RiverDog wrote:Aren't you the one that told us, perhaps correctly so, that sanctions wouldn't work against Russia in their invasion of Ukraine? And now you're claiming that they would have worked against Japan, a country that would kill their children rather than surrender to an enemy?
By 1945, Japan's armed forces were almost completely obliterated and all shipping into the country had been halted many months earlier. Advocating sanctions? Gimme a break! They were already cut off. The Japanese military was in such a poor position that General LeMay ordered all the defensive guns and the gunners that manned them to be removed from all B-29's, allowing them to carry more bombs, because the Japanese air force was no longer a threat. Instead of the box formation flown by B-17's over Europe in order to protect themselves against German fighters, they flew in single file formation, so they could drop bombs more accurately, cover a larger area, and extend the raid over a longer period of time.
In a single conventional bombing raid over Tokyo in mid March of 1945, 5 months before Hiroshima, we killed an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children, nearly all of them civilians and as many or more than were killed in the initial blast at Hiroshima, and left over a million Japanese homeless, yet they didn't surrender. What makes you think that we would have brought them to surrender in a war of attrition? What makes those types of attacks any more moral than the dropping of a single bomb?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_o ... March_1945)
The Japanese would have starved to death rather than surrender. There exists film of Japanese mothers hurling their children over a cliff before jumping to their deaths themselves rather than surrender.
Suicide Cliff is a cliff above Marpi Point Field near the northern tip of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, which achieved historic significance late in World War II.
Also known as Laderan Banadero, it is a location where numerous Japanese civilians and Imperial Japanese Army soldiers took their own lives by jumping to their deaths in July 1944 in order to avoid capture by the United States.
. Japanese propaganda had emphasized brutal American treatment of Japanese, citing the American mutilation of Japanese war dead and claiming U.S. soldiers were bloodthirsty and without morals. Many Japanese feared the "American devils raping and devouring Japanese women and children."[2] The precise number of suicides there is not known. One eyewitness said he saw “hundreds of bodies” below the cliff,[3] while elsewhere, numbers in the thousands have been cited.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Cliff
Because they would have ran out of the means to fight. They are an island nation incapable of producing sufficient food or oil to maintain a war. Patience would have won out.
This is not about a war of attrition. The position is moral rightness.
Spend more time contemplating moral rightness and wrongness, When you use the term often as you do, know what they mean. It is morally wrong, it is evil....EVIL...to mass murder women, children, and noncombatants using a bomb that indiscriminately kills and irradiates humans. There is no mathematical calculation to measure the effect of it. It is wrong, morally wrong.
What America did was commit a war atrocity, a morally evil act of mass murder of noncombatants using a weapon they could not control.
What you post above is irrelevant because it puts the moral wrongness on the Japanese and not on America. This is the part that you are having trouble comprehending. What Japan does is irrelevant, how America carries itself is relevant. We had control over our actions, We did not need to mass murder civilians including women and children to defeat the Japanese. What the Japanese did to themselves to resist surrendering is not provable and makes the moral position theirs, not ours.
We chose as a method of nation breaking an indiscriminate use of an experimental bomb we knew would lead to the mass murder of civilians including children when we had other options available to us. We used them because a group of war mongers in the United States wanted to use the bombs to break Japan as well as see what these bombs looked like in actual war. America is a war-like nation which is why we have been in so many wars in our history and especially in recent history than any other nation. We go to war or employ military action every decade since our creation and have expanded as our means to project force expanded.
The only reason men like yourself can take the position you do is because you have not been the target of extensive warfare of the type we employ since the Civil War where the technology for carpet bombing and nuclear attack were not available. If you had to experience carpet combing or a nuclear attack watching people die on that scale, I think...or at least I hope...you could finally see the moral evil of the act. It's wrong...unjustified...and never necessary. It is merely the current method of warfare that evil men engage in who want to control the world as they have been doing for thousands of years developing unnecessary and vile weapons tech and organizing armies for empire building and world control.
In July of 1945 following the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. Had the bomb not been dropped and the war not ended when it did, the Soviets would have invaded the home islands from the north, the US from the south. After many years of fighting and countless millions of Japanese, young and old alike, killed in a manner just as gruesome as the dropping of two bombs, we would have ended up in a predicament very similar to that of Germany, with a North Japan controlled by the communists and a south Japan controlled by the Americans. How do you think that would have played out during the ensuing cold war? Would Japan have been better off than they are today?
One thing that cannot be argued about is the aftermath. 68 years after the dropping of the bomb and Japan is a free country with a vibrant economy and a society that is free from drug abuse and crime. In almost every way, it is superior to any other country that I have ever visited. Would that have happened had the war not ended like it did? Almost certainly not. If America did anything right in the 20th century, it's their rebuilding of Japan after WW2. That would not have happened if the Soviets had shared occupation of the country. The world would be a different place.
