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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.
Scary stuff...
I believe the article said he died in his 90s. If that's that radiation does to you, bring it on.
A lot of people go "OMG! teh nukes!" like Fallout is what would happen after a nuclear war :)
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Actually, no.
He died in 2002, a whopping 57 years after his "walk in the atomic park".
Actually, he died 3 years ago having lived probably longer than you or me: he was 95.
Certainly he didn't walk away from that place perfectly healthy.
He lived until he was 95, passing away a few years ago. Frankly I think that it is amazing that he survived the aftermath of Nagasaki unscathed.
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
"The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be."
Certainly disagree with the choice of words here. Selective and proper ? Maybe. Merciful ? definitely not !
-- Ravi
Which is somewhat ironic, I didn't read the entire thing-- however I did read the first 2 articles (or 2 pages?) and the most prevelant theme I saw in it was doubt that the radiation was really as bad as stated by the Americans, or as its phrased there 'American Radio'.
When thats added to the idea that he was at ground zero for a while it really makes one wonder if the effects of radiation from 'those' atom bombs were overstated.
The other thing I thought interesting was that we dropped it within a mile of a prisoner of war camp, although I suppose it makes sense when combined with the knowledge that the pow camp existed so close to many manufacturing plants. Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
Only one country has used atomic bombs against an other, which one? (hint it's not Iraq).
Oh sure, killing japanese civilians is fine but allied soldiers never!
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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The answer is in the text, from this doctor Nakashima, who appeared to be the only one around who was familiar with the symptoms of radiation disease.
The article says this (in part 4):
I believe the article said he died in his 90s. If that's that radiation does to you, bring it on.
That's a simplistic view. It could have been uneven distribution of the fallout or the wind or how much becomes dust instead of absorbed in the ground.
FTA;
Men, woman and children with no outward marks of injury are dying daily in hospitals, some after having walked around three or four weeks thinking they have escaped.
I would say that walking around in a heavy fallout zone is an extremely unhealthy activity, and if things ever came to that I hope that I am in my own bunker in another region altogether.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
A Slashdot story mentioning the US. I knew I should have prepared for the fallout by avoiding the comments altogether.
Logical, thoughtful discussion of the actual article? Never. Not here.
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Yeah, I saw that, but it doesn't mean he didn't get cancer at some point and survive it. If he walked away with no ill-effects at all, it's certainly interesting.
Read this for more on why those concerns / worries are *very* valid.
-- Ravi
It seems most of the victims to suffer radiation poisoning and radiation burns were those cought in the initial blast, most of whom died two weeks to a month later (see page 4 of the article) -- being as the reporter was not actually in the initial blast maybe his exposure and risk of poisoning was factors of hundreds less? (IANA nuclear physicist). At other times where there have been nuclear disasters (think chenobyl) most of the people to die were those cought in the blast, and even then, the probability of survival was seemingly random (e.g. radiation is not a gauranteed killer, varying very much upon the type, duration and strength of exposure and sometimes, even the direction in which the wind is blowing to move radioactive materials/dusts around).
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I never implied either way, but because the common consensous, at least officially is that it was done to save american lives and that 'they got what the deserved', it makes it interesting when you realize just how close to americans they dropped it.
At any rate, I would hate to be the one to give the order regardless of who I was dropping it on, I was just stating that I think it would compound the problem when you know that it very well could be your neighbors son that you could be dropping 'the bomb' on.
What the hell does this story have to do with rights or online?
Seriously, it was wartime, and a bunch of stories didn't get published. Big whooping deal.
But its slashbait for a flamewar...so it's on the front page. This isn't news for nerds, but it sure fits with the leftism on this site.
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).
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we dropped it within a mile of a prisoner of war camp, although I suppose it makes sense when combined with the knowledge that the pow camp existed so close to many manufacturing plants. Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
Has to be asked- was it entirely a coincidence that the camp was situated near the manufacturing facilities?
I doubt it; it seems a logical tactic to discourage bombing of the most likely targets. If so, the Japanese were likely not the first, and certainly not the last to use prisoners as hostages in this manner.
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Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp.
