- [Announcer] Enough nuclear
power to destroy the human race several times over. - I need to show you a video
that is blowing my mind. You have the ocean just sitting
there being nice and calm, and then this pops out. Boom! It doesn't just pop out. It pops out for a second and looks like it's just
about to fall back down. And then... (laughs in awe) This is a rocket. Yes, A full blown rocket
that is headed for space. Oh, and I know this kind of looks small. It's not small. And where is this rocket
being launched from? Are there underwater bases? Yes, they're called submarines. (tense music) Once it gets to the surface, it flies a thousand
kilometers above Earth, literally into space. It starts looking at the stars to navigate and eventually falls back down to Earth, traveling up to like 12,000 kilometers to hit whatever target the people who launched it wanted it to. Like what have we created? - [Announcer] With such destructive power, it threatened the world. A deadly game of stealth. An undeniable strategic deterrent. Nuclear warheads that
can wipe out countries. - Submarines are fucking cool. I just gotta say it. They're these massive
floating nuclear weapons that could be anywhere at any time that we use for psychological
warfare and actual warfare and spying on people. And because of this, these giant vessels are actually incredibly stealthy. Like you could be swimming
in the ocean one day, minding your own business,
and right below you, there could literally be
this massive 48,000 ton metal machine with a couple
hundred humans aboard equipped with nuclear warheads that could be launched
at a moment's notice and you would've no idea
because not being seen is kind of their whole MO, which is nuts because
these were some big boys. Like Russia's Typhoon class submarine. If you just pluck that out of the water and put it on land somewhere, you start to get a scale for
how massive this thing is. Like a floating building. Yeah, these guys are thick and they're cruising around our oceans 250 meters below the surface. Oh, and something we're
gonna talk about later. They literally have nuclear
power plants on board giving them basically unlimited energy to make fresh water and oxygen, which means they could be down here in the depths of the ocean for decades. That is, if there weren't humans aboard that needed to come up to eat food. Navies around the world
who have submarines do everything in their power to ensure that these subs
are quiet and invisible, even magnet-resistant, all in the name of being undetectable. And they're always out there. Right now in this very moment, there are tons of these things. There are humans on these
multi-story buildings that are floating around our oceans with giant weapons in them. This is not normal. How did we get here? Why were these things invented? There's a lot to understand
about submarines. There's a lot of angles we have been researching for months and today we are going to
show you how we got here, what submarines can do,
and most importantly, why. - One submarine has enough nuclear weapons to essentially end life on
the planet as we know it. Just one submarine. - An increase in submarine activity. - [Reporter] Russia re-arming their fleet, Chinese submarines, Iranian submarines. - [Reporter] They will preserve peace for many years to come. (tense music) - Boy, today's topic is so juicy and there is so much to get through. Nick, our studio manager,
is building something for today's topic I wanna show you. But actually first, I
wanna thank the people who made this possible, so thank you BetterHelp. I've become a massive
proponent of therapy. I wasn't my whole life. It's only a couple years now
that I've been in therapy and it has truly changed my life. I am not saying that because BetterHelp is sponsoring today's video. I'm not saying that as an exaggeration. I'm saying that truly, literally therapy is a life-changing thing. Regardless of if you have a
clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety or like me, you don't have something clinical, but you're just a human
who lives in this world and has relationships
and fears and stresses, therapy can truly give you tools to approach your life
in a very different way. The big problem here is
that finding a therapist can be really difficult. It's often a matter of calling
and going to waiting rooms and talking to insurance. BetterHelp changes the game on this. They're an online platform
where you can go on, answer a few questions and
then based on your preferences, BetterHelp matches you with someone in their massive network
of over 25,000 therapists. Oh, and if you don't
wanna talk face to face with your therapist via like a video call, you can do text or a chat or a phone call. You get to make that decision based on what you need and what
your preferences are. If the therapist isn't a good fit for you, you can easily change and it
doesn't cost you anything. I think a lot of people don't get therapy because it's incredibly arduous and there's a lot of friction in finding a therapist and scheduling. BetterHelp solves this and makes therapy more
accessible and affordable. And again, I'm a giant proponent of that. There's a link in my description. It's betterhelp.com/johnnyharris. Clicking that link helps
support this channel, but it also gets you 10% off your first month of BetterHelp, so you can try it out at a discount and see if it's a good fit for you. Thank you BetterHelp for
