>>150959152
I disagree, there is no equivalence. I'm speaking here as someone who is opposed to both.
Both acts, dropping the nuke on Japan and dropping the squid on New York, were bad, but there are degrees of badness. Certain actions can be worse than others. Theft is bad, but it's not as bad as murder.
Let me use an analogy: suppose a guy attacks you and is trying to kill you, you fight back and kill him in self-defense. Most people agree that's justified, or at least morally gray, very few people would say it is completely unambiguously wrong.
Now suppose a guy attacks you and is trying to kill you, you fight back and kill him in self-defense, and also kill his friend who wasn't attacking you. That's bad. It's easy to understand why, in a stressful situation, you may make a bad judgement call like that. However, it is morally wrong. You should not have killed the bystander.
Now suppose nobody attacks you. You just kill a random guy, and say "I hope by killing this random guy, I have inspired all the bystanders to become better people." That's unambiguously bad. You're a crazy person. There is no equivalency between what you did, and what the first two guys did.
Scenario 1 is the equivalent of killing soldiers or striking military targets. Scenario 2 is the equivalent of killing civilians or non-military targets of a country you're at war with, and is meant to be an analogue to nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if you believe those bomb drops were justified, it is a historical fact that civilians and non-military targets were murdered/destroyed as collateral damage. Scenario 3 is Veidt's plan. It's idiotic. It's utopian. It's half-baked. It will not work.