151–160 of 168 posts
Children on their way to school, the innocent and the weak were the victims of nuclear bombs, people were left without skin, their faces melted, bodies deformed and with radiation poisoning.
Sorry but it's a disgusting and weak act no matter how you people try spin it, I can never truly get past the facts and some of the footage of the aftermath available.
If you ever get a chance to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum, it is a moving and worthwhile place to go. Give yourself a few hours so you can spend time watching eyewitness interviews. The main tram line through downtown goes right past Ground Zero, which never stops being shocking.
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?" Then, in college and especially after, learning about the eq…
A good start would be to learn the facts. US-Japanese history didn't begin with Pearl Harbour. Edo-Japan was minding its own business before the Black Ships arrived. How many Americans know about the atrocities the US committed in the Philippines? The Japanese saw what was heading their way from the US and Europe.
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As someone who grew up outside of the US, I have found that Americans have a unique view on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. American schoolchildren are raised to believe that it was morally justified because it won - and therefore ended - the war. This attitude is so deeply and fundamentally ingrained into most Americans (including many who would self-identify as liberals) that it is very hard for them to see it as a war cri…
The nuclear bombings saved at least a million Japanese lives. It can easily be argued it would be a war crime not to drop them.
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A fascinating comparison with British steadfast resolve in the face of overwhelming force. Britons would fight on the beaches, and on the landing grounds and streets. They would never surrender, even against overwhelming odds. Truly inspiring in comparison with the robotic obedience of the Japanese who would dig in to protect their island, whatever the cost may be.
I see the point you’re trying to make, and by no means am I saying that the British were without fault, but there is a very significant difference between the the British defending their liberal democracy from Nazi domination and a largely rural, largely uneducated Japanese population being conscripted into fighting a war of aggression on behalf of a totalitarian state.
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Honest question: can it not be both a less fatal end to the war and a war crime? This classification of something as a war crime, even if appropriate, isn't the ending of a discussion.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with the concept that the best possible outcome should be considered a crime. (And I'm not limiting this to the circumstances under discussion -- I'm talking about the view that, no matter what situation you're in, there should be a way out that isn't a crime. Such people will, for example, object violently if somewhat incoherently to the fact that, under Qing Chinese law, a man orde…
Complicated Chinese (and Japanese) laws about legal and familiar duty are really not the subject under discussion here, but a red herring. Murdering innocent people is an entirely different matter.
Finally, consider there are many people in this world who won't commit some crimes -- such as genocide -- even if there is no way out and refusing will cost them their own lives.
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Yes, but maybe the bombs would have had the same effect, if dropped on actual military targets (or even unhabitated land, but close enough to demonstrate the power) instead of an civilian city. (a city with military production, sure sure, but they were choosen not because of military value, but because they were relatively undamaged, so the effect of the bombs could be studied. Concern for loss of japan civilian live…
It was discussed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
Why would a demonstration need to be told the japanese in advance?
And a dud could have also happened to the one used on hiroshima.
A shock effect could have been achieved by a bomb detonated close to Tokyo. And with papers dropped, saying, this will happen to all your cities, soon.
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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.
So you do think you know more than Eisenhower. Fascinating belief. The strategic bombing survey of 1946, subject to no objections about Eisenhower’s relative objectivity compared to your own, concludes that the Japanese government was well into the process of determining how to surrender, with predictable resistance from the military but endorsement by the Emperor as they were in the process of determining how to sta…
The document you link to would also benefit from the same treatment, being written in 1946 by the Strategic Bombing survey (a group that notably preferred precision bombing of industrial infrastructure, to the indiscriminate destruction of napalm and atomic weapons).
It not only makes the point you describe (that the Japanese population was war fatigued), but it also concludes that the use of atomic weapons (plus the Soviet declaration of war) gave the peace-seeking factions of the war council a platform to strong arm the army (which wished to continue the war) into accepting the Potsdam terms (unconditional surrender).
Prior to the use of atomic weapons, Japan was seeking a conditional surrender where they kept Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Manchuria. They were also sincerely developing strategies to prolong the defense of a home invasion. Even the emperor (who was pro-surrender) encouraged the simultaneous development of both plans. It is true that there were influential factions who preferred peace. Without the atomic bombs, we cannot know how long it would have taken for them to gain ascendancy in the government, and how many would have perished before they came to an unconditional surrender.
Again, I’m not saying it’s cut and dry that they were necessary. I’m saying it was and is complicated and nuanced.
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It strikes me as odd that practically any victorious military finds all of its actions optimal. If it had not done as it did, then the outcomes would be worse. The regularity of the superiority of the action taken is fascinating. Curiously, this website has a large number of commentators that believe that luck is one of the biggest factors in startup success. Yet, in this other domain of antagonistic participants, wa…
There are many arguments about suboptimal strategies and missed opportunities. They don't usually appear outside of military history discussions, though. Strategic bombing, for example.
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My school education about this was also essentially "bombs are bad, kids". The Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a... ) is actually quite enlightening in this matter. A lot of people seem to think that the Americans didn't try anything else before. Likewise most people don't realize how much more death there would've been on both sides if the US invaded Japan by sea.
> Likewise most people don't realize how much more death there would've been on both sides if the US invaded Japan by sea. That's begging the question - was a US invasion the only alternative? https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/nuclear-war-or... argues that Japan would have surrendered without the bombings. And that's for unconditional surrender - a conditional one would be even more easily achievable.
Furthermore the article is self-contradictory, e.g. first it says the conventional bombings were so successful that a nuclear wasn't necessary, then it says since the conventional bombings were unsuccessful the nuclear strikes also wouldn't make a difference (pure conjecture by developers of the weapon, who are no experts in neither politics nor military strategy or history).
It's also simply a lie that the casualty estimates were pulled out of thin air. Ask yourself: don't you think the US army would try to estimate how many of its soldierd would die (cost) vs how many Japanese soldiers would die and how many military targets would be destroyed (benefit)? Of course they did a huge study on this topic!
The article also suggested the Japanese would've surrendered if key people had been left in power. Yeah, maybe (again conjecture). But for comparison: if the US had allowed Hitler to go unpunished, conquered territory to remain under Nazi possession, the Nazis would also maybe have surrendered earlier. But why would you even offer such a surrender? It would render the entire war pointless.