This August, like the august of very year, past and present. We are summed to pause over one of the most cowardly actions of humankind. The dirty fight!

Baptized with names typical of our childish culture "Little Boy and Fat man"

On an Appeal letter ( Sept. 1st, 1939) to the Governments of France, Germany, Italy, Poland and His Britannic Majesty. President Roosevelt stated the following:
**************
The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women, and children, has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.
If resort is had to this form of inhuman barbarism during the period of the tragic conflagration with which the world is now confronted, hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives. I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities, upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents. I request an immediate reply.
***************

In a radio speech to the nation on August 9, 1945, President Truman called Hiroshima "a military base." It seems likely, considering his July 25 diary entry, that he was not aware that Hiroshima was a city. Otherwise, he was being untruthful about the nature of the target.

"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction."

Now that hundreds of documents have been declassified, one can only feel horrendous shame in the name of the civilized world at those events. Our bastard society, build on the maze of emigrants, lingers in the dirt.

Microzoft
Registered User (1,636 posts)


The japanese people would have fighted to the last,tens of millions of people on both sides would have died if the bombs had not been dropped

Now japan is one of the most richest countries in the world


Remember japan started the war with there cowardly bombing of pearl harbour
america finished it with nukes

I love japan now and japanese people too

most japenese people do not harbour grudges with america, indeed they have embraced america

Japanese Prime Minister Junicho Koizumi's is a Big Elvis fan


If japan has no axe too grind?????
Why do you microsoft?????

You can not fight a enemy when they have suicide bombers
imagine the deaths when japenese planes could have crashed into the invading landforces

Microsoft the deaths from a invasion of japan by land would have run into millions
A American presidents duty is to protect american citizens 1st and he did just that by ending the war

That was the most difficuly decision any humanbeing has made on this planet and he made the right one

Shame on you microsoft for suggesting otherwise

Microzoft

Nipponese Soliders werent exactly angels, alot of the asian woman population on the mainland was raped by nipponese soliders During the ww2 invasion, Not to mention killing men and children over 6 years of age.

Its War, shit happens. So many people died that complaining about 50 000 civilians is stupid.

The japanese people would have fighted to the last,

"fighted " <- Its Fought.

Odin'Izm
Registered Atheist (872 posts)

Im so sorry please feel free to correct my spelling or grammar
if you have nothing important to say or anything better to do
regards xxxxxx

Well, Vincent, I have always welcomed corrections of my grammar, spelling, quoted 'facts', grasp of concepts, etc. It is one of the important ways in which I learn. Should I take it from your sarcastic reply to Odin'Izm that you have no wish to learn?

Ophiolite
sarcastic me
no
i send you kisses you send me insults


Japan like germany wanted world domination but unlike germany they had suicide bombers and therefore a land battle was impossible

Japans emperor was a stubborn *astard and would never surrender to america
2 great men saved mankind from the the trio of evil countries japan germany and italy
they were roosevelt, and churchill

vincent28uk

That was the most difficuly decision any humanbeing has made on this planet and he made the right one. …..Shame on you microsoft for suggesting otherwise

Stupid governments get their own people involved in wars for dubious interests, same as we went to Iraq because of WMD’s. And so, we could argue if Japan was or wasn’t provoked into hostilities.

However the deployment of atomic bombs (not nuclear bombs) on a defenseless population is something not to be proud about. Japan capitulated, not because their military infrastructure was destroyed but because of the massive life losses inflicted on their population.

So, you say that Koizumi’s a big fun of Elvis! Perhaps also we could say that many Japanese love rock-n-roll or that they are enthusiast of McDonalds, or that we get flooded with japans tourists, or Japanese cars. What all that has to do with the crimes of deploying the atomic bombs??

I haven’t implied that Japanese were angels, they were just like other soldiers. They too have records of violations, rapes, and out of line conducts. But so we are too, in Vietnam and other places, even in our modern civilized times. Still, does it make it more digestible to accept that deploying the atomic bombs on the Japanese population was justified??

We build a monster with the help of German scientists and quickly needed an excuse to test it out on a realistic scenario. Released documents attest to that. As usual, our military cronies had more power then our government institution.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wicked cowardly tools of murder.

Bravery is called for sometimes, but it's stupid to be brave for no reason. WWII was TOTAL WAR, with every citizen contributing to the war effort, something that hasn't been seen since, probably because of nuclear weapons. If I had a tool to end the war that would have saved a significant number of my own troops from a bloody invasion, then that's what I would do. It is nothing to be particularly proud or ashamed of. Yes, we wanted to show the soviets, so what, that was important, there were multiple reasons for our nuclear attack.

And how are atomic bombs not nuclear?

Microzoft
Registered User (1,637 posts)

Today, 04:20 PM
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And so, we could argue if Japan was or wasn’t provoked into hostilities.




Japan flew thousands of miles to bomb pearl harbour!!!!

The americans did not provike them, they hoped to catch the yanks snoozing
and there ultimate prize was america itself

Japan brought the yanks screaming and kicking into world war 2 they did not want to get involved, they wanted to sit on the fence and silently supply the uk with weapons.

If japan had not attacked america when it did, germany would have won the war


"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wicked cowardly tools of murder. "

So you would rather have seen a mass invasion of japan were tens of millions of troops on both sides would have died.

It takes a coward to ignore tyrants like the japanese emperor

neville chamberlain was a coward if it was not for a man with balls like churchill
britain would have sat on the fence too, because chamberlain was a peace pacifist


The fact that Koizumi’s is a big elvis fan is too ridicule your argument. the japenese leader and its people are closest to america

You are harbouring the grudge against america here not japanese people

The world accepted it was the right thing to do
You my friend are a good old peace pacifist hippy
You guys think we should throw flowers at the enemy

Try staying clean for a couple of months and you might see this matter in a differnt way

Our bastard society, build on the maze of emigrants, lingers in the dirt.
Wow, that's poetry. Don't know what it means, but it sounds deep.

Did you know that the firebombing of Japanese and German cities killed more people than the atomic bombs? The only major difference is price and expediency, and not having to risk more than one bomber at a time. Do you know any WWII veterans? Because the ones I met agree we did what needed to be done.

There are legitimate objections to the manhattan project, though, in that it started the whole world building nuclear weapons, eventually enough to wipe out all life.

It strikes me it would depend on the vet you talk to. Not many vets would have had enough information to form the basis of a decision like dropping an atomic bomb.

Some historians believe that based on the information at the time the atomic bombs were unnecessary.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

Throw in some quotes from some higher ups who also thought the atomic bombs were unnecessary.
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

mapsdnasggeyerg

well if atomic bombs were unnecessary as you say they were

Then you must like these historians feel that the land invasion was the better choice
And the death toll around 10 or 20 million people from such a invasion would have been the best option then

and the needless deaths of 10 or 20 million people would justify such a dumb ass argument

Or like microsoft do you think we should have dropped flowers, and american tights in demand then, or how about whiskey it worked with the american indians

Your argument is so weak its pathetic

There has never been a good war or a bad peace – Benjamin Franklin

vincent28uk

Where do you get the idea that a land invasion would have been necessary?

There some seems to be some record that Japan was trying to pursue a peaceful surrender in the months before the bombs were dropped.

Yes, Japan was trying to pursue a peaceful surrender, one that allowed the emperor to remain in control, but we wanted unconditional surrender. Without the big stick of the bombs, it was unlikely Japan would have agreed to this. In the end, we did allow the emperor to remain, but only as a figurehead. The Japanese had their chance at Potsdam and they blew it.

mapsdnasggeyerg
fubar (17 posts)

Today, 07:38 PM
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vincent28uk

Where do you get the idea that a land invasion would have been necessary?



When you are faced with millions of potential suicide bombers, and a emperor who would be only too glad to see them sacrifice themselves, and being so arrogant as to dictate a surrender when he started the damn war in the 1st place

The americans should have bowed to his conditions then in a couple of years time he could start the whole process off again

Remember germany and the 1st world war, we made the mistake of not controlling germany then and 20 years later they were at it again, we did not make that mistake in the second world war

We controlled germany and japan and made 2 powerful rich & peaceful countries out of them and made sure they did not start another war off in the process


Surrender is not about letting the losers to regroup!!!!, and attack again in a few years
The emperor seemed to think it was, that was his mistake!!!!!

mapsdnasggeyerg
fubar (17 posts)

Today, 07:38 PM
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vincent28uk Why do you do this?




Surrender is not about letting the losers to regroup!!!!, and attack again in a few years
The emperor seemed to think it was, that was his mistake!!!!!

Vincent28uk, you know what? I think I finally agree with you about something. In the case of Japan, and Germany, in WWII, I think you are right. If an emperor of a nation killed my men and women in a way such as Hirohito did in WWII, there is no way in Hell I would let him stay in power.

I also don't think any adult civilians can be considered innocent. In the past or present. If you think you are innocent, think again.

I also think that the ends justify the means in some circumstances.

Do all of you who say that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do also think that the ends justify the means? For this is what you are saying.

The ends don't always justify the means, and this is not what I'm saying. I'm not trying to make some rule about it, every situation is different. It's just that the means, ie., the bomb, was not so much radically different than what we were doing already. We already incinerated entire cities and killed large numbers of civilians. This was just quicker.

The ends don't always justify the means, and this is not what I'm saying. I'm not trying to make some rule about it, every situation is different. It's just that the means, ie., the bomb, was not so much radically different than what we were doing already. We already incinerated entire cities and killed large numbers of civilians. This was just quicker.


Good point, but the people who made the decision still made a choice to kill innocent children in order to save the lives of many american men who would have eventually had to invade Japan in order to ahceive total surrender.

I disagree with you though. The above choice to kill innocent children, either with nukes or fire-bombing, is based on the belief that the ends justify the means (the ends being less loss of american life, and the means being fire-bombing or a nuke). If you are a person who thinks that the ends don't justify the means, you do everything possible, everything, to make sure that no innocent life is lost (whether you believe innocents to be only children, like me, or men, women and children not involved in the war effort, unlike me).

The only way to do the just thing would be to assassinate only those members of the Japanese leadership that caused the war. So nothing other than that is really justified, only expedient. The bombs saved American lives, time, and money. It's a cost-benefit rationale, not a moral choice.

The American government was on an economical rampage all over south East Asia prior to WWII. A sort of Imperialism over imports and exports in the region, including china, influencing trades and utilizing favoritism to exert pressure on countries not so willingly amicable with the “Big Corporation”. I would imagine that for that small group of islands of Japan, our game was playing just to close to comfort and on their backyard.

Anyone researching on the events prior to the war would understand that Japan just didn’t wake up one day as if nothing else to do, and decided to pick up a fight. Analogy to this, is for example the fact that Iraq also just didn’t wake up one morning and decided to invade Kuwait. Only the mediocre would allow the common news do the researching for them.

However, on the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought we could discuss the use of WMD on conventional wars and against civilian population. Hitler was heading in that direction, I guess like any fanatic would. As we see time and time again, the evil of terrorism and radicalism targeting innocent unarmed civilians. Are we therefore defend in our minds that our Actions in Japan against their population back in 1945 was justified???

It's a cost-benefit rationale, not a moral choice.

If the civilized world would move in the Cost-Benefit rationale, I wonder why some people were born, ... Some, may not even have deserved been born, …total selfish waste!

The only way to do the just thing would be to assassinate only those members of the Japanese leadership that caused the war. So nothing other than that is really justified, only expedient. The bombs saved American lives, time, and money. It's a cost-benefit rationale, not a moral choice.

Yes, there seem to be nothing but cost-benefit rationale's used today.

P.S. Did you not notice what else I said in my first post here. I said that I am FOR the ends justifying the means in some circumstances. NOT ALL, OR EVEN MOST, BUT SOME.

P.S.S. Everything is a MORAL choice.

Microzoft
Registered User (1,639 posts)

Today, 09:46 PM
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The American government was on an economical rampage all over south East Asia prior to WWII. A sort of Imperialism over imports and exports in the region, including china, influencing trades and utilizing favoritism to exert pressure on countries not so willingly amicable with the “Big Corporation”. I would imagine that for that small group of islands of Japan, our game was playing just to close to comfort and on their backyard.





SO THE WAR WITH JAPAN WAS A TRADE DISPUTE, JAPAN PISSED OFF WITH AMERICAS
IMPORT AND EXPORT STRATEDGY BOMBED PEARL HARBOUR, IN RETURN AMERICA AFTER THE WAR REBUILT JAPAN TO MAKE IT THE POWERHOUSE OF THE WORLD FOR INDUSTRY

WELL I GUESS ITS A GOOD JOB WE HAVE THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION NOW TO HANDLE THESE DISPUTES

MICROSOFT LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL

The bombs saved American lives, time, and money. It's a cost-benefit rationale, not a moral choice.
That was the argument used to justify the use of the bomb.

However I wonder if you'd still say the same if it had been Japan who had dropped the bomb on an American city? If Japan had dropped the bomb on the US and then justified it's use by saying it saved Japanese lives, time and money, would you see it as being a good move?

The use of the bomb showed the world the true face of horror. There is no justification for the use of the Bomb. While it saved time, money and the lives of soldiers, America lost in all other stakes because the use of that Bomb was an act of pure evil (for lack of a better word). Its use was not merely to save time, money and the lives of soldiers, its use was to demonstrate power. Targetting civilians in the hope of bringing a country to its knees can never be justified. The Japanese were known for their horrible acts during the war, but America did not take the high road in the use of the bomb. Instead, it sunk to a lower level.

Japan would have bombed American cities if they could. I hear they did manage to send one conventional bomb to the coast of Oregon from a sub, but it didn't do anything.

Kill or be killed, this is what humanity has come to, and it is the final result of nationalism. It was inevitable.

Nagasaki was a mining and industrial town as well as a port. The civilians were engaged in warfare as much as soldiers. I just feel sorry for the wild animals and pets that were harmed.

Bells
Registered User (2,104 posts)


"There is no justification for the use of the Bomb."


There is when it saved 10 to 20 million lives of soldiers from both sides from a possible land invasion

Bells
you can do maths cant you is it not better to lose 200,000 lives than 20 million

America needed total surrender on its terms to stop another war in the future with japan

America learned from the mistakes made with germany in world war 1
Bells you should do the same

******
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4735163.stm

Hiroshima survivors keep memories alive

By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Tokyo


An elderly man shuffled through the door of the classroom on the top floor of the Hiroshima Kokusai Gakuin High School.

"I feel it's important to try to make sure it never happens again," he said.

"We were the offending side, but also the victims. We harmed people in China, Korea and South East Asia. But the A-bomb was dropped on us, so we understand how difficult and terrible war is.

********
Hiroshima memorial

Japan's "mistake" of waging war "Let all the souls here rest in peace as we will never repeat this mistake."



Japan brought this bomb on themselves
I feel sorry for the dead but i feel more sorry for the american pilots who dropped the bomb and the american president for having to make the most painfull decison of his life

This August, like the august of very year, past and present. We are summed to pause over one of the most cowardly actions of humankind. The dirty fight!

Baptized with names typical of our childish culture “Little Boy and Fat man"Your post seems to suggest that somehow because the bombs were nuclear, that, THAT makes them a crime to use?

But, the Allies dropped more explosive power via “conventional” bombs [not to mention the fire storms kicked up in Tokyo by said conventional bombs [and Germany]) – why are you focusing on these two “nuclear” bombs?

So if the Allies had dropped a couple MOAB/Daisy-Cutters – then it’d of been OK? Or are you saying that the Allies shouldn’t have bombed Japan at all?

What exactly is it that makes the use of nuclear bombs, in particular, so wrong to you?

Let’s face it, nuclear bombs may be bigger bombs, but in essence they’re still just bombs.

Japan would have bombed American cities if they could.Actually, I was watching a show about Hiroshima the other day and the Japanese who was interviewed said they prayed they could have such a wonderous weapon to use against the US.

I agree it was all out war, if the Japanese had had that weapon they'd have used it - and they still would have lost because there is no stopping the US, but the fact is they would have used it as well.

It's all in the movies and film footage, Michael. Things that go "BOOM" and aren't very spectacular are deemed "just bombing". But ones that go "BOOM" and the movie or film footage shows it as a spectacular, long-lasting, mushroom cloud is ...oooooh, sooo bad, soooo horrible, soooo terrible!

Baron Max

Kill or be killed, this is what humanity has come to, and it is the final result of nationalism. It was inevitable.
...final result of nationalism?


What's so special about nuclear weapons? Is it really any different than any other means to kill a person? What we should really be concerned with is a weapon out there that will make nuclear weapons look like a walk in the park - Biological Warfare. But who would be intellegent enough to create it and yet fanatical enough to release it? I can only think of one type of type of person: theists.

Anyway: Wikipedia

Biological warfare has been practised repeatedly throughout history. During the 6th Century B.C., The Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with a fungus that would make the enemy delusional. In 184 BC, Hannibal of Carthage had clay pots filled with poisonous snakes and instructed his soldiers to throw the pots onto the decks of Pergamene ships.

Historical accounts from medieval Europe detail the use of infected animal carcasses, by Mongols, Turks and other groups, to infect enemy water supplies. Prior to the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death, Mongol and Turkish armies were reported to have catapulted diseased corpses into besieged cities.

During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging their corpses and excrement over castle walls using catapults. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval.

Much, or even most of the Native American population was decimated after contact with the Old World due to the introduction of many different fatal diseases. The British army at least once used smallpox as weapon, when they gave contaminated blankets to the Lenape during Pontiac's War. It is suspected but not confirmed that biological warfare was used against the Indians at other times as well.

In July 1763, the English Colonel Henry Bouquet wrote to his commander suggesting a chillingly modern plan; they would send smallpox rather than soldiers to fight the Indians. "I will try to inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets that may fall in their hands," Bouquet wrote, "taking care however not to get the disease myself. It is a pity to oppose Good men against them. I wish we could make use of the Spaniard's methods and hunt them with English Dogs."

Native peoples in Aptos gave to Spaniards gifts of freshly cut flowers wrapped in leaves of poison oak.

During the United States Civil War, General Sherman reported that Confederate forces shot farm animals in ponds upon which the Union depended for drinking water.

During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II, Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army conducted human experimentation on thousands, mostly Chinese. In military campaigns, the Japanese army used biological weapons on Chinese soldiers and civilians. This employment was largely viewed as ineffective due to inefficient delivery systems. However, new information has surfaced within the last decade, which alleges a more active Japanese usage. For example, firsthand accounts testify the Japanese infected civilians through the distribution of plagued foodstuffs, such as dumplings and vegetables. There are also reports of contaminated water supplies. Such estimates report over 580,000 victims, largely due to plague and cholera outbreaks. In addition, repeated seasonal outbreaks after the conclusion of the war bring the death toll much higher.

