Hiroshima, What Would You Have Done If You Did Not Drop The Atomic Bomb

[Parche]

Would you have left Admiral Halsey and the 3rd fleet surrounding Japan, and keep bombing them with conventional bombs?


Would you ignore the fact that our POW's were dying every day?

Would you have invaded Japan proper, and risked millions of lives in the process?

Would you have protected the fleet from the kamikaze's the best you could?


Would you mourn the loss of Chinese and Korean civilians being brutalized from Japanese retribution?


Would you care that thousands of Japanese military were dying of starvation every day on Pacific Islands that we had surrounded and left them to 'Wither on the vine'


:hi: :patriot:

[Name removed]

1. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[valerief]

2. Would you have given Japan oil and steel so they wouldn't have bombed Pearl Harbor? nt

[Parche]

4. They Did Not Have To Bomb Pearl Harbor

Countries dont have to trade between one another

They were the aggressors, in China, and Korea at first.............

[valerief]

8. Wah, wah, wah. nt

[Parche]

12. You Are Uninformed Also

Do you want to tell that to the Chinese at Nanking?
The Marines and civilians at Wake Island?
The US Navy fliers and sailors at Truk Island?
The civilians from the Phillipines?
The US Military at Bataan?


It shows in your childish response

[rpannier]

132. Wah, wah, wah

This message brought to you by the clueless (valerief) of the world.

[INDIA]

46. "Would you have given Japan oil and steel"

Uh, NO?!?!?!??!?! WTF? Are you insane? :shrug:

[CrazyDude]

62. No n/t

[Freddie Stubbs]

67. NAFTA-style free trade with Japan?

:shrug:

[iamthebandfanman]

81. that wouldnt have stopped them

what do you think all that oil and steel was for ?

not building playgrounds, i know that much

[OmahaBlueDog]

92. Not after what they did in China

That would have been kind of like of like supporting Sudan, knowing what they were doing in Darfur

[Occam Bandage]

3. Started a Hiroshima thread and unleashed its full fury on the Empire of Japan.

[bicentennial_baby]

5. Happens every year....like clockwork

it's a tradition

[Parche]

6. Clockwork

I just want to know why people dont realize the facts, or just didnt realize we were really
at war with Japan.

[bicentennial_baby]

9. You do understand that others may not agree with you, right?

And that they may be as well read as you are on the subject, right?

It happens.

[Parche]

14. I Understand That Some May Not Agree With Me

But every single response, shows me they are NOT well read on the subject
and dont know anything about it, just the fact that we did drop 2Atomic bombs on Japan

:hi:

[G_j]

16. bull

Some of us just aren't taking the bait.

[Parche]

17. Bait

This is not bait

I just want to understand from these people, why they think this way


Every response is from people who are jumping to conclusions, and are ignorant of the facts

[Posteritatis]

34. If that - I've seen folks talk about the nuking of Tokyo (nt)

[G_j]

11. "facts"

not everyone who disagrees with you is ignorant of facts.

[Parche]

15. I Havnt Seen Anyone Yet Who Knows Of The Facts

Every single response from people shows me that they do not know anything about this subject

Just respond in childish ways, or saying that because the US was the only nation that used the
Atomic weapon makes us bad, without knowing all the facts.

[G_j]

19. who are you talking to?

I do not wish to engage in your debate.
Besides, you already think I'm an ignorant child anyway,

:rofl:

[godai]

20. I know the facts. Please respond to post 17

I attended the 50th anniversary ceremony at Hiroshima on August 6, 1995. I've read extensively, trying to understand what happened in Japan in 1944-1945. Is that informed enough for you?

[LaurenG]

7. My father fought in WWII and he was convinced it was the only thing we could have done

He and I had totally different viewpoints on this but I respected his opinion because he was in the heat of it.

I have no idea what could have been done, the version I was taught of history seems to be coming apart at the seams. I'm glad I wasn't born for many years after the 2 bombs were dropped. :(

[Parche]

18. I Respect Your Response

It is a good one, and not like the others that are either childish, and dont know what they are talking about.

I was never taught this in school, oh we were shown that they were dropped, but not the reasons.

Even people who were there, like my favorite Admiral Halsey didnt think we should have dropped it,
that is the only time I would have disagreed with him....

:hi:

[CTyankee]

105. I was 4 years old when those bombs were dropped. I had nightmares and was

very frightened. My mother did something interesting: she told me to put aside 30 minutes a day to do nothing but worry about the Atomic bomb and then not think about it the rest of the day. Of course, I didn't make it to more than about 2 minutes of "worrying." Funny, I stopped worrying about it after that. She was wise. She didn't dismiss my fear but she made it inoperative.

[isentropic]

10. Lacking a time machine, your questions are pretty much worthless.

Sorry.

(I have stood at ground zero, in the Peace Park in Hiroshima...and I did not feel either pride or shame.)

[Parche]

21. My Questions Are Facts

These were the things that were going on at the time, so you saying they are worthless
shows me you do not know.

[isentropic]

49. What a shame the world didn't have your omniscience back then.

Bah.

[godai]

13. Sounds to me that you are trying to justify widespread killing of civilians

To me, the bottom line is that there are rules even in war and Hiroshima and Nagasaki violated those rules as did the even worse firebombing of nearly all Japanese cities. But, we won, so, no problem, right?

[Hugabear]

23. Don't forget the firebombing of Dresden

And other German cities.

Yet the war crimes committed by the United States are okay because we won. :sarcasm:

[Sequoia]

28. A beautiful city destroyed, yet don't even think about bombing

those camps that killed 6 million Jews/Gypsies/Gay's/Liberals/Cripples or tearing up the train tracks that took them to their death.

[MicaelS]

82. Blame Roosevelt for that one

He had the knowledge and he refused to do anything about bombing the camps. http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=5395

ANGLE: One of the other interesting things about this was the failure of Roosevelt to really confront the issue of what was happening to the Jews in Germany.

BESCHLOSS: That disappointed me most of all. Beginning in '42, Roosevelt began learning a lot about the murder of the Jews by Hitler and Jewish leaders went to him and pleaded and said, "Please give a speech in public, tell the world what's going on," because Hitler was trying to keep it a secret. For 18 months, Roosevelt refused. People would beg him to help get Jewish refugees out of Europe, relax the immigration quotas. Roosevelt wouldn't do it. And I found that early in the war, Roosevelt had had lunch with Henry Morganthal, his treasury secretary, who was Jewish; and a Catholic official, Leo Crawley. And he said, "You Jews and Catholics have to understand that you Jews and Catholics are in America only under sufferance because this is a Protestant country. And, therefore, you have to go along with everything I ask you to." And Morganthal went back to his office and said, "What am I working 24 hours a day for if America is not for me?

ANGLE: One of the most difficult and most agonizing issues was a proposal that Auschwitz be bombed by Allied planes.

