Stas Bush wrote: I've always known that military service warps the moral perceptions of a human, but I guess working in nuclear targeting warps it to extremes where morbid things become funny in a way.
We've got the best graveyard humor ever created. For example, one of our get-rich-quick schemes in the event of a nuclear strike coming in was to identify the targets and then sell short on the city bonds in question. It really was a good environment to work in though, one learned an incredible amount very quickly and about the most esoteric of subjects, some of the people I worked with had backgrounds that could only be described as bizarre yet their expertise was indispensible. Also, I still know my way around Russian cities by the strategic targeting desiderata. "The way to the Stadium? Yes certainly, we're standing at ground zero now. Go south until you reach the 100psi line, then turn left and follow the thermal pulse until you meet the reflector wave off the ridgline. Allow yourself to be carried along by that wave until its reinforced by the blast wave from the second initiation. Take the road that's perpendicular to the primary shock vector and the stadium will be the third collapsing building on your right"
Told you we had graveyard humor down perfectly.
Stuart wrote:"Strategic objective" itself may be considered criminal in case it causes mass excess deaths of civilian population.
Yes indeed, no argument there. In my comments it was presumed that the target system adopted was itself legal under international law. Taking out military installations, factory complexes producing military equipment (which these days means all of them) and so on are legitimate target systems and are therefore covered. Taking things to extremes, a target system that concentrated on blowing up orphanages would not be legitimate because a nation's orphanages would have no military value that would justify any level of civilian deaths. So, yes, you are quite correct, some target systems are illegal due to their lack of military value and therefore any level of civilian deaths associated with that attack would be a war crime.
The Germans had a "strategic objective" of recolonizing newly conquered territories, which obviously required exterminating the entirety, or close to that, of the existing population. Thus, the nature of the objective of the military operation is itself brought into question.
Again, agreed. In fact "recolonization" as a strategic objective is very precisely and emphatically declared a illegal under international law and that goes back beyond WW1. In fact, its actually illegal to recolonize by mass movement of population let alone by mass extermination. Viewed utterly ruthlessly, that might not be a bad thing. If territorial realignments are necessary, then shifting populations around (with due care and as much decency as is possible under the circumstances) might well be the most humane alternative. It's arguable that under some circumstances, a population shift could be the lest-bad alternative.
If you have an objective to destroy urban factories but this results in the entire population of the nation dying, that cannot be considered "legal" unless there is no other way period, or all other ways result in yet greater civilian casualties. The use of force might be "proportionate" in the sense that it is enough, but if other methods exist, which yield lower casualties, it would still not be legal.
Again, no argument there, if cat you've summarized the situation very well. In the strategic nuclear business though, the problem was that we had to be able to get at the militarized infrastructure of the Soviet Union. WW2 proved that eliminating said military industrial infrastructure had to be done totally and in a very short time-span if it was to be effective; the ranges involved meant doing so was extremely difficult. We only had two options for getting through to destroy that infrastructure, bombers and ICBMs. By the time I was involved in The Business, that devolved to a single system, missiles. Nobody liked that but we were stuck with it. We had no option but to use missiles, the missiles were inaccurate primarily due to their range so to compensate for the lack of accuracy we had to use big warheads and that inevitably meant a large civilian death toll. So, there was no alternative and that was that. As we got alternatives, more accurate missiles, we were able to use smaller and smaller warheads, thus reducing the civilian collateral damage and satisfying the proportionality requirement.
The classic example of proportionality is a small town where the congregation of a local church is in said church but there's a sniper in the tower creating havoc. Dropping a strategic nuclear warhead on the town and wiping the entire population out would be considered disproportionate but bringing up a howitzer and firing it over open sights to destroy the church (killing most if not all the civilians inside) would (is) considered proportionate.
By the way, using civilians as a shield or siting military targets within civilian areas is also a war crime and doing so eliminates the protections granted to the civilian population. So if, for example, an enemy commander deliberately sets up an artillery battery in an orphanage courtyard, the gloves come off right there and we more or less have a free hand to do our worst. That's why the Russian Army didn't do anything (legally) wrong in the Chechnya business (operationally wrong is entirely another matter). The way the Chechens conducted themselves basically eliminated the legal protection for their civilian population.
