes on my civ last campaign. Lucky I had bomb shelter up before they started that war. I keep thinking my interceptor should kill any plane before they the bomb but they did not . In civ 5 nuke destroy half of the pop, improvement tile and irradiated a couple of random tiles. If I had not won the game before the war was over it would have took 7-10 turns per tile to fix everything.

Hey I'd love a more realistic diplomacy system and art style, but in the end Firaxis will make the right choice. This game has never been about realism, which is the argument currently used against my complaint that they dropped the rifleman unit from the game leaving the harquebus style musketman unit to go from renaissance to the modern era... I like your ideas, although the pollution part might be difficult to implement seeing as the game is more of a game and less than a sim. But the diplo hit would be nice. The global health was used in BE and it kinda fell flat with the style of gameplay they chose; similarly to the global happiness mechanic. Who knows though maybe the expansions might encompass something along these lines, as I feel vanilla VI is just focused on making the revamped systems and AI work.

I know it may seems... overly-reacting because it's a game but I never dropped a nuke (I played IV and V) because I prefer to lose than using nukes.

EDIT: ESL

DarkAlabaster said:

EDIT: ESL

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You are forgiven hahaha

I'd really like late-game warfare to be cold war diplomacy-esque between major powers, with nuclear weapons being both overwhelmingly powerful and plentiful, and able to be developed by everybody at the same time, with mechanisms to ensure that should a full-blown war break out, very few people would be left standing on either side. MAD warfare and all that. Late-game diplomacy and warfare would be more conducted through proxies than through direct action.

One of the documentary DVDs I own is part of a "Why We Fight" 8 DVD-Box on WW2, it is a compilation of smaller films and was titled "Hiroshima & Nagasaki" (DVD 8). I think I also saw them in school in the Cold War years since danger of nuclear war was always present at that time. For those interested, I found the documentary footage on YouTube :

Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Atom Strikes!
Survival Under Atomic Attack
Duck And Cover

I think Truman ordered to drop the two bombs because he was misled by his military advisors and unaware of what the radiation does to the survivors of the bomb. The claim that Japan surrendered as result of the atomic bombs is an american propaganda myth. To the Japanese government, the fact that Soviet Union had declared war and overrun Manchuria was much more important. The Soviet invasion was requested by Roosevelt in Yalta. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference) (Post-war Soviet presence in Manchuria/Korea later directly led to the fall of China in 1949 and Korean War 1950-53 ...)

If you look at the original film footage about the victims of real nuclear warfare, you might wonder if atomic bombs should be an "interesting" decision in a game ... I rate nuclear weapons in the same category as Poison Gas, Death Camps (Concentration Camps/Gulag) and Firebombing/Using Napalm on civilian areas ... you might use them but if you do without need, you should lose your moral superiority ... a legal usage might only be in defence of your core homeland in an unprovoked attack, e.g. if you have no colonies/puppets and are attacked and fight against complete destruction ...
Maybe the first usage of nuclear weapons in a Civ game could be free of diplomatic effect due to unawareness of the impact of nuclear weapons (for historical reasons) ...

cooldude1128 said:

I'd really like late-game warfare to be cold war diplomacy-esque between major powers, with nuclear weapons being both overwhelmingly powerful and plentiful, and able to be developed by everybody at the same time, with mechanisms to ensure that should a full-blown war break out, very few people would be left standing on either side. MAD warfare and all that. Late-game diplomacy and warfare would be more conducted through proxies than through direct action.

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The AI for that would have to be really finely tuned. If the AI is too trigger-happy, then the threat of MAD would quickly turn into actual MAD. If the AI is not willing to pull the trigger, then there's no threat of MAD at all.

A mechanic that REQUIRES the AI to play smart to be fun rather than lame is a really, really risky thing to include in a game.

Isn't OT the proper place for this sort of thinly-veiled proselytizing?

What you're asking for from a gameplay standpoint is for nukes to be even MORE effective than they currently are. You aren't slinging nukes at a city in the late game because you want the production from the tiles. You're slinging nukes because you think you have enough units to win by Domination, provided that you remove enough of the opponent's units from the field by nuking them. If you're wrong, then conferring additional production penalties on the victim just makes it that much harder for the target to recover should they retain their cities.