BESCHLOSS: And Roosevelt flatly refused. We had thought before my book that the decision did not even get up to Roosevelt. Turns out it did from research I found. And you know, when you look at presidents, I mean, you study them for a living; you know, you always want to make sure that if a big decision comes up to a president he deals with it seriously, convenes his advisers even if in the end he doesn't make the right decision. This was one of the big decisions to face a president, which was if you bomb the death camps, is that going to save more Jews and others than it will kill? As it turns out, this went to Roosevelt and he dispensed with this almost like a fly on his lapel. He said, "I just don't want to do that. Next question."

ANGLE: It was a very tough issue and there were actually some Jewish leaders saying, "Yes, do it."

BESCHLOSS: Absolutely. It is an honorable position for others to have said it might have killed more people because you would be killing the inmates in the camps. But the point is that for some reason Roosevelt had a disconnect on this subject. He once said to Joe Kennedy, I've got it in the book; "Privately I've always worried that if an American demagogue took up anti-Semitism there would be more blood running through the streets of New York City than in the streets of Berlin." This was an issue that he was always a little bit strange about and I think it caused perhaps his greatest failure during World War II; which was unlike Churchill, Roosevelt did not understand that the holocaust was the most monstrous crime in human history.

[Sequoia]

90. He "flatly refused" ????????

Why, why, why?????!!!! He refused to let Jewish refugies in also and the ship was turned back.

[MicaelS]

100. Yes, truly sad

I hate to say it, but I can only assume it was part and parcel of the anti-Semitism of the times. No one will ever really know.

[Sequoia]

104. Sadly, this still holds ture today.

I've always been amazed when I'm in a group, or just with a lone person and maybe a woman or man walks by and the other person will say, "He/she's a Jew", like they have a sign on them. I never look at a person and wonder if he or she is a Jew. I mean, so what? Are they aliens or something? Or, in the south as a kid. "She may look white, but let me tell you her great-grandfather was black. AND A SLAVE, even if was only 2 at the time. Tsk, tsk." Or, "He's acts like he's a ladies' man. But I know he's gay." And, a German woman I worked with years ago who married an army guy after WWII (the enemy!) who said her husband would NEVER, EVER (on the pain of death no doubt) by any product made in Japan/China/Far East because of Pearl Harbor. I said, "But what about Hitler?" Sometimes, my mind just can't grasp the attitudes of these people.

[Leopolds Ghost]

117. Hannah Bell said Beschloss is an elitist who is married to a capitalist

So what he thinks count as war crime don't matter
and she doesn't much care to read what he thinks
in his book, The Conquerors.

:eyes:

Thus refuting an argument I made on the Rwanda genocide thread.

Reminds me of my African History professor who was
a doctrinaire Marxian sociologist. I asked what she
thought about George Pakenham's Scramble for Africa
a highly readable layman's account of the bloodshed
and machinations and adventurism, on that continent.
She said "That is not a legitimate scholarly work,
Pakenham has no social critique, you should not be
reading it."

Funny how PC is being used only to isolate liberals
from other lefties and only for the sake of purification
arguments ("I'll attack liberals and grant such behavior
on the part of conservatives, we're better than that.")

Except of course, we aren't, as FISA (and Clinton's
behavior in the 1990s, including with Rwanda) proves.
So why the endless double standards that only attack
those who err to the progressive side of any issue,
often using disengenuous claims of "not far enough"
while ignoring every outrage committed by conservatives
and so-called liberals? Our leaders are "better than
the alternative" but we get criticised by people on
the far left for demanding that they move a little
bit to the left because they have no interest in
half-measures and accept the status quo as given.

[MicaelS]

134. Roosevelt was a Great Man

IMLHO the 3rd greatest US President after Washington and Lincoln. But every Great Man has a blind spot, and I just have to say apparently with Roosevelt, it was the plight of the Jews. But he wasn't the only one.

[Parche]

29. War Against A Country That Declares War On You

Is a war crime?

That is a new one to me....:hi:

[Hugabear]

43. Firebombing an entire city?

Waging war, targeting military and government, is not a war crime.

Targeting civilians and deliberately wiping out entire cities is.

[Leopolds Ghost]

120. Aerial Bombing of Civilian Infrastructuire Was an International War Crime until WE (LeMay) did it.

And you claim to know ANYTHING about the subject.

Clearly you are not as well informed as Robert McNamara,
who flatly stated the above.

You don't remember what Guernica was about or why
people were so appalled by it.

Planes allowed governments to commit acts of terror
from afar -- just like Bin Laden. For 20 years after
WWI, these acts of terror were considered terrorism
and war crimes -- including when the Japanese and
Hitler bombed cities such as London.

The act of bombing civilian targets by planes ITSELF was
the #1 war crime recognized by the world public.

The rape and murder were mere add-ons (most people died
in the bombing, after all, and don't pretend to claim
intent of the pilots was different than in-person
rape/slaughter.)

This held true until LeMay ordered US Military and
McNamara to adopt Hitler's and the Japanese policies
of aerial bombing against them.

[MaxPlancker]

133. War "rules" and how they are applied

The rules of engagement evolve out of necessity. For example, in the fight for Independence from Britain American sharpshooters were considered "unsportsmanlike". Cavalry charges with swords drawn were rendered ineffective as a combat tactic by machine guns im WWI. Germany rewrote the "how to wage war" book in WWII. There were no consideration of rules unless they could use them to their advantage. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Kamikazes. Thousands of them. How do you counter that mindset?

Throughout history each side in a conflict tries to gain an advantage over the other. Until the conflict is unambiguously over those advantages are brought to bear. "Breaking the rules" is not justified because "they did it to". Breaking the rules is in response to the other side that gained an advantage by breaking the rules. Its survival.

If an aversion to casualties is all it takes to stop a country from engaging in warfare then there would be nothing to stop those who aren't casualty averse. As soon as you self impose a restriction in how you conduct combat the opponent will exploit it to gain an advantage. If you give your opponent what they want in order to prevent conflict or casualties they will eventually own you. There is no "moral high ground" in war. There can't be.

Nobody has to like it. But they do have to realize that when you wrestle with pigs you both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

[Parche]

24. I Never Said That

Hiroshima was a city that was mostly intact, but it was a industrial city, and war is war.....

Nagasaki the alternate city, was a huge port, that the Japanese Navy used

Both were strong military targets


Yes we did win, they FINALLY surrendered

If they would have surrendered in March or April, they would have been spared....?

:hi:

[godai]

30. War is war, huh? Read this...

I. Recognizes the following principles as a necessary basis for any subsequent regulations:

1) The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal;

2) Objectives aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be identifiable;

3) Any attack on legitimate military objectives must be carried out in such a way that civilian populations in the neighbourhood are not bombed through negligence;

http://www.dannen.com/decision/int-law.html#D

---------------------------------------------------------
I'm done posting. You represent the classic rationalization of acts which might easily be considered war crimes.

[Parche]

31. So You Dont Condone What The Japanese Did At Nanking?

Or Phillipines, or Bataan, or Guam, Or Wake Island, or to POW's?

