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Censored Nagasaki Bomb Story Found
EccentricAnomaly writes "In 1945 journalist George Weller snuck past the American occupying forces and became the first American Journalist to see the devastation left by the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki. His story infuriated MacArthur, who had it quashed. The Japanese paper, Mainichi, has now published Weller's account. CNN has a story discussing how it was found." From the Mainichi article: "As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation."
Certainly he didn't walk away from that place perfectly healthy.
A lot of people go "OMG! teh nukes!" like Fallout is what would happen after a nuclear war :)
Nuclear myths
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European zine. Guns, hacking, survival
If They didn't think the people could cope with hearing about the devastation of the weapon , and did not think it appropriate to report the after effects, then the weapon should never have been used.
It certainly should never have been used on a civilian target , At-least this quash shows that perhaps they had a little shame about it
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Only one country has used atomic bombs against an other, which one? (hint it's not Iraq).
This isn't meant to be flamebait, and only meant to be a serious question.
Why did MacArthur give Japan only three days to respond after Hiroshima? Why not at least a week?
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#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Which makes sense as the bomb was a small one (for a nuke) with a yield of approx 15 kiloton and was detonated at an altitude of 500 meters. This would have prevented the fireball from actually touching the ground and contaminate the ground. Thus only neutron activation would have created any lasting radioactivity on the ground below the bomb, and that was also reduced due to the distance.
The only permanent radioactivity would be trapped in the fireball and would have been deposited downwind by the 'black rain' (which would be dangerous).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
One thing I remember from history classes is that pictures of survivors of the atomic blasts were censored.
Makes me wonder what else has been censored within the last century, particular for historically significant events. Was there anything censored that could have been historically significant had it not been censored?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I think perhaps you're missing a point here, it's not about whether it saved lives.
It's about whether using a nuclear weapon is ever a sane thing to use, if not a war crime.
Is victory worth the price of mass murder?
Whether it would have saved lives or not in the long term is purely hypothetical, is the use of a nuclear weapon ever justifiable?
I think the fact that no nuclear weapons have been used since the end of world war 2 perhaps answers that question.
No doubt dropping chemical/biological weapons on Japan and wiping out large swathes of population centres would have won the second world war also, but would such a thing be morally justifiable? (Which can be equally applied to nuclear weapons)
Nagasaki wasnt the primary intended target. The intended target was Kokura, but the spotter planes that went ahead found it to be completely socked in with clouds, so the bomb plane diverted to their secondary target, Nagasaki.
"Well one nuclear descruction we can handle! What? Another?? Ow then we surrender."
While it is beyond me to argue for or against the use of the bombs, I think the point was the following. If you drop one bomb - what with all the confusion that ensues, none of the politicians can make up their mind - was this just a huge conventional attack, like Dresden? Are the witnesses lying? Was this just a fluke? Remember we're talking about politicians here. Politicians are human and suffer the same defense mechanisms like denial, for example.
But when you drop a second bomb, the message you are sending is "We can do this every day from now on". The "enemy" has no idea HOW many bombs you have, but now they know you have MORE than one. Also when they start getting the same reports from Nagasaki as from Hiroshima they realize that this wasn't a fluke. There is no longer any way of "explaining away" the evidence.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's very easy to go back 60 years into the past and play armchair quarterback using your own "modern" moral compass.
The fact of the matter is that Japan was fully prepared to fight an invasion of Japan to the last man/woman/child. The people who decided to pull the trigger on the atomic bomb had just seen firsthand what that kind of scenario was like in Germany.
Do I like the fact that those bombs were dropped on cities? No. Do I think it saved millions of Allied soldiers' (and Japanese soldiers/civilians) lives? Absolutely.
Does the military censor news? Absolutely.
Arrived in Nagasaki two weeks after the bomb was dropped; he was a Marine assigned to the Occupation force, he died of advanced arterial disease in 1972; I firmly believe that his time walking a perimeter around the blast area as a guard caused his problems; he actually died of kidney failure after his vascular system broke down; he had both legs amputated, several strokes and several heart attacks; he was an extremely old man at his death, aged 52; I'm 58, with several of the same problems, but I was concieved in 1946.
Realistically speaking, what other options did the US have in the Pacific theater in WW2?