supporting this video. Let's go check in on Nick. He's building something super cool. Okay, Nick, Nick, Nick,
Nick, what are you up to? Oh. - Yeah, it's coming together. [Johnny] Look at this model. Oh my God. - [Nick] That's the SSBN
Andrew Jackson Lafayette class. As you can see, all the
pieces are out everywhere. - [Johnny] And these are the people. Look at the people, oh my God. - [Nick] You look up here in the front. These are the bunks. These are the torpedoes. - Okay, we will check
in with Nick in a moment as that model gets built. Let me tell you how we got here. People have been building
boats to try to go underwater for a very long time. Like look at this old art where you can see Alexander the Great going completely underwater
in a big glass barrel. This was like 2,000 years ago. 1,800 years later, you
have Leonardo da Vinci who was busy literally thinking of anything that could be invented and he sketched up his very own version of an underwater boat, this beauty right here. It was basically like
a big mechanical fish. Oh, and this is wild. He kept these sketches a
secret because he feared quote, "The evil nature of men
who practice assassination "at the bottom of the sea." Like he thought that we might use these underwater boats for war. Whoops. Anyway, the first known boat
to actually navigate underwater was of course built by a Dutch dude. The Dutch, man, they're
just so good at water. 150 years later, over here in what was soon to be the United States, George Washington paid for this sucker to be made for his army. I mean, there could be a
whole video about this boat, the Turtle, because it kind of looked like two turtle shells put together. So cute. The guy in there is just like so cozy. They tried to use the Turtle in their war for freedom
against the British, but it never really did anything useful and then it just sank. I mean cool name, but wasn't
a super useful submarine, but it paved the way. 50 years later, we have
the American Civil War where the Confederate rebels built a sub that was powered by a bunch of guys manually turning a crank and on board it had a long spar torpedo. Don't be fooled, though. Spar torpedo was just a fancy way of saying a bomb on a 15 foot stick, and they actually used it. They snuck up on a Yankee ship, underneath it with their bomb stick in the middle of the
Civil War and blew it up and both sides sank, like
the submarines sank too. Like, it didn't work. I mean, it kind of worked,
but it didn't really work. Anyway, I had to mention all
of these like early submarines because they kind of laid the groundwork. But in the 1800s, things
get really serious thanks to this guy over here in Germany. Rudolf Diesel invented an
engine that changed everything. This new engine mixed pressure
and air and fossil fuels that all exploded and made things move. This changed a lot of industries, but the Germans were like let's put these in submarines and run them to charge
a bunch of batteries that we can use to power the
sub while we're underwater. It's a lot better than the
hand crank, and indeed it was. But there was one big problem, which is that this engine needs air, like it needs to be able to pump out the exhaust that it makes and it needs to be able to suck
in air to like make energy. So you can't actually run
your engines underwater. So these German subs, as
stealthy as they were, were still very limited because they could only stay underwater for like 48 hours max
before having to come up and give away their position so that they could get
air for their engines. This is a problem that
will soon be solved, but we just need a few wars first. It's the 1900s, we have
all these big empires that are looking for ways
to destroy themselves with their new industrial technology and they're getting good at submarines. They're loading them up with
more and more batteries. Now they have sonar and radar capabilities so that they can like see underwater and they have radios
and encryption devices so they can talk to each other
while they're underwater, which is everything when
you're fighting a war. The Germans call these these submarines untersee boats or U-boats and they use them for their new plan of unrestricted submarine warfare, which is a sterile way of just saying we feel comfortable sneaking
up on civilian boats and sinking them and killing
the people without notice because we've decided
we are literal villains. - [Announcer] Submarines aim
and fire their deadly torpedoes and all was over then in the sudden attack, in the face of enemy submarines. - So yeah, being used for horrible means, but let's be clear, this
is amazing technology. Like this is light years ahead of the forefathers of
submarines like the Turtle or that poorly thought
out bomb on a stick thing from the Civil War, but they still have the limitation of air. They need to come up all the time to get air for their engines. No matter how scary and
stealthy they could become and sneaking around
underwater during these wars, they still have to come up
to the surface every 48 hours to run their engines and
recharge their batteries, giving away their sneaky position and becoming way less
effective as a war tool. This would be like playing Battleship, but every few turns, you have
to flip your board around to show your opponent
