I don’t doubt that in the heat of battle, we’re going to be asking some version of “is nuking women and children cheaper than firebombing them”. But discussing the ethical questions outside of battle directly feeds into this calculation: because humanity has decided that nuking civilians is immoral, even a commander with no moral compass knows that nuking civilians may have reputational/legal impacts on themselves and their country, and may cause the enemy to retaliate in kind where it would not have otherwise: in other words, the “cost” of using the nuke has gone up, hopefully to the point that they’ll decide alternatives are “cheaper”.
I don’t doubt that in the heat of battle, we’re going to be asking some version of “is nuking women and children cheaper than firebombing them”. But discussing the ethical questions outside of battle directly feeds into this calculation: because humanity has decided that nuking civilians is immoral, even a commander with no moral compass knows that nuking civilians may have reputational/legal impacts on themselves and their country, and may cause the enemy to retaliate in kind where it would not have otherwise: in other words, the “cost” of using the nuke has gone up, hopefully to the point that they’ll decide alternatives are “cheaper”.