But ones that go "BOOM" and the movie or film footage shows it as a spectacular, long-lasting, mushroom cloud is ...oooooh, sooo bad, soooo horrible, soooo terrible! :eek: it's a worry!!! But so true.. . .

I heard that there's going to be a mini-drama in the States of the Iraq War? That's kind of weird. I worry Americans will get confused between the real war and the mini-drama?

Lots of BOOMs to be sure.

By the way, are they bringing back the coliseums yet? The TV in Iraq just isn't real enough anymore? Maybe recreate a part of Baghdad outside of Vegas, capture a few "insurgents”, drug them, sneak them out of Iraq into Vegas-Baghdad (a life-like recreation) and we sit in some buildings and watch!! Boom ...oooooh, sooo bad, BOOM!!!! Ooooo soooo horrible, soooo terrible! YEAH!!!

Hiroshima bomb may have carried hidden agenda

* 13:46 21 July 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Rob Edwards

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. "It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."

According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid end to the war without the need for a costly US invasion.

But this is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US. They are presenting their evidence at a meeting in London on Thursday organised by Greenpeace and others to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the bombings.
Looking for peace

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace". Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.

Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London, UK. He says that Truman's decision to bomb Hiroshima was "understandable in the circumstances".

Truman's main aim had been to end the war with Japan, Freedman says, but adds that, with the wisdom of hindsight, the bombing may not have been militarily justified. Some people assumed that the US always had "a malicious and nasty motive", he says, "but it ain't necessarily so."

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7706


I wouldn't doubt that. Once the war was over, there would have been lots of grabbing of territory and why in the heck would they want the Soviet Union to grow bigger than it already was?



SO THE WAR WITH JAPAN WAS A TRADE DISPUTE, JAPAN PISSED OFF WITH AMERICAS
IMPORT AND EXPORT STRATEDGY BOMBED PEARL HARBOUR, IN RETURN AMERICA AFTER THE WAR REBUILT JAPAN TO MAKE IT THE POWERHOUSE OF THE WORLD FOR INDUSTRY

Yes. Not to mention the oil and other embargoes we had against them. The Japanese were hurting for resources and since the world was already in turmoil, they had to make their move to get what they needed. This is exactly what China is going to do with Taiwan once we invade Iran or Syria. Our resources will be extended too far to stop China just as the world wasn't able to stop Japan except for us. And the Japanese knew we were the only ones able to stop them, which we would have, so they had to make their first move -- their "pre-emptive strike", so to speak.

Basically, what Japan did in WWII is the same thing as the US is doing right now in the Middle East. I've no problem with what we're doing in the ME because we need to do what we can to survive an economic collapse of oil prices skyrocketing and hurting us even more with the switch to the Euro. The only part that I hate with a passion in regards to these wars is the adminstration hiding behind the excuse of bringing freedom to those people when it's solely all about our self-interests, not theirs. Quit the damn lying and propogandic brainwashing and I'll be somewhat content with the issue.

- N

Your post seems to suggest that somehow because the bombs were nuclear, that, THAT makes them a crime to use?

What exactly is it that makes the use of nuclear bombs, in particular, so wrong to you? .........Let’s face it, nuclear bombs may be bigger bombs, but in essence they’re still just bombs.

Bombs are not just bombs. You are probably ignoring the sufferings even to our days caused by the radiation.

Microzoft
Registered User (1,640 posts)

Today, 05:22 AM
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"Bombs are not just bombs. You are probably ignoring the sufferings even to our days caused by the radiation."


Microzoft did you suffer brain radiation damage, do you still suffer today with it 60 years on

Bombs are not just bombs. You are probably ignoring the sufferings even to our days caused by the radiation.Yes I agree that there was suffering from radiation. Just as there is suffering from having your lungs burned out or having your face half burned off or having your limbs blown off. My point is THAT is the nature of bombs - I see no reason why nuclear should be singled out as somehow less humane than the rest?

(1) Would you suggest if the USA had dropped 1000 Daisy Cutters (the largest of the “conventional” bombs) that would have been OK?

(2) Would you suggest that the USA never dropped a single bomb on the Japanese?

Oh my personal opinion is that it would have been much better if the US had completely stayed out of WWII altogether, or as much as possible. They could have signed a few treates with the Germans and Japanese and now the French/Dutch would be German-ish and the Chinese would be Japanese-ish. Is that so bad?

Kill or be killed, this is what humanity has come to, and it is the final result of nationalism.

Seriously Spidergoat, kill or be killed is the first lesson of humanity. It's the first lesson everything must learn, it is in fact inscribed within every living thing's very being. You think we can break that which ties us by blood?

Yes I agree that there was suffering from radiation. Just as there is suffering from having your lungs burned out or having your face half burned off or having your limbs blown off. My point is THAT is the nature of bombs - I see no reason why nuclear should be singled out as somehow less humane than the rest?

I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on. It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land.

The same can be said for some of the weapons and armory they have used and are currently using in Iraq and in Afghanistan which involve depleted uranium. Leads to ongoing contamination of land and people.

Less humane because I guess when you think about it, it's horrible enough to be dropping the damn things on people, but when you do it with the knowledge that you're not only going to defeat and affect the oppositon that you are currently fighting, you're also going to affect future generations who will come after the war is over ... Gives you something to think about the morality of using such weapons I guess...

Oh my personal opinion is that it would have been much better if the US had completely stayed out of WWII altogether, or as much as possible. They could have signed a few treates with the Germans and Japanese and now the French/Dutch would be German-ish and the Chinese would be Japanese-ish. Is that so bad?

The problem with that, Michael, is that you have absolutely no evidence for holding that personal opinion. And as such, it's more than a worthless opinion.

Anyone could form a fantasy in his/her mind that would/could cover all possible contingencies ....for the better OR the worse. But what good it is?

Humans don't have little crystal balls in the heads, so making up theories about how something MIGHT have been or even how something WOULD BE ....IF... something should change.

I hear such statements often about .....IF... we got out of Iaqi, everything would be rosy and peachy-keen in Iraq. But with the exact same scenario, I could paint a theory of horrible, deadly civil war and violent oppression. And there ain't no way to prove either theory. So why make such a statement?

However, I did like your thoughts on TV shows! We love the violence and death and horror on TV and the movies .........but then come here and make statements about how humans should love and help all other humans!! ....LOL! Humans are very, very strange animals.

Baron Max

You need evidence to hold a personal opinion??? what a great world of fact we live in.

Do you beleive in god by the way??

Although I have to agree with you... these entire political forums are all theory and opinion... its all bullshit, there is no such thing as fact when trying to predict the future or other peoples actions. As for complaining about the past... its not going to change a damn thing, in the end the only gratification will be alot of nods and sighs.

The problem with that, Michael, is that you have absolutely no evidence for holding that personal opinion. And as such, it's more than a worthless opinion.

Anyone could form a fantasy in his/her mind that would/could cover all possible contingencies ....for the better OR the worse. But what good it is? I’m not really sure what you are going on about here? Its no different than saying, oh I wish I had done X then maybe Y. I wish I had started studying Japanese sooner, then maybe I wouldn't have to learn 2850 more kanji!

What I was saying is hypothetical, and of course I’d do nothing to actually change anything about the past, because then I wouldn’t be born :eek: But, what I am saying, is that I think that things would have been fine had the US stayed out of the WWII. We, Americans, like to think we saved the world. But, in actuality, I think everything would have been fine on its own. That was my point. Or what we'd have as a new future would be perceived as fine by whom ever would be living in our place.

Does that make sense?

As to Iraq.

Well, I’m 100% positive that the entire Arab world will become more like the West – with or without the West’s military intervention. And this is for various reasons. It’s quite obvious that Islam is on it’s way down and has been for centuries, it's also obvious that Arab culture is rapidly becoming anything but "traditional" Arab - as is natural in all societies, and I believe the next century of people will see America standing high atop of the upper most hill for some time to come. So if the goal was to remake the ME in our image – yes it’s happening with or without our direct interference.


I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on. It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land. I’d like to read more on this . . . do you have any links?

This is interesting: ON this day in 1954: US tests hydrogen bomb in Bikini (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/1/newsid_2781000/2781419.stm)
It is believed the hydrogen bomb was up to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

It was so violent that it overwhelmed the measuring instruments, indicating that the bomb was much more powerful than scientists had anticipated.

The bomb was the equivalent of 20m tons of TNT.

One of the atolls has been totally vaporized, disappearing into a gigantic mushroom cloud that spread at least 100 miles wide :( and dropping back to the sea in the form of radioactive fall-out.

The Atomic Energy Commission announced this was the first in a series of tests to be carried out in the area. I'd be curious as to what happened to the people that used to live around this area. Also, I'm surprised that it's legal for the US to seize other peoples islands, not give the people US citizenship, and then proceed to bomb their home lands f*cking flat?!?

It's crazy. . . .

Lastly, if this was over 50 years ago - what do you suppose they have now?

Lastly, if this was over 50 years ago - what do you suppose they have now?
At that age? Probably either a tombstone or a room in a nursing home. Their descendants probably have apartments and regular everyday jobs.

I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on. It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land.Life goes on and on for atomic bomb survivors (http://smh.com.au/articles/2005/08/04/1123125852838.html?oneclick=true)


But of the 280,000 or so survivors hit by radiation, 45 per cent are still alive, New Scientist says. Leukaemia is commonly thought to be one of the main legacies of the bomb. But new research suggests that only a small portion of the population might have been at risk of developing leukaemia after the bombs were dropped.

Doubts have also been raised over claims that radiation exposure increased the risk of diseases other than cancer, such as chronic liver disease.
The idea that genetic abnormalities in people affected by radiation are passed on to offspring appears to be a myth.

Research on 22,000 children, half of whom had a parent within two kilometers of the bombs' "ground zero", suggest they do not have unusually high rates of disease. But New Scientist reports it is too soon to assume the children were in the clear. "Their average age is still just 48 - too young for most cancers to appear."

At that age? Probably either a tombstone or a room in a nursing home. Their descendants probably have apartments and regular everyday jobs.haha ... I didn't think I needed to be THAT academic? :bugeye:

I was still wondering: Why are nulcear bombs considered so much more EVIL than their conventional counterparts? Why doesn't the US use them? If the goal is to kill people then why isn't the US dropping these bombs in Afganistan? And if not, then why keep them around?

Use them or lose them I say!

Use them and everyone else loses any compunction they may have against using them on you.

Hooray for revisionist history!

Stupid governments get their own people involved in wars for dubious interests, same as we went to Iraq because of WMD’s. And so, we could argue if Japan was or wasn’t provoked into hostilities.

However the deployment of atomic bombs (not nuclear bombs) on a defenseless population is something not to be proud about. Japan capitulated, not because their military infrastructure was destroyed but because of the massive life losses inflicted on their population.

So, you say that Koizumi’s a big fun of Elvis! Perhaps also we could say that many Japanese love rock-n-roll or that they are enthusiast of McDonalds, or that we get flooded with japans tourists, or Japanese cars. What all that has to do with the crimes of deploying the atomic bombs??

I haven’t implied that Japanese were angels, they were just like other soldiers. They too have records of violations, rapes, and out of line conducts. But so we are too, in Vietnam and other places, even in our modern civilized times. Still, does it make it more digestible to accept that deploying the atomic bombs on the Japanese population was justified??

We build a monster with the help of German scientists and quickly needed an excuse to test it out on a realistic scenario. Released documents attest to that. As usual, our military cronies had more power then our government institution.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wicked cowardly tools of murder. Based on this inane, ineloquent rant, it is apparent to me that you lack even the most fundamental grasp of the history of World War Two, or any semblance of knowledge of the Manhattan Project.

First of all, the Manhattan Project scientists were not German. Fermi was Italian. Oppenheimer was American. Teller was Hungarian. Ulam was Polish. Okay, Einstein was German. I wanted to make sure you were listening. There are many more, but I've said enough to convince the masses here of your error already. Anyway, this is sort of a nitpick, but this is my subject matter so bear with me.

Secondly, your differentiation between nuclear and atomic weapons is just stupid. Please explain the functional differences for us, paying particular attention to the destructive mechanisms of course. In other words, answer Michael's question: What makes the nuclear attacks bad because they're nuclear? I notice that you say nothing of the 300,000 people killed during the two week long firebombing of Tokyo, which preceeded the nuclear strikes by only a few weeks. Why not focus your outrage there instead? (Tokyo was less of a strategic and/or military target than Hiroshima or Nagasaki were, btw)

Third, Japan capitulated because of the losses we inflicted upon them. This was the only correct assertion in your entire post. However, your righteous indignation is misdirected. Unless we are to believe that you are childishly naive enough to think that war isn't about killing so many of your enemy that they no longer have the capacity or the will to fight. Is this what you believe? Or not?


Good point, but the people who made the decision still made a choice to kill innocent children in order to save the lives of many american men who would have eventually had to invade Japan in order to ahceive total surrender. The lives of one million American servicemen. As well as the lives of two million Japanese military and civilians.

This is not to mention that dropping the bombs and ending the war kept the Soviets out of Japan, which inarguably saved and improved the lives of millions more Japanese.

Would you like to propose an alternative?

That was the argument used to justify the use of the bomb.

However I wonder if you'd still say the same if it had been Japan who had dropped the bomb on an American city? If Japan had dropped the bomb on the US and then justified it's use by saying it saved Japanese lives, time and money, would you see it as being a good move?

The use of the bomb showed the world the true face of horror. There is no justification for the use of the Bomb. While it saved time, money and the lives of soldiers, America lost in all other stakes because the use of that Bomb was an act of pure evil (for lack of a better word). Its use was not merely to save time, money and the lives of soldiers, its use was to demonstrate power. Targetting civilians in the hope of bringing a country to its knees can never be justified. The Japanese were known for their horrible acts during the war, but America did not take the high road in the use of the bomb. Instead, it sunk to a lower level. See above. I'm asking you the same question.


Bombs are not just bombs. You are probably ignoring the sufferings even to our days caused by the radiation. Perhaps you could furnish some empirical evidence supporting your claim?

Don't bother. You can't. Why? Because the dosing threshold for chromosomal damage is beyond the dosing threshold for sterility. There have been exactly zero documented cases of chromosomal damage being passed on from parents to children prior to fertilization.


I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on. It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land.

The same can be said for some of the weapons and armory they have used and are currently using in Iraq and in Afghanistan which involve depleted uranium. Leads to ongoing contamination of land and people.

Less humane because I guess when you think about it, it's horrible enough to be dropping the damn things on people, but when you do it with the knowledge that you're not only going to defeat and affect the oppositon that you are currently fighting, you're also going to affect future generations who will come after the war is over ... Gives you something to think about the morality of using such weapons I guess... Again, see above.

Also, the hypocenter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were workable in eight hour shifts per day within two days after the attack (fission fragments from the bombs had half lives measured in single-digit hours) and fully liveable 24/7/365 within one week.

Your fallout fears are unsubstantiated and the risk is overrated. The only types of bursts that produce an appreciable amount of fallout are surface bursts, where the weapon's fireball actually comes into contact with the ground immediately below the hypocenter, allowing dirt and debris to be churned up in the fireball, lofted in the mushroom cloud, coated with fission fragments and then dispersed as meteorological effects dictate. Airbursts, which are what a majority of our attack profiles call for due to an airburst's more efficient use of weapon output, never churn up any dirt thus their fallout is scant more than trace amounts.

Hollywood != real life.

Oh my personal opinion is that it would have been much better if the US had completely stayed out of WWII altogether, or as much as possible. They could have signed a few treates with the Germans and Japanese and now the French/Dutch would be German-ish and the Chinese would be Japanese-ish. Is that so bad? I hope you're joking. Normally I would laugh and congratulate you on your keen sarcasm but with half the membership on this forum you can't ever be too sure.

Lastly, if this was over 50 years ago - what do you suppose they have now?Not a whole lot, actually.

Sure, we've managed to miniaturize battlefield weapons to be more deliverable via supersonic tactical strike aircraft. We've designed hardened penetrators to enable bombs dropped form high altitude to dig far enough into the earth to crush subterranean structures. Our modern warheads are tolerant enough of G-forces and thermal transients to be able to survive delivery via ballistic missile, cruise missile, torpedo, even artillery shell.

But the last warhead that entered the stockpile was designed in the early-1970s, and used a physics package strikingly similar to designs from 15 years before. Simply put, the technology involved just isn't all that modern.

yey stokes is alive! I was getting bored.

I was still wondering: Why are nulcear bombs considered so much more EVIL than their conventional counterparts? Why doesn't the US use them? If the goal is to kill people then why isn't the US dropping these bombs in Afganistan? And if not, then why keep them around?

Use them or lose them I say!


Fallout contaminates an area of land for a longer time than the residue from conventional bombs. Not to mention the huge radius it affects. It would be stupid using that kind of force on a semi populated area like afghanistan, as killing the civillians isnt directly in the intrests of the US military.

With Hitler gone in the west, Japan could still be persuaded to surrender rather than resorting to nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki & getting more barbaric in short span than fire-bombing for a week.

The other side to american story of 'nuking is inevitable and saved millions of lives'. :

In Racing the Enemy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of history and director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, blames both Stalin and Truman for not doing more to negotiate a surrender.

He also claims that it was the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, just after Hiroshima, which really worried the Japanese and which made them give up.

Mr Hasegawa says that Stalin rejected peace feelers put out by Japan because he was determined to win spoils from joining the war.

And, he suggests, the Americans ignored the feelers - which they knew about from breaking Japanese codes - because they did not like them.

Truman refused to modify the "unconditional surrender" demand because he wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor, courted popularity at home and needed to demonstrate strategic power.


Thus, Mr Hasegawa claims, opportunities were lost. The myth that it was only the atom bomb which could have ended the war was invented in order to assuage "Truman's conscience and ease the collective American conscience".

Mr Hasegawa argues that the hard-line Japanese leaders were not overly concerned about the destruction caused by the atom bombs since American conventional bombers could cause the same - and indeed worse - damage anyway.

War Minister Korechika Anami contemplated defeat with equanimity and compared the potential destruction of Japan to the withering of a flower.

What alarmed the Japanese, Mr Hasegawa says, was the Red Army. According to this theory, Japan gave up because it could not accept that Soviet troops might take part in an invasion and occupy part of the homeland, given the history of conflict with Russia in the past.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4724793.stm

Stokes Pennwalt
fundamental grasp of the history of World War Two, or any semblance of knowledge of the Manhattan Project.