That is one sided of you...............:hi:

[godai]

32. Yes, I don't condone those war crimes. n/t

[Bright Eyes]

98. Tell me, since "war is war"

Would you have supported dropping nuclear bombs on Vietnam? Iraq in 1991? Iraq in 2003? Iran if we go to war with them in the future?

After all, as you say, war is war.

[Terran]

114. An entire city is not a "military target"

Industrial installations or a port could be military targets, but not an entire city. I think there was and still is some sort of distiction made between military and civilian targets.

We were at war with them, that's certainly a fact (since you keep referring to everyone's lack of facts here). But I don't see how that's ever amounted to a solid reason for nuking a city.

What else might we have done? Dropped the bomb on an uninhabited area...wiped out some farmland, or better yet, a forest. Or hit an aircraft carrier. It's kind of a useless question, since there's no way to know if such a less-lethal demonstration would have convinced them. Please don't tell me it wouldn't have--you don't know any better than I do.

I do wonder how you would feel if they had done the same to us. If, say, San Francisco or Honolulu had been nuked and 100,000 Americans had died, would you have been ok with that?

[Leopolds Ghost]

121. That would have been an interesting question wouldn't it? Why couldn't Japan have nuked Honolulu?

Parche?

[Leopolds Ghost]

118. war is war? WRONG. Aerial Bombing ANY civilian infrastructure was a war crime until LeMay did it.

Don't believe me? Watch Fog of War
and hear it straight from the horse's mouth.

(Robert MacNamara, who engineered the firebombing
in WWII where the US bombed civilian targets for
the first time -- previously only done by the
fascists at Guernica and Ethiopia. the entire film
is narrated by MacNamara.)

(The very first city to be bombed by an airplane
was the black ghetto of Tulsa, OK).

So you don't believe bombing cities is a war crime
and the resultant deaths "acceptable casualties"
because of intent, eh? I.e. our intent in lighting
up a building in Iraq is different than Bin Laden's,
so the resultant civilian deaths are acceptable
(thus negating the assertion in the premise,
i.e. that we don't intend to do kill civilians?)

[Romulox]

88. So the "rules" forbade the widespread killing of civilians? Who forgot to tell Japan?

Japan was stopped from pursuing a genocidal war of aggression against the civilians of mainland Asia.

Why didn't your rules apply to the Japanese themselves? :shrug:

[Leopolds Ghost]

119. Fallacy ==> "You Too" (Argumentum ad Hominem Tu Quoque). NEXT!

If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you?

By this logic it's OK to fly planes into buildings
because the enemy did it first.

:barf:

[IndianaJones]

22. I woulda dropped 3 or 4. nt.

[godai]

25. So, killing 100,000s of civilians doesn't bother you? n/t

[Parche]

27. Yes Killing 100,000 Civilians Does Bother Me

The Japanese did that at Nanking China, and yes that was very brutal
As they did to other places they occupied....

:hi:

[IndianaJones]

35. 5,400,000 Korean civilians were conscripted for labor from 1939 on...

among them, my grandparents. it is estimated that 300000 to 800000 of those people died.

the numbers for China are much greater.

[Leopolds Ghost]

122. Do you believe in collective responsibility?

If so, does the "payment in blood extending to the nth generation for the sins of slavery" as Lincoln described it in his famous 2nd Inaugural Address, apply to the murder of Japanese civilians?

By Old Testament rules, it does. In fact, by Old Testament rules, we were wrong not to enslave the Japanese.

[Parche]

26. We Only Had 2 At The Time

The 3rd was weeks away, if they had not surrendered, then they would have probably used them....
:hi:

[IndianaJones]

33. I fully support the use of the bombs at that time. nt.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

36. Backed off. Negotiated a truce. And, let the military power crumble.

Japan was defeated. There was no military justification for slaughtering 200,000 civilians. It was a political act to satisfy the American people and frighten the Russians.

[Occam Bandage]

39. So you would have allowed China to remain under Japanese rule? Interesting.

[Hugabear]

44. Since when was our war about China?

As horrible as Japan's treatment of China was, how was that really our concern? Was our primary duty to end the war, or to utterly defeat Japan and liberate everyone that Japan had conquered?

How many people died under Stalinist Russia? Should we have invaded Russia, dropped a few atomic bombs on Moscow, and set free everyone suffering under Soviet oppression?

Should it be up to the United States to be the world's savior?

[Occam Bandage]

52. If our primary duty was to end the war period, why didn't we sign a truce Dec. 8?

The entire reason the Japanese attacked, after all, was to knock us out of the Pacific theater in one blow, ensuring that we did not interfere with their ongoing conquests of China, the Philippines, and Indochina.

[Hugabear]

54. You're missing the point

Once we were attacked, our fight was with Japan, and our goal was to defeat them. Our goal was not to liberate China, Korea, or anyone else the Japanese had conquered.

[IndianaJones]

55. so you support the atomic bombings to end the war quckly? nt

[Occam Bandage]

59. Right. To defeat them. "Here, why don't you keep all your conquered colonies,

all of which were our allies, your military apparatus, and your insane, honor-obsessed, expansionist government, and in return you please stop shooting at us" is not exactly "defeating," now is it? The atomic bombs ended the war, and ended it with less total loss of life then allowing the Sino-Japanese war to continue indefinitely would have.

[Hugabear]

70. Would you favor using atomic weapons to end all future conflicts?

If your answer is no, then explain how you decide when and where to use them.

[Occam Bandage]

87. If the use of said weapons is likely to cause less total loss of life than conventional warfare.

It would be stupid to, say, allow three million to die when an atomic bomb could limit the deaths to a hundred thousand.

[Leopolds Ghost]

123. Occam Bandage considers many things acceptable. n/t

[MicaelS]

111. Really?

The fact we provided loan assistance for war supply contracts to Kuomintang didn't matter? That we organized the AVG (Flying Tigers) didn't matter? The fact the the United States, Britain and the Netherlands East Indies began oil embargoes against Japan in retaliation for their attacks against China, which in retaliation Japan attacked the US, Britain and other Allied areas in the Pacific. So the fact that China under Chiang Kai-shek was a member of the Allies didn't count?

By extension of your point, once Hitler declared war on the US, our goal was to defeat Hitler, and not liberate occupied Europe?

Am I interpreting your point correctly?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

83. The Chinese and Russians were already beating the snot out of the Japanese army.

One of the reasons that Truman dropped the bombs on civilians was to frighten the Russians. It didn't work.

[Occam Bandage]

89. The Russians had not yet invaded when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped,

and even still they were not likely to engage the Japanese past Manchukuo. The Chinese front was still hundreds of miles inland. Neither would have resulted in the collapse of the Japanese militarist government. Perhaps heavy strategic bombing would have--but strategic bombing caused a far greater total loss of civilian life than the atomic bombs did. I suppose if you don't die in a flashy manner, your life isn't worth saving.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

103. Strategic bombing was just as much a war crime as nuclear bombing.

The Japanese army was on it's last legs everywhere. The Russians were certainly going to invade whether the bombs were dropped or not.