Japan had attacked us first. Japan indeed had brought us into the war. The fighting in the Pacific had been extremely bloody, with countless islands and other places won with much bloodshed and cost--and we weren't even to the Japanese mainland yet.
Kamikaze--divine wind--took a pretty rough toll. On the Japanese too for sure, but us as well. It's rather indicative of the extreme lengths to which some Japanese soldiers and commanders were willing to go to win.
Would you have rather we performed a manned ground invasion of the Japanese islands and subdued the entire place by force? The Japanese leaders PROVED by ignoring the nuclear bomb not only before it was detonated but more to the point, AFTER it was detonated, that they would not easily surrender.
Estimates I've read (and common sense as well) have point casualties and destruction on both sides from a ground invasion much higher than the nuclear bombings.
No side can be completely innocent in war. Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Tokyo for that matter were horrible. So too was the rape of Nanking, and the Japanese push throughout the Asia Pacific.
What choice did we have? This was not a war of our choice, or one that would end without a decisive victory or defeat. What better outcome could there have been?
General Patton once said something like 'no dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country--the trick is to make the other dumb bastard die for his.' Somewhat egalitarian if you really think about it.
Welcome to war-- it is never pretty.
Take a fascinating story about a lost account of the damage from the atomic bombs and use it sling around lectures on morality and politics.
Besides the reasons "because two's better than one" and "two proves it wasn't a fluke attack", the two bombs were of different designs, "Little boy" and "Fat man".
Outside of using it to stop war, we also used it as a weapons test, among other things. We hadn't set off too many of these massively powerful devices yet, and we wanted to know which would be the better war-time design.
Now, we know a lot more about the weapons; enough to know that either design wasn't so good, and that newer weapons are massively more powerful in different configurations.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
For instance there are many spas (Bad Brambach, Schlema) in the Ore Mountains in Germany who offer Radon cures. You are basicly sitting in a tub filled with warm, Radon contaminated water. Radon is a radioactive noble gas, basicly a heavy version of Helium and Neon, and most of it is the product of the slow decay of Uranium-238 (via the alpha ray decay of Radium-226). The soil of the Ore Mountains is rich in Uranium, and so there are enough places everywhere, where Radon comes out of the earth. Radon is part of nearly all natural well water, you can even use Radon as a measurement of the relative amount of well water in water sources, because all surface water will loose their Radon within a short period (within 3,8 days half the Radon of a given amount has decayed, and additionally it is gaseous, and a noble gas, so it will leave the water without any chemical reaction), and rain water will not contain any Radon anyway, because it is to heavy to reach the clouds.
Because of its heavy weight cellars in the Ore Mountain may contain a high level of Radon, it enters the cellar through earth rifts and doesn't leave it anymore. It can reach levels where it really starts to be a health risk, leading to lung cancer because of the alpha rays (Helium cores), which destroy the tissue of the lung.
Not, just there.
All Bulgarian, Cheh and most Caucasus (Russian and Georgian) SPAs are like this.
Radon containing water works miracles on arthritis, joints problems as well as many forms of eczema. While it usually fails to provide permanent cure it provides 3-4 months of relief or gives medications a better chance to work.
In btw, the feeling is weird... 20 minutes in a warm pool of such water makes you feel like your joints have started to melt. They feel like rubber.
The mechanism is still unclear, but it is not the Radon which is the active agent. It is the way its decay changes water properties.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs did one simple service for the entire world, and all of humanity: they gave us all fear.
Imagine that you're a military type, and you've got this brand new, super-powerful toy, the Biggest Bomb in the World. It tooks millions to build, and the biggest aspect of all that work was that nobody really knew if it even could be built. But once it is known that one can be built, it's only a matter of time until others do it.
Further imagine that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened, so the Bomb wouldn't be anything real in the public's mind, just another weapon, just another bomb. Military types are prone to exaggerate their own capability, so without having seen the Bomb used against a real city, it would have remained a bomb, not The Bomb. Seeing pictures of a devastated atoll just isn't the same as hearing reports of death from a devastated city.
Finally, imagine the Cold War, where both sides have the Bomb, but the world lacked the fear generated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine both sides with thousands of Bombs, each. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened during that brief interval in history, when only one side had the Bomb, when there was no issue of retaliation, when Mutual Assured Destruction, wasn't even a possiblity, much less a deterrent policy.