As far as I'm concern, you got Fermi right, and Oppenheimer, and obviously some of the others too. How ever, I said with the help of “German scientists”, and not implied that there were only German scientists. You got so excited that you’ve overshoot yourself there.

The Manhattan project was related to the making of the atomic bomb, I was referring to R&D prior to that, to the lab results that convinced the government to invest into it.
But don’t think I should waste my time with you on this.


…Secondly, your differentiation between nuclear and atomic weapons is just stupid. Please explain the functional differences for us, paying particular attention to the destructive mechanisms of course

An old friend of my, a nuclear engineer insisted that Atomic bomb is one thing as an object, and nuclear (nucleus) is something else altogether, since it relates to the science. But hey, don’t let me distract you from your concept. Even CNN refers to it alternatively to nuclear bomb, …I think!



In other words, answer Michael's question:

Hey.. you're the babysitter around here, not me mate!



Tokyo was less of a strategic and/or military target than Hiroshima or Nagasaki were, btw)

If that’s what you believe, keep it. I really don’t think you are worth the time of sending you analytical reports that have been cleared dating that period.


Third, Japan capitulated because of the losses we inflicted upon them

I believe that I referred to the murder of innocent civilians, the atomic bombs didn’t neutralized their military capabilities.


The lives of one million American servicemen. As well as the lives of two million Japanese military and civilians.

This is the most cheap and frequent argument used on this thread, “ the math “ argument. Well, how come we haven’t used it in so many other wars??? :rolleyes:

All cultures have their darker side in history. Ours, it is without a doubt the experimental deployment of Atomic Bombs on Civilian population.

I believe that I referred to the murder of innocent civilians, the atomic bombs didn’t neutralized their military capabilities.
War is traditionally fought by crushing the enemy's industry, leaving their war machine crippled and unable to sustain itself. Hitting the civilian populace was considered a very effective way to do this.

Dead men can't be recruited as soldiers. Dead men can't work in factiories to build planes or ships. Dead man can't till the fields to feed the armies or the factory workers. Sometimes a nation must do some unpleasant things if they expect to win the war and survive until tomorrow.

Guess the Allies were murderous bastards after all. Well, time to stop demonizing those Axis powers then......

Allies did what they had to in order to win the war. The Axis killed and enslaved even those who were no threat.

Germany put the Jews, gays, gypsies, handicapped, and non-Nazis in forced labor camps until they could eventually be killed. Japan treated the inhabitants of places it conquered, such as Korea and China, as forced labor that lived only for brute labor. They were more than willing to commit atrocities for menial reasons.

There is a difference between ruthlessness and sadism.

The lives of one million American servicemen. As well as the lives of two million Japanese military and civilians.

This is not to mention that dropping the bombs and ending the war kept the Soviets out of Japan, which inarguably saved and improved the lives of millions more Japanese.

Would you like to propose an alternative?
No. Would you like to read some of my previous posts, moron?!

Allies did what they had to in order to win the war. The Axis killed and enslaved even those who were no threat.

To quote yourself:

"Dead men can't be recruited as soldiers. Dead men can't work in factiories to build planes or ships. Dead man can't till the fields to feed the armies or the factory workers. Sometimes a nation must do some unpleasant things if they expect to win the war and survive until tomorrow."



Germany put the Jews, gays, gypsies, handicapped, and non-Nazis in forced labor camps until they could eventually be killed. Japan treated the inhabitants of places it conquered, such as Korea and China, as forced labor that lived only for brute labor. They were more than willing to commit atrocities for menial reasons.

So the Axis are bad all because the Allies weren't smart enough to put the civilians to work before killing them? Talk about a waste of good work. Both sides killed lots of civilians. How and why is irrellevant and mere moral opinion as the end result is the same. Besides, it meant less recruits, less factory workers, and whatnot for the opposing side to being used against em. Isn't that a good strategic thing to help one's side win the war?

Remember, victors write history. If the Axis would have won, what they did wouldn't have been seen as bad. Because we won, we get to say that what they did was bad especially since they were the enemy. Who's ever heard of a "good" enemy? One side is always good and one side is always evil in one another's eyes. Both sides did bad things, just one was smarter than the other.

- N

yey stokes is alive! I was getting bored.Sup dude. I pop in when preempting obligations permit.


An old friend of my, a nuclear engineer insisted that Atomic bomb is one thing as an object, and nuclear (nucleus) is something else altogether, since it relates to the science. But hey, don’t let me distract you from your concept. Even CNN refers to it alternatively to nuclear bomb, …I think!The atomic bomb is referred to as such because it derives its output from the binding energy of atomic nuclei.

Nuclear weapons are referred to as such because they derive their output from the binding energy of atomic nuclei.

Read the above sentences carefully and note the similarities. Now, how are the two are not functionally identical?


If that’s what you believe, keep it. I really don’t think you are worth the time of sending you analytical reports that have been cleared dating that period.
Translation: "I have no knowledge of my argument nor evidence to support my position and can't be bothered to provide any for either."

Well done.


I believe that I referred to the murder of innocent civilians, the atomic bombs didn’t neutralized their military capabilities.
Nagasaki (Japan's only remaining operaitonal deep water port after Fukuoka and Yokohama were summarily destroyed by air raids from B-29s at Tinian in May-June 1945) and Hiroshima (host to an Imperial Army barracks and a plethora of industrial centers not yet touched by strategic bombing) were both high-value strategic targets worthy of obliteration in pursuit of ending the war as quickly as possible.

Here's a riddle for you.

Pretend you are CINCPAC circa August 1945: Other than nuclear strikes, how would you achieve an equal amount of devastation over each target while simultaneously sparing the civilian population? Remember: Your alternatives consist of carpet bombing, incendiary carpet bombing and the eventual landed invasion of the Japanese mainland. Which, of these, do you find least odious? Why?


This is the most cheap and frequent argument used on this thread, “ the math “ argument. Well, how come we haven’t used it in so many other wars??? :rolleyes:
In what other instances would a nuclear release have been preferable to conventional munitions? Why?

No. Would you like to read some of my previous posts, moron?!I was calling you on your failure to take into account the Japanese lives that were saved from invasion and Soviet occupation, 'tard. The strikes did much more philanthropic good than saving a million American lives.

Remember, victors write history. If the Axis would have won, what they did wouldn't have been seen as bad. Because we won, we get to say that what they did was bad especially since they were the enemy. Who's ever heard of a "good" enemy? One side is always good and one side is always evil in one another's eyes. Both sides did bad things, just one was smarter than the other.
Moral relativism strikes again. Are you seriously attempting to equate Allied and Axis atrocities?

You are talking like a US general whose task is to give the best solution to destroy the enemy. Bombing Hiroshima & Nagasaki is a political decision when another option was available for the decision makers - negotiated surrender of the enemy.

So the Axis are bad all because the Allies weren't smart enough to put the civilians to work before killing them? Talk about a waste of good work. Both sides killed lots of civilians. How and why is irrellevant and mere moral opinion as the end result is the same.
Intent is everything.

Axis caused suffering and death as an end unto itself, even when it did not benifit them an ounce. They brought a hell upon the earth that would make the devil himself shudder and went to great lengths to drag innocents down into it. It would have been easier to let them live but they actually went to the bother of hunting them down and locking them away while they died the most slow, agonizing, and degrading deaths that any man can. It didn't matter if they were old men, women, or children.

The allies can at least claim to have only done what was necessary to get the job done. They did not need their daily pint of human suffering the way a dog needs food. Perhaps a city needs to be bombed but there was no joy in that. You do your job, mourn the losses on each side, and try to take some small comfort in the fact that infinitely worse horrors would have occured if you had not.

There is a great difference between the two.

Stokes Pennwalt

The atomic bomb is referred to as such because it derives its output from the binding energy of atomic nuclei.
Nuclear weapons are referred to as such because they derive their output from the binding energy of atomic nuclei.

Hey! You finally got it, so say, what what’s the big deal? Why don’t you start a new thread on that topic instead of deviating from the subject in this thread?



Translation:
Do you have this regular habit of talking to your self to be ascertain that you’ve understood it?? Don’t get sensitive, shit happens, and you don’t need to repeat what you think you’ve understood.


Japan's only remaining operaitonal deep water port after Fukuoka and Yokohama were summarily destroyed by air raids from B-29s at Tinian
Don’t know what movie ya been watching, but you certainly like to tell only a very narrow, short clip of the entire story. Obviously, if you’ve missed the big picture is not your fault!



Here's a riddle for you.

Thanks for the thought but ….Sorry no interest! Factual events of history, are more interesting to me.



In what other instances would a nuclear release have been preferable to conventional munitions? Why?
You don’t get it, do you? To me, there’s no other instance and there was one instance too many. Why? I guess if another uses (under what ever mathematical pretend of reasoning) atomic warfare against us. You would have my answer!

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were murderous acts. Not for self defense, and not to reduce casualties.

In response to the original question.

Considering what Japan did to people during the Second World War, especially to those of China and Korea, and considering the fact that their attack on Pearl Harbor was considerably more cowardly (they were right in the middle of Jap-US negotiations) than anything else, it is a damned shame they didn't get a hydrogen fusion bomb in every single city.

Japan thoroughly deserved to be nuked. They got off lightly at 2 bombs.

I'd like to shift the discussion from the ethics of tit-for-tat (I believe Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vengeance raids, weapons tests, and a pre-emption of Russia) to history.

Japan's empire was broken by 1945. It had literally run out of gas. All supply lines were severed. Production was at a near standstill. The command structure was imploding. In the labrinthine halls of the new Pentagon, they knew these things, and also that time was fast running out on "the Good War". Our WMDs were unleashed murderously. The blowback is still arriving today, augmented by our own hypocrisy.

even after the two bombs the decision to surrender was not popular at all,invading japan by land would have been absolute hell.

Invasion forces were already on their way when the bombs were dropped. If they hadn't been used, I suspect Japan would have had to look forward to two months of constant bombardment from every ship in the US navy along with full carpet bombing and napalm runs over every major city. And I don't even want to think about what would happen once the ground troops actually go ashore...

Moral relativism strikes again. Are you seriously attempting to equate Allied and Axis atrocities?

Yes and no. I'm not trying to make them sound the same, just the Axis' not as bad as if Satan himself was doing the work himself. Both killed many civilians and arguing anything else is mere moral symantics. The end results were the same, so that part is yes. Just remember, war is hell and don't forget the bad things we ourselves have done.


Axis caused suffering and death as an end unto itself, even when it did not benifit them an ounce.

The allies can at least claim to have only done what was necessary to get the job done.

They worked the people in labor camps so that was benefits for em. They also performed scientific studies on their workers as well. Why waste a perfectly good worker or test subject by killing them instantly with a bomb or bullet? Yeah, the biological studies are gruesome to us, but how do you expect them to be done? How do you think study of the body first started? Would you have rather them made a race of monkeys or gorillas extinct at the same time? The Germans just milked their resources for all that they could rather than letting them go to waste as the Americans did.

And is everyone forgetting the American detention camps we had for our Japanese citizens? While they were not even close to the German ones, we did beat our own Japanese citizens and quite a few did die. And hell, I don't even have to mention current times such as Abu Graib with the murdering of people and the raping of children. Then we can argue Iraqi prisons where they killed people out of the blue as well. I just hate it when nationalistic people scream bloody murder at other's atrocities while ignoring our own.

However, if you want to talk about Japanese atrocities, that's a whole 'nother subject. THEY were sick bastards with their rampant killings. Heck, they gassed complete villages and cities! It just irks me though when people make the Germans sound the worst all because of Jewish propoganda in wanting to have their state of Israel created. But hey, I guess the reason why the Japanese aren't seen as bad is because they did the same type of butchering (gassing not included for obvious reasons) us Americans did to the American Indians so we don't want to be seen as hypocrits. It's why Hillary Clinton isn't bashing Karl Rove right now. ;)


I believe Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vengeance raids, weapons tests, and a pre-emption of Russia

So we bomb the Japs, who are now a fallen power, to protect ourselves from the Russians, and you see that as a bad thing? What, you'd rather us have nuked the Russians who were still a major power? Geez, talk about payback. At least the Japanese couldn't do anything back to us, but the Red Bear could. The Cold War really WOULD have been one.

- N

Good points Neildo. Especially about what we, as Americans, did to the native Americans. It's a very sad story of greed and theft, for we Americans did have a Manifest Destiny, after all. Ha! Bullshit. Greed and developed need, if you ask me.

Yes, don't judge anyone, or any "nation," before you have looked at yourself and realized that all of us are very similar, no matter what you need to believe or are led to believe by those that want more power and are "ambitious." Have you ever asked yourself what drives some of the currently "ambitious" and what they are attempting to accomplish. What drives a "Bush" to be president of the U.S.? What do you really think His motives are with respect to Iraq? I mean, ask yourself why the second coming of Bush wanted to invade Iraq, of all places. Iraq is, after all, the established birthplace of civilized man. Mesopotamia. Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Cradle of Civilization. Babylon(ia), precursor to "Babylon," or better known by christians as the Roman Empire, after Alexander's exploits of course.

Ahh, what is my point, you ask. Iraq has a very long (if not the longest) history in recorded history. There are many other reasons to take Iraq, above and beyond "terrorism." There is a history here. There is a need to take and control Iraq. Many, throughout history, have taken and controlled it. Alexander, Persians, Romans, Turks, and many more. It is key. It is necessary. For different reasons throughout history. Now, for oil, for a world so dependent on oil.

How other to get it, than to create, possibly, an acceptable reason. Such as terrorism. Where else are we going to go to get the oil we need when China is buying up and controlling other limited supplies of it, as in the Sudan and other African nations. The Race is On.....

Why did we spend so much money trying to shape and control Saddham Hussein and the Shah of Iran in the 70's and 80's? Why did we train and fund Osama Bin Laden? Who better to place the blame on now? Where the fuck is he, if we want him so bad? Has anything ever stopped us? Why can't we get him? Do we really want to get him? Hmmmm?

Look to yourselves before you blame someone else.

http://www.imgzhost.com//uploads/a9206cafcf.gif

August 6, 1945, a bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on the City of Nagasaki, thus marking the end of the bloodiest war in human history. In all there were 60 million military and civilian casualties from all countries involved. Germany had been defeated and Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker, however in the Pacific war raged on with no end in sight. The Japanese Emperor Hirohito vowed not to surrender as long as there was a single Japanese standing. The only other way to defeat Japan was a direct invasion on there mainland. This would have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and possibly over a million Japanese.

President Harry S. Truman had a difficult decision to make. He could either risk the lives of thousands of US troops, or he could use a new weapon that had just been developed. A weapon with such destructive power that it’s use would put a curtain end to the war. Its code name was the “Manhattan Project”. It had been in the works for many years but only had recently been tested secretly at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The US Navy and Marines were inching closer to the Japanese mainland. The closer they got the bloodier the battles became. Harry Truman made the only responsible decision he could have. He ordered the bombs to be delivered and dropped on Japan. His decision would cost the lives of over 300,000 Japanese citizens, but it would save a lot more on both sides.

The debate rages on to this day whether it was the right decision. Those questioning Truman’s decision do it in absolute hindsight and will never be privy to the information he had at the time. They question the decision comfortably in their homes never having experienced the Hell that was World War 2. Would it have been better to lose a million people to not drop the bomb? I say defiantly not. It was the right decision. It was the only decision.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 AM. An Aircraft named the Enola Gay dropped an Atomic bomb called “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. It was a warm summer morning, with the sun just above the horizon. Then out of nowhere a new sun appeared over the city. It would be the rising sun of a new age.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 AM. An Aircraft named the Enola Gay dropped an Atomic bomb called “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. It was a warm summer morning, with the sun just above the horizon. Then out of nowhere a new sun appeared over the city. It would be the rising sun of a new age.

I like that part. :)

- N

And is everyone forgetting the American detention camps we had for our Japanese citizens?
What, so they are the same thing now? You think they were built with the purpose of extermination, slaughtering those of oriental descent to the last and boiling their teeth down for gold?

America did some crazy stuff in a rash of paranoia back then, but we had our limits. A soldier kills the enemy out of duty but wishes he didn't have to, taking any better alternatives that are presented. A monster kills even when he has to go out of his way to do so, causing as much pain and anguish as he can before taking life. After he has finished gutting the victem, he metaphorically licks the blade clean of blood before seeking out his next victim.

War is suffering for everyone.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were murderous acts. Not for self defense, and not to reduce casualties.[/COLOR]

A 60 year guilt trip over whether civilian lives are worth more than those fighting?

If you're thinking about casualties, think about the
Battle of Okinawa

Okinawa was the largest amphibious invasion of the Pacific campaign and the last major campaign of the Pacific War. More ships were used, more troops put ashore, more supplies transported, more bombs dropped, more naval guns fired against shore targets than any other operation in the Pacific. More people died during the Battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Casualties totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing, more than 107,000 Japanese and Okinawan conscripts killed, and perhaps 100,000 Okinawan civilians who perished in the battle.


Deep thoughts now Jack......deeeeeeep :bugeye:

Would one of you Nukems please explain why the USA needed to invade and occupy Japan after Imperial Japan (including their offensive capability, war production, offensive capability, dreams of conquest, etc.) was utterly broken, which had already occured before the WMDs were unleashed.

This is always the tired refrain "But the invasion would\have cost more lives!"

First justify American invasion of Japan.

Well, they weren't broken. If we had just picked up and left, they would pulled themselves back together into a credible threat within a couple years. They still had a great nation built into an only somewhat damaged war machine, each man with complete obedience to the emperor... who, while seen as having divine blood, was by this time only a puppet for the goons behind the scene. It isn't a streach to see them getting back up.

What we needed was to force them to dismantle their war machine completely and break their faith in the emperor by getting him to renounce his divinity. We managed to do both and it worked. To this day, the enconomy is all that Japan can touch.

It certainly worked out pretty damn well for them, however. Japan has been a beacon of industry for many decades now. We break a country down well but we put it back together even better... if the idiots will let us.

What is terrorism? Was Hiroshima terrorism? Is terrorism the killing of noncombatant civilians for the purpose of manipulating their leaders political decisions? The leaders decisions can be manipulated by terrorists because the leaders have sympathy for the fate of their people and because the leaders fear that if the people suffer enough they may choose to replace their leaders rather than rally around their leaders in times of trouble.

The great powers consider collective punishment in which a population is deliberately made poorer so that political pressure is placed upon their leaders to not be terrorism. Even if the impoverishment of a population will predictably lead to deaths through the diminishment of medical care and food to those on the lower rungs of the society targeted for such a war on their economic base and ability to travel the great powers do not consider their embargoes, blockades and collective punishments to be terrorism.

