An interesting read about rogue states financing and supporting terrorism

If you really wanted to get into the tit for tat argument on Japan in WWII then you could pull out a million reasons, Bataan, Pearl Harbor, etc. I agree with what we did, but just threw those in the mix for those arguing that we had no right.

 

Well, I certainly didn't say we had no right. Look, it may well have been the right decision to drop the Bomb. That doesn't make it not terrorism, and it doesn't mean we should be proud of that moment in American history.

It's difficult to do so, but I can make a relevant distinction: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of one bomb each. One singlular, terrifying moment when an entire city was leveled. I mean, let's be honest here - why was no-one scared of Saddam's conventional weaponry? But the threat of a single solitary nuke changes the entire equation.

It was terrorism. The entire point was to intimidate and coerce the Japanese into capitulation.

 

The available evidence that has been hashed and rehashed in numerous threads before this is that Truman dropped the bomb for three reasons (in no particular order):

1) It was thought to be more cost effective in terms of many different resources, including our soldiers, to drop the bomb to speed up the Japanese decision to surrender.

2) Various persons in the U.S. government wanted to send a message to Stalin that we had the bomb and, more importantly, that we'd use it if he made a drive for western Europe.

3) Various persons in our military just wanted to see if it would work in combat conditions and also what the effects would be. If we were willing in peacetime to test it on our own soldiers after the war, what was to stop us from testing it on a hated enemy?

We knew the Japanese had lost and we knew that they knew they'd lost. In fact, we knew that they had virtually lost the capability to resist militarily in any effective manner - they effectively had no air force, no navy, no industry, no fuel and a starving populace. We knew they would surrender soon. The only questions were: would the surrender be unconditional and would the emperor be charged with war crimes. The Japanese were preparing to resist should the USA decide to show no mercy but mass suicide was as likely as "fight to the death" in that case. But since we knew we were not going to treat them as they treated others, we knew that we only had to communicate this to them to avoid the spectre of hundreds of thousands of dead GIs. As it is, we ended up agreeing to many of the things they felt were most important, including sparing the emperor.

While the evidence at to the relative importance of the three reasons I gave above is inconclusive, the fact that we were in obvious haste to drop the second bomb as quickly as possible before the war ended, the fact that we deliberately chose cities with negligible military value but that had the crucal quality of having escaped previous bombing and were therefore "intact", and some of the comments made by the participants in the US government and military at the time and afterwards leads me to believe that reasons number 2 and 3 were more important to us than reason 1, as important as that may also have been. To me, if it was true that 2 and 3 were more important than 1, then that's stretching the boundaries of what is morally excusable. That's my opinion based on the evidence. YMMV.

We emphatically did not drop the bombs on them in revenge for their being so mean and evil. If that was the case, we'd have dropped a lot more nukes on them and had done with them. And we'd have dropped atomic bombs on Germany, too. At any rate, we did rebuild them rather than demand mindless venegeance and that's what ennobled our sacrifices and morally differentiated our leaders from theirs in the end.

 

Yea, conservative estimates of an invasion had the Americans losing 1 million, and the Japanese 6 million. Add those two together and you get....7 million.

 

I actually don't disagree with why we bombed them or that we used the bomb. I just disagree with considering them lucky for being exposed to a nuclear detonation.

 

We purposely killed as many Japanese civilians with two bombs as there were American soldiers that died in all of World War II.

Anybody who wants to argue that the bombings saved lives is full of it.

 

Ok. Am i going to sit and claim there wasn't any outside motivation to use the bomb? no. Was the Nagasaki bomb a little too quick? It's debatable.

But the face that the military launched a coup against the Emperor even after Nagasaki makes me doubt their peaceful intentions.

The bomb ended the war, and launched us into superpower orbit. The bomb was a lot of things, but it wasn't terrorism.

 

Looks like Mr Gringo is unfamiliar with the concept of total war. Do yourself a favor. Go open a book on the civil war and look up "Sherman-march to the sea."

That might shed some light on your dark, dusty intellect.

 

What's six or seven million, or ten. What are we going to debate next? The actual death toll of the holocaust?


Off topic:
According to this site 61 million people died world-wide as result of WWII. But this site also set off my *#*#*#*#*#*#*#*# detector.
http://artzia.com/History/WWII/

I dated a Russian girl for a while in college (Goddam was she hot, but like talking to a brick wall) She used to bitch that nobody cared about the 10 million Russians who died during WWII becuase of the Germans. I'd always shut her up by asking about the 25 million who died becuase of Stalin.

