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America dropping the A-bomb


Centrist Simon Steele

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I'm wondering what you all think.

America dropped the A-bomb twice on Japan. I'm an American. I love this country despite the seeming lack of depth our consumer society promotes. But there are a lot of shady things in our history, to downright evil, but if you talk about it openly you are branded treasonous by a number of people.

So what do you guys think? The A-bomb defense from guys like O'Reilly, Hannity, etc. would be that we actually saved lives by bombing those cities.

My argument is we bombed innocent civilians with a weapon so devastating it continued to kill people with cancer for decades after the bombing. I see this as a disgusting thing we did, there is no justifying it, not even from a military standpoint. Is the response "well they bombed Pearl Harbor" justifiable or comparable...at all? I say no. I bring this up because Rev. Wright is back in the news talking about it, about all the people who died.

I don't think he sounds so crazy most of the time.

Go ahead--have at me. I'm un-American I know.
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It probably did save lives. Any mainland Japanese invasion would've been much more costly for both sides. Hell, the continued conventional carpet bombing of Japanese cities over a long period may have cost more lives. Japan had lost. The only one who didn't seem to realize it was Japan. They could have surrendered before the bomb or after the first one. They chose not to.

Further, nuclear weapons weren't the anathema that they are today at the time. Back than, it was just a really big bomb. None of the ethical or moral considerations that go along with even the odd thought of deploying nukes today. There was no global status quo of utter condemnation against the weapons. Probably a quite limited understanding of the extent of the fallout. There was no reason at the time for them to be considered morally or ethically off-limits. No reason for them not to be considered legitimate weapons of war.

I cringe with embarrassment over Japanese internment. I don't bat an eyelash over using the nukes. It was the right move at the time and ended the war.

Of course we've have a dozen threads on this already and I know all the objections from all the usual suspects, but instead of anticipatorilly responding to them, I'll just wait til they post em up.
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[quote name='Simon of Steele' post='1616738' date='Dec 11 2008, 17.07']So what do you guys think? The A-bomb defense from guys like O'Reilly, Hannity, etc. would be that we actually saved lives by bombing those cities.[/quote]
This is also part of the reason given on the walking tour of ground zero in Hiroshima's Peace Park.
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[quote name='EHK for a True GOP' post='1616750' date='Dec 11 2008, 20.17']It probably did save lives. Any mainland Japanese invasion would've been much more costly for both sides. Hell, the continued conventional carpet bombing of Japanese cities over a long period may have cost more lives. Japan had lost. The only one who didn't seem to realize it was Japan. They could have surrendered before the bomb or after the first one. They chose not to.

Further, nuclear weapons weren't the anathema that they are today at the time. Back than, it was just a really big bomb. None of the ethical or moral considerations that go along with even the odd thought of deploying nukes today. There was no global status quo of utter condemnation against the weapons. Probably a quite limited understanding of the extent of the fallout. There was no reason at the time for them to be considered morally or ethically off-limits. No reason for them not to be considered legitimate weapons of war.

I cringe with embarrassment over Japanese internment. I don't bat an eyelash over using the nukes. It was the right move at the time and ended the war.

Of course we've have a dozen threads on this already and I know all the objections from all the usual suspects, but instead of anticipatorilly responding to them, I'll just wait til they post em up.[/quote]

Um .... what this guy said.
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Let's not forget that nukes were not the only bombs dropped in the war. Nor that Americans were not the only bombers. I believe the firebombing of Dresden (a non military target housing Allied pows, carried out by the RAF as well as the USAAF) claimed somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 lives. A-bombs were big, powerful fuck-all bombs, but they were not a necessary ingredient for the various nations involved to carry out slaughter on a massive scale. Conventional bombs worked just fine for that.
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[quote name='Myshkin' post='1616802' date='Dec 11 2008, 21.05']Conventional bombs worked just fine for that.[/quote]
I believe the idea was to make the Japanese think that the US would start carpet bombing with Atomic weapons if they were forced to continue the war.
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i don't agonize over the bombing either, but i do wonder about one thing: the purpose of using the bombs was clearly symbolic, otherwise we would have nuked Tokyo and Osaka. If the object was to prove a point, then, would it have been absolutely necessary to drop it on a city? Could we have dropped one bomb on a hill overlooking Tokyo, or hell, on the summit of Mount Fuji, and achieved the same effect? This is keeping in mind that public opinion, which would clearly be more swayed by having two cities vaporized, did [i]not[/i] have a significant role in the Japanese surrender; the military cabal around Hirohito acted unilaterally in declaring surrender. would they have been equally persuaded if we had used the weapon in a way which showed its destructive power without having to slaughter that many people? i dunno. my alternative still leads to deaths via fallout, but i've always wondered whether or not such a display would have done the job equally well as destroying two cities...
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[url="http://www.japanfocus.org/images/UserFiles/Image/2724.mselden.waratr%20histmem%20recon/Tokyofirebombed.jpg"]This [/url]is Tokyo after the March 15, 1945 firebombing raid that killed close to 100,000 people and levelled 91.5% of the total metropolitan district.

