Miscellaneous Musing #59

Recently I learned that a US Army Air Force incendiary-bombing of Tokyo destroyed that city more thoroughly than atomic-bombing did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  From a military standpoint, one naturally wants to prevent the enemy from acquiring such things as bombs that can each wreak the same amount of havoc as can hundreds or thousands of less potent arms, but what does it matter ethically?  People seem to think that the use of "weapons of mass destruction" by a belligerent is not morally permissible but that the use of any other type of armament is; they might see things less simplistically if they realized that "conventional" weaponry, if there be enough of it, can do just as much damage as a nuclear warhead.