According to the definitions of terrorism that would hold blameless the Governments of the USA, Russia, the UK, Israel and France, reckless collateral damage is not terrorism. Even if the reckless collateral damage occurs in a bombing campaign intended to demoralize the opposition political leadership the reckless collateral damage will not be considered terrorism so long as each intended target was chosen as a military or economic target.

Israel would tell you that when Palestinians kill Israelis it is terrorism because only on-duty soldiers are legitimate military targets and the suicide bombers are targeting civilians. When Israeli soldiers routinely but accidentally kill two or more Palestinian noncombatant Palestinian noncombatant civilians for every Palestinian fighter or terrorist they kill that is not terrorism because they were not targeting the noncombatants.

If for a destructive act to be terrorism it is required that the intent to use the creation of the emotion of terror as a tool towards achieving a political goal must be present then we can argue that genocide is not terrorism when it's intent is to eradicate a people rather than to influence the political decisions of the people's leaders. Reckless collateral damage is not terrorism because it's intent is to kill combatants even if little effort is made to avoid killing noncombatants. During the Vietnam war between one and two million people (probably half or more of those killed in the war) were civilian noncombatants unintentionally killed the United States military as collateral damage during attempts by the US military to kill and destroy VC and North Vietnamese fighters and supply infrastructure.

According to some Nixon's "Secret Plan" to end the Vietnam war involved the use of or threat to use Nuclear weapons on North Vietnam. It is very difficult to find a sensible military or industrial target for Nuclear weapons in which you could credibly claim that the civilian deaths were just collateral damage and that creating terror for political purposes was not the primary goal of the use of the nuclear weapon.



In response to the original question.

Considering what Japan did to people during the Second World War, especially to those of China and Korea, and considering the fact that their attack on Pearl Harbor was considerably more cowardly (they were right in the middle of Jap-US negotiations) than anything else, it is a damned shame they didn't get a hydrogen fusion bomb in every single city.

Japan thoroughly deserved to be nuked. They got off lightly at 2 bombs.


The American dropping of the Nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly was an act of terrorism on a monumental scale. I can find no way in which the targeting of a civilian population for the purpose of creating a terror that would then change the political decisions of the Japanese leaders could be considered anything other than terrorism.

The remaining question is was this bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki good terrorism? Can there be good terrorism? This use of nuclear terrorism by the United States almost surely saved not only American lives in WW2 but also saved Japanese lives by stopping the war from being prolonged and saved Russian and American and other lives by stopping Russia and the USA from pushing their cold proxy wars into hot direct world war 3.

Hiroshima and Nagagaski were probably good terrorism but those burned up people were no more deserving of being burned up than the people who died in the World Trade Center were deserving of being killed. The WW2 Japanese government was evil. If the brutality of the Rape of Nanking had a purpose then that purpose was terrorism. Is it Ok to do terrorism to any people who's rulers do terrorism?



attack on Pearl Harbor was considerably more cowardly
What do you mean? You are not the first person to misuse the word cowardly in this way. Where is this misuse of the word cowardly coming from, TV action hero cartoons? I think Bush called the 9/11 suicide bombers cowardly. Both the Japanese and the 9/11 suicide bombers were misguided, wrong and evil but neither of them were cowardly.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a gamble and very brave attack but the Japanese were tactically incorrect to think they would defeat America in a war and they war morally wrong to think that imperialist expansionism modeled on the previous imperialist expansionism of England, France, Spain, Czarist Russia and the United States was morally acceptable. In all of the horrible Japanese behavior they did no evil acts that the USA had not previously done to the native Americans.

Osama Bin Laden thinks that targeting noncombatant American taxpayers and voters is an act of Self defense by Arab and or Islamic people because the American government has been a key element in putting in power and maintaining in power clearly immoral self-serving traitorous governments through out the Arab and Islamic World. Even evil enemy Saddam owed had since the 1950s been in a off and on mutual aid relationship with the USA government. It is fair for Bin Laden to blame the USA for everything that is rotten in the Middle East because the fingerprints of the USA government intrigues have been all over the internal politics of all of each of the Middle East nations since the 1950s. Of course letting Bin Laden type fundamentalist wackos lead the revolution against the current depraved leaders would be to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire as the people of Iran did when it kicked out the American installed tyrannical puppet Shah only to find themselves under the control of tyrannical narrow minded to the point of blindness mullahs and allied traditionalists.

If it was OK for the USA to use nuclear terrorism against Japan which had attacked America then why is it not also OK for Third World People to engage in terrorism against the USA if they believe that the USA has stealthily attacked and colonized them via the CIA's and related groups endless political intrigues, and the meddling intrigues of World Bank, IMF, and Multinational Corporations, and the moral degeneration caused by adopting the values promoted by Hollywood and Wall Street?

Do you really think that the Japanese thoroughly deserved to be nuked. Some of my forefathers participated in the genocide of the American Indians; did my forefathers then deserve to be nuked? Has America gotten of too lightly with the 9/11 suicide plane bombings?

what is terrorism? pearl harbor. and the united states DOES NOT negotiate with terrorists [we just supply them with weapons]. and as for the rest, there is no terrorism in war, those are called war crimes, for which the loser of said war will pay in the aftermath. ;)

"Has America gotten [off] too lightly with the 9/11 suicide plane bombings?"
big words.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were murderous acts. Not for self defense, and not to reduce casualties.
You have yet to substantiate this statement or any of your others with any semblance of evidence. Stop changing tacks to irrelevant bullshit each time I call you on your error. Put up or shut up. This is your final chance.


Would one of you Nukems please explain why the USA needed to invade and occupy Japan after Imperial Japan (including their offensive capability, war production, offensive capability, dreams of conquest, etc.) was utterly broken, which had already occured before the WMDs were unleashed.

This is always the tired refrain "But the invasion would\have cost more lives!"

First justify American invasion of Japan.You give the Japanese too little credit. The Imperial leadership, particularly the War Council, was too stubborn to acknowledge the gravity of their situation. As Clockwood already said, Japan was not "utterly broken". Japanese resistance remained as strong as ever. The Japanese people had been brainwashed by propaganda into believing the invading American GIs would rape their women and eat their babies. I am not hyperbolizing one iota.

The Empire remained monolithic and steadfast. Contrary to popular notions, Hirohito was not ready for peace and did not give a damn about his people. After the fire bombing of Tokyo the only thing that he was concerned about was his three symbols of power. Hirohito wanted to recreate the glory of Japan's win in the Japanese-Russian War of 1904-1905. The Magic transcripts tell us that Hirohito was very much involved and in control as Japan tried to make her place in the world of the 20th century. They also tell us that Hirohito knew of the atrocities in China and that Hirohito did little to nothing to stop them. The only reason Hirohito agreed to surrender to the Allies when he did was to save his position of power. It was the strikes that brought about his capitulation.

So far as Operation Olympic and Operation Downfall go (these are the potential invasions of the Japanese mainland), the US was going to to send in 9 divisions of Marines and Army troops to invade the Japanese island of Kyushu. The Japanese knew exactly where we going to invade. In June of 1945 there were 3 Japanese Imperial Army divisions stationed on the island. By July this had grown to 9 divisions and by August the number had increased to 13 with Japan being able heavily fortify all of the beaches. This in contrast to Hitler's Atlantic Wall where he had hundreds of miles of coast to defend and no idea were the allies would attack. Cracking Kyushu would have been extremely bloody. By the summer of 1945 we had a good idea of what fighting the Japanese back to their homeland would entail because we'd done a lot of it. Peleliu, Leyte Gulf, Tarawa, Manila, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, etc. were all testament to the Japanese will to fight to the bitter end. I probably don't need to go into any more detail with any of these but if you need me to I can. Add on top of this the Kamikaze attacks that the IJN had been conducting against US Naval elements in the Pacific for going on nine months by then and you have a pretty clear picture of the decision the War Department was presented with. With the ETO wrapped up, the full focus of Allied military power was directed at forcing a Japanese surrender and ending the war as quickly as possible with as few casualties as possible.

This magical third option you seem to be hinting at simply did not exist. It would have been great if there was some third option available that did not include a massive loss of human life, but there simply wasn't. It was either drop the bombs or invade. The former cost 130,000 lives. The latter would have cost 3,000,000+ and a good portion of Japan spending 40 years suffering under Soviet control. I don't see how anybody can realistically argue in favor of that. And I sure as hell haven't seen anybody in this thread come close to trying.

The burden of proof is on the critics. What WERE the alternatives?

what is terrorism? pearl harbor.

So now "terrorism" is military targets attacking other military targets?

Uhhh, okayyyy..

Go ahead and freely toss about the word "terrorism" or whatever else makes you feel better and more justified.

- N

i'm sorry, terrorism cannot be used to refer to a clandestine attack against americans without a declaration of war.

but go ahead and engage in this exercise of semantics or whatever else makes you feel better and more justified.

- A

i'm sorry, terrorism cannot be used to refer to a clandestine attack against americans without a declaration of war.

but go ahead and engage in this exercise of semantics or whatever else makes you feel better and more justified.

- A

Do you realize how many "wars" we've been in without actually formally declaring war against someone? You calling that terrorism just makes us look worse and if you think this is an exercise in semantics, you're wrong. I feel sorry for you if you think it's so. Semantics, heh. How sad that acts can be labelled as terrorist so easily. The word is now neutered and will continue to be spouted off for any bad thing that is done to us so as to brainwash us and allowing whoever in charge to continue on their own crusade.

- N

okay. just because it makes us look bad does not change a thing. but tell me this, are soldiers still soldiers in peacetime? [i hope you get my meaning, but i can clarify if you do not.]

Personally, I can accept the ambush at Pearl Harbor. Even the use of kamikazi planes against our ships. That was uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers. Not honorable, but acceptable in my eyes.

I can not accept their atrocities upon civilians and POWs. They had the choice of causing undue pain or not, and they went the extra mile to cause pain. Especially when the noncombatant is on the ground kneeling before you. They could have avoided it, but they just twisted their knife in deeper.

Stokes Pennwalt
Substantiate any statement with any semblance of evidence??

?? In stating my opinion on the deployment of atomic bombs in Japan, I have referred to facts, if you don’t understand that, it’s your problem and learn to live with it. I’m not going to write a lengthy page to bring you out of your ignorance. And the way that you are defending your opinion, it is just mediocre.


… I call you on your error:
If to you disagreement is error, then why do you disagree? Don’t be so harsh on yourself, … You have called nothing


Put up or shut up. This is your final chance.

Final Chance?? That's cheap! In what world are you living? Or is it just a normal brain disorder?

I simply do not buy your arguments supporting the justification of using the atomic bombs. Because you do not share any view that hasn’t already been printed on
our newspapers, thus not originality what so ever. ..But you can continue reading paper clips out loud.

I find that the nuking was justified. The alternative to the bombs was an invasion of Japan.
Casualty estimates for allied forces were between 500,000 and 2 million. Japanese were about 20 times that.
The bombs saved more lives than they ended. IMO.

Personally, I can accept the ambush at Pearl Harbor. Even the use of kamikazi planes against our ships. That was uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers. Not honorable, but acceptable in my eyes.

I can not accept their atrocities upon civilians and POWs. They had the choice of causing undue pain or not, and they went the extra mile to cause pain. Especially when the noncombatant is on the ground kneeling before you. They could have avoided it, but they just twisted their knife in deeper.
Whether civil wars or wars between nations. The way, in which wars are/were fought, leave a lot of room for discussion. Since there has never been a
clean war, wars involves the killing, and in that process, the abuses and violations. I feel that there’s no nation with the accreditation of having fought
without a shame.

But in this thread, I believe that the question or argument is more related to the deployment of atomic bombs against innocent civilians. As an example, ..our popular
support for our current war in Iraq varies like a barometer from just less then 50% to 30%. That’s the view of unarm civilian population on a conflict that its own government
has started. If Iraq had atomic bombs, would there be any justification for them to use it on our population??

My personal view on this is that throwing atomic bombs on civilian populations is not justifiable by anything, it's an action beyond any redemption so to say.
The argument that Japanese committed other atrocities holds no ground, because if you do the same you become no better than the enemy.
Also ending the war is no argument. Yes, thousands of american soldiers would have died, but those would have been soldiers, man against man, not a nuclear weapon with all its' consequences deployed over children, women, future generations, monks, etc, people that had nothing to do with the war.
That was a barbaric act and the USA has not a bit of my respect because of this,
it's no better than Japanese with their bioweapon tests.

Yeah I think it was pretty sick dropping a weapon like that.

I just hope that everyone here remembers that not all Americans are the same. Not all of us want to be in Iraq, or rather, want our troops to be in Iraq dying for what almost half of us feel is a bullshit cause. Same with Germany during WWII, or Japan, or Italy. There were members of all three "axis" states who opposed Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini. Just because those in power do mad, "evil" things doesn't make all the citizens of one nation mad and "evil."

Hell, I feel pressure in my own country (the u.s.a), right now, to not think the way, and the things, that I do. If you say something that goes against what those in power here want you to think, then you are "un-patriotic" and they tell you to get the fuck out of "their" country. Then I tell them to "fuck off, this is my country too."

Nonetheless, I almost feel that I might get arrested as a "terrorist" sympathizer, or some such bullshit, because I say "Look at what we have done in the fucking Middle East for the last 75 years or so, ever since we created the Arabian American Oil Company in Delaware in 1933 (which was granted the oil concession for the whole kingdom of Saudi Arabia)." Look at what our leaders have done, rather, to instill this hate and anger in Muslims over the past 75 years or so. You can't solely blame terrorism on the terrorists. Our leaders' actions over at least the last 75 years, and probably longer, have created an environment where it is likely, if not almost a 100% probable, to have "terrorists" show up on the scene. And we are continuing to let our fucking dumb-ass leaders get away with it. Wake up America.

Imagine what it must have been like for dissenters in Germany, Japan and Italy in the years leading up to the start of WWII. Late-night death squads and such. Never knowing if you would be alive tomorrow or not. I can see this same attitude in some here now. Scary, of course, but I like it. Others, not so much.

P.S. If the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not "terrorist" weapons, then I don't know what is. We did to the Japanese with these two bombs exactly what "terrorists" are doing with their suicide bombers today. Trying to scare them/us into submission. At least somebody is reading and learning some history, although be it in a sad way.

Yeah I think it was pretty sick dropping a weapon like that.
The alternative would have been much, MUCH, worse for both the United States and Japan.

The alternative would have been much, MUCH, worse for both the United States and Japan.


I agree. However, a spade is a spade is a spade. Those two bombs were "terrorist" weapons, just like a suicide bomber today is a "terrorist" weapon.

Those two bombs, along with all the other bombs we dropped on civilian populations during WWII, Korea, Vietnam and both Iraq wars, were a "means to an end," and we decided that the ends justified the means.

A spade is a spade is a spade.

Cottontop3000
Death Beckons (491 posts)

"A spade is a spade is a spade."

Is the redneck in you starting to show Cotton buds, these words have southern racial tones to them.

"A spade is a spade is a spade." (classic ku klux klan talk to me)

"A spade is a spade is a spade." (classic ku klux klan talk to me)

Oh ho, is that because you know it so well, even all the way over there in England? The kkk must being doing outreach work nowadays, kind of like evangelistic christians. It's great for me, and others like me, that all they get is morons like you. Duh huh.

EDIT: WEBSTER'S Dictionary: (under spade) call a spade a spade: 1. to call a thing by it's right name however coarse 2. to speak frankly.

the kkk has NO monopoly on this phrase, idiot.

Is a man killed by being flashfried by a nuke any more or less dead than someone killed by a daisycutter or regular-old bullet? It seems like the superstitious way many people thought in the middle ages. They were more scared of dying by magic than swordpoint, as if the means of death mattered.

Wars are necessary and will continue to happen until the end of time. People will die in those wars and you will end up having to kill your fair share yourself. That, or accept death... in which case we won't have to worry about you for very long.

Cottontop3000
Death Beckons (495 posts)
"A spade is a spade is a spade."


Lets be frank here cotton and call a spade a spade, you are a out & out racist
a redneck a kkk deluxe member

And all the white cotton sheets in your house cotton have 2 holes burned in them.

Uh...vince, you're the one who has been advocating genocide and murder...that's a bit more KKK-like than anything we have said thus far.
If anyone's a racist, it's you.

"Yes, thousands of american soldiers would have died, but those would have been soldiers, man against man"
with all respect, what sort of bullshit is this?! are you saying that soldiers are not men? that they are somehow expendable. that their lives are worth less than a civilian's?

"Those two bombs were 'terrorist' weapons"
i would counter that there is no such thing. there are weapons used in terrorist acts, but i have also made the claim that there exists no terrorism when under a state of war.

Is a man killed by being flashfried by a nuke any more or less dead than someone killed by a daisycutter or regular-old bullet? It seems like the superstitious way many people thought in the middle ages. They were more scared of dying by magic than swordpoint, as if the means of death mattered.
Thanks for making my point for me, brain-dead limp-dick. I don't need your help though. Do you have a point? Didn't really think so. Kind of like bush. Scratching your head yet, or are you still working on those lice in your armpits? Taste good, huh duh?

In my eyes, yes, it was terroristic, but since it was a state of war, it wasn't really an act of terrorism.

with all respect, what sort of bullshit is this?! are you saying that soldiers are not men? that they are somehow expendable. that their lives are worth less than a civilian's?
Yes, because they chose to go to war and kill. Drafted or not the choice was there.

s a man killed by being flashfried by a nuke any more or less dead than someone killed by a daisycutter or regular-old bullet? It seems like the superstitious way many people thought in the middle ages. They were more scared of dying by magic than swordpoint, as if the means of death mattered.
Have you read any of the accounts? :bugeye: Walking to the hospital and watching your skin slowly peel off, face deforming and lungs liquify. There is a lot more suffering.
Besides the soil is p0isoned and future generations put at a serious health risk.
And you compare it with a bullet? :bugeye:

And, what, getting shot in the stomach, falling to the ground, watching your guts spill into your hands as you slowly bleed to death isn't painful?
Moron. :rolleyes:

As much as I feel above your level of shit, I'd like to say that you have no idea what radiation damage is. It's a crime against life, deforming and destroying DNA of living beings.
In medieval times it would have been equal to pissing on mans' soul.

So? It may be painful, but getting shot in the stomach, intestines, liver, or groin is also very painful.

Then, again, radiation poisoning is a really fucked up way to die.
Still, either way, you're killing another human being, which is wrong any way you look at it.