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility. During the Vietnam War someone noted that while in theory nobody would accept burning children alive, some children are being burnt alive due to decisions made in a long chain of command where everyone is responsible for just a tiny bit of the whole process - from workers in plant making napalm bombs, to the pilot who is "just following orders", to Robert McNamara, who deals just with abstract figures, maps, tables etc. So you would be just the guy who draws an arrow on the map. Or the guy who is just pressing the button. In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
Has to be asked- was it entirely a coincidence that the camp was situated near the manufacturing facilities? I would be incredibly surprised to find out that it was a coincidence. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when the American's were first planning this out and realized they were going to be dropping a bomb pretty much on the pow camp.
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?
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No matter how often you say it, it still doesn't make it true.
...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
i roshima_and_Nagasaki
The argument that it save a million lives has been refuted time and time again. First of all the casualty figures are far from certain and it's far from certain that these were indeed that casulty figures the US had to expect had an invasion taken place.
Further, there are rather strong arguments for the assumption that Japane would have surrendered without an invasion and without the use of atomic bombs.
Finally, you discard all the eveidence that has been brougth to light by historians that suggests that the US did indeed have at least some additional reasons for using the atomic bombs, namely the begining confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Just one quote for you:
""...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63 "
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
Finally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_H
How about going there and learn yourself...
Don't you read Comic Books Man! Radiation only has positive effects on people. I am sure the reporter had super powers after that and lived to a rip old age of 95.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I love it when people paint the US as the bad guys in this whole thing. It's easy to arm-chair/monday morning quarterback a war long after it's over.
Try asking a person who was alive during WWII and they will tell you that it was the right thing to do based upon the stituation at that time. Japan was knocking it out all over the place. They were good at what they did. They were brutal and in times of war, it does pay to be brutal. (check the Romans, Egypians, Ottoman Empire, Germans, Mongols etc...).
Was dropping those bombs on Japan the right thing to do. I don't know I wasn't alive. It did end the war and potentially saved more lives then if the war had been allowed to go on. Yes it killed many innocent folks, but those cities were centers for military production of equipment (just like any city in the US with a large material support is a target, ask the Russians).
Do you think that if hitler would have developed the Atomic Bomb he would have hesitated to use it?
This of course is worthless to argue, since folks who think it was wrong will never accept any justification, and those who think it wasn't the wrong action for the time, will look like 'war-happy' goofballs.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
If i had any mod points and hadn't already commented I would have totally modded you up for that comment.
.. for that matter anyone charging off to war or helping 'the machine' should give a long hard thought to that statement.
very well put and it is a thought that perhaps more americans charging off to war in hopes of financing college should think of
I also suggest you, the Parent, read this, and look at the expected casualties to take the Islands of Japan. 1.7 to 4 Million US Service Personnel expected as Casualties, including 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities.
And that's just Americans. You are also looking at the fact that civilians were being organised to mount suicide attacks and to provide extra backup for the army, and everyone was expected to fight to the death -- "Death before Dishonor."
If we had not dropped those bombs, there very well might not be a Japan today.
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I believe the actual quote is Speak softly and carry a big stick.
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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.
If you found this interesting you might want to read John Hersey's account of the Hiroshima bomb. Published in 1946 and still in print, it's pretty much the definitive version.
It's written in an extraordinarily calm style, almost without emotion, but is strangly fascinating and moving.
Try a search for 'Hiroshima John Hersey'.
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.
The link is misleading because it tries to dispell myths that few people seem to have. If you look at the portrayal of post-nuclear war environments in recent film and fiction, radiation and fallout are generally not the biggest issues, but destruction of infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, public health services, and government are.
Nevertheless, while nuclear fallout and radiation would not be the main problems a post-nuclear war society would face, that doesn't mean that they are harmless. Fallout and radiation are serious problems, with long-term effects on the environment.
The use of atomic weapons in 1945, was a demonstration for the benefit of the Soviet Union. It was us saying to them "Don't fuck with us, look what we can do" and then 3 days later doing it again to say "we can do this as many times as it takes".
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.
Or, sometimes, when the US doesn't move quite fast enough, the country in question handles the removal for them, and the successor regime screws them over instead.
(Think Iran.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Welcome to war-- it is never pretty.
Showing the effects of just about any weapon of war will sicken a normal person. And yet, somehow, we keep on managing to figure out ways to dehumanize opponents enough to justify in our minds waging war on them.
Japan got what they had coming to them. Looking at the effects of the atomic bombings in isolation and going "Oh, how awful" is worthless. You have to look at the whole war and take actions like the atomic bombings in the context of the time.
