Sometimes blowing things up does the world good.

If it weren't for the death, destruction, damage, hate, discontent, disease, famine, and general evil of warfare, its actually not a bad thing.


Next time you are crying over spilt milk, the loss of your Mittens the cat, or your cable bill; thank chemical warfare for helping you. You see, the Kleenex you use to evacuate your nostrils, is a development of the First World War. Since cotton was in high demand for all sorts of things including bandages, a need for another material arose for gas mask filters. Yup, Kleenex.

There's a Nobel Prize for blowing things up. Actually, there is a Nobel Prize because of blowing things up. Alfred Nobel is the inventor of dynamite. Made quite a bit of money from that as well as owning the defense contractor Bofors. In his will Nobel left a lot of money to establish the Nobel Prize.

As militaries became more and more adept at blowing each other up, field medicine came into it's own. The barber who previously would hack off your injured limb and sentence you to a miserable life has long given way to modern emergency medicine. Soldiers wounded in Iraq are making it from the incident site to an appropriate medical receiving center within an hour. Once stabilized they are in Germany within a day and sometimes home to the US for rehabilitative care within the week. Ambulance services, Medic1, and most emergency medical services can trace their history to military medicine.

However, when you absolutely, positively have to blow something up (really well) within minutes - you develop the Space Program. The great space race of the cold war was a function of the cold war. It had very little to do with exploration, national pride, or looking for little green people. It had everything to do with the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead across the globe quickly, accurately, and without needing an aircraft or even people to do it.

As for blowing up things on large scales, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were necessary. It was a horrible waste of human life. A single death in war is a waste. There are some who say it was unnecessary, that the casualties on the US side would not have been as high as predicted during the US invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) at the end of World War II. Guess what? It's a war. You try to minimize civilian casualties, but I don't think I can agree to do so at the loss of friendly soldiers.

Next, if there had not been atomic bombs in Japan, I believe you would have seen a nuclear exchange in Europe within years. The destruction caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have made future nuclear attack or retribution untenable. If the US had not dropped the bombs, it is quite conceivable the Cold War would have gone "Hot". In this way, the bombing also saved civilian lives.

The greatest benefit of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is more simple. If not for those events, we would have no large scale explosion to relate other events. I mean who can visualise Mount St. Helens being equated to 44.6quadrillion pop-its?

Crop Circles? Well, those aren't military. Those are kangaroos stoned out of their minds with opium.