"Yes, thousands of american soldiers would have died, but those would have been soldiers, man against man"

with all respect, what sort of bullshit is this?! are you saying that soldiers are not men? that they are somehow expendable. that their lives are worth less than a civilian's?But then we could have legitimately stuck to our claim, our deeply held "conviction," that the ends don't justify the means.


"Those two bombs were 'terrorist' weapons"

i would counter that there is no such thing.I think you would be wrong. Terrorism is defined as the systematic use of terror esp. as a means of coercion. Be it against enemy soldiers, women, children or the pope. You could say that we have lived with terror for the whole history of mankind, and I think you would be right.


there are weapons used in terrorist acts, but i have also made the claim that there exists no terrorism when under a state of war.You could also claim that the recent london attacks are not terrorism, but acts of war. After all, we are at war with Al Qaeda, are we not? Hell, let's say that the attack of 9/11 wasn't even a terrorist attack then, or even the first attack on the world trade centers in '93. Let's say the first attack in '93 was like Pearl Harbor, we just didn't get around to declaring war on those responsible (Al Qaeda?) until after the second one in 2001. So no attack carried out by Al Qaeda since 1993 was an act of terrorism, but an act of war.

Now, you could also say that a nation cannot declare war on a non-nation, right? In which case, we are not actually at war with Al-Qaeda, nor can we be. So all of Al Qaeda's attacks have been terrorist attacks. Therefore, would you call our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan legitimate?

"Terrorism is defined as the systematic use of terror esp. as a means of coercion."
Merriam Webster? anyhow, i differentiate between terrorism and war crimes and i was countering the term "'terrorist' weapons" as there are no weapons used exclusively by terrorists. rather pointless in retrospect.

"Therefore, would you call our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan legitimate?"
strictly speaking, no. you can't fight a "war on terrorism".

Exactly. Terrorism is just a method. Noone can declare a war against a method of fighting.
It would be the same as declaring war on abortion.

There are too many posts here to read them all. I read about half, and hope I know the overall flavor of the thread.

Those who object to our dropping the bombs are living over fifty years after it happened. You are second guessing a decision made in another era. On Monday morning, a lot of experts know exactly what the losing quarterback did wrong on Saturday afternoon. Would we do it again today? Apparently not, but I suspect that our hesitance is due to political expediency rather than more humane considerations. The administration is afraid of the PR effects both at home & abroad.

Somebody once said "When you are in a war, you are committed to killing many people including non-combatants. Does it really matter if you do it with nuclear weapons or swords?"

As mentioned by others, we did more damage and killed more people by fire bombing various German cities. Many died due to suffocation when the firestorms used up all the oxygen, many burned to death. Was that some how better than doing it with nukes? I seldom see anybody saying that we should not have staged those attacks. Perhaps it is the cost effectiveness of doing it with one plane that upsets people.

"Terrorism is defined as the systematic use of terror esp. as a means of coercion."
Merriam Webster? anyhow, i differentiate between terrorism and war crimes and i was countering the term "'terrorist' weapons" as there are no weapons used exclusively by terrorists. rather pointless in retrospect.

"Therefore, would you call our attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan legitimate?"
strictly speaking, no. you can't fight a "war on terrorism".

Webster's, yes.

I agree with you, strictly speaking. :D

Exactly. Terrorism is just a method. Noone can declare a war against a method of fighting.
It would be the same as declaring war on abortion.

Oh, but the US has. Haven't you heard? :D :rolleyes:

Dinosaur,

Good points. Thanks for your input.

I simply do not buy your arguments supporting the justification of using the atomic bombs. Because you do not share any view that hasn’t already been printed on
our newspapers, thus not originality what so ever. ..But you can continue reading paper clips out loud.
:rolleyes:

So you are refusing to believe anything I post on the grounds that it has been corroborated elsewhere? I have to ask: Are you willing to accept ANY evidence that is not aligned with your agenda?


As much as I feel above your level of shit, I'd like to say that you have no idea what radiation damage is. It's a crime against life, deforming and destroying DNA of living beings.
In medieval times it would have been equal to pissing on mans' soul.
A few factoids that may surprise you:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both habitable 24/7 within one week of the attacks. In fact, this was mostly delayed due to fires that were still burning. Secondary radiation from the bombs became a non-issue within a few days. In fact, even the crater of the Castle Bravo nuclear test of 1954, what became the worst radiological disaster in human history (yes even worse than Chernobyl) is now open for recreational SCUBA diving. Hollywood myths aside, lingering radiation from weapon explosions doesn't have a lot of longevity.
The significantly dangerous daughter isotopes in the bombs' fission fragments have half lives measured in hours. Also, the attack profiles used against both cities called for airbursting the bombs at around 600 meters. At this altitude the fireball does not impinge upon the earth's surface and VERY little fallout it created. The biggest hazard of residual radiation is radioactivity that is induced in elements in the soil by the bomb's initial neutron flux, which is largely irrelevant due to the quantities involved.
Generally speaking, radiological output constitutes only 15% of overall weapon output. The primary effect is blast, followed closely by thermal radiation. Little Boy and Fat Man, being dirty devices, were also very small devices. Their radiological output was tiny.
There has NEVER been a documented case of chromosomal damage being passed on from exposure victim to offspring. This is mostly due to the fact that the threshold necessary for genetic damage is beyond that which will cause sterility.
Today, you would never know that anything bad happened at Hiroshima or Nagasaki unless you were educated. At ground zero in both cities there is a small park with exhibits to educate visitors on the events.
As an aside, and just for general informative purposes, the weapons employed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki are some of the most inefficient and dirty devices ever designed. Modern weapons, which are essentially anything designed after 1955 or so using the Teller-Ulam layer cake cores, are a lot less messy and produce a hell of a lot more explosive yield from a given mass of fuel.
Note that I am not claiming that the radiological issue was not a significant factor in the aftermath. However, it was and is insignificant compared to the other effects of the weapon. A nuclear weapon is nothing more than a very large explosive device. It is not a magical engine of destruction. If we had incendiary-carpet bombed Hiroshima from 36,000 feet for two weeks as we had done to Tokyo several weeks before, it would have ended up more or less the same way. And I posit that the deaths that resulted would have been equally as horrific for the victims. So there is simply no reason to harp on the issue that a nuclear weapon was the destructive mechanism, including the unique effects of radiation poisoning. And it certainly does no good to use emotive demagoguery such as "equal to pissing on a man's soul".

Stokes Pennwalt

I have no agenda except trying to merit events based on facts and in accordance with my moral values. I didn’t know that we are talking about evidences? What evidences?

We are talking about the deployment of atomic bombs on civilian population, for experimental purposes just a few weeks after their local controlled first test. Not knowing the repercussions and long term effects to generations to come. We were not just punishing a country but their generations as well.

Our government forced a blackout of graphical news reporting of the incident for many weeks. If it was so great, heroic, humane and high-tech for the time, why not to allow us to see the real picture, why only the mushroom cloud. Bad conscience??



Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both habitable 24/7 within one week of the attacks

Really? Within a week? Where did you get that?



As an aside, and just for general informative purposes, the weapons employed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki are some of the most inefficient and dirty devices ever designed.

DIRTY?? You finally got something right!! It’s about time!

The rest of your comments are just hallucinations and I don’t even know where to start, sorry!

The Americans hate anyone with culture. Death to America. Death to Israel. Death to the UK.

The Americans hate anyone with culture. Death to America. Death to Israel. Death to the UK.

Death to Android. And wherever you are from. Ha!

I have no agenda except trying to merit events based on facts and in accordance with my moral values.[/COLOR]Microzoft, yes or no. Do you beleive that during the USA-Japan war, the USA should or shouldn't have bombed the main Japanese islands with conventional weapons?

If so, to what degree.

Microzoft, yes or no. Do you beleive that during the USA-Japan war, the USA should or shouldn't have bombed the main Japanese islands with conventional weapons?

If so, to what degree.

Yes or Not? And then, ….to what degree?
To what degree what? The yes or the no?? :confused:

Yes or Not? And then, ….to what degree?
To what degree what? The yes or the no?? :confused:What I am asking is this:

(1) During WWII, do you think the USA’s dropping of "atomic" bombs to kill Japanese and win the war was OK?

(2) During WWII, do you think the USA’s dropping of “conventional” bombs to kill Japanese and win the war was OK?

In my view and as I think that I have already and frequently indicated;


1 - No, because it was used indiscriminately and on the civilian population in a premeditated act.

2 - Yes, I think the use of conventional weaponry (non-radioactive) against specific military targets should be OK within the contest of wars.

2 - Yes, I think the use of conventional weaponry (non-radioactive) against specific military targets should be OK within the contest of wars.You use of the word contest is interesting, in me it invokes a sense of “honor to the winner” – sort of Samurai style - it’s as if you think the nuclear bombs were unfair or cheating?

More questions - In the Contest of War:

1) Do you count the people that work in the factory making the war machines as civilians or military targets?

2) Are the factories themselves targets?

Michael


Michael
You use of the word contest is interesting, in me it invokes a sense of “honor to the winner” – sort of Samurai style - it’s as if you think the nuclear bombs were unfair or cheating?

Yes, in my view, the act or involvement in a war, it is a contest indeed, especially to those doing the killing and the survival.

1 – military targets.
2 – targets

I don’t understand the rationale (within a military industry) whether the people inside a building or the building itself may or may not be a target. But what the heck, if this pleases you, why not, right?

So that we do not deviate unnecessarily too far away from the subject at hand, I would like to point out that I started this thread relating to our position on deployment of atomic weapons on the civilian population.

(1) During WWII, do you think the USA’s dropping of "atomic" bombs to kill Japanese and win the war was OK?
Yes.


(2) During WWII, do you think the USA’s dropping of “conventional” bombs to kill Japanese and win the war was OK?
Yes.

There are no real rules in war, goddamn it. It's freakin' WAR! TOTAL WAR!

For those interested in documental coverage:

http://www.archive.org/details/TaleofTw1946
http://www.archive.org/details/AtomBomb1946

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=atom%20bomb%20AND%20mediatype%3Am ovies

There are no real rules in war, goddamn it. It's freakin' WAR! TOTAL WAR!

So what do we do with the make believe rule book? Something about hyporcisy just pisses me off. I wish we could make everybody who talks about rules and justice live by their words or else make them shut up and burn their rulebooks.

So that we do not deviate unnecessarily too far away from the subject at hand, I would like to point out that I started this thread relating to our position on deployment of atomic weapons on the civilian population.Well then, I still do not see why you think Atomic weapons are somehow more , or inherently ?, evil while you do support the use of Conventional weapons. It’s been pointed out that Atomic weapons do no more long lasting damage than conventional weapons – that is, the radiation does kill people into the weeks to come, similar to conventional weapons, there's no permanent lingering effects.

What’s the difference between:
- Radiation that kills you off in a few weeks.
OR
- Being burned via a conventional bomb that melts off 80% of your skin leaving you to die in a few weeks.

I just don’t see the difference. DO you?

If either city was bombed with conventional bombs the goal would have been to kick up a fire storm that would have burned the entire city to the ground – killing any man, women, or child in the city. As the military factories a littered throughout the city – this of course is the only sure way to destroy them. It’s not like you can aim a ten thousand bombs directly hit each building as you chose – dropping bombs is not all that accurate. Hell even these so called smart bombs miss all the time.

So I don't see the difference - either way civilians are killed. I think you should be saying: "Dropping any bombs on cities is wrong", not: "Dropping atomic bombs on cities is wrong" . . . agreed?

"The burden of proof is on the critics. What WERE the alternatives?"

Stokes made an excellent post several days back, and meanwhile I have been away from civilization. I think that among the alternatives to invasion that a more reasonable, humble, and pragmatic America should have publicly considered, would have been to isolate the remnants of Imperial Japan and declare their empire, and hence the war in the Pacific, at an end.

I can see no credible way in which Japan could have regained its empire, considering how embittered mainland Asia had become toward Japan; Considering Japan had no remaining navy (NO navy remaining at that time that was a threat to anyone); no fuel; and a shattered economy. By 1945 the jig was definitively up for Imperial Japan, and the USA needed do nothing further but engage in the postwar rebuilding, and to give the Japanese People time and opportunity to awaken from their imperial dreamland. No more mass- incinerations of civilians was necessary, and setting the tone for the postwar years with "that's enough" could well have carried the USA onto an even higher road in the eyes of the world. Before unleashing the nukes, the USA and her allies had reduced Imperial Japan to her original borders, and to her knees, and mercy would have had much meaning. I believe we Americans could have offered already-defeated Imperial Japan something more majestic than mushroom clouds, and if we wished to demonstrate our new atomic power to the world, we needn't have done so over population centers. We could have done better:


The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God’s
When mercy seasons justice-shakespeare (http://www.allshakespeare.com/quotes/277)

Likewise to the empire, Japan's fanaticism could not have long survived the crush of reality, and it was certainly not the nuclear strikes that extinguished it. Maybe the American WMDs scared leadership, but they weren't instrumental in changing popular views, because everyday Japanese were not privy to factual real-time news.

For all the talk of bloody invasions of Japan, I really can't see the strategic need for such an onslaught in 1945 or thence. Just saying Japan would quickly rise again does not convince me: HOW?

"The burden of proof is on the critics. What WERE the alternatives?"

Stokes made an excellent post several days back, and meanwhile I have been away from civilization. I think that among the alternatives to invasion that a more reasonable, humble, and pragmatic America should have publicly considered, would have been to isolate the remnants of Imperial Japan and declare their empire, and hence the war in the Pacific, at an end.

I can see no credible way in which Japan could have regained its empire, considering how embittered mainland Asia had become toward Japan; Considering Japan had no remaining navy (NO navy remaining at that time that was a threat to anyone); no fuel; and a shattered economy. By 1945 the jig was definitively up for Imperial Japan, and the USA needed do nothing further but engage in the postwar rebuilding, and to give the Japanese People time and opportunity to awaken from their imperial dreamland. No more mass- incinerations of civilians was necessary.

Likewise to the empire, Japan's fanaticism could not have long survived the crush of reality, and it was certainly not the nuclear strikes that extinguished it. Maybe the American WMDs scared leadership, but they weren't instrumental in changing popular views, because everyday Japanese were not privy to factual real-time news.

For all the talk of bloody invasions of Japan, I really can't see the strategic need for such an onslaught in 1945 or thence. Just saying Japan would quickly rise again does not convince me: HOW?I think they tried that with North Korea - 3 million died of starvation in the last couple of years, what do you imagine would have happened to Japan? Not to mention after they built their own atomic weapons (similar to NK).

No no, history shows that it's best to finish the job.

Well, then again, China only starved 30 million people to death, and now they're coming to their senses (I think) - - so maybe you're right? Hmmm, hard to say?

In this new game, does they US get to keep Okinawa?

Americans are not responsible for what other nations do to their own: We do not run the planet, and did not in 1945.

"history shows that it's best to finish the job."

Was the job not finished? Do you seriously think the Japanese Empire was not mortally wounded already?

And again- I was trying to impress that American mercy could have had greater leverage than American destruction by that point.

I think these are worthwhile conjectures of alternative policies, because we will be facing similar choices in the future: Nobody has the nukes or so far to fall as we Americans have, and the temptation is going to come again to "finish it" on someone.

Please answer

Was Imperial Japan finished before the nuclear attacks?

Was Imperial Japan finished before the nuclear attacks?IMHO, no, not finished - they would have definitely signed peace agreements, to give themselves some leeway. Then, as their economy crapped out, I suppose it could have been ripe for some ultranationalist to come along and promise the world? It’s really hard to say? Who knows?

Didn’t we try that one with Germany after WWI?
Didn’t we give it a go with North Korea?

But also, like I said, we also didn’t nuke China when they supported NK and the Vietnamese – and they seem to be coming around.

Although every Chinese I know dreams of regaining their rightful status as the greatest superpower the world has ever known! Just as it had been for most of history! Gawd, they almost sound like Yanks!!! :)

So, what I am saying is, yes, Japan would have signed some peace agreements. But, maybe islands like Taiwan would have been sacrificed up to appease the Japanese and just end the war? It’s really quite hard to say. Of course, Japan wouldn’t have had the $$ coming in from the US during the Korean war – which is what really kicked their economy off. And they would have been in a poor state – probably ripe for ultra nationalism (I mean Jesus, the Chinese are already ultranationalists, and no one is threatening them!) So maybe The Japanese would have gained nuclear weapons and the world may be a different place?

It’s all really hard to say – and because it’s hard to say, I think that the historical trend has been to win the war – not stalemate it, like we did in NK and Vietnam (well - actually we lost that one).

So we nuked 2 Japanese cities to save Japan from rampant nationalism. I hope such a favor is never done for the USA.

Too much conjecture on the past [i]is[/b] strained- but would we have had to beat down Japan like Armistice Germany between the wars? Couldn't we have taken that lesson to heart as well?

I think that we are still paying, and will still pay, for being the world's only nuclear aggressor to date. What if someone someday demands a kiloton of flesh for our nationalism?

So we nuked 2 Japanese cities to save Japan from rampant nationalism. No, I think our forefathers nuked Japan because they can NOT predict the future and so they thought - it's best to direct the present to acheive the future.

We nuked Japan to save ourselves from either one hell of a bloody fight in a couple months or an ungodly bloody fight a couple decades down the road. And it worked... perfectly. We made ourselves a firm ally and the best damn trading partner a country could ask for. I couldn't imagine things turning out better.

"...an ungodly bloody fight a couple decades down the road."

Please explain. I don't understand that threat, just as I don't understand why a US invasion of Japan was necessary.

If in some manner, shape, or form we did not utterly break and reshape the Japanese Empire into something better suited to our purposes, they would get back up again in short order and most likely be our enemy. Humiliation and hardship brought by the foreigners, the Oni, would only harden them even further. They would rebuild their war machine, freshly juiced up with the nucular technology that would eventually get out, and the dance would begin again.

They would start grabbing land wherever American or Soviet influence slipped for even a moment. An island here, a piece of korea or the still impoverished china there. Your options are to let them do whatever the hell they want or start another major war. This one with a whole new set of weaponry. They might have simply wanted blood for vengence's sake. I am sure Japan wouldn't have been above petty terrorism once mass warfare becomes impractical.

Think a totally united Nazi Germany or a North Korea with one of the world's greatest industrial centers.

How could Japan have resuscitated her empire? They were sent packing from the rest of Asia. I really don't understand how they could have rebuilt another imperial fleet, invaded, and administered a new empire after their military, economic, and moral defeat, which really was complete before the nuclear attacks (do you admint this?). Like Germany, I don't think that their militant nationalism was intact after defeat. Like Korea, I don't think that Japan remained a world menace.

