(Note: You may be tempted to discount this idea from the outset. Please give it a fair shake and read through to the end.)
Have you seen Lost?
The T.V. show?
Yes? No?
So, anyway, there’s this one plot point where Guy A drugs Guy B and when Guy B wakes up Guy A says that while he’s been out he’s put a pacemaker on his heart. If Guy B ever steps out of line and doesn’t do exactly what Guy A says, Guy A will press a button and Guy B’s heart will spasm out. Death death death. There’s even a nice newly stitched wound on Guy B’s chest to confirm the story.
Now. All of this is a lie. But the fact that it is a lie doesn’t make it any less effective as a means of control. The lie makes Guy B highly compliant.
And that’s what nuclear bombs are.
I think, anyway.
“BUT JAPAN!!!!!” I hear you scream.
I know, I know. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yes? Yes. Well in point of fact nobody in Japan thought they’d been nuked until the newspapers told them so. The folks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki believed they’d been firebombed, just like all the other Japanese cities had been firebombed. Here’s a photo of Tokyo after the U.S. firebombed it. Here’s the aftermath of Hiroshima. Do they look so different?
So firebombing. Exactly what it sounds like. Thousands of planes fly over a city and drop incendiary bombs by the ton that would light everything on fire. They used a mix of flammable chemicals designed to be very difficult to extinguish. It’s more complicated than this but if you imagine fleets of aircraft flying over a town, dousing it with gasoline, and then setting it alight, you’d have the general gist of what firebombing was. Mostly this was against civilian targets by the way. Remember, we were the good guys.
So when the residents of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki scrambled out of their underground shelters and looked upon the ruins of their city, they assumed, naturally, that what had happened to Tokyo and the other major Japanese cities had happened to them. Firebombing. Plain and simple. They went on believing this for a week or so after the bombings, until it became globally publicized that something quite different had happened. The Americans, see, had a superweapon. It was new, space age technology that could literally wipe cities off the map. SCARY. You’d better surrender. We’d hate to have to use it again. You know… after the first two times.
Not a bad tactic really. As we’re seeing in real-time with the Ukraine Russia War, war propaganda is a powerful tool. If you can make the enemy believe that resistance if futile, they may very well cease trying to resist. Get demoralized. Go home. People have been using tales of superweapons to subdue the enemy for ages. You know, claiming that they had a powerful supernatural relic on their side, or that Athena was blessing their armies, or that some of their warriors were literally unstoppable demi-gods. The bomb is just that for the technological age. People don’t believe in God or the gods anymore so supernatural propaganda won’t work. They believe in atoms though, so, hey, why not?
I know, I know. The argument I’ve made so far doesn’t seem very strong. What? Nuclear bombs are just war propaganda? A means of controlling the populace through fear? Fair.
Consider then the following points:
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