> If the Nazis won WWII, don’t you think it would be worth at least considering using nuclear weapons in a war to destroy their regime before they developed a competitive nuclear arsenal of their own? Or would you have argued for coexistence with them?

That's a fascinating question. I'm not sure what to say.

EDIT: Ah, my response is "That's an unfair comparison." The context was that Von Neumann was advocating the extermination of the Russian population, not their regime. I agree that it would be worth considering the strategic options at the time, but that the strategic options should not include the extermination of the entire German population.

> The context was that Von Neumann was advocating the extermination of the Russian population, not their regime.

I don't think that's accurate. 1950 was before hydrogen bombs.

Von Neumann was ethnically Jewish and his relatives or friends literally went from respected citizens to extermination in unfathomably short order; so one would not be surprised if his calculus pertaining to collateral damage in decimating the Nazis would be rather unforgiving.

That's an explanation, but it's still wrong. It's a very dangerous thing to justify ethnic revanchism.

Definitely does not make for justification but I am helping us understand why [hopefully hyperbolic] comments of a political nature by Von Neumann [or other Jewish contemporaries] are often rather objectionable by universal or nominal moral standards.

Stalin is the guy who executed people who didn't abandon the idea of worldwide communism. He moderated the foreign policy of the USSR. He was also the guy who expended a lot of political capital and burned quite a few bridges to propose defensive alliances with Western countries, betraying those who wanted to plunge them into revolution.

He was pretty evil, but Stalin was much more moderate on exporting communism by military force than the norm - his invasions were mostly about maintaining the national security of the USSR.

The US by 1950 had hundreds of nuclear bombs. It would have been devastatig, the fallout would have been horrifying, and the famines that would follow would be the largest in the history of humanity.

>If the Nazis won WWII, don’t you think it would be worth at least considering using nuclear weapons in a war to destroy their regime before they developed a competitive nuclear arsenal of their own? Or would you have argued for coexistence with them? The Soviet Union in 1950 was very much the moral equivalent of that situation.

If it was the Nazis, I would, because there plan after winning WW2 involved killing 200+ million people. Say what you will about Stalin and he truly was evil, he had no plans of world conquest, much less of genociding hundreds of millions and literally enslaving a billion people.