What do you think our chances of surviving the last 60 years would have been, without the Fear from Hiroshima and Nagasaki permeating our culture. Sometimes I fear that that Fear is fading, but I hope that enough is left to keep us alive until we hopefully mature as a species.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Actually, in this case it did end. The Japanese surrendered, we (the US) spent millions rebuilding it, and Japan is now a thriving nation and respected world citizen. The US has a good relationship with Japan, and vice versa. Within the US citizenry, there is very little latent dislike or hatred of Japan. China, on the other hand, still remembers their brutal treatment by Japan, and they resent Japan's failure to really come to grips with and acknowledge their behavior.
Does that justify, then, the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know.
I would find it hard to believe that there was much talk about "justification" at the time.
My grandmother was in a Japanese prison camp. She was there simply because she wasn't Japanese. She was "different" from them and perhaps that's while they raped and tortured her every day for months. Apparently it didn't matter to the Japanese that she was pregnant at the time. Later her son was born, but babies can't work so they don't get fed. One of the other prisoners (I don't even know his name) smuggled in some food & medicine to try and keep the kid alive. Unfortunately they found him out. The Japanese assembled all the prisoners in the camp to make an example of him. They shoved a fire hose down his throat and pumped water into him at high pressure, his stomach exploded and his internal organs flew all over the place. The prisoners could only watch as he died in agony, trying to pick up all his bits and put them back in.
This is not a unique story and not a particularly bad one when it comes down to it compared to a lot of the stuff that went on. A lot of really awful shit went on in that war.
Dropping atomic bomb(s) on a (comparative) handful of people (compared to the millions dying and in danger) to end the war with Japan is a no brainer. It only seem "wrong" to a lot of people today because they aren't having their internal organs removed and fashioned as a hat.
Oh for fuck's sake, if you're going to be a reactionary redneck at least get your facts straight.
What part of "women and children" did you miss in those passages you quoted? Or was everybody in Japan classified as a combatant in your eyes?
Kyoto was skipped over purely because a couple of people in the US Administration (and one of the general's wives, apparently) couldn't bear the thought of not being able to go sightseeing there after the war.
The second bomb was dropped before the Japanese government had actually made any official response to the first bombing (it took quite a while for the full extent of the damage to reach other areas, for one thing). How did the US Government "know" Japan wouldn't surrender? Perhaps they were psychic? Or perhaps, just maybe, they wanted to try out their shiny new plutonium weapon that's never been tested (seeing as how both Trinity and the Hiroshima bomb were uranium-based weapons)?
Now go fuck off, you idiot. In case you hadn't noticed, history isn't always as simple as it appears in the excuses for textbooks that you apparently used in school.
And just to correct this stupid goddamn "own civilians" thing, it doesn't matter, okay? They weren't "his" civilians any more than the Native Americans were "our" civilians or the Palestinians are Israels civilians. He gassed a bunch of people, and thats bad, and you don't need to try to make it "more bad".
By the way, according to your own logic here, there's no reason we should be upset about 9/11, OR the gassing of the Kurds - they aren't any more (or less) deserving of sympathy than civilian deaths in Nagasaki, or Dresden, or London.
A form of Pentagon-supported censorship... http://www.democracynow.org/static/hiroshima.shtml
summary:
After the bomb drop on Hiroshima, press are confined to a barge off the coast of Japan. Wilfred Burchett, an independent journalist, decides to go and see things first hand and writes about it ("I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.").
William L. Laurence of the New York Times, and on the Pentagon payroll, writes a series of stories discrediting Burchett and gets the Pulitzer Price.
Democracy Now is trying to get the Pulitzer stripped from the NYT.
from http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn200 10806.html
Soon after the bombing, as reporters converged on a ship off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese, one independent reporter named Wilfred Burchett took a train for 30 hours to Hiroshima. He couldn't believe what he saw: people with their skin melting off them, images of people engraved on the sides of buildings. He sat down with his Hermes typewriter in the rubble, and tapped out the words, "I write this as a warning to the world." He talked about something he called, 'bomb sickness', that he had never seen before. Another reporter did a ten-part series on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was William Leonard Laurence of the New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the Pentagon. One of his headlines was, "No Bomb Sickness Found." He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Wilfred Burchett died of cancer decades later, but always traced it to Hiroshima.