I live in Japan currently, my wife is Japanese and my children are half-Japanese (I am American). I enjoy Japan and I like the Japanese people. It's hard to imagine now how a war like WWII could have been fought by them.
My landlord, at 80+, was in the Army and served during WWII. He's a nice old man who likes to garden and play with my kids. I've never had a conversation with him about what he did during the war though it wouldn't surprise me if he had been running around with a bayonet through Nanking or poking POWs along the Bataan trail. It was what you did at that time and somehow there is a collective insanity that sweeps men up and gives them license to run amok.
My grandfather drove landing boats in the Pacific during WWII. He never talked much about it, but my grandmother told me he used to wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night after he got back. I knew other men from his generation who had been to war and must have been through and done terrible things. Yet they came back and went back to normal lives and did normal things and we sat and ate dinner with them. And we, as a society, condoned what they had done and dreamed up ways to kill more people faster and easier while still being concerned about what kind of car to drive and what kind of school the kids should go to.
Death comes to us one at a time. Each life lost is a tragedy. Atomic weapons changes these tragedies into statistics but make no mistake, each death is still a tragedy. And each life lost to a bullet is just as much a tragedy as one lost to a nuke. War is terrible and destructive and to be avoided. Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others.
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
Much of this 'overgrown bully' stuff is true. The trouble is that the rest of the world is no better, indeed much of it is undeniably even worse. Don't expect that when America's luck runs out the next big kid will be nicer.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Disobeying orders in war time can get you shot. If I where to be ordered to kill someone else (an enemy) or get shot myself I know what I would choose.
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s/will not deal/is not dealing/
The U.S. IS a good country, but that doesn't mean its not bad.
Er... I mean for instance you ever see that Mcnamara Documentary 'The Fog of War.'
Well before we dropped the A bombs we had fire bombed the majority of Japanese Civilian Centers.
Remember WWII was the first instance of real Total War. Our targets were directly civilian and civilians, along with everything else.
You are correct, this was WWII, and whoever the loser ended up being they were going to be prosecuted for war crimes with good reason.
The Axis lost and they were prosecuted, and with good reason.
But if the allies had lost after we had done some of the things we'd done, then we too would have be prosecuted for war crimes, and with good reason.
To the victor goes the spoils.
He who controls the present controls the past.
Blah blah blah blah...
Now I've seen Everything
It's not necessarily hypocrisy:
1) it's perfectly possible for someone (or a country) to do something (especially in a time of crisis), see the effects it has, and repent. Having realised their own mistake, they may well seek to prevent others from making it
2) the people in command at the time are not in command now, so no real hypocrisy is involved, as the people decrying these weapons are not the ones that previously sanctioned their use
3) as you suggest, it's only natural to want to be exposed to as little risk as possible, and other nations/groups having these weapons increases the risk of them being used against the US, so of course they would rather no-one else has them
It's official. Most of you are morons.
must strike fear. All that we know of the effects of atomic bombs came from our government. Our government has a vested interest in enhancing the fear factor of the atomic bombs. The greatest secrets of all in the cold war were that nuclear winters are a theoretical result of a method of usage that would not be used and that nuclear war is definitely thinkable.
The sad thing is that the propaganda campaign has had such a devastating effect on peaceful usage of nuclear energy. We lag behind other countries in the development of peaceful nuclear usage precisely because we were the center of the propaganda campaign. If not for the cold war, we would not be in the business of mass destruction of our land to gather the coal necessary to produce half of our power. The coal power industry has seen far more deaths than the nuclear power industry and many of those deaths are just as slow and painful if not more so than those that would be expected from nuclear catastrophes.
Actually, low levels of radiation may prove to be beneficial for you. There is actually some scientific data on this..
Hormesis
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.
We should have just bombed the entire country into the stone age with conventional weapons, and then invaded. Sure, several times as many Japanese civilians (and 100K+ more Allied soldiers) would have been killed that way, but at least we wouldn't have used nukes.
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I didn't catch it before I submitted, but the penultimate sentence should read:
However, the real reason that these bombs proliferate is for defense, as misguided as that sounds.
With the USSR gone (for now at least), the US became an easy target for 'your the next evil empire' folks.
Will the US fall? If history is any indicator, then it will. Probably due to an economic war with China though, not through physical war. The new war front has moved into the stock markets. But then again, you never know what the future holds.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
> > Do you think that if hitler would have developed the Atomic Bomb he would
> > have hesitated to use it?"
