Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 142 posts

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

#111

Post by kubanczyk »

bart_spoon wrote: post #103
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 bom…

Yes. If anything it's a good lesson about wars: for the British to attack German cities it was a hard decision and it was to-be-or-not-to-be for their country. So at first it wasn't The Revenge.

But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.

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

#112

Post by boomboomsubban »

mardifoufs wrote: post #106
boomboomsubban wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>. 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…

>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

Those aren't terms. On a simple, likely over discused level, the Japanese leaders were against the removal of the Emperor. If the US had provided terms accepting a figurehead role for him they may have been willing to discuss peace.

>Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.

Though leaflets were dropped in Japan, they did not list Hiroshima as a target and they were not dropped in Hiroshima.

> 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? 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?

Again, those weren't the only options available. It's entirely possible their weapon could have ended the war without using it on cities.

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

#113

Post by pmachinery »

someperson wrote: post #105
pmachinery wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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")

> I'm not saying the users upvoting are shills

Ah okay, sorry, I thought that's what you meant.

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

#114

Post by kubanczyk »

mardifoufs wrote: post #102
brabel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Nope. The German command didn't act normally in this respect. They were in hopeless situation since June 1944 (Operation Bagration) and continued to kill and die for nonsensical reasons. They only surrendered after Hitler killed himself.

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

#115

Post by macintux »

rmellow wrote: post #110
macintux wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At this point people understand what they want to understand. I don’t know how to fix that.

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

#116

Post by DuskStar »

jessaustin wrote: post #25
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…

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…

Humanity might have been safer without nukes. I think it's more accurate to say that humanities safety would have been less variable without nukes. No chance of nuclear war, but almost a certainty of WW3, and WW4, and...

It's not quite as much of an unalloyed good as you're suggesting.

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

#117

Post by gadders »

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.

Ask Sweden. Relatively few teachers have caught COVID there. Taxi drivers have a five times higher risk than teachers. Also, it depends on the age of the pupils.

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

#118

Post by Multicomp »

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…

I agree with you. I do wish historical context was not so easily lost from the public consciousness, but I don't have a solution for it.

I can't find it now, but there was an audible audiobook that I used to have back in the dvd-audio days that showed just how much effort the Japanese government took to even be able to accept surrender when their militaries were extremely hawkish even to the end. It briefly touched on US discussions as well but was primarily focused on the Japanese government.

The Emperor of Japan himself had to do a certain amount of conspiring in order to be able to both surrender and not lose face. Even though he was in theory the supreme ruler, apparently if not done correctly there was risk of that military officers would go rogue.

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

#119

Post by ElMono »

chefkoch wrote: post #63
oh_sigh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Japanese interment sucks, but I wonder what would have happened if there was no internment. Could US wartime industry on the West coast have operated successfully under constant sabotage? Would it be better for America to lose the war to Japan (or at least reach a deal and let Japan keep all of the Pacific islands and Chinese land holdings) if it meant that the internment didn't happen? It's impossible to f…

So why didn't that happen with the germans and italians in the US?

Especially for the roughly 20,000 supporters of the German American Bund that openly supported the Nazi regime.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund

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

#120

Post by mardifoufs »

kubanczyk wrote: post #114
mardifoufs wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Nope. The German command didn't act normally in this respect. They were in hopeless situation since June 1944 (Operation Bagration) and continued to kill and die for nonsensical reasons. They only surrendered after Hitler killed himself.

Sure, the high command was delusional or had nothing to lose, but for the most part german units surrendered in massive numbers throughout 1945 especially to the western allies. Same for germany cities, where civilians usually put up 0 resistance and were revelieved to see the war end. There is no comparison possible imo, just look at the number of japanese war prisoners vs those from germany
Post reply on HN