US air strikes kill 140 civilians in Afghanistan, including 93 children

What's even more laughable is that Japan was still inflicting heavy casualties against the US even at the end of the war. The toll by Kamakazi bombers and entrenched Japanese soldiers still fighting on islands in the pacific were staggering.

~String

 

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Yeah, but if we'd have asked them very nicely, they'd have stop doing all those nasty things!

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The historical world of "if" is always fun to play with, ain't it?

Baron Max

 

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Could off-topic posts from 396 forward please be split to an appropriate thread?

 

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Because it didn't matter whether the enemy knew its capabilities or not. In fact, the enemy knowing the Bomb's capabilities is one of its chief strengths and greatest benefits, as a weapon - to the point that showing them its capabilities might have ended the war months earlier.

Its makers knew damn well what it would do.

You surprise murder two cities worth of doctors and schoolchildren, to prove that you can, instead? Note that the US did in fact negotiate some surrender terms - the emperor remained, and some other considerations were agreed. The final surrender was not unimaginably different from what the Japanese were apparently offering months earlier.

I'm just taking the analysts's word for what they said they knew. They knew the rail lines were cut, for example, because they had bombed them and photographed the results.

The Japanese did not know about the Bomb, what do you expect?

And what is so mysterious to you guys about the idea of "negotiation"? The US did not reject any Japanese proposals - the US rejected the offer of negotiation altogether. The initial Japanese demands are irrelevant - one of the first principles of negotiation is to come in high, and everyone knows that.

Germany dropped similar leaflets on London, in the dark days of the Blitz. Leaflets don't mean shit. Threats without backing don't mean shit.

What the Japanese wanted before they knew about the Bomb, when they still had the threat of the cost of invasion or protracted seige as leverage, and what they might have accepted after being presented with the actual situation as known to the US, are two very different things.

The evidence is obvious - the bombing of Hiroshima did not do that much damage to the war effort overall (less than the fire bombing of Tokyo already had), yet it ended the war. Why? Because it presented the Japanese high command with a piece of information they did not have before, when Tokyo and half the cities in Japan were being destroyed: the US had the Bomb.

And the Japanese had many first rate physicists and competent, educated government advisers (so many that there is a faction of Bomb apologists who claim they were making a Bomb of their own, which supposedly excuses Hiroshima). A set of diagrams and a few photos, perhaps if necessary an inspection of one of the completed Bombs by a competent Japanese emissary, would have told the Japanese high command everything they learned from Hiroshima. The US builders certainly knew what they had built, and what it would do. Up until the last few days before Trinity, they were working on calculations to reassure themselves that it would not set the entire atmosphere of the planet on fire. They had refined the Hiroshima design, for Nagasaki, to increase the yield. The nature of the weapon was not hard to understand, for the knowledgable. The US government was spending a large percentage of its total war budget on that "device", because what it would do was obvious to everyone who knew about it.

Now you are laughing at the heavy casualties and enormous cost of those extra months of war, as Truman refused Japanese overtures for negotiations and secretly waited for the Bombs to be built - so he could drop them.

Laugh it up.

The subject of false or refused negotiations used (as pretext or setup hindsight justification) for what would otherwise be atrocity, in furtherance of another agenda, is relevant.

 

You're absolutely right, it's a relevant point- but if someone can't understand it, then it might call for a sidebar, or reference to another thread. And if you disagree and want to discuss my interjection further, we might adjourn to the peer-moderation/self-governance arena of this intelligent community.

Or, it could be that I'm just tiring of thick-headed members here, so lately I've been stupidly picking arguments with the people I respect most, before they disappear. Sorry to throw a wet blanket... Let's just all be friends, and chat with impeccable civility about the latest bright-eyed kids we've killed in Afghanistan, and the thousands sure to follow. Or maybe we could talk about how to make it stop.

 

This is a ridiculous argument, and one put forward by the kooks all the time. Deterrence didn't exist then, and to create it, the bomb, as you alluded to, would have to be demonstrated on some sort of live target (meaning people would have to die in great numbers anyway before the strength was truly known and the frame of reference that continues to this day was known). And the convenient notion that such a demonstration was within US interests and would have been possible, amid a war, is a recent bullshit fantasy created by the Left. And as I already mentioned, this fantasy overlooks the all-important human component.

Not entirely. They had tested it, of course, but it had never been deployed on a city. Certainly, they knew it would do great damage, but the did not know "damn well what it would do."

I do not accept the term "murder," nor your erroneous argument that the US negotiated surrender terms. It dictated them.

String and I are waiting for you to post something that backs this completely erroneous statement up with some facts.

And your adding 60 years worth of hindsight. Oh, sure, the analysts knew some things from aerial reconnaissance, but they didn't know as much as people like to claim. To return to Iwo Jima, for example, the US miscounted the force there and failed to realize how hard it would resist. Intelligence in the Second World War is always a tricky game because it was so much more hit and miss.

Nothing. I just do not think it is called for in this case. Or in the Afghanistan case. You think negotiation is some sort of fix-all for every problem. You also, wrongly, tend to think that both parties are honest brokers with acceptable intentions. And in many cases, you completely fail to grasp the political and military necessities driving the decision not to talk to the other side. This does not surprise me anymore.

You mistake evidence and conclusions, as usual. No one is arguing the evidence we are arguing against your bullshit conclusions, which, typically, seem to be backed by little more than your anti-American bias and your Socialist hot air.

Bullshit. At some point, somewhere, a bomb was going to have to be used by somebody or someone before humans truly grasped the power of the device and became fearful of its use. The bombs dropped in Japan, I believe, exceeded the predictions of the makers.

This is a conclusion you cannot support. Truman was told late in the day about the bomb and has said he was not certain he would deploy it until almost the 11th hour. Once again, you are making claims you cannot begin to support -- all because they support your warped view.

Please. Enlighten us on that agenda. I can't wait.

 

I'm not saying anything that wasn't being said at the time, and absolutely no hindsight is involved - the situation as it was understood at the time by the US high command, according to their own accounts, is assumed.

The key fact: the US refused negotiations, and kept the Bomb a secret. The people who wave their hands and speculate that such negotiations would have been inevitably fruitless, and the Bomb unpersuasive unless dropped on a city full of civilians - and then, quickly, another one - need to find some support for what appear to be lame excuses resting on either nonsense (the only choices were Hiroshima or invasion, the Japanese high command were universally and fanatically blind to reality, etc) or hindsight evaluations of the net benefits (many fewer died compared to the imagined consequences of the hypothetical responses of the Japanese to the possible course of negotiations otherwise).

Impeccable civility is I hope compatible with acidic reference? -we are all, here, mere pixels - and in any case not the dominant tone of my ( at least) context here.

Eventually, the flailing and futile attempts to justify the (long-planned) surprise bombing of Hiroshima cannot help but display parallels to similar justifications for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, drone rocketings of farmhouses and aerial bombardment of cities - or at least, there it is.