There were hardly any civilians in Japan during World War Two.
Seriously. Read up on the war. The Japanese imperial government forced elementary-school children to drill with bamboo spears and take on military rank as preparations to 'defend the homefront'. Men unfit for military duty, as well as most women, were forced to work in factories making war materiel. The entire civilian population had been forcibly mobilized by the government into joining a military war effort. The entire population of Japan over age twelve were essentially military draftees. This is called "total war". Today, total war is considered by political thinkers to be a crime against one's own populace, because it makes the entire population a legitimate military target.
I agree that following orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime. I agree that giving orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime.
I just don't see there were very many civilians in Japan.
The moral calculus that makes civilian deaths a "necessary evil" is the scariest part, to me at least, of warfare in this day and age. Certainly from the beginning of human history we have dealt with the evils of humanity killing each other. I am not so naïve to believe that civilians were not killed in wars. I am sure that the raping and pillaging that accompanied victory included immeasurable harm to civilians.
The interesting (or scary) part to me is that in a day and era where war is (at least to some degree) governed by the Geneva conventions we still don't bat an eye at civilian deaths. Those who die (like those killed in the firebombing of Dresden, or when Sherman burned Atlanta, or as a result of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are simply swept up into the category of "necessary evil." There deaths, we tell ourselves, are necessary so that our goals in warfare are to be achieved.
So my question is, when we start applying this kind of moral calculus to our decisions what is a human life worth? What are the lives of our children, our wives or husbands, our mothers and fathers or anyone else worth? Do we care if those who have no part in the combat die? Would "necessary evil" be a satisfying explanation to you if persons you love had to die?
Perhaps I am to soft, but "necessary evil" is not an explanation that I would accept, nor is it an explanation that I would be prepared to think some one else who may or may not be my "enemy" should accept.
If you are never moderated, do you really exist?
The reprint is still spoofing the truth ... as shown on part 4 of the article. There it says, quoting roughly, that Disease-X was being treated on an experimental basis with ... [illegible] drug.
The drug was opium. It helps the immune system, mainly kidneys and liver, organize formation, collection and elimination of salts which contain radiation minerals, and thus accelerates curing. Withing a few years after the bombings, the contaminated populations had completely recovered, including hair, reproductive and immune system capacity, and etc.
The reason this is still "top secret" is that the planet's annual production capacity in opium is limited (by geographic and political availability of alkaline soil, accessible mountainous exposures with cheap labor, supervised by loyal warlords, dark nights, for complete formation of plant alkaloids, etc.) to approximately one-tenth of the size of the "national medical reserve" the U.S. alone would require to stabilize its own "designated survivor" population, in the event of a nuclear wars between the U.S. and Russia, China, France, etc. If amongst the powers on this planet, the U.S. maintained exclusive control of the entire production of the planet's maximum production capacity in opium-based pain killers, it would take the U.S. alone ten years to acquire its required "two-balled" military "entirety" for a nuclear war.
Oddly, or contrary to our Hollywood-created popular opinion, survival ("continuity of government") in a nuclear war is not determined by the bombing phase, which is relatively shortlived, using missiles which the media generally portrays as "sexy" and/or "terrifying. Survival in a war by mass contamination, and diplomacy by threat of mass contamination (read: state-sponsored terrorism), is based on not on the bombing phase, but on the longer and economically more arduous restoration phase. This more crucial phase starts with medication-stabilization programs of the government/military/fema, to treat the "designated survivors." The only know treatment for 500rem+ radiation sickness, on a mass contamination basis, is by production control and medical delivery of opium-based painkillers and treatment alkaloids.
That was the purpose of the experiments on Tuskeegee prisonors. (The controlled contamination and experimental treatment of black prisoners was for national-security dosage determinations, required for determination of (a) the size of the designation population which could be expected to survive (with any degree of continuing political stability), and then the ten-year annual production capacity of the planet, for treatment of the U.S.'s designation survivor population alone.