This is [url="http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2004/12/31/hiroshima_wideweb__430x323.jpg"]Hiroshima[/url], for comparison.
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[quote name='Lord of Oop North' post='1616804' date='Dec 12 2008, 13.10']I believe the idea was to make the Japanese think that the US would start carpet bombing with Atomic weapons if they were forced to continue the war.[/quote]

From memory this is exactly correct - and Truman and Stimson went out of their way to convey that impression to the public and via diplomatic channels (despite only having one bomb left after Nagasaki).
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I have 3 uncles (two alive, one who has passed away) that were in-service in the WW2 pacific theater. Two were marines and one was in the army. At the tail end of the war all three were being prepared/staged for a ground invasion of Japan. If that invasion had taken place, I wonder who would have made it home?

Based on how the Japanese soldiers fought against overwhelming odds in many of the south pacific islands, I cannot think how much blood would have been spilt for a conventional invasion of Japan. I am thankful each day that I have my uncles as part of my life and using the atomic bomb facilitated these relationships.

The simple fact is that the atomic bombs forced an unconditional surrender without one American life being lost on the Japanese mainland. I am sorry innocent people died but this represented the fastest resolution possible and I feel it was the right decision at that time.
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I'm one of the usual suspects on this topic. I hold the view that Hiroshima was a brutal necessity of war and Nagasaki a war crime. Three days was not enough time for the effects to sink in. It took six days after Nagasaki even.

They should have given the Japanese government more time to surrender. But that lives were saved relative to ground invasion is pretty much beyond question. And it probably saved Japan from partition.
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[quote name='Bronn Stone' post='1616828' date='Dec 11 2008, 18.31']I'm one of the usual suspects on this topic. I hold the view that Hiroshima was a brutal necessity of war and Nagasaki a war crime. Three days was not enough time for the effects to sink in. It took six days after Nagasaki even.

They should have given the Japanese government more time to surrender. But that lives were saved relative to ground invasion is pretty much beyond question. And it probably saved Japan from partition.[/quote]
This pretty much sums up the opinion of virtually every Japanese person I discussed this with when I lived there.
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[quote name='Per Iocum' post='1616851' date='Dec 11 2008, 19.05']There is compelling evidence that a- negotiated- surrender could have been reached…[/quote]
In what time frame? Before Hiroshima?

Remember too, that the goal was not merely to end the war, but to end the Japanese Empire.
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Realise that by August 6, the Japanese had been decisively defeated on air land and sea, their major strategic points taken, their Home Island cities razed with impunity for nearly a year, the remains of their army either sitting uselessly in Manchuria with no means of transport or fighting futile last-man defenses in PNG, Borneo, and on dozens of strategically worthless islands without hope of resupply or rescue. They had been beaten, thoroughly and yet thousands of Chinese, Allied and Japanese soldiers were still dying in bleak, bloody battles across the Pacific and East Asia. The War Council was in session during the March 15 firebombing raid that saw their capital city near-annihilated - they make no mention of it, save recommending that greater air-raid safety measures be taken.

At this point, why is it incumbent on the United States to wait any longer? Why is the onus not on the Imperial War Council to save their citizens and put an end to an utterly futile war, in which all hope of Japanese victory had vanished three years earlier at Midway?
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Allied intelligence indicated that the Japanese military command was prepared to fight to the last man, and engage in essentially a scorched earth retreat across their own nation. Moderate elements of Japanese command had been marginalized over the course of the war.

Yes, I believe that the bombing of Hiroshima, in the end, saved lives. I can't say that, as an American, I'm particularly happy about it, but I can understand it.
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Written about his time in a Japanese POW camp, Laurens van der Post's book [i]The Night of the New Moon[/i] is interesting about life in a camp and how it ended because of the atomic bombings. IIRC, he thought that the Japanese would have killed their prisoners as part of a no-bridge-left-unburnt, fight-to-the-death defeat.
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[quote name='Bronn Stone' post='1616828' date='Dec 11 2008, 21.31']I'm one of the usual suspects on this topic. I hold the view that Hiroshima was a brutal necessity of war and Nagasaki a war crime. Three days was not enough time for the effects to sink in. It took six days after Nagasaki even.

They should have given the Japanese government more time to surrender. But that lives were saved relative to ground invasion is pretty much beyond question. And it probably saved Japan from partition.[/quote]
Yeah, why the fuck did we bomb Nagasaki?
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