Hiroshima & Nagasaki

[Mladen]

Just as a pedantic nitpick, nuclear weapons aren't biological weapons.  Bio-weapons are weaponized viruses, bacteria, or even something like the potato beetle.  They have horrible, horrible consequences, but they aren't biological weapons.  

 

Even though my categorization is completely wrong by the definition, in my book, nuclear weapon is sort of biological weapon. The impact it has on human health is undeniable. And Japan is just the prime example of that.

[polishgenius]

http://www.angelfire.com/ca4/yourturf2/HiroshimaandDetroit.htm

They're some interesting photos, although I'm not really sure what the comparison to Detroit is meant to be saying. However, a line in the article made me wtf:

However, we know little about the progress made by the people of that land
during the past 64 years.

Seriously? Japan some obscure underdog of modern success that people haven't heard about?

   

[TerraPrime]

 

Even though my categorization is completely wrong by the definition, in my book, nuclear weapon is sort of biological weapon. The impact it has on human health is undeniable. And Japan is just the prime example of that.

 

The term "biological weapon" means weapons made out of biological agents. I am not sure what you will gain by trying to redefining it to mean "weapons that affect a lot of biological beings" instead. *shrugs*

[polishgenius]

 

The term "biological weapon" means weapons made out of biological agents. I am not sure what you will gain by trying to redefining it to mean "weapons that affect a lot of biological beings" instead. *shrugs*

 

 

Yeah, surely a big point of any weapon is to seriously affect human health?

[Mladen]

 

The term "biological weapon" means weapons made out of biological agents. I am not sure what you will gain by trying to redefining it to mean "weapons that affect a lot of biological beings" instead. *shrugs*

 

No, I get that... And as I said, it is just my view on nuclear weapons. Nothing more...

 

 

Yeah, surely a big point of any weapon is to seriously affect human health?

 

It is, but there is a huge difference when you radiate someone and when you shoot him.

[The Anti-Targ]

Breaking news, war kills people and is a shit way of resolving disputes. All war is a crime against humanity. Quibbling about scale and methodology misses the point entirely.

[Horza]

The other point to consider, particularly if you are inclined to believe that strategic bombing of Japanese cities forced that country to surrender is could the war have ended sooner but for the diversion of resources to the construction of the Atom bomb - this was far more than than the cost of say another 1000 bombers which could have been constructed and in operation well before the summer of 1945.

 

XXI Bomber Command was doing pretty well on its own, and I'd be surprised if there was much more room in the Marianas for hangars and airfields for a more-than-doubling of paper strength.

 

 

In anycase the opinion of the United States Strategic Bombing survey's summary report on the Pacific war in 1946 was

 

It's surprising how readily people take the USSBS's findings at face value. Strangely enough, many who think the aerial campaign over Germany was misguided at best and downright criminal at worst find it an objective and credible assessment of the bombing campaign over Japan. You'd never know that this was a report comissioned by the then-United States Army Air Force, which determined the parameters by which its strategic bombing campaigns were to be assessed, nor that its commission came against the background of a concerted push for Air Force independence, in which the usefulness of strategic air power was the foundation of the case.

 

When the Survey's mandate was expanded to included the Japanese campaign, Truman added a requirement to address the role of the US Navy's blockade as well, staffing the Survey with Navy personnel, intensifying the conflict of agendas already at play. In this context, the Survey's finding that the atomic bombing was not decisive enabled both the Army Air Force and the Navy to assert a counterfactual scenario where both strategic bombing and blockade could be said to have been successful, allowing each to walk into the post-war defence budget clampdown with ammunition.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Kyoto Castle- http://lordtamasaburo.deviantart.com/art/Kyoto-Castle-359858880
A UNESCO World Heritage site.
Spared because the residents of Kyoto were lucky enough to have hosted the Stimsons on their honeymoon. If only the Stimsons had visited Nagasaki or Hiroshima instead, one has to wonder if things may have went differently?

@polishgenius, my guess for the picture comparison would be something along the lines of a saying we would hear when I was growing up in Michigan.
That "Japan had lost the war but won the peace."

[Spring Bass]

It wasn't a major consideration for the Allies IIRC, but there's a good argument that ending the war as it did was better for the Japanese than a potential continuation of the war into 1946. The Japanese rice crop in 1945 failed, and the Allies were going to go from conventional bombing cities to trying to destroy the railway network. Continuing the war in 1946 would have likely meant mass starvation of millions (possibly tens of millions) of Japanese civilians on the main islands. 