Is it by accident that this article just happens to blotch out and make that word illegible, while be bomb and control the most critical of the opium production areas of the planet, Afghanistan?
This is just me, but I think that the Dresden firebombing sticks in the mind of the US more because it was Europeans who died, while for years after World War 2, the Japanese continued to to be something of a inferior people in the minds of a lot of people in the US. Remember people, the history that a culture builds itself on is not necessarily "what really happened" but always some kind of selection from amid many possible histories. History and the present feed back on each other, any present, in order to exist, has to build its own past. This, to me, is what the Dresden versus the Tokyo firebombings are an excellent example of.
Lots of people have already pointed out he lived 57 years after his visit to post-nuke Nagasaki.
I would like to post a comment as someone who knows some people who were there that day.
There certainly is a strange thing about the effect of the bomb to people. I have no statistics, but my anecdotal experience shows that those who are still alive 60 years after their experience are extremely healthy.
My father was 14 and was 2.5km from the ground zero. He, obviously unscathed, visited the ground zero after a day or two. He is 74 now and plays tennis every day. He does get his conditions checked every year as a survivor. He is apparently an interesting case because he does have half the amount of white blood cells compared to normal. This is somewhat consistent with the well-known effect of radiation. Still, he doesn't even catch cold.
And my father is not an exception. There is a rather well known view among Nagasaki population that some survivors are extremely healthy. This may simply mean that they survived because they are extremely strong. There might be a correlation but it would be really hard to tell which is the cause and which is the effect. Some people may be just lucky that their damaged genes have better ability to repair itself.
On the other hand, people are now starting to talk about the effect on the third generation. There seem to be some concern that instead of the second generation, symptoms are appearing in the third generation. The effect of the bombing in terms of how much the radiation affects the genes is understandably hard to prove. There are many many other factors, and it is practically impossible to isolate the experience in a nuked environment as the major cause of mutation.
Personally, I don't have an opinion whether dropping the a-bombs is justified. It's history and that's what happend, we cannot change it. But if I'm pressed, I'd personally think because of the bomb, I'm here. If there had been no bomb in Nagasaki that day, my father may not have survived till the end of the war. It's well-known that teenager boys had been recruited to become Kamikaze attacker. An elder brother of his was being trained to be one. Another year or so, my father would probably have become one.
Every time I think about the bomb, I have a strange feeling. If my father had been killed on that day, I would not be here to think about the bomb. It was obviously a major event in his life although he always talks about it in a calm manner. I think he is a cool guy.
The real question to ask is why on God's Green Earth (or blue once you actually see it from space) did the Japanese intermix their civilian population with military manufacture? No one else did that as much as was possible (though the Brits did have secret aircraft factories in populated areas.)
The reason is multi-part but basically that was simply how Japan worked. Instead of big, mega factories, often you had small cottage industry that served the greater factory. Its actually a very nice model in peacetime.
The casualties were even worse than they needed to be. Fearing incendiery attacks, the Japanese organized to pull down wooden structures. However, they did not organize to haul away said piles of wood which ended up burning more efficiently that way.
If you look at what the japanese were doing to prepare themselves for the inevitable invasion by the Allies (including the Russians) you will no doubt come to the conclusion that dropping two atomic bombs was by far better than having a poorly armed population attempting to fight it out. They were trainng young women to fight with bamboo spears. It would have been a sensless slaughter that Japan probably would not have recovered from. I think the question is quite well answered in the book "Downfall."
Also, there is a film put out by Showtime in 1995 called "Hiroshima" that I thought was very well balanced. It does portray the Emperor in a more heroic light than I think he deserves but for the most part I think it does show the intentions of everyone involved quite well. Its 3 hours long. I got a copy off of Half.com. Its hard to find but well worth it.
--Pete
I'm not sure what you mean by "nuclear response time", but I recently read a book called "Day of Trinity", which was a history of the months before, and weeks after, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response to your "What was the nuclear response time" question, there was enough nuclear material available that there was a serious discussion on dropping a third bomb before the surrender was signed.
Sure, the US wasn't capable of reducing Japan to a nuclear wasteland at that time, but even 2 or 3 more bombs would have had a devastating effect.
