Lemeiux

While nuclear weapons have refined names for refined homicide, "tactical"  and "strategic" come to mind, a characteristic of these weapons is that they are designed to be used against civilian populations. The economist  Pierre Lemieux has an article on nuclear weaponry where he compares the writings of Jouvenel, writing from the safety of Switzerland in WW11, with some opinion polls from then and now.

While aristocratic governments generally kept ordinary people out of their conflicts, Jouvenel claimed, "totalitarian democracy" has regimented ordinary citizens into the states' wars; they have become implicit combatants. Jouvenel wrote:

In the time of Louis XIV ... conscription was unknown, and the private person lived outside the battle ... For the first time in [American] history, a President of the United States [Franklin D. Roosevelt] looked on the mass of his fellow-citizens as 'human potential,' to be used as might best serve the prosecution of the war! ... Whereas the feudal monarchs could nourish hostilities only with the resources of their own domains, their successors have at their disposal the entire national income.

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Sagan and Valentino vindicate Jouvenel by arguing that American public opinion favors the use of nuclear weapons. According to a Gallup poll of August 4, 1945, 85% of Americans approved of the bombs just dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, in retrospect, less than 50% think it was a good idea. But Sagan and Valentino's 2015 opinion survey indicates that, in a similar scenario with Iran instead of Japan, 59% of Americans would support a US government decision to nuke 2 million civilians in order to prevent the deaths of 20,000 American soldiers in an alternative ground invasion. (The scenario presented to respondents was that of a war started by the Iranian government.) And most of these hawkish respondents would not change their minds even if a diplomatic solution were possible.
Of the American respondents who favored either a nuclear or conventional strike on civilians to save American soldiers, 68% agreed with the statement: "Because the Iranian civilians described in the story did not rise up and overthrow the government of Iran, they must bear some responsibility for the civilian fatalities caused by the U.S. strike." Sagan and Valentino express surprise at the number of respondents who "suggested that Iranian civilians were somehow culpable or were less than human."


Grim stuff, but I am not sure any of this is true. The wars of the Mongols were total wars and leverage against non-combatants routine, the impact of invading armies upon crops and transportation had wide ranging indirect impact upon non-combatants. Many wars, like the wars of Rome against the Frankish Celts and the Iberian Celts were wars of extinction, genocidal wars to extirpate a people. Are these people arguing that royal wars were somehow kinder? That the viciousness of modern war is a technological quirk? Is the endpoint argument that wars will be a lot more benign with good management?
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