Of course we're speaking in conjecture, but it doesn't seem to rise sufficiently in justification of nuclear attacks: There were other means for containing a potential Imperial resurgence.

Sure. Break them really badly with conventional bombing and then put the entire island chane under quarantine... forever. Isn't exactly working with North Korea. Probably would result in more dead anyways.

We could assassinate the entire royal family. But then there would be chaos and infighting, probably with even more dead. Whatever arises out of the ashes would probably be none too friendly either.

There are no real rules in war, goddamn it. It's freakin' WAR! TOTAL WAR!

--------------

So what do we do with the make believe rule book? Something about hyporcisy just pisses me off. I wish we could make everybody who talks about rules and justice live by their words or else make them shut up and burn their rulebooks.

Yes, I know whatcha mean. Only the losers in war are ever guilty of anything. Because it's war, it makes everything okay, but the losers wind up having to pay for their crimes but the winner's excuse is "war is hell" so it makes it peachy keen.

- N

An influential member of the Admiralty Staff has given me to understand that, since the situation is clearly recognized to be hopeless, large sections of the Japanese armed forces would not regard with disfavor an American request for capitulation even if the terms were hard, provided they were halfway honorable. May 11, 1945 (http://www.chinamarines.com/docs/bomb.htm)

More background here: Was It Necessary? (http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm)

There is ample reliable evidence to show that no drawn-out quaranteen (as Clockwood contends), blockade, standoff, cold war, etc. etc. was likely in any event. Reason: Japan was already on her knees when the USA went nuclear.

It was over. but Truman and his cabinet wanted something I can't quite put my finger on (revenge? scare Stalin? a test?) Whatever the motive, I don't expect it is something to be proud of as an American, or as a human being, because the men who authorized the attacks knew that Japan's fate was already decided with or without the nuclear option.

You stay they were ready for a lick my balls and do whatever I say style unconditional surrender? I could see them bargaining for peace, but only to buy time for rebuilding. I doubt they would have been willing to put themselves totally at our whim.

That bitch Japan. We never did nothing to them. Ok we did pull a Admiral Perry on them and forced them to give us a little kiss against their will but they kind of liked it. And we were thinking that they were getting kind of uppity and might need to be slapped around some. But that was just thinking. We didn't do nothing to them and she goes and put poisen in our dinner. Japan wanted to kill us.

So we kicked japan hard and put a knife to her throat and made her lick our balls. Then we gave her a mink coat and we've been friends ever since.

And the lesson to be learned? Very loosely paraphrasing Machiavelli: Showing somebody that you can't be messed with is a smart move if they tried to hurt you but after you make them like your balls you had better either kill them or give them a mink coat and be friends.

Leaving the Japanese regime intact and un-brutalized would have been like not punnishing a seriously bad kid. That Japan would have seen that as a sign of weakness and would have rebuilt and sought new allies with which to pursue empire and chalange western dominance.

Not treating Japan kinder than they expected after the surrender also would have created a hostile Japan.





It was over. but Truman and his cabinet wanted something I can't quite put my finger on (revenge? scare Stalin? a test?)

Since the 1950s a lot of smart people and insiders have thought the use of the A-bombs was all about keeping the Soviet Union in check.

The use of the bombs gave us the street cred of an insane unpredictable ghetto punk with a reputation for doing crazy and cruel things. By some accounts that street cred is what stopped China from taking Taiwan. By some accounts Nixon threatened Vietnam with nukes and they called our bluff. By some accounts the bluff would not have been a bluff if Nixon thought the American people would not have disapproved of using nukes.

Others say the use of nukes made Japan surrender earlier thereby stopping the Soviets from taking all of Korea and more of Northern Japan.


I have to call the use of those Nukes terrorism and a war crime, but I think it was probably one of the few times in history that using terrorism was the tactically and morally right thing to do.

......So I don't see the difference - either way civilians are killed. I think you should be saying: "Dropping any bombs on cities is wrong", not: "Dropping atomic bombs on cities is wrong" . . . agreed?

I started this thread (check opening post) with reference to the Appeal Letter from Roosevelt regarding the act of bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population. This was followed by the radio speech to the nation by Truman were he referred to Hiroshima not as a city but as a military base.

On the issue of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I started this thread making an indication of how hypocritical was our foreign policy in those events.

Sooner or later Truman must had found out that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were military based but regular populated cities. If he had the conscience, he should have felt the weight in his soul for allowing that murderous act.

And, I believe I have repeated in this thread many times, that the topic I wanted to discuss here was the in deployment of those atomic bombs over civilian population.

We could discuss the war in the pacific, but on another thread. We could discuss the feudal and political atmosphere of Japan on those days, but on another thread. Or even about bombing tactics, if this type of bomb or that type of bomb would be more, or less painful, etc. etc. But in another thread!

I would have love to discuss here the human and historical repercussions relating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. As more and more government and military documents have been declassified, giving us a better insight on what was really cooking in their heads and how the bluffed their way out.

Discussing whether one atomic bomb is better then a thousand conventional bombs, it is not only childish but totally irrelevant in this thread.

So, Michael…

1 do you understand the topic of this thread?
2 you do, but prefer to discuss wargames?
3 no, but what the heck?

And, I believe I have repeated in this thread many times, that the topic I wanted to discuss here was the in deployment of those atomic bombs over civilian population.To make sure I am on the right track – you think that atomic bombing of “purely military” targets is fine, just so long as they do not have civilians in them?

I'm not trying to piss you off Microzoft, I'm just not convinced the atomic bombs are more evil than MOAB bombs. They both seem pretty evil - I mean, war is nasty business.


I would have love to discuss here the human and historical repercussions relating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing. As more and more government and military documents have been declassified, giving us a better insight on what was really cooking in their heads and how the bluffed their way out.It seems, from the above posts, that the US both felt that it would end the war quickly (even parts of the Australian fleet were on their way towards Japan for the invasion – I think we can assume there would have been one), and also that the bombs prevented Stalin from making an further advances on American interests in the East.

Hence the ideological war against communism.

To me, atomic bombs are to conventional bombs what guns must seem like when compared with swords. Killing gets just little bit more removed and a little bit more ugly as a consequence.

Just another brave decision!
http://www.gandhitoday.org/hiroshima.html

Sorry, but all of this reminds me of "If WWII Were an RTS Game":

http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp

- N

I can see no credible way in which Japan could have regained its empire, considering how embittered mainland Asia had become toward Japan; Considering Japan had no remaining navy (NO navy remaining at that time that was a threat to anyone); no fuel; and a shattered economy. By 1945 the jig was definitively up for Imperial Japan, and the USA needed do nothing further but engage in the postwar rebuilding, and to give the Japanese People time and opportunity to awaken from their imperial dreamland. No more mass- incinerations of civilians was necessary, and setting the tone for the postwar years with "that's enough" could well have carried the USA onto an even higher road in the eyes of the world. Before unleashing the nukes, the USA and her allies had reduced Imperial Japan to her original borders, and to her knees, and mercy would have had much meaning. I believe we Americans could have offered already-defeated Imperial Japan something more majestic than mushroom clouds, and if we wished to demonstrate our new atomic power to the world, we needn't have done so over population centers.
This post is a breath of fresh air after the crap Microzoft has been replying with. Thank you.

You do not leave empires set on world domination alone. We learned that lesson in Europe in World War I. Japan needed to be completely disassembled and rebuilt in an entirely different manner. No vestige of their Empire could have been allowed to exist in a functional sense. The Japanese culture was far too nationalistic for that. Anything less than a total reformatting of their government would have had us fighting the same war again some number of years later. Leaving Imperial Japan's government intact was not an option. It would have only led to another war. The options for Japan and for us were the Potsdam declaration or nothing.

Even today, the nationalist movement is alive. A nationalist vandalized the Hiroshima Peace Memorial by chiseling off the part of the inscription that referred to the war as a "mistake". Firebombing the capital did not convince them it was over, massive starvation of their people did not convince them, loss of the Pacific and their entire Navy did not convince them, and two blasts that killed over 100,000 people did not convince them. It took the nukes to bring Hirohito to his senses that maybe it was better to fully surrende. Not even was enough to convince his military staff (who staged a failed coup to keep the war going) that surrender was truly the best course of action. Imperial Japan was, with the exception of (perhaps) Hannibal's Army, the most resilient and tenacious fighting force in all of human history. Quite simply it was foolish to expect them to surrender. The only way to beat them was to kill so many of them that their numbers were too weakened to continue to resist. We learned that hard lesson dozens of times across the Pacific rim. By the time only Kyushu and Japan remained, we knew better.

Japanese offers of peace beforehand were not genuine, they would be on the terms of Japan, and that was not going to happen as long as we had the capability to get it on our terms. People say that because we left Hirohito uncharged as the war criminal he was anyways, the nukes were not justified. In reality, if we had killed him, the population and military would have been uncontrollable. The Emperor was God to the Japanese people. Hearing Hirohito's voice on the radio for the first time in their nation's history, as he told them to lay down their arms, convinced some, but not all, and he was still their God. I'm pretty sure that killing or otherwise deposing their God would piss them off. He was stripped of all power and we wrote their new constitution (which they butchered in translation). You can thank Japanologists of the time for that most likely, for the same reason we didn't nuke Kyoto.

Three points to remember: First, Japan held quite a few Allied POWs, and in an invasion, all would have been killed without exception. Everyday the war dragged on, tens of thousands were dying. The nukes ended it without question in one way or another and the cleanup could start. Second, and this is something that people frequently do not consider, is that dropping the bombs and ending the war quickly kept the Soviet Union out of Japan. It is anybody's guess how many Japanese were saved from suffering under Soviet occupation because of that. East Germany is a telling example in that regard. The Japanese are lucky they surrendered when they did, because doing so robbed the Soviets of an excuse to invade and occupy them. Third, famine was sweeping through Japan in the closing days of the war. By laying seige to Japan and demanding capitluation without the atomic strikes, the bloodiest war in human history would be needlessly prolonged. Many more Japanese would starve to death. All Allied POWs would certainly die or be killed. The amount dead would be anybody's guess, but it would be a hell of a lot more than 130,000 Japanese I can promise you that.

As you can see the strikes could easily be argued as some of the most magnanimous and philanthropic acts of the entire terrible war. Truman's job was to win the war and protect United States soldiers. If two atom bombs could end the war sooner, and result in fewer US casualties, he had the responsibility to use them. Not doing so would have been an act so outrageous that it borders on treason. It was the responsibility of Hirohito to protect his people by surrendering when they were no longer able to win the war. He did not. It is his fault that the bombs were dropped.


I have no agenda except trying to merit events based on facts and in accordance with my moral values. I didn’t know that we are talking about evidences? What evidences?

We are talking about the deployment of atomic bombs on civilian population, for experimental purposes just a few weeks after their local controlled first test. Not knowing the repercussions and long term effects to generations to come. We were not just punishing a country but their generations as well.

Our government forced a blackout of graphical news reporting of the incident for many weeks. If it was so great, heroic, humane and high-tech for the time, why not to allow us to see the real picture, why only the mushroom cloud. Bad conscience??
This has nothing to do with anything I posted.

Really? Within a week? Where did you get that?Had you bothered to read my post before mashing the reply button, you would know. Perhaps you could go back and read it again. If you'd like anything clarified, ask and I will explain in detail.


DIRTY?? You finally got something right!! It’s about time!

The rest of your comments are just hallucinations and I don’t even know where to start, sorry!
Your level of historical and military knowledge is insufficient for you to be commenting on this topic any further. Please stop.

..Even today, the nationalist movement is alive. A nationalist vandalized the Hiroshima Peace Memorial by chiseling off the part of the inscription that referred to the war as a "mistake".

The way you pick and choose certain elements, uncovers your real mental agenda. You are validating a vandalism action by a single person or a small group of people as representing, to any significance, the Japanese population.

It would be comparable as if a KKK action would mirror the United States population. Very shallow.


…and two blasts that killed over 100,000 people did not convince them.
With this statement, it is obvious that you have no problem in lying to yourself. Same lie as with your previous statement …
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both habitable 24/7 within one week of the attacks. In fact, this was mostly delayed due to fires that were still burning

NEXT


The only way to beat them was to kill so many of them that their numbers were too weakened to continue to resist. You really have an infatuation with the Japanese civilian population. Resist what??


….The amount dead would be anybody's guess, but it would be a hell of a lot more than 130,000 Japanese I can promise you that.

You are mesmerizing your views on the deployment of the atomic bombs on civilian population to the point that you can even offer a promise on something that could, may or would have happened??? You obviously have everything well worked out in your mind. Even as far as coming to your conclusion over something that didn’t happened.


… If two atom bombs could end the war sooner, and result in fewer US casualties, he had the responsibility to use them. Not doing so would have been an act so outrageous that it borders on treason. This really gets the thermometer working. Read to your self the correct meaning of treason would you.


…Your level of historical and military knowledge is insufficient for you to be commenting on this topic any further. Please stop. or your previous
..Put up or shut up. This is your final chance.

Please stop? …a Final chance???

What is your problem?
You still haven’t realized that you’re participating in a public forum?? Or is it that you are so wrapped up in your military rhetoric that you have forgotten that we are mostly discussing
the deployment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on unarmed civilian population??

When America dropped the first bomb the Japanese response was an equivocal “we are considering surrender”. We dropped the second and they surrendered immediately. By the standards of the time and the rules of war at that time, we were justified in dropping the two atomic weapons. We saved American lives, which is supposed to be our commander-in-chiefs primary goal. We saved Japanese live that would have been lost in a conventional softening bombing campaign, which was the standard procedure prior to an invasion back then. I think that the bombing would have been justified by today’s standards although there would always be some argument about weather we gave enough time for consideration and tried hard enough to avoid civilian casualties. Nuclear weapons are dangerous and I hope that we never have to respond to a nuclear attack on our soil because we will have to respond in such a way that no one will ever contemplate such a hideous strategy again. At what point is it fair to sink to your attackers level? I have always believed in playing fair and fighting dirty which is on of the reasons that I did not become an officer. I do not agree that one side should play soccer and the other should be allowed to play rugby.

Heh, how will you respond if some islam terrorist from the UK comes to the USA, has a nuclear bomb and detonates it? Or even better, what if it is a USA citizen? Will you nuke the state he comes from?

The way you pick and choose certain elements, uncovers your real mental agenda. You are validating a vandalism action by a single person or a small group of people as representing, to any significance, the Japanese population.

It would be comparable as if a KKK action would mirror the United States population. Very shallow.


With this statement, it is obvious that you have no problem in lying to yourself. Same lie as with your previous statement …

NEXT

You really have an infatuation with the Japanese civilian population. Resist what??



You are mesmerizing your views on the deployment of the atomic bombs on civilian population to the point that you can even offer a promise on something that could, may or would have happened??? You obviously have everything well worked out in your mind. Even as far as coming to your conclusion over something that didn’t happened.

This really gets the thermometer working. Read to your self the correct meaning of treason would you.

or your previous

Please stop? …a Final chance???

What is your problem?
You still haven’t realized that you’re participating in a public forum?? Or is it that you are so wrapped up in your military rhetoric that you have forgotten that we are mostly discussing
the deployment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on unarmed civilian population??
Are you planning on presenting a cogent argument at some point, or are you just posting because you like the sound your head makes when you bang it against your keyboard?

If the terrorist was a US citizen, I would find out what cause he supported and swing major effort into ensuring that it lost completely. And I would attempt to ensure that no other political activist would consider that a viable strategy. If it was a foreign born terrorist I would locate which group he belonged to what were there goals and who were the people who funded his organization. I would attempt to find a geographical entity that shared responsibility for this person’s organization. If I had the authority and sufficient evidence to convince myself of their fault I would use weapons of mass destruction on their cities in retaliation. I would train elite military forces to go after the group’s sponsors and members of the group. I would target associates and friends of these members. I would do my very best to make it very uncool to be associated with this group.

Maybe the US and its' policy in middle east is the cause. Never thought of that you yourselves have created the world you live in?

Maybe the US and its' policy in middle east is the cause. Never thought of that you yourselves have created the world you live in?

No. We're perfect.

/sarcasm

- N

Are you planning on presenting a cogent argument at some point, or are you just posting because you like the sound your head makes when you bang it against your keyboard?


You're are obviously bored and I can’t really say that I blame you, you’re a just using the wrong thread for your shoddy jokes. :rolleyes:

We build a monster with the help of German scientists and quickly needed an excuse to test it out on a realistic scenario. Released documents attest to that.

Actually, released documents attest to the fact that we dropped the bombs because they hadn't surrendered yet.

It strikes me it would depend on the vet you talk to. Not many vets would have had enough information to form the basis of a decision like dropping an atomic bomb.

Some historians believe that based on the information at the time the atomic bombs were unnecessary.

They believe it based on information that came out years later. The lack of necessity was not apparent at the time the bombs were dropped.




http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

The world's foremost Holocaust denial site isn't exactly the best reference.




Throw in some quotes from some higher ups who also thought the atomic bombs were unnecessary.
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

Hindsight sure is nice.

Truman didn't have the advantage of hindsight when the bombs were dropped.

vincent28uk

Where do you get the idea that a land invasion would have been necessary?

There some seems to be some record that Japan was trying to pursue a peaceful surrender in the months before the bombs were dropped.

Not exactly.

There is some record that a powerless faction of the Japanese government was pursuing surrender, without the backing of the faction with power, in the months before the bombs.

In the few days before the bombs, both factions decided they wanted to surrender, but they deadlocked over how many unacceptable terms to demand of us, and so didn't act.

It was only after Nagasaki that they actually made a surrender offer, unacceptable though it was.

They were about a week away from getting nuked again when they gave up and offered to surrender on acceptable terms.


The notion that an invasion might be necessary was a very real fear during the war, when no one knew just what it would take to make Japan agree to surrender on acceptable terms.

Targetting civilians in the hope of bringing a country to its knees can never be justified.

I guess it's a good thing we didn't target civilians.


Hiroshima was Japan's largest military town, and there were 43,000 soldiers in its large military districts when the bomb was dropped.

Hiroshima also held the headquarters of the Japanese Second General Army, which was responsible for repelling any invasion of the southern half of the Japanese home islands. (Guess where we were likely to begin the invasion if it had come to that.)


The primary target of the second bomb was Kokura Arsenal, a massive (4100' x 2000') arms-production complex. The secondary target was the Mitsubishi Shipyards, a huge warship-production facility. The bomb ended up being dropped in an industrial area north of Nagasaki, between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi Ordnance Works, destroying both. (The Mitsubishi Ordnance Works was responsible for designing and building the special "shallow water" torpedoes they used to attack Pearl Harbor.)