You have no way of knowing if the dropping of the bomb is what did this. America committed a morally reprehensible act on Japan. It is fortunate that afterwards we are kind in victory as I have stated, which is the main difference between us and other empire-like nations.
To be honest with you, I care as much if not more about the Japanese as I do many of my fellow Americans. It is as good and decent of a society as I've ever experienced. I take it as a personal insult that I would rather see two Japanese killed in order to save one American. Each life is equal. I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the dropping of the two atom bombs saved many, many more lives than it took, Japanese as well as American lives.
I have no doubt that you like the Japanese otherwise you would not visit. This decision is a long time removed from us, but suffice it to say I do not buy the propaganda sold in the same manner I do not believe we lost he Vietnam War due to military defeat as has been sold to us for so long for some reason.
We cannot murder Japanese children and families and claim we are saving anyone using math we cannot prove. We could have stayed the hand of the bomb and waited longer for negotiation. Sufficient time was not spent waiting for surrender and the United States was not threatened by Japan as they were defeated. You are claiming the use of a weapon of mass destruction was "necessary" against a nation that was no longer a threat to America and no longer able to harm America.
No moral nation uses a weapon of mass destruction when not threatened. If the Japanese harm themselves, that is their moral cross to bear, not ours.
As a more pragmatic argument you can contemplate:
1. First, you must prove the creation of the nuclear bomb was necessary. This I believe most humans would agree is not necessary. If I asked, do we need to create a weapon that that's sole purpose is to cause destruction and mass murder humans using radiation that will burn them to ash and poison them to the point they will die of cellular damage, what do you think they would answer?
This weapon was created in secret in competition with Germany for the sole purpose of conquest and nation breaking using weapons of mass destruction. The weapon is an evil...or morally wrong...invention from the outset. Anyone who uses it has crossed a moral line that should not be crossed.
2. Second, you claim that it saved the lives of the Japanese and thus use of the nuclear bomb will lead to fewer lives lost. Why then wasn't this criteria used in all future wars?
Why did we not drop a nuclear weapon on North Korea or North Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan? Would this same criteria not be used in other wars as was used in Japan? Drop the bomb, end the war, and save their lives? This is your argument. It can be used with any war America has been in. But we do not use it. Why if it it saves lives as you claim do we not just drop a nuclear bomb and do the "necessary" action?
I know what I think which is what was seen in the aftermath of Japan was so horrifying most decent humans wanted these things never used again. They could see with their own eyes their creation was a moral crime against humanity and it is our hope that they are never used again against a human population.
3. Third, why has nearly every nation signed an agreement to not use these weapons in warfare? If nuclear weapons save lives as you are arguing, why don't we save lives by using them against war torn nations to pacify them and end wars that lead to prolonged conflicts and instability that lead to death in the long-term? If nuclear weapons are a preferable and necessary weapon to break an opposing nation in warfare to save their lives, why did most of the world swear off their use?
Are nations not costing lives by not using the nuclear bomb for it's necessary "life saving" function?
Either nuclear weapons' are a necessary weapon that saves lives during war or it's a WMD that shouldn't have been created or used in the first place due to its indiscriminate, uncontrollable nature.
When I think of nuclear weapons, poison gas, napalm, and bombs in general, they are what I see as a Pandora's Box that should not have been opened. It's only going to get worse with the advancement of robotics. If human existence were a story, the ending looks like we're on a path to an Armageddon of our own creation. It's foolishness on a scale hard to imagine. It's like these war mongering folks are alcoholics destroying themselves and those around them with their creations and behavior while we all have to sit and take it.
We have created weapons that are not good for any of us and justified their use. Even when we see the burnt and irradiated bodies of Japanese children, there are still people justifying this garbage. I wish you would look at the people you care about in this world and decide if you wish that any nation that seeks to do this under the guise of saving lives might show greater mercy than to drop a weapon of mass destruction on people.
You can't do anything if your enemy harms their own people, but you can certainly not be the one doing it to them. That's what this position is about: showing mercy and standing on the moral right side where you do not advocate or excuse the mass murder of non-combatants including women and children even during war, especially using indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction like a nuclear weapon. You cannot control it. It is merciless. If you drop it, you do so knowing you have engaged in indiscriminate mass murder.
I will not justify or excuse it or participate. I despise these weapons. I wish they were never created. They were wrong the moment they were created and their necessity is fabricated by war mongers who want to hold death's scythe over each other's neck from their bunkers and secret protective domiciles while the rest of us will have to reap the pain of their evil inventions and conflicts.
That's the last I'll say on it for there is no argument that can convince me the use of a nuclear weapon on a human population is necessary or justified. It's just evil mass murder and sickening to me.