Also remember that at this time the US was still horrified at the "unfair" bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the nation had finished the war in Europe so huge amounts of resources were becoming available for the war in the Pacific. If someone had blind-sided you with a bat, giving you a concussion, and a few years later you had a shotgun aimed at them, (with no chance of being convicted for murder - it is war after all), there would be a lot of temptation to pull the trigger. It might not be morally right, but we are human and, historically, morally right usually takes a back seat to the fight or flight instinct.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
i've never understood this word, terrorism.
I'll bet back in the 1770s, England would have agreed that one man's terrorist is another man's patriot.
It's all a matter of perspective - which side you are on.
First they burn books, then they burn people.
My father was 17 and preparing to ship out as a radar operator for the land invasion of Japan, when the bomb was dropped, and the war ended.
I don't know if he would have lived through that invasion, it was predicted to be terrible. After the battles for Pacific islands, the mass murder of civilians by the Japanese in Okinawa, it was pretty certain to be an awful thing.
He told me that after the first A bomb was exploded, many people in the world simply did not believe or understand what happened. Many thought that the US had towed a barge of explosives into the waterfront and detonated it.
I don't think people today second-guessing the decisions made then have as much moral superiority as they think they do.
The interesting question is whether the aggressor could be right at any time. I think not. The Bush administration seem to think otherwise. This is the question worth debating, not whether a country should defend itself or not.
interesting point. though, basically, all the US's problems right now are being caused by the cold war, which ended about 15 years ago.
brief history of bin laden
in 1979 the USSR occupied afganistan. the afganies didn't like it and the US, with it's "policy of containment" didn't either. there was a small milita, namey the mujahideen, who really didn't like the russians. take a guess who the leader of this litle band was. anyway, the US though "hey, these guys wanna fight. we want them out, and we can't get out hands in it though. they'll probabley get stomped in a few months, but it'll annoy the russians." so, they sent in CIA people to train the guys. they also gave them money, weapons, and inteligence. and they didn't phenominal. the US never expected them to do so well. they were kicking butt with hit and run attacks. ride in, blow up some stuff, run like hell back to the caves. then. the soviet union came apart. they pulled out of afganistan. and they just wasted the country on the way out. pour gas, toss match, run away. the country was devistated. and the US basically went "well, thanks for killing the russians. bye now." and left. bin laden (being of the saudi arabia royalty) had a lot of money, and help to rebuild. so, people there generaly like him and that's likely why he hasn't been found. the basic thinking (AFAIK) is "well, i don't like that he's blowing up buildings, but he did help us, so i won't help him, but i won't help the US either."
i'm not saying that 9/11 was justified, but i can see where the hatred of america comes from.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I usually don't respond to ACs, but I'm going to assume your question is sincere.
Of the 200,000 people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most historians estimate about 180,000 of them were part of the Imperial Japanese Army's war machine. IJA conscripted the population into being part of the war machine, to the point where schools stopped teaching math and literature and history and started teaching how to stick American GIs with bamboo spears--some of the classes being taught with American POWs.
Women were forced to work in factories building war materiel, as were men unfit for military duty. Of the population of Japan, only a small fraction--ten percent or so--could truly be considered noncombatants.
It's true that most of the 180,000 military personnel killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unwilling personnel, but that doesn't make them any different from IJA troops who were drafted and sent against American GIs.
So, are a couple of nukes worth more than a couple of hundred thousand innocent civilians? Of course not. Are they worth more than several factories building war materials and 180,000 people working in the furtherance of IJA goals? Absolutely.
My mother understood from the papers at the time that the Japs thought it was a fluke. The Americans must have hit a gas pocket or something that cause that destruction, not a secret weapon. There was also the military that didn't want to surrender until the last person was dead. Even after the second bomb, the military still resisted and some in the military even tried to take over the government to stop the surrender. They were put down by the army. The bombs saved Japan from certain death.
Just think if they bombed Tokyo instead of where they did. I think Tokyo was on the list but I'm not sure if it was next or not.
Such awful descruction. Never really knew as well if the US in those days really needed to end the war that way or did they just wanna see what happend. Maybe a bit of both.
