Hiroshima (1946)

The Eisenhower quote is from 1963. He was not a general in the pacific theater, and was not involved in postwar Japan.

IMO, his quote should be read as that of a politician (which he was, at that point, having served two terms as president), rather than that of a military general.

It was not so cut and dry, as his words imply.

The children raised in bushido, who would grow up to make sure the enemy took no prisoners by having all prisoners suicide attack captors? Those who didn’t grow up to be warriors an just be innocent civilians would still fall in line with a culture that would gladly sacrifice every innocent civilian in its borders to fight. Murder until not even the dust of the bones of the society remain. It isn’t some historical fantasy. Japan was in a bloodlust.

> willing to destroy Japanese cities merely as a show of force

We had already destroyed most Japanese cities with fire bombs. Hiroshima was one of the few cities specifically spared from fire bombs

> When I was young in grade school, and learned about the bomb, and its terrifying aftermath, pictures, scars, I thought that this was clearly a wrong against humanity to have been dropped on anyone. Clearly the visceral kind of "this should never happen" reaction that any average person would have. "How could we put the Enola Gay on a stamp to glorify this?"

This is captured very well in Leiji Matsumoto's "The Cockpit" anime short, where in the protagonist, a Nazi Luftwaffe Pilot, is faced with the dilemma where Nazis had access to Nuclear weapons before the Allies but ultimately told from the perspective of the Japanese and perhaps even the Hibakusha themselves as he was born in 1938 and saw the the War in Japan first hand in this lifetime. It's pretty heavy stuff but conveys how this technology should not be in the hands of Humans in their current form, as its not worth the risk of the inevitable usecases we've collectively created thus far.

> Now, my 3rd phase of thinking -- beyond any opinion on tactics or reaction or bombs in the moment of a war -- is how do we get people to help themselves get out of the path to war? Each and every one of us, who whether by support or indifference, or tacit approval, or compounded misinformation, or ego, get ourselves into situations that we look back 50 years from now and say, "what happened?".

Honestly, War, especially to that massive destructive scale is only capable under the Nation-State model, which is what initially got me interested in Anarchism: as a tool for effective Anti-war measures.

I just fear Humanity may never truly be able to accept a Social model in which the State model is entirely absent and unnecessary before these things occur again, look how close this US vs CCP rhetoric is stoking the flames of potentially WW3 (both nuclear capable) when we have a so many ongoing crises that need the collective focus of all of Humanity to come close to even trying to solve.

Sidenote: The bombing of Horoshima and Nagasaki took place after the US had effectively crippled the Japanese economy and supply lines in a nation with no natural resources of their own. Its often speculated about how much longer they could have put up a resistance, prolonging Japan's defeat, and what would ultimately create a near permanent occupation by the US, but the War effort and the manufacturing of these armaments to the level they had before was impossible by the time Fat Man and Little Boy entered the Pacific theater.

Moreover, the constant conventional bombing and air raids of Tokyo by Allies (Tokyo Daikushu) claimed more lives (that still stands to this day) than both Nuclear bombs combined at the time of it being dropped, but the tragic thing being that that Hibakusha and their descendants still suffer long after the Empire fell, but still live with the horrible birth defects and health issues to this day. The way the US via GE and Westinghouse imposed Nuclear technology on them was perhaps the most cloaked dagger to Humanity I have ever seen in the reconstruction phase of all the 'axis' nations when you see how devastating Fukushima is (at the hands of TEPCO/Abe Government) that continues to pour massive nuclear contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean to this day.

The lesson (hopefully) being, that no one 'won' and all of Humanity 'lost' as we probably embarked on a very dark and destructive phase of our Human Condition that we probably would have been better not knowing we were capable of as a Species. Just look at the tragic plight of the Marshall Islands in the race for other nations to be Nuclear capable as well.

As a tangent to your comment, it always good to remember that big geopolitical decisions are never made in a vacuum, so when someone says “country X did Y because of Z” it usually misleading.

Some of the most fascinating reading I’ve done is the Pentagon papers because they go into exquisite detail about all of the thinking that resulted in the US’s involvement in Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Domino Theory, it wasn’t just containment of China, it wasn’t just getting France’s support for NATO, it wasn’t just Truman’s, JFK’s and Johnson’s efforts to look tough on communism.

It was all that plus a dozen other things.