where you are for a sec. They kind of figured this out a little bit when they started to use
these two little tubes that allowed them to kind
of still be underwater, but to like put the tubes up and suck down air from the
surface, push out exhaust, but it was kind of rubbish. Like having to run your
noisy engines every 48 hours was a huge limitation on how
useful these subs could be. Well, of course, the war ends. Germany loses and surrenders and some of these U-boats
that were just sitting there were divvied up among the winners, the US, the UK and the USSR, who discovered that, wow, the Germans have some
amazing submarine tech. Let's use this tech to
pimp out our own subs, leapfrogging decades of development. And this is where things
get juicy and scary. (tense music) So now you have these two former allies, the US and the Soviet Union looking at each other with skepticism. They both got their
hands on this German tech and they both know that the other `got their hands on this German tech, and they both secretly are like, we need to get way better than
the other at submarine tech. Let's go. This was a huge priority, but it was also weird and hush hush. (sighs) The Cold War. This begins an era of secretive investment into submarine technology, and this is where they level
up to blow all of our minds, where submarines become the impossibly advanced
machines that we know today. Something that changed everything here was that humans had learned
to tinker with atoms, breaking them apart to make
incredible amounts of energy, and they used that
energy to blow things up, but also to make electricity. And crucially, nuclear
energy didn't require air. So it's the 1950s and you got this guy. He's a Russian born American
Navy guy named Hyman Rickover, and he was like, "Whoa,
whoa, wait a second. "You're telling me that
you can make electricity "but you don't need air?" Light bulbs going off on this guy's head because he's a submarine
guy and he's like, "Let's slap these puppies into submarines. "That would solve all of our needing "to come up to the surface
every couple of hours problem." The US government's like, "Wait, sorry, what did you say, Rickover?" And Rickover's like, "I said let's put the nuclear power plant "inside of the submarine. "We gotta get ahead of the Soviets." He got a lot of pushback for
this for obvious reasons, but he dug his heels in, leapfrogging all the bosses till he got to the
chief of Navy operations and whispered in his ear his
big idea and it totally worked. The story of how this went down is insane and Rickover was insane and visionary, and I'll leave some reading in the sources for those who want to go
down that rabbit hole. Whew. Showing a lot of discipline here, just like breezing over this guy's story. But yes, it's the 50s
and the US government set about trying to put a
full-blown nuclear reactor, a power plant inside of
their giant floating weapon and they did somehow and
it changed everything. - [Announcer] Arrival of nuclear power has broken those bonds. - [Announcer] Can go around
the world on a core of uranium only slightly larger than a golf ball. - [Announcer] She may have
just as profound an effect for naval strategy as the
airplane has had on war. - Let's see how Nick's
doing with his model. Oh, here we go. Look at this big boy. - [Nick] Here she is. - [Johnny] Wow. (soft music) - Wow, I am going to put
this model on my desk and look at it every day
because it's beautiful and it's like retro,
which is kind of cool. Anyway, let's get back to the story here because the next chapter here is really the chapter that matters most. Once they got the nuclear
reactor onto these subs, everything changed. I'm gonna show you why. (soft music) So look at this big old submarine. It's a Sturgeon class
submarine from the 60s. It's a US Navy sub. And look, back here, we've
got the nuclear reactor. It sits back here doing its
thing, breaking atoms apart, which produces an enormous amount of heat that can heat up water that
turns this massive propeller, and remember that spinning things gives you power, electricity, boom. You're spinning turbines and now you have electricity
for your submarine. Not only does the nuclear
reactor not need air to work, but it literally creates air. After all, it's surrounded by H20, so all it needs to do is
break the two H's from the O and boom, you've got oxygen
for your crew to breathe. I mean this nuclear reactor was magic. Move over, trees, we've got submarines. And they use all of this abundant energy to get rid of salt in the water. So now the crew has like drinking
water and can take showers while they're floating hundreds
of meters under the ocean. Like this is becoming really insane. The nuclear reactor
solved all the problems. Remember how diesel submarines
had to refuel all the time and they had to come up to the
surface to run their engines and get rid of their
exhaust and suck in the air? Nuclear submarines
could now run underwater without needing to refuel for 20 years. Oh, that is if you don't count having to refuel the humans on board. So Rickover was right. Nuclear reactors on
submarines changed everything. They are now way more useful. You can now sneak around the ocean and never give away your position. Okay, so now that we can be
underwater for basically ever, let's load these suckers
up with big weapons. (mysterious music) These suckers are getting