Roosevelt did his successor Harry Truman a huge dis-service. He left him out of the loop on the development of the Manhattan project (atomic bombs). Roosevelt died, Truman became president and very quickly had to make the decision to use them or not. He looked at it as a numbers game most historians think. What did they think would happen if they used it and what did they think would happen if they didn't. It seemed clear that the war would continue without using it and based on every campaign up to that point, the Japs faught down to the last man as a matter of honor. So Truman felt that dropping the bomb would shorten the already long war and ultimately save thousands, perhaps millions of lives and perhaps the Japanese people. So it was a no brainer. Even so I understand he thought long and hard about it before turning it over to the military to use. Lets hope none of us have to make such a decision.
Is it just me, or might MacAuthur have been disturbed by the section which discribed Nagasaki geography in terms of Manhatten, and been ill-disposed to the rest of the article because of it? That's just a bit too much identification with the enemy for comfort, plus they probably didn't want to give the citizens of NYC particular nightmares. And, even though the article reports that most of the stuff destroyed was factories of military contractors, it associates it with a residental and business area.
On the second floor of the museum in the Peace Park at Hiroshima, past the exhibit about nuclear proliferation, but before you get to the room with video, you will find replicas of the documents themselves, and you will find that you are wrong. There was almost no difference between what the Japanese offered the Soviets and what the US offered the Japanese. You're thinking of what the Japanese previously offered the US, which is not what I'm talking about, and not what could have ended the war without using the bomb.
The bomb at Nagasaki was dropped on the wrong target. Not the wrong city, mind you, but the intended target was the center of town, and the actual target was an industrial facility on the edge of town. Visibility was quite low, and there were enough large buildings to fool the aircrew (our at least convince them that, whatever it was, it was a valuable target).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."
"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
These quotes come from Robert McNamara in Errol Morris' film The Fog of War. (More quotes can be found on the wikiquote page: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War)
I completely agree with you, but I would follow up your point with McNamara's comment about proportionality. McNamara became lost in his own ability to improve our firebombing campaigns, and, in doing so, perhaps fascilitated the deaths of tens of thousands of people that could otherwise have lived, all without changing the ultimate result of the campaign.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
... to the pilot who is "just following orders" ...
That is a myth. Only sociopaths think that way and the military is pretty good at weeding those out. More likely is that at the time of weapon release the pilot honestly believed that there was a valuable military target below. Only later do they find out the intel was completely wrong. Do you think President Clinton knowingly had an aspirin factory or the Chinese embassy bombed?
"Just following orders" was a last ditch defense strategy used by war criminals at trial. There were SS soldiers who after arriving at the concentration camps refused to be a part of the murder of women and children. They were transfered to front line combat units and were not court martialed. To court martial them would have required publication of the order that were disobeyed. No one wanted that on paper.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
Complete nonsense. Have you spoken to many combat vets? Especially those from World War II where everyone believed their caused was just and moral. The World War II vets that I knew felt guilty about killing the armed men who were shooting at them. The only ones they wanted to kill were the "sons-of-bitches who started the damn war". They guys they had to shoot in order to protect themselves and their friends were just "unlucky bastards" like themselves.
Hell, a World War II vet I knew felt guilty just feeding anti-aircraft shells into a hopper and this was while his ship was under attack.
More recently I had a college buddy who served in the first Gulf War and was involved in target selection. They prayed hard that their intel was correct and that their interpretation of photos and other data was correct. They felt responsible for whatever happened, the pilot pulled the trigger but they aimed the gun.
This is interesting in that I completely agree with what you mean, but think the way you say it is sub-optimal. People are entirely too good at rationalizing away nearly anything if given permission to call it "good". They're so good at it that very quickly they feel no *need* to try to justify it. That being the case, I think society is better served if we think of war as inherently "evil", and therefore something that must be fully justified at every turn.
IMO, American society is entirely too accepting of war now. We hear no end of people proclaiming that the war in Iraq is good because it is "defending our freedom". That notion is wrong on many levels, starting with the erroneous idea that it's possible for any military force to defend freedom and continuing on through questions about whether or not Iraq has anything to do with American freedoms at all. A healthy dose of the "war is unconditionally evil" meme would do us all a lot of good because it would force us to consider whether or not this particular evil is justified.
