Should we really wage war going after nukes and chemical weapons and biological weapons? Christiana Amanpour’s hissy fit over Syria and their alleged use of chemical weapons was the visceral reaction so many of us have had since the non existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It has been the visceral response so many of us have had since World War I frankly. Of course a weapon that can kill more than one person at a time is a problem and a threat. Of course dying as a result of exposure to mustard gas is a painful and horrifying. The incineration of thousands in moments at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrid. The long slow cancers that claimed so many more were beyond the pale. The millions of indigenous people that could not defend themselves against Small Pox borne by European explorers new to the Americas amounted to genocide.

Of course, all of this is bad. Very very bad.

Still I believe it would behoove us to think hard about death and war.

On February 12, 1943, Allied bombers killed 35,000 people in a single night of bombing in a town called Dresden.

On July 28th and 29th, 1943, Allies bombed Hamburg Germany and killed 42,000 people, men, women, children, fathers, brothers, uncles, mothers, cousins, grandchildren, the vast majority of them were families asleep or refugees sleeping in the streets trying to escape the war in some other place.

These deaths were the result of conventional bombing. Consider that over two nights, March 9th and 10th, 1945, B-29s firebombed Tokyo. Over 100,000 people died in that time span, and thousands more died of their wounds and lack of medical aid in the ensuing weeks.

Think about this for a moment. In fact, let’s describe the death throes so many suffered under a conventional bombing.

Imagine you are hiding in the basement of a building with your family, packed tight with other families with you. You listen and pray that the explosions rocking the town miss your shelter. There is a tremendous explosion over your head. The building collapses on you. Literally tons of wood and concrete fall on the people around you. Some people in the cellar are knocked unconscious by the compression wave, and others die of trauma, the result of being crushed to death under the rubble. You awake and find that you cannot move, because the detritus of the bombing is covering most of your body. You struggle to breathe through the dust and smoke. Others are crying, calling your name. You recognize one of them as your 8 year old daughter. She is screaming terrified, and in agony. By the way, everyone else in the cellar is in a similar situation. Mercy helps no one, because no one on the street above you can hear you or get to you if they could hear you. You die from asphyxiation listening to their cries.

Above you, in a nearby park, a woman running from the street with her baby is caught by a white hot piece of shrapnel that arced across the field and severed her leg. Her baby is screaming at the top of his lungs. She hears his screams and tries to utter a comforting word while while she goes into shock and slowly bleeds to death.

In downtown Tokyo, thousands of incendiaries dropped from bombers start fires in the town, and the fire is burning so hot that it starts a windstorm, sucking debris and, for all intents and purposes fuel into itself that feeds the ever expanding flame. A lone man, most of his life a poor worker who lives in the paper and bamboo homes on the outskirts, makes his way to another part of the city where his brother lives. Suddenly he is swept sideways by the wind towards the fire. He grabs a fence, hoping to slow his movement, but the wind builds until he and the fence are dragged inexorably into the conflagration. For a few moments he is literally floating over the ground, pounded by debris, until the heat itself sets his clothes in fire. He falls unconscious and is consumed while he is out.

Consider the fate of a combat death. Take a tanker. A man who was born and raised in Brooklyn, who happens to be a loader, taking 75mm shells from a storage compartment and placing them into the breech of the cannon. He signed up to fight when the Japanese attacked the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. He finds himself in Western Europe facing one of the strongest armies ever assembled. Across a field, a Tiger tank fires a high velocity 88mm shell that smashes into the side of the tank. The loader survives the hit, but not the gunner. The commander is dead, his corpse and the dead gunner are blocking the exit hatch. The fire started by the explosion spreads. The loader dies an excruciating death slowly cooked by the heat.

My father was a ground crew chief in the United States 8th Air Force. He loaded the bombs and the ammunition of B-17 crews heading towards a target. Twenty five planes headed out for this mission and only fifteen return. Inside the planes were often body parts, dead gunners who were cut down by 20mm cannons that ripped through the aircraft and then the air crew. And where were the other crew members? Many fell to their deaths from 25,000 feet in the air. Many burned to death, or bled to death or suffocated at altitudes where there was not enough air to breath.

Tell me, how are these deaths any less excruciating than dying of Small Pox, or Anthrax. Tell me that a POW who starves to death after eating his own boots and grass growing out the ground is dying a better death than say suffocating from blistered lungs after a chemical attack. For every picture of the Kurds lying in piles after Saddam killed them, and I’ll show you bodies piled like cordwood at Gettysburg. I’ll show you fields of ice and snow where nameless faceless soldiers numbering in the thousands literally died of cold outside of Stalingard. History is replete with death at the business end of weapons, all manner of weapons from the Roman gladius to Sarin gas.

And if course this leaves out those who survive war, millions whose hearts and minds were literally broken by the carnage and suffering, people whose daily lives and nightmares are haunted by the horrors they were asked to visit upon others.

Instead of trying to stop the dissemination of weaponry, let’s spend our time and genius stopping the proliferation of war itself. It’ll go a lot further to promulgating peace than bombing the Capitol of a tyrannical regime.

I realize how unpopular this opinion might be. Weapons of mass destruction makes me laugh when I hear it. Because it is red herring. It is not the weapon that matters. It is the intent to kill that matters. Just remember that war is hell. If we can do that, then perhaps we will go a long way towards keeping the simple blessing of life intact.