huge by like the 70s and 80s. I mean, here was the German U-boat. Remember the one, like the thing that like really like
pushed it all forward? And here is an American
Cold War era submarine, the Ohio class. This thing is massive. Like zoom in here. Those are people, here's their kitchen. Here's the reactor back
here doing all of its magic. And look, here's where the crew sleeps. Oh, and what are they sleeping next to? What are all these tubes doing here? Oh, these tubes, kind of right
where the crew is sleeping, yeah, these tubes are
what make the submarine maybe the most important
weapon to have ever existed. This is where the nukes are. (mysterious music) - Well, technically, we don't know that this is where the nukes are and any submariner will
vehemently tell you that quote, "We cannot confirm or deny whether or not "the missiles inside of these
silos carry nuclear weapons." Wink, wink. This is where the nukes are. So what started as two superpowers nerding out about German
submarine tech in the 40s turned into an arms race
that resulted in both of them figuring out how to power their
subs with nuclear reactors and the ability to load up
these subs with 24 rockets that they could launch to the
edge of space at any moment carrying multiple nuclear warheads. Like having nuclear weapons
on land ready to fire is pretty cool. Having them on planes is pretty powerful. But you can see both of those things. When you have a sub quietly
roving around the world's oceans with the ability to carry
a bunch of nuclear weapons and to launch them at any point, you've just achieved the
most powerful advantage in military strategy,
surprise, the panopticon. Your enemy has no idea where you are, but they know you are somewhere
in range at all times, so they have to act as
if you are everywhere, a few button presses away from launching one of these things. But this psychological sort of mind game only works if you are never noticed. So the next phase of this technological
evolution of submarines focuses on silence. They start coating their
submarines with rubber tiles so that the sonar doesn't
bounce off as well. They took these giant propellers
that yes, are massive, bigger than you can imagine,
and made them impossibly quiet. And even on the inside they started taking crazy precautions. Like all the heavy gear in a submarine is mounted on rubber pads
to dampen any vibration that could be detected or heard. The cooks even started
putting rubber on everything. Like their mixing bowls
and their mixing spatulas are all like sound-deadening materials so that they don't send out
vibration and make noise. The submarine force is
serious about silence. In fact, they take pride
in calling themselves the silent service and there's kind of a
chip on their shoulder because they don't get
nearly as much recognition as like these guys do. They're just like lurking
in the depths of the ocean doing like a really
important defense thing and no one knows about them because literally that's their
job is to never be noticed. (sighs) Wow. So you have the US and the Soviet Union both with the ability to launch
nukes from their submarines. And ironically, this whole everyone pointing a
gun at each other thing actually keeps these great powers from ever fighting a war with each other. They were both too afraid
of how easy it would be for the other to strike back
with their stealthy subs, ensuring the destruction of both sides. This is deterrence and it
is one of the major forces keeping great powers from
going to war with each other. It's why the US has an
entire fleet of subs with no other mission
than to go into the ocean and just disappear and just sit there, silently ready to make
good on their threat that if you attack us, we
are always ready to respond. Submarines are also
really good for spying. Okay, so we know by now that a lot of communication in this world is made possible because
of underwater cables. It's not just the internet. These cables have existed
for a very long time and they're just sitting there
at the bottom of the ocean connecting the whole
world and they're safe because no one has access to them. No one's gonna go to the
very bottom of the ocean. Oh wait, submarines. Submarines have unique
access to these cables. So it's the early 1970s and
American intelligence agencies team up with the Navy to have
them scour the ocean floor looking for Russian communication cables with the idea that they
could tap into the cables and listen to them. And lo and behold, they found one. 120 meters below the surface over in this eastern part of Russia, they found a cable that
connected to Soviet naval bases and they put a literal tape
recorder into the cable and now they're literally
listening to Soviets talking to each other about
all sorts of military things. (voice speaking in Russian) None of it is encrypted in any way because no one expected them to dive down and find this cable. Oh, and they were really clever. They sort of only loosely
attached it to the cable. In case they like needed to pull up the cable for
maintenance or something, the little device would fall
off and no one would ever know that they were being spied on. But the tapes that were
recording like filled up, so divers had to go down and
retrieve the recording device and take out the tapes
and put in new tapes. And they did that like every month. And they were like we will
