mike2h

for those of you who think the atom bombs dropped on japan were somehow 'wrong' - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7858855/ .
this does not even brin into account their starting a awar in violation of accepted international policy or their numerous war crime violations.

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mkk

I'm a firm believer that it was "very wrong" indeed. At the same time I largely understand how the mind on how wars could be waged changed through the years of the WW2 conflict. Terror bombing civilians had become commonplace long before so why not do the same with the biggest bombs you can find rather than sending hundreds of planes on a firebombing mission? It sure seemed logical within the logics of war, but even understanding that doesn't make it right to me looking back at history sixty years later. Because terror bombing civilians is not okay today to most of the world, no matter what other casualties could be avoided compared to one other possible scenario.

radTube

What exactly are you saying? That because the Japanese fought back the invasion without regard for their own lives and didn't just give up as soon as they saw the US forces coming, Children in hiroshima still deserve to be born deformed and die of cancer. That's what the article seems to be propose. These bombs were a war crime. Japan did start a war, and a multitude of war criminals have been tried over the years, but no numbers are going to make the deaths of those 100,000+ civilians all right. Even if it was the easy way out for the US.

swatX

yea well if u invade japan you would have million casualties over both sides.

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thx stick for the sig

mike2h

you guys really miss the point. if those 2 bombs would not have been dropped a LOT more japanese civilian & military lives would have been lost. that does not even take into account the massive amount of us lives that would have been lost.
so, according to you two america should have sacrificed thousands of us lives & squandered massive resources to kill even more japanese in a war that japan fought started & fought witout honor.
i am also sure that the people that were killed by the 2 bombs really gave a crap as to how they died. those deaths & the terrible problems that followed saved tens of thousands of japanese lives. let alone american. so in that sense they should be honored & have a memorial.

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radTube

Thats pure bullsh*t. Bombs kill, they don't save lives. It's true that even more civilian lives might have been lost if some other way of warfare had been chosen, but as soon as you claim that those civilian deaths are not a bad thing, you're no better than the average terrorist. As I said, numbers won't make it all right. You can't justify the death of one innocent, let alone thousands of them.

digerati

I won't touch this thread after this because it asks the question.

Is it alright to kill some to save others? Is that justifiable? Is that fair to who is killed?

I don't think any killing other than self defense is justifiable. I see the practicality of dropping the bombs, but in terms of morality, it was an atrocity, and so is war.

Falstaff

If your going to look back into the history that we know today, it almost begs the question whether we should accept popular mythology about nuclear deterence, acceptable losses and eventual outcomes. Hollywood and the Department of Defense would have you believe that an invasion of Japan would have been costly beyond anything we know, and that is true, however the decision to use the bomb was Harry Trumans and he did so on the behest of his military cabinet and advisors. We knew the Russians had penetrated our Atomic program but to what level we couldnt prove in 1944 and 45. What we knew for certain is that the war was costly and lives were sacrificed on all sides to perpetuate an island hopping and blockade philosophy in the pacific. We also knew that Russia would eventually declare war on Japan. Curtis Lemay among others knew the value of aerial bombardment and fire bombing civilian targets, we literally burned the heart out of many Japanese cities. Hollywood and the DOD portrayed the decision to use atomic weapons as a "do or die" proposal, and I believe it for years. But after living Japan for six years and learning about Japanese history from the Japanese, I saw a country that could not survive another year without plunging back into the stone age, an economic wasteland, starving people, overwhelming losses and terribly strangulation of all incoming and outgoing commerce, and a biological and nuclear program that was unsuccessful. Japan was dying and would have succumbed very quickly. No what Truman and his staff and the world wanted was a total and unconditional surrender, and the only way to achieve it was to bring the Emperor and his loyal staff to their knees. Several failed coups attempted to prolong the war in Japan but the government was ready to capitulate well before the first bomb was dropped.
War is a terrible thing, and we now know a series of blunders and perhaps some sabotage of our intelligence machine occured and forced us into war.
I ask you to consider the bombing of Madrid, by the Germans, the bombing of Canterbury and Churchill, and our ineffective anti submarine program in the Atlantic and along our shores, and you tell me what you think? Acceptable losses are often defined by the Winners in a war, and atrocities by the winners as well. But morally I can understand why war is so terrible. but I ask you, what is more terrible? Are the use of Atomic bombs more terrible than say the fire bombing of Japanese cities without a clear strategic target? Or is the terrible genocide of the Jews, or Africans in the Congo worse, and it happened with the knowlege of the free world. Look at Africa now, and you will see a terrible festering sore of corruption, disease and genocide right under your very nose, now that didnt make it into the history books yet did it? I digress, but the point being, that the Nuclear option was borne after both events in Japan, but it ushered in an entire age of nuclear concern and proliferation, thousands died, we won the war so to speak.
But try to find the old lense that we all viewed world events through back in the late forties, look through the cloudy prism and try to see things the way we all did back then, and wonder why we didnt destroy ourselves and invade Russia as well, it might scare you.