The Japanese government was no longer governing because it had almost no power. That's why it surrendered.

[Leopolds Ghost]

124. Perhaps Occam could address the fact (discussed by Beschloss) that nuke use was all about Russia.

Keeping their concessions on the negotiating table to a minimum.

We nuked Hiroshima because of Sakhalin. As you noted, strategic
bombing of civilian targets by the US is and was a war crime.
in the Fog of War, McNamara said so. And he was merely pointing
out what was obvious before LeMay came along. That was Hitler
and Japan's #1 recognized war crime before we learned the details
of Nanking, Bataan, and the Holocaust. So we were committing the
same war crime already, the victims don't care whether it's a
firebomb or a nuke! What's one or more less Japanese city?
It was a demonstration of the efficiency with which we could
do what we were already doing, to warn Russia off the bargaining
table. We wanted to end the war quickly enough to keep the
Russians out.

[Posteritatis]

37. A plague on all possible houses

I was just gonna post a popcorn emoticon...

Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the unpalatable followup option of doing Tokyo in a couple of weeks) has its own obvious horrors, not the least of which is letting that whole genie out of the bottle in the first place. I'm torn on the use of nuclear weapons; I consider the things obscenities at the best of times, but there's something to be said for the fact that they terrified the great powers so much that they simply stopped fighting one another (officially) since then. Looking at the number of wars, their casualties, the rate at which new ones start, the scope of those which are ablaze, etc., we're in a more peaceful era than we've been for hundreds of years. That reassures and terrifies me at the same time, and which of those two emotions is on top changes regularly.

The siege would have worked too - eventually. It would have prolonged things for years, maybe polarizing the situation in Japan further and setting off a coup by some hardliners-even-by-the-standards. It might have also gone the other way. We just can't tell; about the only thing we can tell for certain is that it would have resulted in an extended period of vicious fighting in pretty much all the littoral waters and the gradual, further disintegration of every community in Japan larger than a village. Sieges - particularly of entire countries - are, like the existence and use of nuclear weapons, obscenities in my eye.

Olympic would have worked too, and would probably "only" have added another year or two to the war. Of course, it would have added casualty figures whose optimistic numbers were in the seven digit range and whose pessimistic ones were something more akin to what happened to Poland proportionately. The surrender as it was was relatively "clean," and the siege situation would have probably ended in a similar result, if more drawn out - but I'm not sure I want to think of the magnitude of bad blood, to say nothing of spilled blood, that would have resulted from an opposed slog across half the length of Japan followed by an eastern analogue to the Battle of Berlin in the capital. This course of action would also have been an obscenity.

And of course, all of those aren't even taking into account, as you mentioned, the condition of the soldiers and civilians on the islands, the threats to the allied fleets blockading Japan, the Chinese and Korean populations, and oh yeah the Soviets rampaging through Japanese-occupied Asia precisely on the agreed schedule.

Of course, some of the more ludicrously naive options I've heard (like declaring victory and leaving Japan alone after the Battle of the Coral Sea, which I shit you not I've heard seriously suggested now and then) just wasn't an option then.

I just don't know. I'm not a product of that time; folks near my age who can casually discuss or advocate total war barely have a comprehension of what it would involve unless they're really unlucky. I find it hard enough to grok the sheer scale of the Second World War, to say nothing of the mindsets involved in it. Speaking as an historian I can't get closer to comprehending what was involved in total war between great powers than merely thinking I can comprehend it. Were I a product of that time I'd certainly feel more comfortable trying to make the decision, or even to think about it in terms of counterfactuals and wouldacouldas like I am right now.

For now, though... as far as I'm concerned, every option they had available at the time was a blackest obscenity upon the human species, borne out of a series of prior obscenities which brought the whole situation into being in the first place. Some times I think I could make that decision. Tonight isn't one of those times.

[bbinacan]

38. We did the only thing we could.

I took some military classes at UNC, taught by a liberal prof. Estimates of casualties on an invasion on Japan ran from 1 to 5 million.

Parche, you're correct, many here are ignorant of the facts and only have a knee jerk reaction.

[catnhatnh]

40. And Nagasaki was bombed on the Ninth...

To show we could continue doing this...City by city and day by day.

We could have hit Nagasaki on the Sixth also, or the Seventh, or the Eighth...Only one aircraft of the 509th bomb group made both raids. We had the aircraft and crews.

More died in the firebombing of Tokyo but the demonstration was that ANY single aircraft could decimate an ENTIRE city. And though Japan might oppose any large raid, it could never oppose each and every single airplane.

So we showed it at Hiroshima and when surrender was not forthcoming after 72 hours, we confirmed it on the Ninth...

I wish I could fold and float a paper crane for each victim in each city. I cannot. I wish it had never happened yet I fully understand why it did...

[unkachuck]

41. how about....

....a public demonstration of the awesome might of the new atomic weapon we had with an implied warning that we would be prepared to use it if the war did not end?

[Thothmes]

63. What would have happened if the

demonstration device failed to explode?. The scientists and military were not firmily convinced that the nuclear weapons dropped would go off as planned. No one had ever dropped one of these weapons before.

[deaniac21]

77. I thought it was pretty public

http://maps.google.com/maps?gbv=2&ndsp=21&hl=en&q=hiroshima&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il

[aka-chmeee]

42. I would have dropped 'em...

I try to capture the WWII zeitgeist..I don't even care if it was purely a case of "Oh Yeah? Well take this MF!"
An almost surreal moment I once experienced:
I was visiting the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB and was in the area of the "Fat Man" mock up and Bock's Car (B29) when a large group of Japanese tourists appeared..took great interest in the display, films etc........ I guess you had to be there!

[mudesi]

45. I'm so tired of this idiotic justification

Here's what I would not have done.

I would not have indiscriminately murdered millions of innocent civilians.

[IndianaJones]

47. best estimates are 600,000 civilian Japanese deaths during WWII. nt

[TankLV]

48. conveniently forgetting or ignoring the MILLIONS of chinese and others the Japanese slaughtered...

nice...

[IndianaJones]

50. who the heck are you replying to? I support the use of the atomic bomb on Japan. nt.

[Occam Bandage]

53. Ah. So you would not have engaged in strategic conventional bombing of industrial cities.

That is to say, you would have lost, in addition to doubling or even tripling the length of the war.

[Bonobo]

56. B, but all those 80 year-old grannies with the bamboo spears!

They would've killled our GI's by the dozens. Skewered 'em like yakitori, I tell ya. I've seen it with my OWN EYES.

They call them "OBA-tallion" (Granny Battalion) and they will rip your skullcaps off and suck out your brains if you even get in their way on the subway! Imagine wartime!

[IndianaJones]

58. not a threat if they were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. nt.

[Thothmes]

64. Or maybe they would have done like the Japanese civilians

on Okinawa did, just commit suicide.

[ZombieHorde]

51. What Would You Have Done

I have no idea, but I wish that I did.