never get caught for this. But then eventually they did. It turns out that an NSA employee got paid $35,000 from the Soviets to tell them about this operation. Anyway, that would be an amazing movie. Someone please make that spy movie. The fact is that subs
still do a lot of spying. They will often have Navy Seals aboard that are ready to dive and
do dot, dot, dot, redacted. We have no idea, like we have literally
no idea what they do for obvious reasons. There is evidence that
the US and UK spy agencies still tap into cables, like
the undersea fiber optic cables that like govern the internet and that they do this all the time. See Edward Snowden's big leak
and some deep dive into that. I'm not gonna go into it, but
we know that submarines spy, we know that countries are
always spying on each other. This should not be surprising. In fact, during the
research for this video, I felt the insatiable desire
to dive down the rabbit hole of how submarines spy, and I didn't because I'm
trying to stay disciplined and I'm trying to tell this story, but leave a comment if you
want me to make that video and I will consider it 'cause there is a lot
more about that topic. Let's move on. (soft music) Okay, so let's get up to speed. Where are we today with submarines? According to the US Navy's website, the US has 71 submarines. 53 of them are fast attack subs and 14 are the ballistic missile subs that sit there and be our deterrent and four are guided missile subs. But then there's other sources that say that there's only 68 submarines. I don't know, all of
this is like classified and we're not supposed to know and no one's supposed to know, but we know a lot but not specifics. And like I mentioned, all of these subs have very
different capabilities. Fast attack subs, for example, are optimized for closer attacks. They use a lot of cruise missiles, which are launched through these big tubes and have jet engines and
computer brains for navigation. They're way more precise, but they can still go pretty far. I mean, we're talking like
2,400 kilometers away, 800 kilometers an hour, like they're still very, very
effective long-term weapons. - [Reporter] Russia says it launched 26 cruise missiles today. 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles
have hit a Syrian airbase. Launching dozens of missiles
targeting the Syrian regimes. - But again, the one that like represents the mind-blowing reality of
what we humans have invented is this sucker, the Ohio class submarine. They do have torpedoes and several other sort
of smaller scale weapons, but it's these tubes that
are carrying missiles which are carrying warheads that are the big defining game
changer of this technology. So let me just break down
the journey of these rockets. They can hit targets that are upwards of 6,400 kilometers away. That's like wider than
the entire United States and probably a lot longer, but of course, the Navy
won't tell us these things because it's all classified. And they don't just carry
like one nuclear warhead. They can carry multiple and they're not all
just going to one place. They actually get dropped
at different locations. How? An unbelievable amount
of scientific ingenuity. Let me explain. It starts at the boost phase where the missile gets its initial umph, gets pushed out of the
water up into the air, goes up into the sky,
gets a bunch of momentum, and then the engines cut and
the missile just has momentum and it starts to fly just
using the laws of physics, it's literally at the edge of space. We're now in the mid-course phase. The missile then just starts
casually looking at the stars to calibrate its position and then making little micro adjustments to make sure that it is perfectly
on course for its target. And this is where we need
to talk about warheads. No, not, not those. These little cones that aren't
that little are warheads, the most powerful weapons
humans have ever created. These missiles can have up to 12 of these cone-shaped warheads. They're just hanging out on
the front tip of this rocket. Eventually this missile
reaches its highest point and starts to come down. At this phase, the missile
starts spitting out the warheads just at the right time,
just at the right velocity and as they reenter Earth's atmosphere, they start hurtling towards their targets as far as 1,500 kilometers apart. So like roughly the distance
between Iceland and Norway. And then when they get where
they were programmed to go, I mean, you know what happens. (warhead explodes) Oh, but that happens potentially 12 times from this one rocket, each one of these explosions being roughly six times more powerful than
the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Okay, so that was one missile. This submarine can hold 24 missiles. Like what have we created? (rocket rumbling) Luckily since World War II, no one has had to use nuclear
weapons in any conflict. We've had a lot of threats lately, but luckily they just
remain a deterrent force and not an actual thing that we use. Hopefully it stays that way. And yes, several
countries have the ability to load these things onto
their floating weapons called submarines that are lurking in the depths of the ocean at all times, spying and just sitting there. Okay, so that's submarines. Well, no, that's like a
