> I think Lincoln didn't have access to an arsenal that could end humanity if used in the wrong way, so I don't know if the comparison is warranted.
Neither did the US in 1950. You’re thinking of H-bombs, which didn’t exist until 1952.
> In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population
Which is not, in the context of 1950, what von Neumann was advocating. He was advocating for the use of strategic bombing in a campaign to topple a totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of people anyway. Which is what most people agreed was a good idea with the Nazis five years previous.
This is quite wrong. The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity. Certainly enough to kill the vast majority of the USSR.
There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country. The plan was a war of extermination. Strategically at the time the majority of the military was in the GDR, not even in the USSR.
> The plans were to drop hundreds of nukes. Those were definitely in the right order of magnitude to potentially end humanity.
I'm not sure where you're getting a plan to drop hundreds of nukes on the Soviet Union in 1950 from Von Neumann--source?
In any case, these weren't hydrogen bombs. There were probably hundreds of relatively legitimate military targets in the USSR in 1950 that could be usefully attacked with nuclear weapons with yields in the tens of kilotons (versus the hundreds to thousands of kilotons of hydrogen bombs). It's a big country and you could drop hundreds of nuclear weapons in the right parts of it without destroying population centers. The Soviets themselves did that with their own testing.
> There is no strategic use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear armed country.
Which the USSR barely qualified as in 1950. Plus, they had few reliable ways of delivering those nuclear arms to US soil. That's the point of attacking them in 1950 as opposed to waiting until they had a large nuclear arsenal and the ability to reach the United States.
Neither did the US in 1950. You’re thinking of H-bombs, which didn’t exist until 1952.
> In general, if someone is trying to exterminate a population
Which is not, in the context of 1950, what von Neumann was advocating. He was advocating for the use of strategic bombing in a campaign to topple a totalitarian regime that murdered tens of millions of people anyway. Which is what most people agreed was a good idea with the Nazis five years previous.