What are some notable blunders in history that resulted in huge loss?

Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.

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Oil spills, wars, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, not counting for 2 decimal places in employee cheques by a large firm in Metropolis
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberate atrocities, not sure how you’d list them as blunders.
  
  How about neither atrocity nor blunder? It was the right thing to do and saved lives on both sides by ending the war in the Pacific. Wars still happen but we've gone nearly 80 years without making the world wars into a trilogy since nobody sane wants to invite that level of destruction again.
  
  Not this again. Just because you can end a war faster by intentionally targeting civilians doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be moral or ethical. The U.S. government considers that act terrorism by definition.
  I’m not going to relitigate the whole argument again. The U.S. government knew women and children were in the cities and the military proceeded to nuke the cities instead of an uninhabited because they wanted to show off the power of the weapon and observe the level of urban damage it could do.
  
  And remind me the estimated casualty counts of operation downfall, along with the civilian casualties and damage. Not to mention a North Japan and South Japan like germany.
  You won't. But consider a pragmatic view and not an idealistic view, so be it if you need a show of force for an enemy who refuses to surrender and would rather destroy themselves and all who would try to make them yield utterly and totally.
  
  Could do a show of force in an area where people don't live, and then threaten to use it in cities or something. Like other countries with nukes do...
  
  Are you kidding? Not to say we didn't exactly have that luxury in 1945, but we didn't.
  We had enough uranium and plutonium for the 3 bombs, and that was it. Our bluff was that we would keep doing it. And the nuke hadn't been displayed before that point either, so what good is a threat when it hasn't been shown before? We did exactly that and they didn't care.
  
  No need, they were both among a set of legitimate targets. It wasn't terrorism and the only people complaining about it slept through all their history classes.
  
  The first bomb could be argued as saving lives. The second was just to test another type of nuclear bomb.
  
  My bad, didn't realize they'd surrendered between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

213 comments