In a nutshell, viewing war as evil-but-sometimes-justified forces the common man to justify it to himself, because otherwise he's evil. Viewing war as good-when-justified makes it easy for him, after a few years of justified war, to assume that war waged by his country is good, period. Frankly, I think that the American populace was taught during WWI and WWII and throughout the long Cold War that this was the case, and that perception continues to fuel our overly aggressive posture today.
While your arguments are logically sound, they fail to take into account the ways in which most people think.
In your case, they will instead argue whether the ends justify "evil" means, rather than debating the facts of whether one choice really will lead to a better outcome than the other.
Ahh, but they will debate. And I think it's clear that if people are given a pass to see war as "good", they'll take it, because it's so much easier and more pleasant -- particularly if it doesn't really impact them personally.
In actual fact, this conversation is meaningless. We're debating which definition would be best if adopted universally, but no such adoption is going to happen.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
it's just that I think that the US has way too high of standards when it comes to "acceptable" levels.
Granite and marble are both naturally radioactive, as are bricks used for building materials. The US capitol building has a natural background radation of 30 microrems per hour. which is higher than EPA limits for "safe" LINK
Strom Thurman and Congress brain damage jokes may now start.
I think it says something that of all the professional soldiers I know, none of them share your view. None. Zero. Their attitude is simple: violence is wrong. It is never morally right to engage in war. The only question is whether not engaging in war is an even worse moral choice.
"War is hell," as Sherman put it. A USMC gunnery sergeant described his job as "legally sanctioned murder". Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC (Ret.), one of the finest living riflemen today and founder of some terrific shooting schools, has said he'd far rather be a cop than a soldier: when a cop shoots someone, it's usually somebody who's made some really bad choices and is endangering lives, but when a soldier shoots someone, it's usually for no other reason than the other guy is wearing the wrong color of uniform. Cooper's said in the past that he thinks most of the people he killed in war, he would've really liked if he'd ever had the chance to sit down and have a beer with them.
Ask General Hal Moore, USAR (Ret.), or Sgt. Major Basil Plumley, USAR (Ret.), if they think what they did in the Ia Drang was "right". They'll be quite adamant: it was not right, it was a horror, a nightmare, and something no human being should ever inflict on another. What would've been worse is doing nothing.
I am not a pacifist. I've actually had to pull a twelve-gauge on someone before, and give a mugger a choice: he could keep on beating an unconscious victim with a tire iron, or he could go away. (He elected to go away, for which I am immensely grateful. I did not need that stain on my soul.) His victim survived, albeit with a lengthy stay in the intensive care unit.
After it was all over I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. I am glad I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. That tells me that I'm still human. That tells me that I recognize other people are human beings and deserve to exist. That tells me that I'm not a bully. That tells me that I'm not evil.
People like you scare the living shit out of me, because the instant someone like you gets a weapon, you start to rationalize its use. I'm not worried about lunatics with tire irons who are beating the living shit out of unconscious people; in all my years I've only met one of those, so they're pretty uncommon.
But I know tons of people like you. People who talk about how the instant someone breaks into their home, they'd better have an ambulance handy. People who have their explanations and justifications prerationalized. People like you scare the living shit out of me.
I'm a firearms owner. Quite proud to be one. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment. But I'm just as big a fan of moral responsibility, which, I hate to say, is becoming harder and harder to find nowadays.
Yes.
I know what I wrote. And I am a chemist by the way.
Water is a very complex substance. You have both van-der-vaals (weak) and polar (strong) interactions between the water molecules and dissolved substances which tend to be much more organised and complex then most average lamerz think. These can be altered by many factors including magnetic field and ionising radiation. After being altered they stay altered for days and sometimes weeks.
A.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I understood your post just fine. Believing what you wrote is something else. Reading a post from some indoctrinated-since-birth worker drone does not convince me that Japan was a country of fanatics. It does not convince me that all, or most, of the people killed by nukes in Japan deserved their fate. It does not bring me into accord with the Jenghiz Khan school of warfare that you seem to espouse.
If you think Japan was unprovoked, please read the McCollum memo.
If you think that it was absolutely necessary to nuke Japan in order for the US to win World War II, read this. Apparently, General MacArthur did not consider the bamboo-spear-wielding Japanese kids as grave a threat as you would have.
Actually, the bomb casing itself produced a lot
of fallout which came down to the ground as "black
rain".