teaspoon of submarines. This topic could go on forever. I mean, seriously, I was- This was a painful story to do because there was so much I
had to leave on the table. I have a feeling that I'm gonna be making a few more videos about submarines soon. But let's just remember
what we've learned here. We humans have invented
something pretty wild, something that should be impossible. The ability for a bunch
of us to live underwater in these floating buildings
for months at a time. We load these things up
with enough fire power to turn entire countries to dust, all in the name of never
having to use them. That is the paradox of modern conflict. And yet, the thing I'm taking away from having spent a lot of
time thinking about submarines is that humans can kind of do whatever they put their minds to. Making power out of nuclear fission and putting that into
an underwater weapon. Like what? Shooting rockets into space, having them look at the stars and then land wherever they want to? Humans did this. We did it because of fear
and skepticism and conflict. We did this to get ahead,
to be more powerful, but we did this. And that in some weird way gives me hope that someday when the
best minds aren't directed to the priorities of power and conflict, we humans will continue
to make magic happen, magic that helps more and
more people live better lives, making impossible things possible. (soft music) (soft music) Thank you for watching
my video on submarines. What you're not looking at right now is all the props we have that were just sort of like in the background blurred
out, but they're super cool. Hold on, look at this. This model of the USS West Virginia. You can see the little
silos up here for the nukes, all these guys. What I didn't tell you
is that my father-in-law is actually the captain of a
submarine, one of the SSBNs. So I had some major insider info that I've been learning
about for literally a decade and that helped spur this video on. I am getting more and more excited about the community we're
building over at the Newsroom. The Newsroom is what we call our Patreon. It just sounds way cooler
to call it the Newsroom. We have a community of people that we ask for feedback on
things, for advice on things. We have live streams. I just did a live stream
with the community. It was really cool. You also get an extra video every month. It's a behind the scenes of vlog of how we make what we
make here in the studio. You'll meet the people, the team, you'll see the processes,
you'll see the shenanigans. It's a good time. And you also get the fuzzy feeling that you are supporting
independent journalism here on YouTube. So go check that out,
patreon.com/johnnyharris. We have LUTs and presets which help you color
your videos and photos. We have a lot more videos. If you're new around here,
subscribe to the channel because we publish a lot lately. Like as the team has grown, we just publish tons of videos now, which is fun and kind
of stressful sometimes. And we have, that's all we have. I've reached the end of
what we have to give to you, and now I am done telling
you what I can give to you. What can you give to me? (snickers) Okay, I'm done. Bye, thank you, everyone. (gentle music)
It was kind of a throwaway line, but I was annoyed when he said Germany initiated unrestricted submarine warfare (USW) "because we've decided we're literal villains."
In WWI, Britain enacted a naval blockade to cut off Germany from supplies. Germany in response initiated USW on 'neutral' ships that were supplying the allied war effort in order to level the playing field.
Famously, they sank the Lusitania which had 1200 passengers, including 123 Americans. The US painted it as indiscriminate warfare. Germany stopped, but as the war dragged on, they started USW again making the (incorrect) calculation that the US would enter the war, but it would take them too long to mobilize and make a difference.
Here's the thing -- the Lusitania was carrying war materiel, its manifest made no secret of that. So in light of the naval blockade and the 'neutral ships' carrying thousands of tons of supplies, bullets, artillery shells, and raw materials to their enemies, it wasn't some mustache twirling evil plot. They sought to cut the supply lines, the same way the British Navy had for them. The same tactic militaries have been doing for thousands of years. The means weren't what made it horrific. The shipping of war materiel in the cargo holds of civilian ships was.
In WWII, Germany utilized USW to attempt to cut off British supplies and take them out of the war. They also initiated campaigns in the Baltic Sea against the USSR. However, the US utilized the same tactics against Imperial Japan in the Pacific theatre. When an island nation is dependent on imports to continue fighting, it's a legitimate tactic. Nazis were absolutely villains, but not because they engaged in USW. Nobody deems US commerce raiding in the Pacific theatre as villainous.
I also fail to see how there's any difference between USW against merchant shipping and carpet bombing entire cities in order to destroy factories and their workers, other than scale. Or dropping atomic bombs to break a country's will to fight.
Mostly though, I'm just annoyed with the oversimplification of a tactical decision into "They decided to be villains." That can certainly be said about things like the holocaust, but it doesn't apply to USW at all.