[csziggy]

57. All I know is that if the bombs had not been dropped I would not be here now

My Dad was on the USS Spot SS-413 and would have been in the thick of it if we had invaded.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

60. There is no good answer

Assuming, arguendo, that the Japanese would have fought tooth and nail to defend the home islands, it is likely that many more people, both civilians and military, would have died than did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. This can reasonably be extrapolated from the fact that more Japanese civilians died as a result of the firebombing of Tokyo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebombing_of_Tokyo) than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Given the mindset of the Japanese militarists, there was no humane choice available if Japan was to be defeated. Carpet bombing the civilian population with conventional weapons would have been different only in the weapons used, not in end result.

The only possible good that came out of the use of the atomic bomb was that it showed how horrific would be the results. At least it moved Hirohito to surrender, and in the long run, his capitulation probably did lead to a net saving of lives.

[MadHound]

61. I would have accepted their surrender offer that was on the table before we dropped the bomb

It had only one condition, that the emperor be retained in his traditional position. The American leadership rejected this offer, pushing for unconditional surrender or else. We dropped the bomb twice, then accepted Japan's conditional surrender. The condition that we allowed was the retention of the emperor in his traditional position.

The bombs weren't dropped to knock Japan from the war, they were dropped as a demonstration to Russia and the rest of the world.

[Thothmes]

65. The Japanes did not accept a conditional surrender

The accepted in their entirety the terms of the Potdam accords of July 1945. One of the terms of that surrender was "the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander for he Allied Forces." The Potsdam accords never specifically called for the removal of the Emperor of Japan from his thrown. What it did call for was "the elimination for all time of the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan" The Japanese surrended with the knowledge that McArthur had the authority to remove the Emperor from his thrown if he thought that it was called for. McArtur believed leaving Hirohito on the thrown (but powerless)was in the best interest of the occupying powers and the Japanese people.

[MadHound]

69. For weeks before we dropped the bomb, Japan was offering to surrender

The only condition that they wanted was that the emperor remain in place as at least the titular head of Japan. The Americans rebuffed these surrender offers, instead calling for an unconditional surrender. When that wasn't forthcoming, we bombed the shit out of Japan, and then, as you point out, proceed to offer terms of surrender that kept the emperor as titular head of Japan.

Again, we didn't bomb Japan to force Japan to surrender, they were already surrendering. We did this as a demonstration of our power to Russia and the rest of the world.

[Thothmes]

72. The fact is the Emperor remained

on his thrown not because we changed the terms of surrender or the terms of the Potsdam accords. The decision to let Hirohito keep the thrown was made after the Japanese accepted the unconditional terms of the Potsdam accords. When the Emperor directed the surrender of Japan, he did so knowing full well that by accepting the Potsdam accords, that he could be removed from the thrown and triedn as a war criminal. It was not a quid pro quo. The Japanese surrendered unconditionally.

[MadHound]

85. Yes, they did, yet we still allowed them the one condition that they had wanted earlier

Before we bombed them. So what was the point in bombing them? We could have accepted their surrender before we dropped the bombs, yet we didn't. Instead, we dropped two bombs, killed a few hundred thousand needlessly, all to make a show for Russia.

There was no justification for using nukes.

[Thothmes]

97. We did not allow them anything

A very concentious decision was made after the unconditional surrender of Japan that it was useful to keep the Japanese Emperor on his thrown at least for the time being during the early occupation of Japan. McArthur had the authority to remove the emperor if he thought it necessary. The fact that the allied powers found it useful to keep Hirohito on the thrown had nothing to do with the Japanes surrender. That option was never offered to the Japanese. The only offer to the Japanese Government was if they accepted the terms of the Potsdam accords, unconditionally, the war would stop. They accepted those terms and the war ended.

[melm00se]

66. the WWII revisionists

overlook a lot of indicators regarding what an invasion of Japan would have looked like.

If you examine several of the late war invasions of Japanese held islands, you would notice the absolutely staggering military and civilian losses on those islands. If you extrapolate out those losses to the larger Japanese home island population, the Japanese casualties would have been in the 10-14 million (both military and civilian), the bulk of those would have been deaths as the amount of food and medical supplies would have been quickly used up.

In addition, the "japanese were willing to surrender" objection is usually traipsed out as well. The USA made it clear at the Potsdam Conference that only unconditional surrender was acceptable. Until the bombs were dropped, all Japanese peace overtures (dating back to 1943) were rife with conditions.

By 1945, the US public was getting very tired of war and it is unlikely that they would have accepted the protracted battle that would have been the invasion of Japan, so given the whole picture (which also included in intimidating Stalin), the best available option was chosen and executed.

[Stuart G]

68. 200,000 Deaths vs 2,000,000..You do the math.

Estimates of deaths resulting from an invasion run up to 2,000,000. At what point would the Japanese surrendered if destruction did not seem close at hand? Would they have fought on or given up?

..If an invasion were necessary how many total deaths would have resulted. How many Japanese deaths?...In one firebombing of Tokyo, over one hundred thousand were recorded. How many more would have been necessary?..Therefore, it seems clear to me, less died using the Atomic Bomb. Less Japanese died using the Atomic Bomb vs conventional warfare.

What a stupid, idiotic argument. It is an ugly thing to say, but dead, is still dead..200,000 is less than one million who would have died due to invasion...

[DailyGrind51]

71. I might not have been born!

My dad was aboard an escort carrier in the Pacific during WWII and believed, even after the German surrender, that the Japanese were prepared to fight a war of attrition for the next 5 years, even if it took every man, woman, and child in Japan. The closer our ships came to the four main islands, the more desperate and fierce the Japanese warriors became, not limiting their rage to Allied military, but on the civilian populations of the islands they still occupied. Remember, the "Rape of Nanking" occurred when the Japanese were winning and optimistic, imagine their behavior when they were losing and in a really bad mood!

Hiroshima and Nagasaki made it possible for my dad to come home. :patriot:

[IndianaJones]

75. a wise decision by our leaders, for men like your dad and many others. nt.

[sofa king]

73. With the advantage of hindsight....

These days it seems most historians agree that the main sticking point was "unconditional surrender." The Americans in particular seemed to be blind to the fact that the Japanese were heavily invested in their imperial system and were more than willing to go down fighting to save it. Therefore, the war might have been drawn down to everyone's satisfaction by simply changing over to a "one-conditional surrender," that one condition being that the Emperor could keep his title and unique place in Japanese society. That's more or less what happened anyway--after the left-right-left of atomic bomb-Soviet invasion-atomic bomb.

This oversight is pretty easily explained, considering the United States' penchant for anti-Imperial rhetoric (note that I say rhetoric, not practice) and the fact that our nation's independent history is around one-tenth that of Japan's.

Winston Churchill seems to have spotted the sticking point and, given time, he may have been able to broker a compromise.