The late game is not like the early game. As time wears on, the value of future productivity from captured cities decreases sharply. You're not capturing cities for the purpose of assimilating them into your empire as productive entities; you're doing it to produce a win condition.

If you want a more realistic approach to the problem that fits within the scope of satisfying gameplay, the best way to do it would probably be to introduce the possibility of nuclear winter causing everyone to lose the game. In other words, if X number of nuclear devices are set off within Y period of time, nuclear winter ensues and everyone loses.

Implemented properly, it means that there's a huge first-mover advantage to acquiring and using nukes. You can't just sling them around willy-nilly, but you can more or less deny everyone else their use unless you're already in the driver's seat and they're trying to force a draw. It would also prohibit the possibility of a truly peaceful win unless you were so ridiculously far ahead of the AI/human opponents on tech that they can't build the bomb by the time you go to Alpha Centauri/impose religious hegemony/what have you.

historix69 said:

The claim that Japan surrendered as result of the atomic bombs is an american propaganda myth. To the Japanese government, the fact that Soviet Union had declared war and overrun Manchuria was much more important. The Soviet invasion was requested by Roosevelt in Yalta. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference) (Post-war Soviet presence in Manchuria/Korea later directly led to the fall of China in 1949 and Korean War 1950-53 ...)

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No, the atomic bombs caused Japan to surrender and it was a choice between a few hundred thousand people dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or millions dead in an invasion of the Home Islands.

Japan was not going to surrender just because Manchuria fell, they were intending to fight it out to the last and were training civilians to be suicide bombers and soldiers armed with literal pointy sticks. Even after the atomic bombs convinced most of the government that it was time to give up, there was still an attempt to stop Hirohito from delivering his surrender speech by elements within the military.

SupremacyKing2 said:

Here is what we know so far about nukes in civ6:
- we know there is a separate fission and fusion bomb (from tech tree screenshots)
- we know that damage is inversely proportional to distance. ie more damage in center than a couple tiles away (from devs)
- we know nukes are extremely powerful (Ed B's own words)
- Devs have said that with new district system that players will not necessarily drop nuke on city center but may choose to drop nuke on a nearby district instead. If you drop the nuke on the city center, you will kill a lot of population but districts might survive depending on distance from center of blast. So if you want to target the enemy's economy/science/industry/culture etc, you can drop nuke directly on districts to obliterate them but leaving city centers less affected depending on how far they are from blast.

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The Hiroshima Bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy) had a strength of about 15 kilo tons of TNT, the most powerfull fusion bomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) with 50-60 Mega tons of TNT was about 4.000 times as powerfull as "Little Boy".

One of the problems with inventing all the bombs in the 40s to 70s was that scientists did not know enough about the fusion/fission mechanism to always correctly predict the strength of a bomb so they had to build a prototype, fire it, measure the explosion and recalibrate their theories ... sometimes the forecasts were wrong and when the explosion was much stronger then expected, it became dangerous for the scientists themselves ... (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo)

Scientists also did not know how exactly the earth's atmosphere would react when powerful fusion bombs were detonated in the atmosphere and there was the fear that a too powerful fusion bomb might destroy the atmosphere and accidently doom mankind to a quick extinction, so finally they stopped increasing the power of the bombs. The tsar-bomb was originally developed for 100 Mt but later tested with an intentionally reduced charge at 50-60 Mt.

The original, November 1961 AEC estimate of the yield was 55–60 Mt, but since 1992 all Russian sources have stated its yield as 50 Mt. Khrushchev warned in a filmed speech to the Supreme Soviet of the existence of a 100 Mt bomb. (Technically the design was capable of this yield.) Although simplistic fireball calculations predicted the fireball would hit the ground, the bomb's own shock wave reflected back and prevented this.[19] The fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away from where it ascended. The mushroom cloud was about 64 kilometres (40 mi) high (over seven times the height of Mount Everest), which meant that the cloud was above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere when it peaked. The cap of the mushroom cloud had a peak width of 95 kilometres (59 mi) and its base was 40 kilometres (25 mi) wide.