 

They wouldn't be the only ones. Japanese forces in Korea seized about 25% of the Korean rice crop despite not having the ability to ship it back to the main islands, meaning that mass starvation was a possibility there as well. 

[MisterOJ]

Sigh, this again. Okay, let's do this.

 

1. The "conditional surrender" that the Japanese were willing to accept? It included keeping their armed forces, keeping some of their conquered territory, conducting their own war crimes tribunals for their own people, and NO occupying troops on their home islands. Why in the flying fuck would the allies accept that? They had just finally defeated an enemy that had signed an armistice in 1918 and it took half the world to defeat it by 1945. Why would they allow another scenario where they might have to fight Japan again in 20 or 30 years?

 

2. Japan had no intention of going down easy. Their strategy in 1945 really wasn't all that different than it had been in 1941: inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible to cause your opponent or their home front to give up. The closer the Allies had gotten to Japan, the ghastlier the war had become. There were practically no surrenders. While the battles in the Eastern Front had been gigantic, hundreds of thousand surrendered and millions could fall back.  On the islands battles, there was no retreat and no surrender. The Japanese would simply do a banzai charge and die while in some cases civilians would leap to their deaths over cliffs rather than be captured by the Allies. All this pointed to horrific battles on the Home Islands.

 

3 The Allies DID know that the Japanese had no plans to accept unconditional surrender. Since before the war, the Americans had cracked the Japanese codes. In the summer of '42 they knew Japan was planning an attack but did not know where, only that the target was code-named AF. So they were able to bait the Japanese at Midway by sending a message in the clear that Midway was having water issues. Soon after the Japanese sent a coded message that AF was having issues. The U.S. carrier fleet was able to ambush the Imperial Navy at Midway and sunk all 4 Japanese carriers.

 

By 1945, the U.S had been able to continue to read the Japanese messages to and from their embassies. A few of their remaining ambassadors abroad  opined that the Japanese should agree to unconditional surrender but the War Council rebuffed them.  The Allies knew going into late summer that the Japanese would fight on and the assumption was that the coming battles would be even worse than the bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

 

4. Those assumptions were correct. From what I've read, the Japanese had two million men and 10,000 planes ready to defend the home islands. The pilots of those planes had very little training but their jobs required only taking off, flying to a target, and crashing into that target. Pearl Harbor gets all the headlines for the damage done to the U.S. navy but the kamikaze at Okinawa did far more damage, sinking or crippling over 30 ships. An invasion fleet larger than the D-Day landings would have been sitting ducks for the suicide planes. Operation Downfall, the plan for the invasion of Japan, called for two major landing: Operation Olympic, the landing on Kyushu in late 1945 and Operation Olympic, the landing on Honshu in 1946. I've read that the estimates of Allied casualties was 1 million dead and wounded. These were based on the experiences of Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. If those are just Allied casualties, the Japanese would have had much, much worse. Especially since there had been several instances of civilians committing mass suicides rather than be captured..

 

People always mention that with the Soviets joining in, the Japanese would have simply surrendered but that doesn't wash with reality. Yes, the Soviets curb-stomped the Japanese in Manchuria but how exactly does that effect the coming battles in the home islands? The Soviets had replaced the Germans as the most powerful army in the world but the Soviets would have faced the same thing in Japan as the Nazis did in England: tanks don't drive on water. Like the Germans, the Soviets had no real surface fleet that could sustained a large seaborne invasion.

 

5. Finally, we have real history that points at how badly the Japanese didn't want to surrender. Little Boy and Fat Man are dropped on the Japanese and then the Soviets invade Manchuria. Pretty much all hope of finding a way to leave the war without losing face are gone. The Imperial War Council, the real power behind the throne, meet to discuss their option. The vote is split, 3 wish to surrender while 3 wish to fight on. Even after the double hammer blow of atomic bombs and Soviet invasion, the council is still split. So in an almost unheard of breach of protocol, the new Prime Minister asks the Emperor to vote. The Emperor chooses to surrender and records a radio message that will be played the next day to the public. However, those in the continue-the-war camp and their followers attempt a coup in which they will kill the 3 council members that voted for peace, take over the government, and confiscate the Emperor's recording. It only fails because one of the rebelling council members chooses to commit suicide rather than disobey the Emperor. So again, it took 2 atomic bombs, a Soviet invasion, and a failed coup d'état for the Japanese to finally unconditionally surrender. Why would you think that the Japanese would fully surrender if the Allies invaded the home islands or strangled (encircle and let the population starve) them?