But I don't think that any more lives would have been saved. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were comparable in scale to a dozen previous bombing raids on Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama, et cetera. The week before Hiroshima was bombed, the city of Toyama was hit in a conventional incendiary B-29 raid and totally destroyed, with 99% of all standing structures damaged. It was one of the few strategic targets left for B-29s to hit. Future raids almost certainly would have wound up catching the hundreds of thousands of displaced Japanese from previously hit cities. Kyoto, an architectural and historical treasure of the world, would almost certainly have been destroyed--it only narrowly escaped being assigned as one of the first atomic bombing targets.

The planned invasion of Kyushu, scheduled for November, 1945, would have been a disaster on a scale only seen on the Eastern Front in Europe. The Japanese correctly predicted where the next blow would fall--down to the very beaches we planned to land on. They were already planning for a levee en masse to defend Kyushu, arming all able-bodied civilians, male and female, and making no plans to evacuate children and the elderly. Unbeknown to the United States, the Japanese quietly reinforced Kyushu and by September, 1945 already had almost as many troops in the landing areas as the Americans planned to commit to the landing. Conventional thinking of the time considered the minimum advantage an invader needed for success was a troop ratio of 2 to 1, so that thinking would have been put to the test. See Chapter 23 of Ronald H. Spector's Eagle Against the Sun.

[Sheets of Easter]

74. Hiroshima & Nagasaki- the original Shock & Awe.

I'm torn, personally. It did bring an effective end to a war in the Pacific theater against a Japan that didn't have surrender in their vocabulary, but at what cost?

It's not a simple scenario that can be sussed out in one post (or one thread, for that matter).

[Dogtown]

76. A military target should have been chosen.

I am aware of the Rape of Nanking, and the other Japanese atrocities.

Ours, perhaps, pale in comparison. Perhaps not.

Still, their inhumanity doesn't excuse ours.

[OmahaBlueDog]

99. They'd considered other targets

Kyoto was spared because of its historic signifigance

Some thought had been given to dropping in a rural area in hopes that few deaths would occur, but the threat that cities could be leveled would drive them to surrender. This thought was dismissed, and with hindsight, the dismissal seems justified. If they didn't surrender after Hiroshima, a demonstration run would not have worked.

In modern warfare, production centers are military targets. Hiroshima had been relatively untouched. One question that arises is 'why not Tokyo?." 2 answers; a) they'd bombed the Hell out of it already and b) if the leadership was all killed at once, actually obtaining a surrender could be difficult in the absence of any credible central government to order a cessation of hostilities.

[Dogtown]

101. Yes, I'm aware of those discussions

and in my heart I know why the soft target was chosen.

Strategically it was perhaps correct, but incredibly inhumane in my opinion. A hard, military-only target would have achieved the same.

We've done worse, though.

[MicaelS]

78. I have a very personal stake in this issue.

My dad served in the war. He was a crew chief on B-17's stateside, but only because he was an only son. He was scheduled to deploy to the Pacific if the approval for Operation Downfall was given. He might have died there, so I wouldn't be here today.

As I have previously stated....

If the bomb had been available six months sooner, or the war had gone on six months longer then Berlin and another German city would have been the first cities targeted. All the guilt-ridden hand wringing and second guessing by those on the Left simply would have never happened because the attitude would have been that the dirty fascists got what they deserved.

Furthermore, all those Jewish scientists who worked on Manhattan only developed their scruples when it became apparent that Germany was no longer the target. So I hold no sympathy for them, their attitudes of any guilt or remorse they feel, or express about their work, or the use of the bombs on Japan, and that includes Einstein most of all.

Furthermore, IF, and this is as big an IF an any of the alternate scenarios for Japan, IF the bomb had been available a 6-12 months earlier, and had been used on Germany, I believe many of those murdered in the Holocaust would have survived because the Nazis "perfected" their methods of extermination during the last year of the war.

Lastly, dead is dead, no matter how. If you are bayoneted, shot dead, blown apart by conventional explosives, crushed under a collapsing building, burned to death or suffocated during a human created firestorm through the use of incendiaries, vaporized in a millisecond, or die of radiation, you are still dead. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million people died during the 8 years of this war (July 7, 1937 to September 9, 1945) and yet the people of Japan are the ones who treated as the greatest victims of the entire war.

I'm absolutely sure that Koreans and Chinese think of the Japanese as victims. :sarcasm:

[IndianaJones]

79. good post. I'm thankful that those bombs were dropped and the war ended quickly. nt.

[tannybogus]

84. The Japanese would not have surrendered.

There would have been terrible consequences either way. Curtis Lemay was already firebombing the hell out of Japan. They were burning down the country a bombload at a time. Look at how the Japanese fought at Tarawa and Iwo Jima. They fought to the bitter end. Think of how much harder they would have fought if it was their own homeland they were defending. The atomic bombs were terrible and unknown. Even after their destruction, it wasn't a foregone conclusion they would give up. The Emperor himself had to step in and use his power to stop it. There were no good choices. There may have been attempts at peace, but the country would not have been easy to defuse.

As for the bombs, nobody really knew what they had. The scientists who worked on them weren't sure when the first test was done that they weren't going to start a conflagration that would burn up the Earth. They handled plutonium with their bare hands. When testing in Chicago, they had someone stand over the reactor area on a catwalk ready to dump material on it if they thought the experiment was going to get away from them.

The scientists were a brilliant and mixed lot. They all weren't Jewish, and they did have misgivings. Leo Szilard started the whole bloody thing by getting Einstein to write a letter ro Roosevelt. They were concerned that Germany would get a bomb before America would. When the allies went into Germany they had a special team ready to find whatever Germany had in their work on an atomic bomb. The Germans had Heisenberg, and it is still of some conjecture over whether he moved more slowly than he had to in order to delay the making of a bomb. However, before the bombing of Hiroshima, Szilard circulated a petition among the scientists who worked on the project asking the President not to use the bomb. The real son of a bitch was Teller. He helped build the hydrogen bomb. He could have cared who was killed or how many.

I read where people would notice Japanese tourists visiting Truman's grave. I always wonder what they were thinking. I know what I would expect them to think, but who knows?

[bread_and_roses]

80. So our war crimes, our crimes against humanity, are justified because

the other side was committing war crimes and crimes against humanity? Because that's what your arguement boils down to.

As for your demands that people come up with an alternate scenario, you know perfectly well that there are reams written about this.

John Pilger says all that needs to be said about this in a few short paragraphs.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/06/10835/

The Lies of Hiroshima Live On, Props in the War Crimes of the 20th Century

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder ...

“Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

...The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”... General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

The continued justifications for the slaughter of infants and children in the name of "peace" goes on. If US soldiers had gone into Japan and thrown infants in a heap, doused them with gasoline, and burned them alive would that be a war crime? And if it would be, what is different about doing it from the air?

American exceptionalism at its most Orwellian.

[Parche]

86. That Is Not This Argument

This post was to find out, what other people would have done instead......
:hi:

[IndianaJones]

91. I think it looks like many would've sat back and let millions of civilians die...

rather than see a swift end to the war.