Japan would have bombed American cities if they could. I hear they did manage to send one conventional bomb to the coast of Oregon from a sub, but it didn't do anything.

They sent about 1,000 balloon bombs to the US.

One killed a woman and five children.

Another came close to causing a Chernobyl-style disaster at one of our plutonium-production reactors.

Hiroshima bomb may have carried hidden agenda

* 13:46 21 July 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Rob Edwards

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

These two "historians" are pretty good about repeating that they have new evidence.

They've come up rather short in actually producing any new evidence however.




Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say.

And the consensus of mainstream historians, backed up by a wealth of evidence, says otherwise.




"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species," says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US.

LOL!

Can you imagine if Greenpeace hired someone other than radical kooks to do their science?




"It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."

They know as little of international law as they do of history.




New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

New studies of the same old evidence certainly wouldn't suggest such an absurdity.

And if they do have new evidence (why are they hiding their "new evidence"), it would have to be rather substantial to overcome the large body of existing evidence.




According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was "looking for peace".

A half truth.

Japan's dominant faction had finally decided to embrace a conditional surrender a few days before the bombs, but only on blatantly unacceptable terms.

And they were deadlocked with the other faction, leading to inaction.

When the bombs were dropped, we had no indication what would make them break their deadlock and actually make a surrender offer, much less try to surrender on acceptable terms.




Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

Well, no. MacArthur and Leahy made their judgments about the bombs years later.

MacArthur even complained that he was never even told about the bombs until after they were dropped.

They couldn't have told Truman without having use of a time machine.

And Ike's claim was that he told Stimson, not Truman (nevermind that his claim has been totally discredited by historians).

These are basic facts that even a first year history student would get right.

The fact that these two clowns can't even get basic facts right pretty much demolishes any possibility that they are real historians.




"Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan," says Selden. Truman was also worried that he would be accused of wasting money on the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bombs, if the bomb was not used, he adds.

They can repeat their discredited claims all they want, but they remain nothing but discredited claims.




Kuznick and Selden's arguments, however, were dismissed as "discredited" by Lawrence Freedman, a war expert from King's College London, UK.

Exactly.

I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on.

That is incorrect. People who were not alive and present in the city (or fetuses in the womb of someone present in the city) when the bomb exploded, did not suffer any from the radiation.




It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land.

Maybe with a groundburst.

But we used airbursts, with little in the way of local fallout.




The same can be said for some of the weapons and armory they have used and are currently using in Iraq and in Afghanistan which involve depleted uranium. Leads to ongoing contamination of land and people.

DU would provide some mild contamination in the area directly around destroyed tanks, and those areas should be cleaned up, but the hazard is really minimal.

"Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb."

macarthur?the one who wanted to nuke china?

An old friend of my, a nuclear engineer insisted that Atomic bomb is one thing as an object, and nuclear (nucleus) is something else altogether, since it relates to the science. But hey, don’t let me distract you from your concept. Even CNN refers to it alternatively to nuclear bomb, …I think!

"Atomic weapon" or "A-bomb" refers to those weapons that rely on fission only.

"Boosted A-bomb" refers to weapons that are nearly 100% fission, but contain a very small amount of fusion.

"Thermonuclear weapon" or "H-bomb" refers to those bombs that have a significant amount of self-sustaining fusion.

Nuclear refers to all of the above.

You are talking like a US general whose task is to give the best solution to destroy the enemy. Bombing Hiroshima & Nagasaki is a political decision when another option was available for the decision makers - negotiated surrender of the enemy.

Negotiated surrender was not an acceptable option.

Would one of you Nukems please explain why the USA needed to invade and occupy Japan after Imperial Japan (including their offensive capability, war production, offensive capability, dreams of conquest, etc.) was utterly broken, which had already occured before the WMDs were unleashed.

The invasion would have come about if they had refused to surrender (or even if they had tried to surrender, but not on acceptable terms).

It is easy to look back in hindsight and not worry about Japan surrendering, but at the time the bombs were dropped, we had no idea what would make the Japanese government break their deadlock and make a surrender offer, much less make a surrender offer on acceptable terms.

What is terrorism?

"Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby - in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought"

http://www.unodc.org/unodc/terrorism_definitions.html




Was Hiroshima terrorism?

No.

It could well have been a war crime though.




According to the definitions of terrorism that would hold blameless the Governments of the USA, Russia, the UK, Israel and France, reckless collateral damage is not terrorism. Even if the reckless collateral damage occurs in a bombing campaign intended to demoralize the opposition political leadership the reckless collateral damage will not be considered terrorism so long as each intended target was chosen as a military or economic target.

Israel would tell you that when Palestinians kill Israelis it is terrorism because only on-duty soldiers are legitimate military targets and the suicide bombers are targeting civilians. When Israeli soldiers routinely but accidentally kill two or more Palestinian noncombatant Palestinian noncombatant civilians for every Palestinian fighter or terrorist they kill that is not terrorism because they were not targeting the noncombatants.

If for a destructive act to be terrorism it is required that the intent to use the creation of the emotion of terror as a tool towards achieving a political goal must be present then we can argue that genocide is not terrorism when it's intent is to eradicate a people rather than to influence the political decisions of the people's leaders. Reckless collateral damage is not terrorism because it's intent is to kill combatants even if little effort is made to avoid killing noncombatants. During the Vietnam war between one and two million people (probably half or more of those killed in the war) were civilian noncombatants unintentionally killed the United States military as collateral damage during attempts by the US military to kill and destroy VC and North Vietnamese fighters and supply infrastructure.

Yes.




The American dropping of the Nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly was an act of terrorism on a monumental scale. I can find no way in which the targeting of a civilian population for the purpose of creating a terror that would then change the political decisions of the Japanese leaders could be considered anything other than terrorism.

Incorrect. The acts were not conducted by clandestine agents.

It may have been a war crime, but it wasn't terrorism.

How could Japan have resuscitated her empire? They were sent packing from the rest of Asia. I really don't understand how they could have rebuilt another imperial fleet, invaded, and administered a new empire after their military, economic, and moral defeat, which really was complete before the nuclear attacks (do you admint this?).

The same way Germany did after WWI.




Of course we're speaking in conjecture, but it doesn't seem to rise sufficiently in justification of nuclear attacks: There were other means for containing a potential Imperial resurgence.

The nuclear attacks were not meant to directly contain a resurgence. They were meant to shock Japan into accepting surrender terms that would allow the prevention of such a resurgence.

May 11, 1945 (http://www.chinamarines.com/docs/bomb.htm)

More background here: Was It Necessary? (http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm)

There is ample reliable evidence to show that no drawn-out quaranteen (as Clockwood contends), blockade, standoff, cold war, etc. etc. was likely in any event. Reason: Japan was already on her knees when the USA went nuclear.

Hindsight. This was not so apparent at the time the bombs were actually dropped.




It was over. but Truman and his cabinet wanted something I can't quite put my finger on (revenge? scare Stalin? a test?)

Surrender. What they wanted was for Japan to surrender.




the men who authorized the attacks knew that Japan's fate was already decided with or without the nuclear option.

Yes, but they didn't know whether it would take a bloody invasion to seal that fate, and they took every shot they could at shocking Japan into surrender, just so they could avoid the invasion if possible.

oralloy

So, specializing on overworking other people’s thoughts,
What about some originality from your part? :rolleyes:

oralloy

So, specializing on overworking other people’s thoughts,
What about some originality from your part? :rolleyes:

Overworking other people's thoughts???

At any rate, I came here to set the record straight on the A-bombings, and that involves sticking to established historical facts, not creativity.

I like what you are doing Oralloy. I so prefer thinking threads to flame threads. In a thread that stays exactly on topic there is quickly nothing new to be said and no deepening of understanding. Microzoft has been possessive of this thread that he/she started with other people and not just you. I would have thought that Microzoft would have been happy that you were reviving the thread.




Incorrect. The acts were not conducted by clandestine agents.

It may have been a war crime, but it wasn't terrorism.

Can you think of any way in which the distinction between Terrorism and War Crimes benefits humanity?

I don't like the official definition of terrorism because:

1. I hate hypocrisy and to me politically (or any kind of motivated) motivated
deaths and suffering are all morally equal regardless of whether they are collateral damage, war crimes, genocide, or terrorism. Death and suffering caused - death and suffering averted = the moral value of an action. The problem is you can never know what death and suffering an act has averted. America claims death and suffering averted by Hiroshima but we don't know. America claims net death and suffering averted by the demolition of Fallujah and in this case the US is probably wrong. Bin Laden claims net death and suffering will be averted by 9-11 via the reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reactions to 9-11 and Bin Laden is almost surely wrong. The Spanish Inquisition would say that they were eliminating future suffering in hell by forcibly "purifying" Spain and they were beyond a reasonable doubt wrong. Death and suffering is death and suffering and to pretend what kind of death and suffering some act caused matters is hypocrisy.

2. I want the world to move beyond the competing nation state phase of human history because this competition cause deaths and suffering both directly from violent competition and indirectly by using up human creative resources that could be used to solve the problems caused by the side effects of material prosperity and increased population. The distinction between the various political acts that directly cause death and suffering enables the continuation of competing nation states by giving the competion a veil of righteousness under which to hide the competition's true vicious Darwinian animal nature.

3. Terrorism has replaced communism as the bogeyman with which to scare the masses of clueless voters into going along with a political programs that do not serve them. Three thousand Americans died on 9-11 but more than three thousand Americans die every year from drunk driving. Bush did not have a prayer of being re-elected had 9-11 not happened.

It would be harder to use the idea of terrorism in this way if collateral damage was also terrorism. Collateral damage and genocide and selective political killings by national governments trying to squash dissent have each killed thousands of times more people than terrorism has. But the UN definition of protects Bush from being accused of terrorism. Only the losers of wars get accused of War Crimes. Milosevic and soon Saddam will be charged with war crimes but why does the Suharto regime get a pass for what they did in East Timor? Anybody can be called a terrorist so long as they don't work for a UN Member State but War criminals can only be war criminals if they do not have a friendly relationship with the US government. When Saddam gassed the Kurds Saddam could not be a war criminal or even be sanctioned by the UN because he had a friendly relationship with the USA. Now that the friendship has ended Saddam must be prosecuted as a war criminal because he gassed the Kurds. So war Criminal is a useless term.

4. If only the weak are terrorists and terrorism and assasination are the only bad types of violece then the grievances of the weak need not be considered. My hoped for Utopia can never happen if the strong refuse to be aware of the grievances of the weak. If collateral damage is OK then we members of the strong need never feel guilty about how we keep the weak obedient and therefore we strong need never know if we are stealing from the weak. I own stock in Chevron which buys politicians and uses those politicians to steal from the weak (Nigerians).

I don't want the worlds poor majority to be able to vote themself access to my money or the money of the world's other wealthier people but beyond that democracy is best and the weak majority must be heard. The terrorists may be extreme in the method by which they try to get our attention but they got that way from a unmet desperation to be heard and have justice. I have yet to see a terrorist movement that did not have some just grievances against the strong.

Why is it that assination is a taboo method of the use of violence but war that kills thousands of powerless people is ok. This culture and the UN definition of terrorism is semi-consciously designed to protect those in power and to keep powerless thos who are not in power.

If all political violence was called terrorism we would be less confused.

.................................................. ..............................................

So, unless you can you think of any way in which the distinction between Terrorism and War Crimes benefits humanity, Hiroshima was terrorism.

Well first off all the Japanese almost didnt surrender, even after the bombs. Their was an attempted coup (that thankfully failed).

You do also realize that more people died in Tokyo of conventional bombing (300,000+).

At the same token you cannot throw in the "poor civilians" arguement when the Japanese veiwed the other asain cultures as inferior and subsequently brutalized them at all oppertunities (Rape of Nanking anyone? 1,000,000 deaths...)

Far more people would have died if we had invaded.

Where is the "I hate Stalin, he killed 50,000,000 people" thread? Why is it always BAD AMERICA around here?

Where is the "I hate Stalin, he killed 50,000,000 people" thread? Why is it always BAD AMERICA around here?

It's the "dog bites man is not a story but man bites dog is a story" syndrome.

Talking about Stalin killing millions of people is like talking about the sky being blue. Nobody debates the viciousness of Stallin. Exactly where on the spectrim of moral righteousness the behavior of the USA government falls is a matter upon which reasonable people have wildly different opinions.




If the next door neighbor tells a mom that her beloved son little Johnny was throwing stones at the retarded kid does the mother yell at the neighbor? Some moms would.

If the mother asks little Johnny if he was throwing stones at the retarded kid and Johnny says I was only throwing acorns the other kids were throwing big rocks, then does the information that the other kids were throwing rocks change how mom feels about her son throwing acorns at the retarded kid?




I don't have an opinion on whether the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were beneficial or harmful events. It's to hard to say what would have happened had the nuclear weapons not been used. The impact of the use of the weapons on the Soviet Union and China can not be taken out of the moral calculations but we can't know how that played out. The use of those nuclear weapons is still having and will continue to have an impact on the thinking of the world's leaders but we don't know what kind of impact.

I do have an agenda to not give the USA or other big powers a free pass on their use of violence because that free pass would hinder the long term move towards all of the world's humans cooperating to make a better world for the future generations of all of the world's humans.

oralloy: "Surrender. What they wanted was for Japan to surrender"

Yes, I understand. The kernel of this debate is whether the nuclear attacks where necessary to achieve Japanese surrender. Please read the link provided in the quote that you posted of mine. It isn't a long or difficult read, and it explains how Japanese surrender was inevitable even before the nuclear attacks.

Here is the link again. (http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm)

Or read further into the documents referenced in the summary I linked:


"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

-United States Strategic Bombing Survey, circa 1946 (http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm)

The SBS linked just above also provides background on the comprehensive destruction of Imperial Japan's offensive capabilities, sufficient to rebuild her shattered empire, destruction that was already accomplished prior to the nuclear attacks.

...and it explains how Japanese surrender was inevitable even before the nuclear attacks.

Yeah, if we'd kept fighting and dying ...perhaps!

But is that what you'd want? ...for Americans and allies to keep on fighting and dying? How many allied deaths would you (or others) have accepted as "permissible" or "acceptable"? (I noticed that the links you provided didn't answer that question either! ...and besides, it's just the opinion of the authors, nothing really proven)

Baron Max

Please read the links, Baron. The point of my repeated references is that the Japanese Empire was destroyed before we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was over because Japan had no offensive capability remaining that could conceivably threaten the South Pacific again. Japan was cut off from the resources needed to function as a nation. The Japanese Empire had been rolled up, the homeland was isolated, the war was over, and capitulation was assured- Before the nuclear attacks.

Now, you can keep repeating the invasion bromides, or you can address the documents I have referenced in support of my argument.

Again, Hype, all ye're givin' me is the opinion of a few historians! YOU might call those "facts", but they aren't facts ...they're opinions! And if you can't tell the differences, then I feel damned sorry for you. History, almost all of it, is opinion ...and what is not opinion is usually biased factual info and leaving out what doesn't fit well into the book!!

Get real! Just because you can cite a few links on the Internet is not going to be a sure way of getting the correct info. Please think about it some, okay?

Baron Max

It's a strange game of denial you are playing, Baron. You seem to be dismissing the very concepts of shared human knowledge and experience of any kind. Even science must work through subjectivity, even as the impossible but worthy goal is to transcend it.

"Get real! Just because you can cite a few links on the Internet is not going to be a sure way of getting the correct info. Please think about it some, okay?"

I have. That's why I'm writing you this. I do not cite references only for my own review. I cite them in hope that you too will give them some thought. You see, without pointing to experience, however subjective, people have nothing whatever to share with each other intellectually.

While I rarely declare them as "facts" as you insist that I have, could you please refer to the information I have taken the trouble to offered in your rebuttals? Or please offer some evidence supporting your contentions. That would offer our discussions here much more in terms of furthering our mutual understanding.

If on the other hand, you truly believe that nothing can be learned from history and political discourse, and if you are truly of the opinion that subjectivity removes all validity from the communication of human experience, then it would be more fitting for you to stick to much more superficial communications than these. Surely there is a forum somewhere where you can appropriately assert that history and politics are irrelevant. It seems to me that such conviction would leave one with very little to do or say about anything.

But around here, and in the most respectful and fruitful of literal interchanges, many of us do take some time to back up our perspectives by tabling appropriate examples: Perspectives on reality gathered up in the eyes and minds of others through duplicated words, sounds, and pictures. These are indeed subjective, but very commonly share something that most people can relate to and apply with just a little intellectual effort.

So please participate, and I'll be glad to hear you out, Baron Max. I would in fact be very interested in some background information as an example of what has been formative in your opinions regarding this topic and others.

On this specific subject, please provide background on how Japan could have revived her empire, had the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not transpired.

Please provide some detailed, reasonable, and logical explanation of exactly why an American invasion of the Japanese mainland (absent nuclear attacks) was imperative for the interests of the United States, considering the ruined state of the Japanese economy and industry in 1945.

Surely there are sources of information supporting these premises that you can find, or an explanation of how you have arrived at such an opinion, if you hold it. Links would be the most convenient way in which you could allow me to also read the facts/opinions/inuendo/analysis that support your position. Cheers!

It seems silly to be arguing about a decision made 60 years ago in an entirely different context from that of today.

First let me say that I have contempt for politicians and believe that almost all of them make decisions based on their desire to win the next election. However, Truman seems to have been one of the very few (maybe the only one besides Churchill) in this century who seemed to call them based on what he thought was right.

Those who disagree with the decision to drop the A-Bomb on Japan are second guessing a decision made in a context unknown to them. Consider the following.Most considered the attack on Pearl harbor an insidious sneak attack, due to it occurring while Japanese diplomats were discussing peaceful settlements of Japanese aggression in the Western Pacific. Frankly, I think that war is not a sport with referees and rules, so I did not consider it any worse than formally declaring war and attacking Pearl Harbor a few hours later.


The Japanese were known to have committed some atrocities in their conduct of the war (EG: The Rape of Nanking and their treatment of American prisoners). While propaganda PR might have resulted in some exaggerations, there was a lot of valid evidence to support the accusations.



In the late stages of the war, there were Kamikaze attacks on American ships by some pilots who voluntarily committed suicide and by some who were reported to have been chained in the cockpit, with no way to escape the plane and with insufficient fuel to return to their base. The Kamikaze attacks coupled with the known Japanese cultural attitude toward suicide rather than losing face strongly suggested that they would fanatically defend their homeland.