> No, probably not, so?
I agree; this is somewhat of a red herring WRT the Japanese situation, as the Nazis (Japan's allies) had been defeated by this time, and I don't think anyone realistically thought there was a chance of Japan having a working A-bomb. (Although the Nazis *had* shipped support for a 'dirty bomb' to Japan shortly before their defeat, IIRC).
However, remember that the Allies believed Germany was trying to develop its own atomic weapon. Although we *now* know the Germans were nowhere near developing a 'true' atomic bomb, that was not known at the time.
And, if I was an Allied commander who had an atomic bomb, and believed that Hitler may be close to getting one in the next few months if Germany didn't lose the war, I would *certainly* have considered its use morally justifiable, and almost certainly essential.
Of course, if the US had had the bomb *before* Germany's defeat and it was clear that Germany didn't have the bomb, would they have used it against them anyway, and would it still have been morally justifiable?
If the Nazis had still had any real chance of winning the war, then yes. If they had been near defeat, probably not.
My gut reaction is that the A-bomb would have been used to bring the war to a swift conclusion, regardless, simply to stop Stalin gaining ground in Eastern Europe. After all, it's widely speculated that this is one reason why Japan was bombed; to win victory before the Russians got there (and send a signal of superiority to them). You can say what you like, but I believe the suffering of the Japanese people would have been far greater under Stalin (who I consider comparable to Hitler).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
America always has been, and still is, nothing more than an overgrown bully.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
I look around the world, and I see a lot of dead Americans buried in a lot of graves on foreign soil, and I'm afraid I don't see how most of those dead could possibly be construed as the result of the actions of nothing more than an overgrown bully.
Perhaps you could explain this to me.
The Former Soviet Union used to have a technical word, called, 'Neutral.' 'Neutral' was anyone who could not possibly hurt the Soviet Union.
Nations like Hungary and Czechoslovakia?
The Rest of the World will not deal with our stupidy much longer.
I'm more concerned about having to deal with yours.
Is it worse to kill 250k with atomic bombs or with conventional bombs? Hiroshima+Nagasaki had as many total casualties as the bombing of Tokyo did. One conventional, one (the combo of two, actually)nuclear, both equally deadly.
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All of these things happen when an overdose of Roentgen rays is given. Bombed children's hair falls out. That is natural because these rays are used often to make hair fall artificially and sometimes takes several days before the hair becomes loose
That's the scariest thing I've read so far, using hard radiation as a depilatory. Reminds me of the practice among alchemists of using liquid mercury as a purgative.
That's all deplorable, of course, but what exactly does any of it have to do with the people who died because of these bombs?
If my country commits attrocities, it doesn't give you the right to kill me.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I can't believe they call it an "atomic attack"
Yeah! They should have called it a "kitten parade"! Or possibly a "neutron-assisted aliveness readjustment"! Or a "celebration of freedom"!
I like "kitten parade" best.
You _do_ realize that it was, actually, an attack? Using an atomic weapon? Hence 'atomic attack'? With no big evil liberal conspiracy? If they'd called it an 'unneccessary atomic attack on a civilian target' _that_ might have been slanted. Just referring to 'the U.S. atomic attack' is simply a handy way of, well, referring to the U.S. atomic attack.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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
i'm not justifying what they did. but lets face it, its only in hindsight that we can tell the good and bad of an action like that. even then we can never be sure..
in any thing we do, we can never really tell what it will lead to. what seems like a good idea may be bad.. what seems like a bad idea may be good..
all we can do is say "it seemed like a good idea at the time" and move on. and hope that our other actions don't end up having bad consequences
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
That's utter crap.
Given the opportunity, every single country in the world would want to be #1. The United States just happens to be in that position.
The real reason America doesn't want anyone but America to have Atomic Weapons is because those countries won't be as responsible with it.
We have experience with the bomb. We know the devastation it can cause. We know the consequences of using it, and we don't want anyone else to. That's why America is against using the A-Bomb.
You guys can preach all you want about the USA wanting to be a bully, but you damn well know that if any other country was in this position, they'd do their best to stay up here as well.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
The Museum in Hiroshima holds that 40,000 of the Hiroshima victims were POWs - but that they were POWs from Asia, rather than European or US.