[OmahaBlueDog]

93. ...and forced millions more to live under a government installed by Joe Stalin

...which, in turn, would mean that millions more would die....from famine or in camps.

[IndianaJones]

94. revisionist history is convenient. nt.

[Leopolds Ghost]

125. "My ancestors suffered greatly" does not make one an authority on the subject

And is not an argument.

Unless you want the debate here to proceed like the
Greek vs. Turkish and Kurdish vs. Turkish arguments
and Armenia vs. Turkish on the Internet.

Models of intolerance and emotional appeals and straw men
attacks on anyone who would not commit atrocities.

Tell me this: If Japanese civilians deserved collective
punishment for its crimes in China and elsewhere,

why didn't the citizens deserve similar punishment AFTER
occupation began?

Why didn't the Germans deserve more Dresdens and another
Versailles? Why oppose the relatively lenient Morgenthau
plan to punish and decommission German industry and
German and Japanese corporations that have profited
immensely from US occupation and are now the number
three and four industrial powers again thanks to US policy?

Why not just massacre people as Genghis Khan did? He was
very selective in who he killed. He only piled the skulls
of people who offended him, not those who sought leniency.
He enforced freedom of religion too.

Retribution and deterrence do not have a statute of
limitations under any sort of universal moral law.

Unless of course you believe that only the powerless
should suffer as scapegoats/sacrifices for
the rich and powerful who directed things
and profited from the postwar period.

[Parche]

95. Exactly

They dont realize, that by prolonging the war, and maybe invading or not invading Japan proper, either way, hundreds of thousands, even millions more would have died.
The use of the atomic bomb, while tragic, saved lives, and not just because we were going to invade.
And they think that Japan was going to surrender.....but when?
Why hadnt they surrendered in January, or March?

I dont advocate the use of atomic weapons ever, but in this case it was justified
people let their emotions take control, and no matter what, dont advocate that use, but dont realize the implications of the war lasting longer.......

:hi:

[IndianaJones]

96. there is no real concern by these people for casualties...its all about painting America as evil. nt

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

107. Humbug.

Countries aren't good or evil. Murderers are, no matter what their nationality.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

108. Actually, you've used that argument several times now.

Actually, your first argument was that it was justified as revenge over Pearl Harbor.

[OmahaBlueDog]

102. Sherman wasn't wrong " War IS Hell"

..and it becomes a fine line, when setting infants in a heap and setting them ablaze is a crime, but setting their fathers ablaze is combat.

War is a horrific reality. However, why are you so focused on Hiroshima? What made that attack any different than the firebombing of Dresden, other than radiation? Why are the bombings of London and Coventry, or the random missile attacks by Germany any less criminal? Why do the detractors of Hiroshima, such as yourself, never mention Japanese atrocities -- which are well documented? Why does this discussion always end up coming down to creating an image of an overbearing, immoral USA using horrible means against poor Japan, instead of the reality, which is that we delivered the end of a war against a nation which had mistreated, murdered, and enslaved thousands and which, oh by the way, chose to attack us?

An interesting, albeit somewhat dry analysis of records on Japanese War Crimes can be found here:

http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf

[bread_and_roses]

109. And who says I am only focused on Hiroshima? THIS thread happens to be about

the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities. Did I say that London, Dresden, or the Japanese atrocities were not war crimes? However, most of us start to learn by Kindergarden that "he did it too" is not a defense. So what exactly would be the point in bringing them up in a thread about the US use of the atomic bomb on civilians?

If I were, for some inexplicable reason in this particular thread, to review every horror back to my own blue-pained ancestors burning people alive in wicker cages, I would have to write a post longer than "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

And yes, what is done to men - and women - in combat is atrocious, but there is no "fine line" that I know of between burning children alive from the ground or from the air.

[MicaelS]

112. The point in bringing them up is...

Because people want to pretend, and yes I meant that word and all it implies, that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the greatest crimes of WWII, way out of proportion to the destruction of any other city or cities, that's why. That somehow the Japanese were innocent victims of US atrocities.

And the real simple answer whole debate is this: If Japan hadn't started the war in '37 with the invasion of China, they wouldn't have gotten nuked eight years later.

To put it in more street slang "Don't start none, won't be none."

[OmahaBlueDog]

113. Spare me the "This thread is about" crap

You brought up points about the justifications or lack thereof for Hiroshima...so this thread becomes about any event that contributes for the causes of that decision, or like minded decisons that aren't widely considered to be war crimes.

The point of bringing up the Dresden and London is to point out that, in the context of a wider, ongoing war, singling out Hiroshima as a war crime and not taking the preceeding events into account is intellectually dishonest. ... and you're wrong -- school and life generally have taugt me that "he did it too" (as well as the popular "he did it first")are common and often successful excuses.

Why do you keep resorting to the device of bringing up children? Why not just bring up puppies while you're at it? Killing of humans is killing of humans.

[bread_and_roses]

116. The "device" of bringing up children?

I was waiting for someone to use some such sort of phrase - though I will give you that your phrasing is less inflamatory than most of what is directed at those of us who bring up the real, actual dismemberment and incineration of children when civilians are bombed. Somehow, some seem to think that doing it is justifiable, but talking about, describing, or photographing it is not.

I never claimed that the atomic bombing of Japan was the only war crime committed in WWII. And while "he did it too/first" may work often in ordinary life, I think that if I murder your spouse in ratialiation for your murdering mine it won't work so well as a justification in court.

While one could hardly dispute that "killing of humans is killing of humans," children are accorded special protections under modern humanitarian law precisely because they are children. And if anyone fits the description:

Art. 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

surely it would be children? I lost a lot of my saved references when our old computer crashed but this one on carpet bombing was handy and seems to fit the bill pretty well:

Area bombardments and other indiscriminate attacks are forbidden. If it becomes apparent that an objective is not a military one, or if an attack is expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects then the attack must be canceled or suspended. (Protocol I, Art. 57, Sec. 2b)

An indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects and resulting in excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 3)

Nothing can justify the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the other side, nothing - it was an act of monstrous slaughter, no less evil than the monstous slaughters perpetrated by our enemies.

And now, I am done with this - I don't usually persist so long, since I find the willfull cognitive dissonance of so many on this topic a mystery that I'll never solve. Besides, a myriad of others have argued the case far better than I, and with our wonderful "internets" their words are available for anyone who looks or is interested.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

106. Negotiated a surrender.

And let the Japanese keep their Emperor.

:shrug:

[Tektonik]

110. I would have only used one bomb

Although this question is really, really tough, and it really isn't just of me to judge it 60 years later.

[baby_mouse]

115. As we are discussing THAT genie, from THAT bottle

I would have continued with conventional warfare and allowed the millions to die rather than sentence humanity to the countless trillions of deaths that will now doubtless be lost as the millennia march on, in faster, more aggressive, more technologically advanced and increasingly asymmetrical wars waged by nuclear powers against non-nuclear powers. America has shown the way, that sufficient vast military power combined with nuclear armament earns the "right" to wage war against anyone, and it was probably only a matter of time before this aspect of nuclear armament revealed itself. If it wasn't America it would have been someone else.