 

For the record, I have seen the horror of the atomic bombs. I've seen pictures and film of Japanese children burned and crying. I've seen the civilians dying of radiation poison. I've seen pictures of civilians incinerated with nothing left but literally their shadows on the wall. But everything I've read and seen has convinced me that dropping the bombs was the best option to defeat Japan with least amount of deaths on both sides.

 

I'd recommend reading "A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II" by Gerhard L. Weinberg. A good documentary series is "World War II in HD Colour"

 

I don't really have anything to add to this thread, other than to say that I have enjoyed reading through it and found Trebla's post especially well thought out. Well done.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

TAT,

Breaking news, war kills people and is a shit way of resolving disputes. All war is a crime against humanity. Quibbling about scale and methodology misses the point entirely.

That's an interesting reverse psychology method for justifying any horror to end a war more quickly.

[Howdyphillip]

Breaking news, war kills people and is a shit way of resolving disputes. All war is a crime against humanity. Quibbling about scale and methodology misses the point entirely.

This seems a simplistic way to look at things. Taken to a micro level, if someone is trying to kill you or your family, is it a crime to kill or incapacitate them to prevent that?

[The Anti-Targ]

TAT,


That's an interesting reverse psychology method for justifying any horror to end a war more quickly.

It would be if I was trying to support the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The call to drop the bomb was a probably vs. a definitely. A ground invasion would probably be protracted and lead to many deaths of both Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians. Dropping 2 atom bombs would definitely lead to the deaths of many Japanese civilians (but probably fewer than a ground invasion), hardly any Japanese soldiers and no allied soldiers. What the calculus assumes is that Japan would fight a rearguard action all the way to the Emperor's palace. But Japan may well have unconditionally surrendered as soon as the first allied boots landed on mainland soil.

 

People like to talk in absolutes when it comes to what Japan would have done if the conventional war continued. But things are never absolute, no matter how certain people are that Japan would have acted in a particular way, it was never certain, it was always assumed. It wasn't an assumption lacking merit or rationale, but in the final analysis was the rationale solid enough to make dropping the bomb twice a reasonable, least overall harm, action? I don't have enough information to answer that, but I dispute the claims that a long, protracted ground campaign was a guaranteed thing without dropping the nukes.

 

This seems a simplistic way to look at things. Taken to a micro level, if someone is trying to kill you or your family, is it a crime to kill or incapacitate them to prevent that?

There is a wide gulf between killing and incapacitating. My personal philosophy is it is better to be killed than to kill. Killing someone is a stain on your soul, no matter how justified the situation. So I don't believe in killing someone else as a means for personal self-defence. In defence of others, that's a different story. Killing the aggressor still puts a stain on your soul, but so does not acting to prevent the death of an innocent party, lesser of two evils and all that. I accept the notion that war can legitimately happen under certain circumstances. There can be situations where a resort to war is the least bad option. But I want war permanently consigned to the pages of history. If people are content to talk about whether this method of killing people is OK but not that method then we're not on a path to that end game. to achieve that goal requires a completely transformed mindset when it comes to war and conflict. Banning or condemning the use of certain types of weapons it just tinkering at the edges and false morality.

[all swedes are racist]

I'm not going to go all the way into this again, just going to quickly say: Dropping the bombs was the right thing to do. In fact, it was the humane thing to do. It ended the war much quickly and had a net impact of saving lives.

Right or wrong, whatever, but I sure as shit wouldn't say humane

[ChuckM]

Hey!

 

I didn't expect that Thread to go that far but History is what it is. Watching these commemorations 10, 20, 30....70 anniversary. I was just P*** off.

Having grew up with what History books and teachers taught me, the other day I just told myself: just forget about everything, the War, Military decisions, the history, politics, Moral, religion, the countries involved....

Just think of these two events for what they simply are: The Annihilation and Destruction of two entired city with all living innocent people and animals full stop.

 

So how do you JUSTIFY The Horror and an Abomination like this? Simply you can't. so what do you do? You just lie.

 

Did they learn anything from that? NO, instead This attempt to justify the Horror lead the world to the so called "Cold War", Guess what? they build them even more and more powerfull (we've stopped counting how many time more than these first 2) so only GOD knows what one them will be capable of now.

 

Here we are 2015, IRAN is back and on his way to be a friendly country to do business with because they agree not to build the deadly weapon. So only a few selected responsible countries and learders are allowed now to use it.... Hoooray! I feel safe now.

 

Please, Please, please.... Just say it was wrong to use it. they didn't know at the time what they were playing with. Now, WE KNOW!  NEVER NEVER NEVER again, and just get rid of Them. So we can still be here to commemorate the 100 anniversary and keep on arguing here.