At the time, nuclear weapons were brand new, never before used, and viewed as merely being more efficient than conventional weapons. I Am not sure that this is an incorrect view of them. If you are willing to kill huge numbers of people in a war, is there really an ethical difference between doing it nuclear weapons compared to doing it with bullets, flame throwers, or rusty knives?

Today nuclear weapons and even nuclear power plants seem to cause some form of hysteria among many people. Such was not the case in 1945.Perhaps the decision was wrong, although I do not think so. Considering the context, it surely seemed like a good idea at the time.

As far as I am concerned, the worst effect it had was to give America haters some ammunition to support their view of us. On that basis, I would advise against the decision if I had a time machine and access to Truman.

BTW: I wonder how many vicious regimes would have used nuclear weapons in the last 60 years if they were the only ones with such weapons? While it would have been dangerous for us to use them against the USSR, we could have used them without fear of retaliation against others. I think we have used admirable restraint in this regard.

Well said, Dinosaur:

"It seems silly to be arguing about a decision made 60 years ago in an entirely different context from that of today.

...the worst effect it had was to give America haters some ammunition to support their view of us. On that basis, I would advise against the decision if I had a time machine and access to Truman.

It seems to me you came full circle there. The United States is presently on a belligerent footing, demanding the last word in who possesses WMDs, and launching profound policy changes justified with ill-corroborated accusations over foreign nuclear capabilities.

Our track record with nuclear weapons renders the USA forever vulnerable as a respected and effective authority in these matters. The shock waves from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still resonating with every confrontation the USA initiates over a weaker country suspected of developing such weapons. We cannot reconcile our ethical justifications for the nuclear frying of two cities of an already-defeated empire with our objections to the ambitions of weaker nations to also hold this fearsome deterrent.

Get real! Just because you can cite a few links on the Internet is not going to be a sure way of getting the correct info. Please think about it some, okay?

Baron Max

I havent seen you cite ONE link to back up your opinion. If that because there arent any? Stop complaining and counter act with what you think are real facts, ones to make your opinion any more worthy than those people provided.

I havent seen you cite ONE link to back up your opinion.

Show me where I've expressed my opinion?? I've mostly asked pointed questions of others who've stated THEIR opinions. You've simply read into my posts what you THINK I'm saying, not what I said.


Stop complaining and counter act with what you think are real facts, ...

I don't know any facts! Y'all seem to be the ones who'll believe most anything that's written - especially if it's bad about the USA. I just sit here and read your posts and ...well, mostly laugh.


... make your opinion any more worthy than those people provided.

I mostly don't give my opinions on issues.

Baron Max

Show me where I've expressed my opinion?? I've mostly asked pointed questions of others who've stated THEIR opinions. You've simply read into my posts what you THINK I'm saying, not what I said.

a list of opinion:
http://www.sciforums.com/search.php?searchid=391518



I don't know any facts! Y'all seem to be the ones who'll believe most anything that's written - especially if it's bad about the USA. I just sit here and read your posts and ...well, mostly laugh.

If you dont know any facts, what gives you the authority to call the facts provided as nonsence?



I mostly don't give my opinions on issues.

But often, when you disagree with someone, your expressing your opinion. Everytime you question their motives you express some opinion. Everytime you call someones facts lies, you are stating that you hold facts that prove theirs to be wrong.

I do agree with you, often its biased bullshit used for their own accord, and not to express the truth, but you have to hold more creditable information to know that its a lie.

If you dont know any facts, what gives you the authority to call the facts provided as nonsence?

I don't call them nonsense ...but no one can or ever has explained how they know that one "fact" is true, while another that refutes that same "fact" is false. How do YOU know what article to believe????


But often, when you disagree with someone, your expressing your opinion. Everytime you question their motives you express some opinion.

Well, if you think questioning other's opinions as expressing ones own opinion, then...?


I do agree with you, often its biased bullshit used for their own accord, and not to express the truth, but you have to hold more creditable information to know that its a lie.

??? "...you have to hold more creditable information...."?? What's that mean? How do you know what's credible info in the first place? Please tell me, then I, too, can have opinions!

Baron Max

I don't call them nonsense ...but no one can or ever has explained how they know that one "fact" is true, while another that refutes that same "fact" is false. How do YOU know what article to believe????

I dont beleive any single article, I try to mix the two sides and derive somthing that seems right to my perception of the world.




Well, if you think questioning other's opinions as expressing ones own opinion, then...?

It is though.



??? "...you have to hold more creditable information...."?? What's that mean? How do you know what's credible info in the first place? Please tell me, then I, too, can have opinions!

It dosnt have to be credible info, but you need to hold what you personally think is the "true" information to discredit theirs. then it all goes as normal and everyone starts insulting eachother, and complaining, The wonders of debate :)

..., I try to mix the two sides and derive somthing that seems right to my perception of the world.

So if I do the same thing and end up with a different "what's right" than yours, then what?

I would also ask how and where you arrived at your "perception of the world"? Your parents? Your schools? Your friends? Books?


...but you need to hold what you personally think is the "true" information ...

So ....how do you know what is "true"? Where did you find this "truth"?

I would also caution you that debate isn't all it's cracked up to be. If two people are debating an issue and one side "wins", that ain't no good reason to believe that what he says is true. They could both be wrong!

I can see, by your answer here and on the other thread, that you don't know how to know what is true, either .......yet, unlike me, you've made up your mind even without knowing!

Baron Max

locked

While we are at it lets be real, the only reason the united states was at war with japan was because the united states the white racist nation was acting to protect intrest in the drug trade
DwayneD.L.Rabon


Funny i thought they went to war over the pearl harbour attack, but every luna eclipse is entitled to ther opinion, right luna.

So if I do the same thing and end up with a different "what's right" than yours, then what?

I would also ask how and where you arrived at your "perception of the world"? Your parents? Your schools? Your friends? Books?

Ye thats a good question, and unfortunately thats exactly what happens around here and everywhere, no one beleives eachothers perceptions of the world because their all different, and everyone always chooses media sources that apply to their own agenda. I probably arrived at my perception of the world from traveling too much :p .




So ....how do you know what is "true"? Where did you find this "truth"?

Oh I havent been able to find truth, no one has, or will. But I can try?


I would also caution you that debate isn't all it's cracked up to be. If two people are debating an issue and one side "wins", that ain't no good reason to believe that what he says is true. They could both be wrong!

Exactly!


I can see, by your answer here and on the other thread, that you don't know how to know what is true, either .......yet, unlike me, you've made up your mind even without knowing!

Oh no, Ive made my mind up by comparing direct source to popular media, and realising that the popular media was telling me bullshit. So now I just discredit the media that lied to me before.

locked

Well Vincent28 UK,
Given your name i take it that your english, and given your own countries log of records and petitions, relvant to the war, it should be obvious that the drug lobby of england was centered on the distribution of drugs from asia to europe and that it was a major trade at the time. Not just so in WW2 but also in WW1, as in World war one the the first tension of the war was drug trade on the black sea, paticularly one vessel on the black sea full of opium that was hijacked, and which cargo was claimed by english drug lords. so there you have it the first spark of WW1.
As drug trade played a intial role in WW1 it also played the intial spark role in the pacific war, as japan furthured its campagin to eliminate the problems of china, it also spead out to india crippling the english drug trade, it is on petetion of the english drug lobby to parliment of england that the english goverment requested assitance from the U.S.A and as a result the USA sent fighter pioltes to south china to protect the drug routers from japanese bombers planes, this resulted in the japanese attacking Peral Harbor causeing the Pacific war.
It is well document histroy in the US for those willing to look at, we can read the presidents own wrods in issueing the troops to go to asia to carry out the task, but even before the president records where made public, there where the piolts who told there story of what happened and thier books, they where never given war benifits ect... and so complained about the alienation, finally the US goverment has acknowledged there role in the war, Cleary prior public acknowledgement would have reavealed to the american public that the US was started a war with japan which resulted in many americans dying for the drug trade.
Since know almost all the responsible parties are dead from old age they can not be called on to beheld accountable ect.... and so such goverment documents are know out for people to read. regardless it is a american leagcy to have fought in the war, to be a war vetern a survior of a major war in the pacific and so america is proud of it, regardless if it was for drug dealers that their children and brothers and freinds died for.

DwayneD.L.Rabon

Man your deep

about as deep as the puddle i just stepped in, while walking with my laptop.
you know alot about drugs, are you a user or a supplier?

"alienation"

U>F>O where aliens, i think you should stick to using the tin foil for your coke, and take it off your head.

locked

Can you think of any way in which the distinction between Terrorism and War Crimes benefits humanity?

No, but the distinction exists nonetheless.




I don't like the official definition of terrorism because:

1. I hate hypocrisy and to me politically (or any kind of motivated) motivated
deaths and suffering are all morally equal regardless of whether they are collateral damage, war crimes, genocide, or terrorism. Death and suffering caused - death and suffering averted = the moral value of an action.

Society tends to put a great deal of emphasis on the motive of a given killing. For instance, what is the difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter?




2. I want the world to move beyond the competing nation state phase of human history because this competition cause deaths and suffering both directly from violent competition and indirectly by using up human creative resources that could be used to solve the problems caused by the side effects of material prosperity and increased population. The distinction between the various political acts that directly cause death and suffering enables the continuation of competing nation states by giving the competion a veil of righteousness under which to hide the competition's true vicious Darwinian animal nature.

I'll have to see the world adopt the Second Amendment before I'll agree to the United States ceding any real authority to a global government.




It would be harder to use the idea of terrorism in this way if collateral damage was also terrorism. Collateral damage and genocide and selective political killings by national governments trying to squash dissent have each killed thousands of times more people than terrorism has.

Presuming the term is being accurately, collateral damage isn't even a crime.

Genocide is worse than terrorism, considering the motive.

Terrorism is roughly equivalent to crimes against humanity when it comes to severity.




Anybody can be called a terrorist so long as they don't work for a UN Member State but War criminals can only be war criminals if they do not have a friendly relationship with the US government. When Saddam gassed the Kurds Saddam could not be a war criminal or even be sanctioned by the UN because he had a friendly relationship with the USA. Now that the friendship has ended Saddam must be prosecuted as a war criminal because he gassed the Kurds. So war Criminal is a useless term.

The fact that war criminals often get away with their crimes doesn't make it useless to have a term (like "war crime") to refer to their actions.




So, unless you can you think of any way in which the distinction between Terrorism and War Crimes benefits humanity, Hiroshima was terrorism.

The definition of terrorism does not require a lack of benefit for humanity.

In fact, acts can be terrorist even if they do benefit humanity.

Hiroshima fails the terrorism definition on more than the non-governmental aspect. For it to be terrorism, civilians would have to have been the target of the bomb, and they weren't.

Had civilians been the target, Hiroshima would have been a crime against humanity, which is roughly the same as terrorism on a moral level.

oralloy: "Surrender. What they wanted was for Japan to surrender"

Yes, I understand. The kernel of this debate is whether the nuclear attacks where necessary to achieve Japanese surrender. Please read the link provided in the quote that you posted of mine. It isn't a long or difficult read, and it explains how Japanese surrender was inevitable even before the nuclear attacks.

Here is the link again. (http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm)

I already realize that Japan would have surrendered anyway. However, there is another important fact that is important to the debate: the US did not realize that the bombings weren't necessary at the time they actually happened.


The page has the important details right, but it neglects to point out that the MAGIC intercepts indicated that the military faction of the Japanese government did not back the Emperor's move to have the Soviets mediate negotiations until August 2nd.

Regardless, it correctly describes the situation from August 2nd up through the two A-bombs:

"Unfortunately for all concerned, Japan's leaders were divided over precisely what terms should be sought to end the war, with the Japanese military leaders still wishing to avoid anything that the Allies would have considered a clear 'surrender'."


The knowledge that Japan was "interested in a surrender but was deadlocked over how many terms to ask of us" was not nearly enough to halt the A-bombs. We had no idea how long that deadlock was going to last. For all Truman knew, the deadlock would last indefinitely.

And also important was the fact that we had no intention of anything other than unconditional acceptance of our terms.


Now, when the deadlock broke on August 10, and Japan offered to surrender just with a guarantee for their Emperor, Truman did delay the next bomb for three days.

But they were about a week away from getting hit with the third A-bomb when they came to their senses and accepted our terms unconditionally.




The SBS linked just above also provides background on the comprehensive destruction of Imperial Japan's offensive capabilities, sufficient to rebuild her shattered empire, destruction that was already accomplished prior to the nuclear attacks.

The Strategic Bombing Survey was a work of Air Force propaganda to try to convince Congress to give them more funding in an era of rapidly-shrinking post-war defense budgets.

The gist of their claim was that conventional air power would have won WWII alone, and thus should get the lion's share of future defense funding.

locked

I think the point he was trying to make is that nuclear bombs don't affect just one generation. Radiation poisoning and the general effects of radiation on a body can be passed on to the next generation and so on.

So why aren't radiation effects passed on to the children of Japanese A-bomb survivors?




It also affects and destroys the land, ensuring that merely living on the land that has been bombed will also result in lasting damage to not just crops but people who live on said land and eat the produce grown on the affected land. In short, it contaminates not just the people for generations but also the land.

Only if dangerous levels of fallout contaminate it.




The same can be said for some of the weapons and armory they have used and are currently using in Iraq and in Afghanistan which involve depleted uranium. Leads to ongoing contamination of land and people.

It is said of the DU we use in Iraq, but it is not said with any accuracy. The radiation is minimal.

There wasn't much call for DU use in Afghanistan.

So why aren't radiation effects passed on to the children of Japanese A-bomb survivors?

They did. Why do you think the Japanese are so smart? The radiation turned em into human mutants that made their brains grow so large! Same reason why Russian Chernobyl hackers are so good. :p

- N

So why aren't radiation effects passed on to the children of Japanese A-bomb survivors?


um...there are still children born with serious birth defects as a result of those bombs.

The Devil Inside, The studies do not support your statement, there were a certain amount of birth defects immediately after the bombs were dropped, of children who were in the 3rd -4th months of gestation, but they can not find any provable long term effect one children conceived after the war.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/09/06/stories/08060003.htm


When the bombs were dropped, these cities had an estimated population of 310,000 and 250,000 respectively. About 90,000- 140,000 in Hiroshima and 60,000- 80,000 people in Nagasaki died immediately or within two to four months after bombing, resulting from collapse of houses caused by the blast and from heat rays and fires and radiation exposure. In the 1950 Japanese national census, nearly 280,000 persons stated that they "had been exposed" in the two cities.

On November 18, 1946 Harry Truman authorised the National Research Council to establish an agency "to undertake a long range, continuing study of the biological and medical effects of the atomic bomb on man". This organisation grew into the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). ABCC continued to work till 1975 when Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) was set up as a bi-national endeavour.

Physicians appointed by ABCC examined 76,626 infants conceived and born in Hiroshima and Nagasaki over a period of six years starting from the late spring of 1948. The researchers did not see statistically demonstrable increase in major birth defects in these infants. While the survey started, certain dietary staples were rationed in Japan. Pregnant women had special provisions. Because of this, the surveyors of new-borns could identify 90 per cent of the pregnancies that persisted for at least 20 weeks of gestation.

Then how can we presume that human genes are not mutable when exposed to ionising radiation? The magnitude of a difference between two or more groups that can be detected statistically depends upon the number of observations made and on the "natural" frequency of the event under scrutiny as well as the difference between the groups resulting from exposure. The RERF study had the statistical power to detect a doubling of the rate of major congenital malformations, if such defects had occurred. The need for prudence is obvious.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~copeland/atomicbomb.html


Scientists, however, were relentless in their pursuit of identifying some type of genetic effect on offspring. In 1969, a third phase to the genetic study was initiated, focusing on congenital defects, malignancy incidence, birth weight, and neonatal mortality (Neel 7). The study continued until 1990, and, although no consistent findings suggested of an effect of parental exposure on birth weight, neonatal mortality, or increased malignancies in the children, a distinction between children born in utero from those conceived after the bombings, was apparent (Neel 178, 190, 397). Such observation led to the hypothesis that although radiation may not cause defects in future progeny, perhaps children conceived before the bombs hit do show increased mutative effects.
Stages of embryogenesis are sensitive to radiation, and therefore, although not being gene-based, varying degrees of teratogenic, or in utero, defects can occur. Generally, these defects lead to spontaneous abortion. In both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, however, analyses have shown that the probability of severe mental retardation is strongly associated with the degree to which the mother was exposed to radiation. Women exposed to radiation during the third and fourth month of gestation appear to deliver children particularly prone to brain damage, and often have anatomical malformations like facial clefts or too many fingers and toes. On the other hand, embryos in other stages of development do not exhibit such deformities. Among the 800 in utero survivors included in the study’s population, twenty-one severely mentally retarded individuals were identified (“Growth...).
In the late 1950’s, IQ tests and data on school performance were collected from in utero survivors. Researchers concluded that radiation exposure had a negative impact on both outcomes; survivors had an IQ loss of approximately five points, and performed at a decreased level in school (“Growth…). This result is supported by the apparent decreased level of intelligence seen in large portions of the generation born during the first years after the war (Neel 344).

um...there are still children born with serious birth defects as a result of those bombs.

No there aren't.

http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/radefx/genetics/birthdef.htm

Well, there were military targets at Hiroshima and Nagasaki mixed in with all those civilians. Those civilians would certainly have been known to the military planners of the day, and considered, and ruled as irrelevant in warfare as it was then being waged. Perhaps had there been zero military targets, those cities would not have been targeted. It appears the primary purpose was to show the Japanese military the awesome power of the new Allied weapon to 'shock' them into surrender to save Allied lives for the planned invasion of the Japanese islands (and I have friends who were in the waiting and training for the invasion, expecting to die during the invasion, only to be sent home immediately after the A-bombs). The secondary purpose was to destroy military targets. It was believed that the Japanese would quickly surrender if major cities were hit, and that belief was proven correct.

Whether or not that qualifies as 'terrorism' is anyone's 'guess'. All the Allied governments and all the Axis governments were engaged in similar acts (fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo by the Allieds, London V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs by the Germans and siege of Stalingrad by the Germans, Rape of Nanking by the Japanese, etc.). Nuclear bombs eliminated the distinction between 'dirty' warfare and 'clean' warfare.

So, where is this thread leading - - back to the current mini-wars being engaged by proxies?

It would be timely for it to lead to a discussion of the proposition that the United States possess the unilateral authority to (directly or by proxy) enforce selective weapons bans worldwide.

This is the issue that the Bush Administration is persistently pushing, and recklessly wagering a vast multitude of lives on.