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mike2h

are you some sort of buffoon? who said bombs save lives? i said that using the 2 big bombs instead of thousands of smaller bombs & an invasion force saved lives. if you cant see the difference you have issues.
who claimed that that all those civilian deaths was not a bad thing? do you actually read posts or grab what you want out of it & twist it around?
what the hell is an innocent?
whenever 2 countries are at war civilians will die, there is no way to avoid it. some of you bozos running around here have no conception as to what war really is. it is not a friggin video game were you get to pick & chooses who to kill & all the targets are are occupied by military personal. get a grip on reality.
why arent you bitching about the us bombing tokyo, or better yet the thousands of civilians the japanese brutally murdered & performed chemical & biological experiments on in china & other asian countries? what about all the civilians killed in korea, ww2, ww1, & every other war ever? what exactly do you think happens when you get flight after flight of b52s dropping tons of ordinance day after day? i suppose in your fantasy world all those bombs magically hit military targets only & all the explosive damage misses all non military personnel.
you do realise that when countries are at war with each other it is just not the military that is at war but the country itself? this is what makes war as horrific as it is & is one of the main deterrents for going to war. people like you who have lost sight of this fact are a major problem imo.

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Ubergrendle

Watch "The Fog of War". Rober S McNamara (later the US Secretary of Defense under Johnson and Kennedy) who was a lead member of the US Bomber Command, openly states: "We committed war crimes and would have been prosecuted as such if the US had lost the war."

So the argument ends there.

HOWEVER

After fireboming the vast majority of Japanese cities, the Japanese High Command had not yet yielded to US pressure. In retrospect the US only needed to continue firebombing and eventually would have cowed the Japanese government, but at the time their resolve was difficult to gauge. The detonation of the atomic weapons was a sign that "until you provide complete surrender, we will just make this worse and worse and worse for you"... it was the only 'escalation' available after the strategic bombing campaign.

Finally, I believe 'war crimes' have grades of severity... an atomic weapon is more humane (e.g. instant death) in many ways to forced starvation via embargo, campaigns of rape & pillage, chemical weapons, or mass extermination.

WW2 allowed for total war against the population. Although the Japanese did not attack US civilians, they were without mercy against the Chinese, and their allies ther Germans were butchers. The US, while perhaps lacking the absolute 'moral authority' to use an atomic weapon, could rationalise their attack as a 'response' to the terms of warfare declared by the Japanese originally.

In the end, the 2 nukes saved more lives than they took.

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Been to Azeroth, lived there for a year, burned my passport and returned to reality.

mike2h

JEFF.
nice post. not sure about all your facts though. japan would have only been back in the stone age if we had not used the a-bomb. infrastucture- wise they were starting to hurt but finincially they were doing okay as they had been robbing the asian countries of tens of millions in wealth. their reasons & methods for warfare were very similar to germanys. guess thats why they were allied.
history books are not to always be beleived to the letter. you definetly got that right. going along those lines i would be very careful about japanese interpretation of those events. they are still busy rewriting that particular part of history. there is a row gowing between them & china right now because of it. (& i fully realise that we, along with every other country in this world have 'creative' historys in some form or another)
the problem with your statement about japan being ready to capitulate is that they didnt. & we will never know how long that would have taken & how many more lives would have been lost waiting for the suurender. given that you lived over there you should understand how japans honor & self & national 'pride' would interfere in this proccess.
an unconditional surrender was obligatory in this case, given how the war was started & how the japanese waged war as far as treatment of pows & civilians.
the fact we did not destroy ourselves in a war with russia & no nuclear bomb has been dropped since is a very good sign imo.
of course with nuclear proliferation going the way it with the smalle & more 'radical' countries, who knows.

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mike2h

UBERGRENDLE
is that a book or a documentary? i agree with the war cimes severity issue.

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Falstaff

the expression about the stone age is not my characterization but based on personal testimony of so many I have talked to that suvived the war. With rationing measures exhausting the already short supply of what remained, peasants and country people were forced to rely further upon themselves for food and shelter and any other resources, but everything had been dedicated to the war effort.
In fact within the emperial staff and among more conservative japanese members of the war government, surrender with honor was discussed and rejected by more militant and right members of the general staff to include General Tojo. I cannot ask you to understand the postwar mind set regarding how Japan recorded history and what they are producing now, but in fact the Chinese were objecting to the latest versions of text used in japanese schools, it ignores some facts about the invasion and puppet governments in China.
I am compelled to say that most of what I know about postwar Japan was based on the testimony of my Japanese colleagues I worked with in Yokohama and Tokyo, but I would not question their varacity, except to say that they are keenly aware of what the went through, how they suffered and the world view of the Pre and Post war Japanese governments, irrespective of their own personal spins, because many I have spoken to are Nationalists even though they are not officially tolerated by the current government, they do feel as if Japan should rise again, and resume their military posture, albiet without the imperialistic overtones of the 20s and the 30s.

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radTube

Don't you think this is just a bit thick? Who exactly is bitching here? Here's a quote from your opening post in this thread: "for those of you who think the atom bombs dropped on japan were somehow 'wrong'". Is it so hard to see how one might think you were suggesting that dropping those bombs wasn't 'wrong'? Well, that's how I took it and told you my point of view.

The rest of your post (including the multiple personal insults) just doesn't deserve an answer.

BTW, if you don't want to hear differing opinions, you'd better not start threads.

swatX

well you could look at it the other way. If we hadnt done anything about japan in WWII, soviets would have surely invaded Japan and if it was successful in defeating japan , the govt would instantly be turned into a communist one and Japan would have lots of problems and not to mention the innovation that comes from japan ( ic walkman, PS1 etc) would be lost.

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thx stick for the sig