China and Russia and others will eventually follow suit and once the human population demonstrates itself able to survive a nuclear war with sufficiently differentiated social strata, politicians will have less and less problem with it as the centuries progress. The wars will be well controlled, of course. There won't be too MANY nukes, just enough to show who's boss. Sort of like an international taser. It'll work fine. Providing populations are given sufficient time to re-establish themselves we could probably "afford" a fair number of nukes a century.

The current distaste for nuclear war is showing itself (as we speak, even, in this thread) to be a fad. It will pass, and much of humanity with it, in the end.

Of course, one could argue that conventional warfare would have ended up doing the same thing, in time, but it's a lot more effort to devote millions of troops to absolute dominance without nukes.

And who's to say the scenario I point is morally wrong? Anything can be painted as a "necessary evil". Perhaps its better to just wipe out the more mathematically awkward problems of warfare with the touch of a button than to expect a nation to go through all the embarrassing self-examination necessary to consider peace.

Let's not delude ourselves. The next George Bush (and oh yes, there will be one and he may nearer than you think) will just nuke whoever he likes, and by that time his kind will be smart enough to have prepared the ground for reaping the benefits a little more carefully.

[asdjrocky]

126. Dude, seriously, you need to read some real history.

We broke Japans code at the beginning of the war. We knew what they were telling their Ambassadors and Diplomats to do. We knew that if we would have not of insisted on a complete, total, and unconditional surrender, then winning the war without dropping the bomb, or loss of more life, was absolutely possible. They only wanted to keep their Emperor, a religious figure in Japan, and we could have avoided the devastation.

Get this straight, my Father was in WW2, on D-Day, I had Uncles who fought in the South Pacific, and I'm proud of their service. But we DID NOT have to use the bomb. Not only once, but twice.

Keep in mind, that on May 8 Russia agreed to wait 90 days after the end of the war in Europe before declaring war on Japan. Now do the math yourself. When did we drop the bomb? And when did the fighting end in Europe?

Read Howard Zinn, starting at pg 422 I believe it is, in the Peoples History of the US, and for good measure, read Norm Chomsky 502.

I'm really not trying to start a fight with you, but I do believe it is of the up-most importance to know the truth of things, and the truth of history.

[Leopolds Ghost]

127. And if the Blue Dogs don't accept Chomsky, read Beschloss. n/t

[asdjrocky]

128. I like all of your points.

And if you're ever in No-CA, we need to get together. I haven't read Beschloss, but after your good words, I will.

[Leopolds Ghost]

130. Thanks!

I excerpted my words on Appeal to Unconventional Authority
aka Popcorn posting ("even so-and-so accepts that we needed
to nuke Hiroshima") and posted them in a separate reply, below.

They might deserve a separate thread since I see this form
of argumentation on both liberal and conservative blogs.

Sometimes it is sincere, just like sometimes concern posts
are sincere efforts to move the dialogue in the opposite
direction from where the majority of posters seem to be
headed. But quite often it is disengenuous...the question
is what would the more conservative Dems do if a liberal
politician questioned the need to bomb Hiroshima. Leave
the party, probably.

"I support Roe v. Wade but I can't tolerate THIS!! they'd
say, and forget all their "love it or leave it" rhetoric
about how FISA was not a legitimate "litmus test" issue.

I'd be willing to bet going up against many sacred cows
on the center-right would create a whole new set of litmus
tests and wedge issues to exploit. They'd be harping on
and on about how we "forced" them out of the party by
refusing to reject and denounce so-and-so for an unacceptably
liberal opinion that is tolerable on DU only because they
imagine their fellow DUers have no power. Why are we only
allowed to stand on principle on center-right issues but we are
expected to concede on liberal viewpoints, like the morality
of Hiroshima, because they are minority viewpoints?

Just to win? That's not how the Geneva Convention
or Just War theory was supposed to work.

Anyway, thanks man for the vote of confidence.
I would like to visit N-California one day...!

[Parche]

131. My Stepdad Was On Omaha Beach D-Day 1944

This thread is only asking what would you have done instead, not to get in arguments....

I have met a lot of people who were in the Pacific also, I have studied WWII Pacific for 33years now.......

Japan could have surrendered in January also.....Truman did warn them, they did not comply
so they suffered the consequence.......simple as that.....

:hi:

[Leopolds Ghost]

129. All this rhetoric seems to be "Even so and so acknowledges..."

Even I skirted the limit of this fallacy by appealing to
a (legitimate) authority on the subject, Robert McNamara,
who you would not expect to agree with me. But I did not
cite that as a reason to believe McNamara. Just because
a person is a DUer does not make his more conservative
positions ("Even I accept FISA is needed!!!") consensus
middle ground somehow.

When did DU get so conservative?

When Obama voted for FISA and freepers saw a wedge issue
they could exploit by defending the newly conservative
direction taken by our party "leaders"?

Seems to me that is an explanation for these sort of
"popcorn posts".

Is there a name for that sort of thing?

I believe it is called "Popcorn trolling" or "Even so-and-so".

As in:

"Even Hillary Clinton believes Iran is a threat. Why don't WE?"

"Even Obama acknowledges some warrantless spying is necessary."

(by a DUer on FR) "Even McCain believes in global warming, so I do too."

"Even I, a DUer, believe it was necessary to nuke Hiroshima."

"And I'm not just saying this because we might go to
war with Iran using nukes... why isn't this an issue
on the table ANYWAY? Pretend that my message is not
in context of Iran."

Another good name for it might be "popcorn" trolling.

A lesser infarction than concern trolling since the
people doing it probably have legitimate conservative
viewpoints on the issue that are at odds with the
moderate (but rightward-moving) direction of the party.

It is sort of the opposite and reverse of "concern".

The OP makes many legitimate arguments but I have to
wonder if some of the respondents arent engaged in a
gentle form of popcorn trolling to get a rise out of
people who disagree about a controversial issue.

"Even I, a Radical Leftist, agree Hiroshima was necessary!"

Another name for the "popcorn trolling" or "Even so and so" argument/fallacy
might be Appeal to Unconventional Authority.

So-called because the basic idea is that if someone
you would not expect, such as a DUer, believes
we should have dropped more bombs on Japan, then
his opinion somehow carries more weight because of the
person saying it being someone you would not expect,
a voice in the wilderness somehow, on an otherwise
liberal blog.

A classic fallacy that such opinions carry more weight.

Appeal to Unconventional Wisdom/Authority.

Like T. Boone Pickens.

[BeatleBoot]

135. Truman vigorously warned them.

Tojo and crew responded with, 'No dice. We call your bluff.'

I would have given the same order and most likely would have demoted some of Oppenheimer's folks for taking so long to develop the goddamn thing.

But that's because I would be the Commander-in-Chief and I would have used whatever was at my disposal to protect America and our troops during World War II.

Would I have relished it?

No.

But I wouldn't lose any sleep over it either.