 

Yes I know, Dream on...

[Maithanet]

So how do you JUSTIFY The Horror and an Abomination like this? Simply you can't. so what do you do? You just lie.

Please, Please, please.... Just say it was wrong to use it. they didn't know at the time what they were playing with. Now, WE KNOW!  NEVER NEVER NEVER again, and just get rid of Them. So we can still be here to commemorate the 100 anniversary and keep on arguing here.

 

Yes I know, Dream on...

Welcome back to the thread (which you started).  Surely you'd admit that you aren't making much of an argument here.  Why do you think that the atomic bombings were unjustified?  Thus far your argument seems to be that they killed a lot of "living innocent people and animals", which was in no way unusual in World War II.  There were approximately 500X the dead from non nuclear causes in WW2, and putting an end to that bloodletting is a very good thing. 

 

Several people such as myself, Horza, and Trebla (amongst others) have outlined why we feel that dropping the A-bombs were a necessary choice to get the Japanese to surrender, with potentially the least bloodshed for the Japanese, occupied asian nations, and Americans.  There are arguments against this perspective, but they are not self-evident.  You need to actually state your reasons for why the atomic bombings are unjustified. 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

Hey!

 

I didn't expect that Thread to go that far but History is what it is. Watching these commemorations 10, 20, 30....70 anniversary. I was just P*** off.

Having grew up with what History books and teachers taught me, the other day I just told myself: just forget about everything, the War, Military decisions, the history, politics, Moral, religion, the countries involved....

Just think of these two events for what they simply are: The Annihilation and Destruction of two entired city with all living innocent people and animals full stop.

 

So how do you JUSTIFY The Horror and an Abomination like this? Simply you can't. so what do you do? You just lie.

 

Did they learn anything from that? NO, instead This attempt to justify the Horror lead the world to the so called "Cold War", Guess what? they build them even more and more powerfull (we've stopped counting how many time more than these first 2) so only GOD knows what one them will be capable of now.

 

Here we are 2015, IRAN is back and on his way to be a friendly country to do business with because they agree not to build the deadly weapon. So only a few selected responsible countries and learders are allowed now to use it.... Hoooray! I feel safe now.

 

Please, Please, please.... Just say it was wrong to use it. they didn't know at the time what they were playing with. Now, WE KNOW!  NEVER NEVER NEVER again, and just get rid of Them. So we can still be here to commemorate the 100 anniversary and keep on arguing here.

 

Yes I know, Dream on...

The world is much more peaceful after the invention of nuclear weapons than it was before. If they hadn't existed it seems very unlikely that the Cold War would have stayed cold, for example, considering how close it sometimes came to war even with the nuclear deterrent. Probably NATO would eventually have gotten fed up with the Soviets and decided to steamroll them (being much stronger in conventional warfare). Then depending on how the world map looked afterwards we might have been looking forward to a WW4 scenario right about now. Perhaps China vs their neighbours + the West? 

 

Though there is of course a very negative side with nukes; that all it would take to trigger a huge nuclear war is a serious accident or misunderstanding, which almost happened during the Cold War. But when you consider how extremely bloody conventional conflicts can be in modern times (as indicated by the death tolls in WW1 and WW2) this risk might be worth it. 

[straits]

 

 

Though there is of course a very negative side with nukes; that all it would take to trigger a huge nuclear war is a serious accident or misunderstanding, which almost happened during the Cold War. But when you consider how extremely bloody conventional conflicts can be in modern times (as indicated by the death tolls in WW1 and WW2) this risk might be worth it. 

 

Isn't conventional modern warfare overwhelmingly asymmetric anyways? With one side usually being vastly better equipped and trained, and the other cornered.

[ChuckM]

"The World is much more peacefull...." Seriously?

I am speechless and you are right I m not coming here with any new argument because there is nothing to argue really. Humans always killed humans what difference that make if it is during Wars Genocides or In one drop... You win I got no argument to justify something I believe cannot and would never been justified. I don t have any agument it is just a strong belief and I will not try to convince you.

[Maithanet]

 I don t have any agument it is just a strong belief and I will not try to convince you.

 

Ok...well then it seems strange you would start a topic that you don't actually want to discuss. 

 

Hows this:  IF (and I understand this is conjecture, not fact), but IF we were to say that the using the Bomb prevented the war from continuing to a 1945-46 invasion of Japan which would have cost over a million lives throughout the world, would using the bomb then be justified?  Or is your position that using nuclear weapons is unjustifiable regardless of outcome?