Pete Clarke Wrote:
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>
> However, what was lost is, in many respects, a
> great unknown. Potentially a huge amount of
> knowledge was lost for ever; whether that
> knowledge would have benefitted us as a species is
> an unknown. I want to emphasise that I'm not
> talking here about the direct human cost of the
> conquest - the simple fact of genocide (whether
> intentional or not) should never be subjected to
> any sort of cost/benefit analysis so I'm not
> discussing it in this context.

I'm not talking about the human cost, either. I'm talking about knowledge. Besides the knowledge that died with the people, the languages, the ways of understanding, there are the recorded writings that were deliberately destroyed. It's no more or less of an unknown that what was lost in the library of Alexandria. The science, the astronomy, calendrics, medicine, logic -- it's all gone.

> With regard to the post WWII arms race - I accept
> that the MAD policy may have prevented a third
> world war. However, we must go back to this being
> a great disaster for humanity. If the atomic bomb
> had not been developed then the superpower arms
> race would not necessarily have happened
> (particularly if agreements between the USSR, UK
> and USA had been kept and the post war distrust
> avoided). THis is all "what if" - what if the USA
> and USSR had developed with peace-time economies.
> What more could the USA have achieved if it hadn't
> channeled massive amounts of GDP into arms
> development. What if communism had had a chance to
> develop without every penny being spent on
> missiles? Could it have succeeded? What could the
> combined will of the two cold-war superpowers have
> achieved if they weren't both convinced they were
> going to destroy each other? How would the
> Developing world be if the USA and USSR hadn't
> been forced to fight proxy wars to avoid an all
> out nuclear conflict?
>
> That's my train of thought on this.

On the nuclear stuff, I honestly think we are too close to this in time to be objective. For me, it's always been hard to justify the bomb, let alone its use. Some of what happened in the world in the cold war was a continuation of WW II, and, IMO, it's hard to separate post war from actual war. But I think it comes too close to modern politics to be allowed on this board to get into all the specifics.