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Hiroshima (1946)

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Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#261

Post by to11mtm »

ekianjo wrote: post #62
defrost wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs? Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ Outside of Japan many other cities received the s…

those are all war crimes but the victors never get prosecuted.

No, but interestingly at least one case of Allies doing a 'war crime' was used as a defense in the Nuremberg Trials; Karl Dönitz was convicted of unrestricted Submarine warfare, however since both Britain and the US were doing the same, they more or less let it slide.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#262

Post by throwanem »

throw0101d wrote: post #198
flyinglizard wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself). A different way could have left an adversary with grudge just waiting to rebuild, but how things turned out completely took the fighting spirit out of Japan.

> Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself). In the novel The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick it is argued that Japan and Germany lost WW2 by winning it. IRL, they won WW2 by losing it. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle

I wouldn't really say those were the subjects of Dick's thesis here. 'Close, but no cigar.'

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#263

Post by karlgkk »

yes_really wrote: post #251
karlgkk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped FYI it is also estimated that the war would end within a few months if the bombs were not dropped. It really depends on whoever was estimating lol This is a heavily contested issue that has been actively discussed for almost a century by full time professional historians and analysts. Making confident assertions isn’t particularly…

What is the argument that the war would have ended in a few months? Is it that the US would have reached Tokyo by then? Or Japan would have surrendered before then? Both are hard to believe

The core point of my post has not sunk in. Your personal belief does not mean that you get to confidently issued judgment on this matter, as if there are no other perspectives.

Again, this is a hotly contested issue, contested by people who in some cases, have a full-time profession in studying this issue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#264

Post by slg »

542354234235 wrote: post #254
slg wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds. >What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo) show? There is no shock value to dropping an atomic bomb on a non-target. Is knocking down buildings the only way people can perceive the power of a bomb? Would a huge mushroom cloud over…

>I don't know why you seem to believe that the only path to surrender was the exact events that transpired. Maybe dropping the bombs in Tokyo Bay would have changed things. Maybe writing the emperor a love song would have changed things. We don't know. There are two aspects that get mixed together with this. >Given the situation and knowledge at the time, was this or that military action reasonable and necessary? >Kn…

>I think you are getting so much pushback because you are mixing both questions, using after the fact "what ifs" to say what people should have done at the time

What have I mentioned here that couldn't have been considered before the bombings? If anything, that other person's insistence on focusing on the exact votes of Japanese leadership is more reliant on hindsight than anything I have said.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#265

Post by lou1306 »

opo wrote: post #135
alexjplant wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either. Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell spee…

I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example: >...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it w…

> Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.

On a strategic level they were. The archipelago was being blockaded, they had no way to contest Allied air supremacy, they were reduced to send children into battle, etc.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#266

Post by opo »

lou1306 wrote: post #265
opo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example: >...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it w…

> Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated. On a strategic level they were. The archipelago was being blockaded, they had no way to contest Allied air supremacy, they were reduced to send children into battle, etc.

Yes, they had no chance of winning and it should have been obvious long before Okinawa. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean they were ready to surrender.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#267

Post by wouterjanl »

542354234235 wrote: post #259
wouterjanl wrote: post #100

Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in…

Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japa…

I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#268

Post by mbs159 »

throw0101d wrote: post #206
Synaesthesia wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb". Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.

> Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them. Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost . That's the problem. Japan not surrendering even when they knew . Per Japanese documents e…

But you do realize that in cabinet meetings after the atomic bombings, the bombings themselves were only scarcely discussed? It is unknown how much impact the atomic bomb had on their decision to surrender, but it is certainly only one of many factors.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#269

Post by mbs159 »

nelox wrote: post #84
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons. American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict. The U.S. had limite…

Many of the top US generals at the time thought that the blockade and imminent Soviet invasion would have been enough to force the Japanese into surrender. The land invasion comparison was propped up as a good "justification" for dropping the bomb, though.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#270

Post by 542354234235 »

wouterjanl wrote: post #267
542354234235 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japa…

I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating s…

I understand what you are saying and I agree. I think it is important to look at, and empathize with, the suffering on all sides of a conflict. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate.

>As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.

Unfortunately, I think this is naive. It is akin to saying "violence is terrible", but as long as someone could decide to do violence against me, whether to take things I have, because they don’t like me, or just because they enjoy it, violence will still be around and I (or someone else like police) will have to use violence in defense. How do you stop every human from doing violence? How do you stop every nation from doing violence?

America’s failures in Mogadishu influenced their decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. The violence still happened because at the end of the day, we are just very sophisticated animals. I don’t see how war, violence, and conflict could be eliminated without eliminating humanity. Would we be human without our emotions, the good and terrible ones?

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