And that is how the slippery slope begins. These types of things tend to start with that line of reasoning, with the line of reasoning escalating. If I was a more religious person, I could argue that in the real world, we aren't talking about souls but physical bodies, and as terrible as mass murder is their souls would still be saved by a God somewhere. What Rand did was demolish those souls with little understanding if those would ever come back - judging from the behavior of him and his companions they all assumed that those souls were gone forever, and I think it's unfortunate that so many of the arguments here bring in RJ's statement to justify it. If President Bush had decided to nuke Afghanistan and Iraq saying that the souls would be reborn in another few generations, we'd call him insane, yet in the bounds of this fictional world there are too many people IMO willing to concede that this is rational. It was not a rational act. It was the act of the madman and power mad tyrant that Rand stood on the threshhold of becoming.

We actually saw this slipper slope escalate in the books: After balefiring the hundreds of people at Graendals' palace, Rand later threatens to rain fire using the Choedan Kal on the Borderlander army which consisted of thousands of people, and later even then he considers to wipe out the headquarters of the Seanchan incursion with balefire - that is a population that dwarfed what was in Graendal's place.

The problem with rationalizing these types of things is that you lose your humanity by denying that other people have a valid right to existence.