
Operation Vegetarian - monort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vegetarian
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Boulth
The source mentioned in that page has more information:
[https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/10/operation-
vegetari...](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/01/10/operation-vegetarian/)

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rossdavidh
The potential risk to potential reward here seems pretty low. Both a good
chance of it killing lots of people you didn't need/want to, and a good chance
of it not doing any damage whatsoever to your enemy. War is full of bad things
and hard choices, but this sounds like the worst of both worlds. Perhaps why
it never got deployed.

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maxander
WWII was also distinguished by the use of aerial firebombing, where tons and
tons of explosives were hurled into cities more or less at random in the hopes
that it would have some psychological or material impact. The whole idea of
“precision strikes” and not harming civilians is a fairly recent development
in the history of war. (Let’s hope it sticks around!)

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yesenadam
My knowledge about this is largely from Jonathan Glover's excellent/depressing
_Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century_.

I thought 'harming civilians' is the fairly recent development. Battles
usually always used to be between two armies on a field, away from cities. At
the beginning of WWII, bombing cities was not even considered by the Allies;
by the end, they were doing it themselves, justified by the Germans V2s
bombing cities in Britain. The Germans justified that by saying the WWI
British blockade of Germany was aimed at starving the people and killed many
more. In the Nuremberg trials, the standard was "stuff they did that we
didn't", but that standard had been slipping constantly during the century, as
that book makes plain.

Perhaps most frightening was the description of the 'decision' to drop the
atomic bombs on Japan, which wasn't even a decision, but a series of
misunderstandings between a few different groups. No-one made a decision.

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tomcam
Um, no. The world history of warfare is very much one of looting, pillaging,
rape, and enslavement. This held true everywhere from Africa over the
centuries, to Greece and Rome, to the Ottoman Empire, to the Aztecs and Mayans
and Olmec to Japan, to the Russian revolution, to the First Peoples in North
America long before there was a United States of America .