 

So then, you have no problem with Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or the killing of American POWs? That's all total war, right?

 

Well, so was the Battle of Yorktown. You've defined terrorism into meaninglessness.

 

I'm sure many Brits at the time considered Washington a terrorist. Don't forget one man's "terrorist" is another man's freedom fighter.

 

Unless there have been some major historical finds since I was in school, then we knew no such thing.

 

Rich...my point is, what is war if not an effort to intimidate and coerce? What is police work?

 

I know, I was just trying to be a smarta$$.

 

And some people wonder why I'm one of manny's big fans.

 

Manny,

First, the estimates you quoted earlier are hogwash. To effectively invade and occupy Japan, American strategists foresaw two invasions, scheduled for November 1945 and March 1946. The first invasion, on the island of Kyushu. would employ some 770,000 American troops. The follow-up invasion on the plains of Tokyo, leading to the forced occupation of Japan, called for two million American troops. To take 1 million casualties out of 2,770,000 troops would been a casualty rate of almost 40%. The U.S. had a lower casualty rate in Okinawa and there we really were fighting a bunkered, prepared, fully armed and supplied military force ready to go down fighting on an island well suited for defense. What, were we going to not use our air force during the propsoed invasion to give them a fighting chance? We could bomb the bejebus out of the remains of their military with impunity if we had to.

And that's assuming that the Japanese fought to the last man, woman and child. Yes, many Japanese were fanatical but we knew that the Japanese leaders were already desperately trying to make deals with us and the Soviets and already even debating unconditional surrender, meaning that the die hard fanatics had already lost out within the Japanese power structure. The Japanese would only have fought to the last if the Allies had announced that we were taking no prisoners and would rape the women, sodomize the emperor and burn their country to the ground. Obviously, Truman knew we weren't going to do that. The pessimistic doomsday scenario was unrealistic and while it was good propaganda, Truman and the other Allied leaders knew it wasn't at all likely to happen.

So, while you can justify the first bomb if you want on the grounds that it terrorized the Japanese into surrendering more quickly and on terms more favorable to us than the Soviets, you're still hard pressed to justify the haste with which the second bomb was dropped. That haste, though, kinda argues as to the motives of the first bomb as well.

Oh, and Sherman didn't slaughter civilians wholesale, partly as an experiment or to send a message to the Mexicans. Even "total war" has limits - unless you're a Nazi or other war criminal, of course. If not, why didn't we nuke Germany or just kill all Germans after the war and take the land for ourselves or give it to the Jews? Why didn't we just nuke the whole island of Japan just to watch 'em fry?

 

Or you got the usual cleaned up version of U.s. history we all got.

Try reading the now declassified documents and diaries from the time the decision was made not the cover stories that were popularized aftee the war.

Most damning to your theory that Truman believed that Japan would never surrender is this:

On August 3, Walter Brown, special assistant to Secretary of State Byrnes, wrote in his diary, "Aboard Augusta - President, Leahy, JFB agreed *#*#*#*# looking for peace. President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden."

So, Truman knew they were looking to surrender three days before the first bomb was dropped. The only question was how fast we could negotiate a treaty and on how favorable the terms would be to us versus the Russians. It's not like Japan was suddenly going to rebuild its air force and navy and resupply itself in the few weeks it would have taken to negotiate a peace, if that was our prime concern. If the Japanese refused all reasonable offers (the offers we ended up accepting anyway), THEN we'd have been 110% justified in using the Bomb. But tha'ts not what happened, your high school history class notwithstanding.

 

Heh, it censored the word "J-A-P-S".

 

You arrogant little f***.

I have an MA.

 

Go read about the coup launched by units of the Imperial Army to prolong the war....then come back...and apologize.

 

Please read how the supposedly all-powerful fight-to-the-death plotters were DEFEATED.

Then, come back and apologize.

 

You overestimate the Japanese will to surrender after Hiroshima. Point made. Moving along....

 

Very well, then...

"But that's not what happened, your Master's Degree history class notwithstanding."

You're still wrong either way, Condescendingdave.

 

And you're still willing to ignore any evidence that does not agree with what you want to be true. Move along....