All buildings in the village of Severny (both wooden and brick), located 55 kilometres (34 mi) from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows and doors; and radio communications were interrupted for almost one hour. One participant in the test saw a bright flash through dark goggles and felt the effects of a thermal pulse even at a distance of 270 kilometres (170 mi). The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero. A shock wave was observed in the air at Dikson settlement 700 kilometres (430 mi) away; windowpanes were partially broken to distances of 900 kilometres (560 mi).[20] Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland. Despite being detonated 4.2 km above ground, its seismic body wave magnitude was estimated at 5–5.25.[8][19] Sensors continued to identify the shockwaves after they had circled the earth twice.[9]

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TheD3rp said:

No, the atomic bombs caused Japan to surrender and it was a choice between a few hundred thousand people dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or millions dead in an invasion of the Home Islands.

Japan was not going to surrender just because Manchuria fell, they were intending to fight it out to the last and were training civilians to be suicide bombers and soldiers armed with literal pointy sticks. Even after the atomic bombs convinced most of the government that it was time to give up, there was still an attempt to stop Hirohito from delivering his surrender speech by elements within the military.

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This is a debate which probably will never fully be decided ...

see here for some arguments on the debate :
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/08/14/historians-soviet-offensive-key-japans-wwii-surrender-eclipsed-bombs.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

cooldude1128 said:

I'd really like late-game warfare to be cold war diplomacy-esque between major powers, with nuclear weapons being both overwhelmingly powerful and plentiful, and able to be developed by everybody at the same time, with mechanisms to ensure that should a full-blown war break out, very few people would be left standing on either side. MAD warfare and all that. Late-game diplomacy and warfare would be more conducted through proxies than through direct action.

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Hell no, that sounds about as boring as it could get. "Cold Wars" are just not fun to play, because literally nothing happens, and when stuff happens stuff is over in no time.

I think Nukes in Civ 5 worked pretty well, the only thing that I didn't like is the fact that there was no diplomatic penalty. There really should be, with everyone, even your allies, to balance the enormous destructive, war-winning power of a nuclear arsenal.

"Cold Wars" are just not fun to play

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For those who remember RoN :
"Rise of Nations" had a Cold War campaign with interventions in neutral 3rd world countries and option for successive bilateral nuclear disarmament. Attacking the other side directly triggered all nuclear weapons of both sides to be launched ... it was not MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), since number of missiles was limited to 3, but it could damage core-countries massively and I think it was impossible to rebuild the lost industry capacity before the campaign ended ... it was possible to win the campaign without any fight by just buying governments, but playing some of the interventions on the maps based on real geography was more fun ...

historix69 said:

... Japan was already negotiating with the allies to end the war ...

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They were indeed negotiating to end the war. You see, the thing is, the peace offer Japan was giving the Allies was completely insane in that it involved Japan keeping all of the SE Asian territories that had been conquered during the war and their government being completely unchanged.

TheD3rp said:

They were indeed negotiating to end the war. You see, the thing is, the peace offer Japan was giving the Allies was completely insane in that it involved Japan keeping all of the SE Asian territories that had been conquered during the war and their government being completely unchanged.

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Do you have a source for this?

The Japanese War Plan from 1940/41 for southern expansion was based on the assumption of a limited war :
- knock out US fleet at Pearl Harbor,
- quickly conquer/liberate and secure the western colonies in South East Asia with needed resources and add them to the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere",
- destroy the approaching allied fleets in a victorious decisive battle (like kind of Tsushima),
- and then negotiate peace with the allies to permanently end western colonialism in SEA and establish the self-supplying "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" under Japanese guidance (dominance).

Situation in 1945 was completely different since Japan already lost large parts of the territories conquered in 1942 so they could not expect to hold on to these territories. Instead I think they proposed or discussed to propose to grant independance to all remaining SEA colonies and asked the allies to do the same ...

Problem with the 1945 negotiations was that the Japanese relied on the Soviets as mediators, which played for time to relocate their european troops to enter the war and occupy as much strategic territory in East Asia as possible before war between Japan and the allies ended ...

Moderator Action: The OP is a political statement that has nothing to do with Civ6. Only at the end does Civ6 come into the discussion. Moved to World History forum.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889