RiverDog wrote:Atomic weapons aren't the only worthless and vile inventions. What about poison gas? Or napalm? Or undetectable fragmentation bombs? Ever heard of a fuel to air device?
We cannot judge a decision based on contemporary conditions. We have to put ourselves back in 1945 and consider the constraints and options present at the time the decision was made.
First of all, a negotiated peace that would have left the Japanese regime in place was out of the question. The Japanese were brutal. In WW2, they exterminated more Chinese than the Germans did Jews, and did so by every bit as cruel and barbaric means as the Germans. They used human targets for bayonet practice. The decapitated prisoners. They buried humans alive. They conducted medical experiments on live, human subjects. Ever hear of the Rape of Nanking or the Battan Death March? If you haven’t, you need to read up on it. You cannot negotiate with a regime like that anymore than we could have left the Nazis in charge in Germany. To do so would have invited another war.
Secondly, the Japanese were not going to surrender. Their citizens were fanatical, had been thoroughly brainwashed by propaganda. For example, they were told that in order for an American boy to become a Marine, he had to kill his parents to prove his courage. In our campaigns on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, there are documented incidents of hundreds if not thousands of women, their babies in their arms, jumping off cliffs to avoid capture. Documents recovered after the war support this conclusion.
Even had Truman tried to negotiate a truce or peace, the American public would never have accepted it. They had been told for nearly 4 years that the only option was unconditional surrender. The Senate must approve any treaty, and with 10-12% of the American public not wanting to even stop at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and just bomb until there was nothing left, no elected body would endorse anything less. We were a bloodthirsty lot.
Given those conditions, Truman was presented with 4 options in the summer of 1945. Option 1: Continue conventional bombing as we had been for the previous 3 years. This clearly was not working. In one single bombing raid over Tokyo in March of 1945, over 80,000 people were killed and an estimated one million left homeless. That’s as many killed as there were at Hiroshima. It didn’t even move the needle. Option 2: A land invasion from bases in Okinawa. This would have added at least another two years, a million US casualties, and many times more Japanese killed or injured. In addition, the Soviet Union had just entered the war and would have invaded from the north. In all likelihood, we would have ended up just as we did in Germany, with a North Japan controlled by the Soviets and a South Japan controlled by the Americans. How would that have played out during the ensuing Cold War?
Option 3 was a demonstration. Drop the bomb over an uninhabited area over the Pacific. This, too, had multiple problems. Who are you going to get from Japan that had the authority to surrender to witness this demonstration? Who was in charge, the emperor or the military? Who in the military, the Army or Navy? And what if it were a dud? Would it motivate the Japanese to resist even more? What would have happened if the demonstration exploded but the Japanese still didn’t surrender? We would have wasted a very limited, extremely valuable military resource and tipped our hand. A single B-29 would no longer be assumed to be a reconnaissance plane.
Option 4 was to drop it over a populated area and hope to hell that the shock of a single bomb being so destructive would compel the Japanese to surrender, and it worked. In Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech, the first time he had ever addressed the Japanese public, he specifically mentioned the A-bomb as the reason for their change of attitude:
Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
And even that nearly wasn’t enough to pull off a surrender. Just before Hirohito’s speech, a military coup was attempted, and if it had been successful, Hirohito would have been placed under house arrest, the speech would have never happened, and the Japanese would not have surrendered.
We can argue about this decision, but we can’t argue with the results: The Japanese did surrender, they have never been a threat to world peace since, and their country and society is truly a marvel.
There is no judging of a decision based on modern ideas.
It is based on morality of man from time immemorial. I already told you I don't like poison gas, biological weapons, fuel air bombs, incendiary weapons, and all the advanced weapons tech that was created as nothing more than a manifestation of human evil meant to dominate human groups by threatening them with mass death.
It's exactly why you hopelessly think that a revolutionary force armed with weapons provided by the 2nd Amendment would soundly lose to the U.S. Military because the government using its vast resources has created such powerful weapons of mass destruction that they would institute tyranny without the ability of humans to resist. They could in essence exterminate us at will with any of the weapons you listed.
These weapons are a manifestation of a handful of humans, usually men, who want to control everything regardless of the cost to do so and have created the means to exert this control with threat of death should you refused to comply.
These types of weapons in the best of conditions are competitively necessary to defend against even more tyrannical regimes that would use them to control the United States or exterminate its population. You have seen the use of poison gas during World War 2 on the Jewish people. It is another weapon like the nuclear bomb with no good purpose other than to mass exterminate human beings indiscriminately.
They are bad creations. A manifestation of the worst impulses of humanity.
Stop trying to make excuses after the fact like humans are prone to do to explain or excuse terrible behavior. I have no interest in listening to the adult form of explaining wrong behavior or making excuses for having to live with mass murder. That is all the excuse for using the nuclear bomb is: the adult version of what children do when they do something bad and don't want to get in trouble with mommy. They try to make it seem like a morally sound decision and then concoct a line of reasoning they sell to the public to make excuses for their vile behavior.
If there were really a God like the Christian or Muslim God, these people who invested and used this weapon knowingly would all be all be burning in Hell for mass murder of innocents. But since there is not likely a god of any kind, no one will answer for this garbage and it will all come down to who is the strongest with the best weapons most willing to use them effecitvely to achieve victory. With the comin of A.I. and robotics, we plebe humans will have to hope again these things are not turned on us in a way that won't lead to a great deal of misery.
You want to know what saves us a lot of the time? Capitalism.
A lot of people don't realize that the consumer-producer relationship that drives capitalism literally saves this world from extreme warfare. Not socialism or communism which operate just fine with the mass extermination and control of human beings with violence. It's capitalism. Capitalism requires an ever larger consumer base of workers that must earn an income to spend on goods and services and drives wealth creation in a way that requires more humans. Socialism and Communism operate better with less humans making them easier to manage as you don't have a method of wealth generation and communism and socialism don't require a consumer to maintain them and larger numbers of humans actually bankrupt communist and socialist societies. But capitalism forces the necessity of new markets with an educated, productive workforce of humans able to purchase goods and services freely able to transact, create, and operate businesses of whatever kind the market is able to financially support.
So what saved this world from a descent into warfare and extreme tyranny is capitalism and the necessary drives of a successful capitalist society. Capitalism encourages peace worldwide through trade and sees productive income producing humans as a valuable and necessary asset towards a prosperous and healthy society.
Nuclear bomb, weapons of mass destruction, and the like a terrible invention.
Capitalism regulated with a moral government (as moral as we can get) literally the driving force of world cooperation and peace. And the far left sees Capitalism as bad because they don't bother to study what drives capitalism and what makes for a successful and healthy capitalist economy. Destroying capitalism would throw this world into a bad, bad place.
Was Oppenheimer good? Did you like it?