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A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

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Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#101

Post by throwaway0a5e »

aebtebeten wrote: post #71
jessaustin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiati…

Being cynical, I suspect the reason "demonstration" of the bomb had not seriously been discussed as an option is because in a way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations, if one considers the target audience to have been Stalin instead of Hirohito. I kind of wonder about the timeline in which Kennedy and Khrushchev hadn't been cancelled by their respective hardliners. Would we have wound up with a world of laws, i…

Demonstrating to the soviets was a fringe benefit at best.

If you read the accounts from any person at the time. Regardless of the theater or the nationality the overwhelming consensus was that the priority was to get the war over with ASAP so that everyone could go home. Anything else was just a side benefit.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#102

Post by mardifoufs »

brabel wrote: post #60
mardifoufs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty absurd take. I mean, of course the bombing wouldn't have stopped if there was no surrender...considering that was the whole point of using nuclear bombs in the first place. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. I absolutely understand why the Americans weren't willing to risk a conventional land war…

> I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. You should definitely try to understand that. Perhaps if the bombs had been targeted at LA or NY by Germans (who would certainly be as correct as you are that doing that would've saved millions of lives in a potential invasion of the USA by Germany once it was done in Europe)…

I'm not european or american so no, I don't have a preference for who gets nuked. Yet, there is a huge difference between Japan and Germany. The german army was acting like a "regular army", that surrendered when it was hopeless and did not have a religious desire to fight until the very end even if suicide is necessary. Germany civilians were also not prone to join the army in that bitter resistance until the end and weren't trained to fight with bamboo spears if necessary. Also, the conquest of germany wasn't planned to cause 1m american casualties and 5-10m japanese civilian and military casualties and didn't require a contested landing that would have dwarfed the one on DDay.

Again, it's pure non sense to advocate that those numbers would have been better than 2 nuclear bombs because... at least it was conventional? And why can't an assessment of the potential casualties be used as a justification? Because that just sounds like grandstanding that completely ignore the reality of the war in the pacific.

Not only that, but Germany was still planned to be a target if it hadn't surrendered by the time the bombs were ready. So yes, it could have happened, but only the japanese were willing go fight until the very end. They had to be shown that they would not die in a honorable resistance against the us forces, but instead will simply get nuked with no chance of fighting or retaliating.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#103

Post by bart_spoon »

freeopinion wrote: post #14

I grew up with a cold war era US-centric understanding of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to happen. I get those arguments, Later I was taught a very different, also compelling, rationale for Nagazaki from a Japanese perspective. I get that argument, too. I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the conte…

> US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.

One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.

So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#104

Post by bart_spoon »

brabel wrote: post #60
mardifoufs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty absurd take. I mean, of course the bombing wouldn't have stopped if there was no surrender...considering that was the whole point of using nuclear bombs in the first place. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. I absolutely understand why the Americans weren't willing to risk a conventional land war…

> I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. You should definitely try to understand that. Perhaps if the bombs had been targeted at LA or NY by Germans (who would certainly be as correct as you are that doing that would've saved millions of lives in a potential invasion of the USA by Germany once it was done in Europe)…

> the potential for a future, prolongued military battle

It wasn't "potential", it was already happening. People fixate on the atom bombs but completely ignore the carpet bombing campaigns that had been going on long before. Dozens of Japanese cities were flattened to the same extent of destruction as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only difference is that with those two cities, it was accomplished with a single plane, dropping a single atomic bomb, whereas with other Japanese cities, it was accomplished with hundreds of planes dropping thousands of napalm filled warheads.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#105

Post by someperson »

pmachinery wrote: post #98
someperson wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact this claim has been at the top of this Hacker News thread for hours piqued my interest. So I did some research. I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily): > During World W…

> I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda. Even for HN this is ridiculously paranoid.

I'm not saying the users upvoting are shills, just that the claim appears amplified and disseminated through through CCP's official propaganda outlet (China Daily is "owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China")

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#106

Post by mardifoufs »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #64
mardifoufs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty absurd take. I mean, of course the bombing wouldn't have stopped if there was no surrender...considering that was the whole point of using nuclear bombs in the first place. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. I absolutely understand why the Americans weren't willing to risk a conventional land war…

>. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. >What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways Those weren't the only two options. Many scientists working on the Manhatt…

I'm sorry, I'm not following. The declaration of Cairo clearly stated that the US will accept unconditional surrender. There was no need to inform Japan of that by that point, they were fully aware that the US would have accepted an unconditional surrender. There were no terms to inform the Japanese of. Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.

And why not? If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? What leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#107

Post by bart_spoon »

Hokusai wrote: post #45

I see how hard we are still trying to rationalize such a despicable act as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And t…

> until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed.

Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.

It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#108

Post by kubanczyk »

mjevans wrote: post #43
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, like you, learned all the rationalizations that got to be written in history by the victor. The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six,…

These acts of destruction should be compared to the full context of the historic moment and not observed in isolation. At the time the US had been dragged in to the war by a surprise bombing that, while targeted at a military installation, was not backed by any declaration of hostilities. The ensuing battles from island to island were also brutal and from every documentary I've ever seen and every historical account…

What? Pearl Harbor? Morally, the entire bombing campaign against Japanese cities, including both conventional and nuclear bombing, was justified by deliberate extermination of Chinese civilian population (estimated 2.7 million civilian deaths in North China for years 1940-1942).

> In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians.

Sankō Sakusen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy

(That "justification" doesn't look valid in my eyes, don't take me wrong. Eye for an eye, civilian for a civilian?...)

Alas, it certainly looks like US had already decided that they indiscriminately target Japanese civilians long before they had nuclear weapons. The single most devastating conventional raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 claimed 90-100 thousand deaths (it's slightly more than Hiroshima).

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#109

Post by Ma8ee »

starfallg wrote: post #91
Ma8ee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is really your best excuse that there are countries that are worse?

No, I'm just pointing out that there is a real difference between places where there is a free press and places where there is not and the state is empowered to clamp down on ideas it doesn't like.

That sounds the same to me. Of course there are worse places than the US. You aren’t Saudi Arabia, Russia or China, Belarus or even Turkey. But you aren’t even in the top ten in regards to freedom, democracy, equality, social mobility, health, etc. I’d much rather live in any of the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, France, ...

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#110

Post by rmellow »

macintux wrote: post #97
gadders wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly due to teaching unions. The risk to children from Corona virus is vanishingly small. https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...

Viruses spread. It’s not just the children we’re worried about. Ask Israel how opening schools worked for them.

There's a curiously large amount of people that just don't understand the second order effects.
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