- April 30, 1945 -> Hitler's suicide
- July 16, 1945 -> Trinity test
- August 6, 1945 -> Hiroshima
- August 29, 1945 -> First soviet test
- June 27, 1954 -> First nuclear power plant
- March 28, 1979 -> Three mile island
- April 26, 1986 -> Chernobyl
Unintuitive order...
The breakdown of empiricist science comes when we realize there are things that don't need to be observed to be true. Hiroshima/Nagasaki were unfathomably shortsighted mistakes, holding back human progress to this day while handing fear-based ideological power to authoritarians.
For clarity, I honestly thought that Hitler's suicide came after the bombs. I'm sure I've been told otherwise, but somehow this must have slipped my mind. By 1944 Japanese soldiers were already cannibalizing for sustenance. We had already won, ideologically and practically.
In the message to the Japanese, Truman (et al) didn't mention a nuclear weapon. Had they given any estimate of what "total destruction" meant and/or accepted a "conditional surrender", the world would be a better place. But they thought they were "smarter" than others, I guess.
They weren't smarter, but they were less ignorant, which is to say: they did have knowledge others didn't have. A lot of problems, big and small, can be solved by figuring out how to share knowledge. This is why I studied communication, but it's really an epistemological problem.
Anyway, sanctions restrict the flow of knowledge. So, in the current situation with Putin, we're punishing ignorance by ensuring further broader ignorance on the grounds that he's too ignorant to understand something most don't understand. It's a knowledge distribution problem.
I conjecture that Putin is a scared child inside: Vera Putina
Scared children can be easily coerced into anything, they can even be coerced into coercing themselves into thinking the world is a dark place and humans are more full of darkness than light.
Sanctions are used by the Kremlin on their own citizens for the same reasons described above, for context. Cycles of ignorance. But I think deep down Putin has the right intentions, I think he's a good person, just so mislead it'd take something 'Rosebud' level to dislodge him.
Why doesn't he think humans are great (so that they must be controlled)? It's the same problem that faces people everywhere. Hell, most of the people I follow on Twitter don't think people are all that great and/or are cyclically cynical/apathetic, myself included until ~2020.
I still feel like a child myself most of the time, but I'm not scared, and I can explain why: "All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge."
Anyway, I just want to add that sanctions are objectively better than deaths (like from an escalating WW situation). And, we did articulate, relatively specifically and clearly, "if you do this we will do this". Boundaries are crucial. It just, clearly hasn't worked (yet?), so...
Also, I think he's been humiliated and backed into a corner, maybe (Biden [et al]) doing the least possible may be the best thing for now--but populism demands something, so we can send money to the Ukraine national reserves and force political sanctions.