Of the 5 shortlisted targets for the two bombs, none of them would have been particularly free from collateral damage, however.
What's more interesting is the whole question of whether the atomic attacks were necessary to end tha war - I shall say no more on this here but I invite all readers to look into it - it wasn't as easily justified as you may think.
His long life isn't due to radiation, more probably has to do with the fact he got bitten by a spider.
The date of creation of the work was 1945.
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In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
And you would be lying to yourself. The guy who draws the arrow is as guilty as the guy who presses the button, who is as guilty as the guy who gives the order, and so on.
I agree that that's the way people rationalise it to themselves, but convincing yourself that you're 100% innocent doesn't make it true.
Of course, were I ever to find myself in the same situation, doubtless I would act in the same way; I'm not saying I'm any better. We're all human in the end.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
What's more interesting is the whole question of whether the atomic attacks were necessary to end tha war - I shall say no more on this here but I invite all readers to look into it - it wasn't as easily justified as you may think.
I suppose you think more fire-bombing like what was done to Tokyo and Dresden would have been better?
Evolutionary thinking will move you down the road, revolutionary thinking will put you on a new road!
take stones, that's less harmful. (if you refer to the Einstein quote)
To know why Japan surrendered to the US, you have to know the following things:
- How many Japanse soldier were situated in China: hundreds of thousends.
- How many Russian divisions were about to engage the Japanse army in China: 3
- Was the *smallest* russian division bigger or smaller than the complete Japanese presence in China: Bigger
- Didn't the Russian have far better equipment than the Japanese: Yes, the Russians had just fought a war against Germany, the Japanese had fought against peasants.
- What would Russia have done after they would have annihilated the Japanese forces in China: Figure that one out for yourself.
But the topic at hand isn't killing an ENEMY, but knowingly killing innocent civilians by following orders blindly. Or do you automatically consider all citizens of an opposing country in wartime to be "The Enemy"?
Following orders to kill civilians is a war crime, as is giving those orders in the first place.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
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.
is largely misplaced.
The Japanese occupied China for 12 years. In just one incident, they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million Chinese in retaliation for the Doolittle raid on Japan. Thousands of prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by the Japanese. They performed experiments with chemical and biological weapons on living people. Chinese are still being injured by leftover stocks of Japanese chemical weapons, yet the Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did.
While the nuclear strikes were terrible things, when one remembers the brutality and sheer animalistic behaviour of the Japanese, it's hard to not think "what goes around, comes around". The Japanese people were treated a hell of a lot better after their surrender than any of the peoples they conquered.
Fat Man was 21 kt yield as I recall.. The fireball ascended into the wind and fallout was not over ground zero. The black rain fell over Nishiyama, to the east.
There is still some residual radiation but surpisingly, the vast majority of radioactive fall-out pollution in the region is due to US atmospheric testing in the 50's, and that was way off in the Pacific!
The neutron radiation is also negligable compared to the background pollution.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
"America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government - and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives."
Sir Winston Churchill, New York Enquirer, 1936
Another reason we used the bomb was to show Stalin that we had it and were willing to use it.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/
It's done the rounds before, but maybe new people haven't seen it yet. Possibly apocryphal, left to reader to decide.
Also has some AMAZING pictures of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine at the end of last year. Very much well worth a look.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
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.
It's called 'diffusion of responsibility', BTW, not 'dilution'.
A lot of the scientists involved had thought that Japan would be shown the power of the nuke and then threatened. Failing that, that a military target would be used, Hiroshima wasn't that much of military target, otherwise why was it untouched in the regular bombings. However, even after Hiroshima was bombed communications within the country was so bad that the central government didn't know what had happened until the bombing of Nagasaki. Nagasaki was in that sense unnecessary and so too probably was Hiroshima. There was talk within the Japanese goverhment of surrender, an explicit threat of nuclear weapons was never made to tip the balance.
Too late now of course. Lots of bad shit happens in wars. What is not so well appreciated is that a lot of very very bad stuff happens in the closing days of a war, because the enemy defenses collapse and bloodlust takes over. Happens all through history, WW2 was no exception. You could view the use of nuclear weapons as an example of this with an unusually potent weapons technology. Still, more died in Tokyo or Dresden than at Hiroshima.
Bitter and proud of it.
It is MUCH stickier than that.
Folks, war is not a simple thing, and trying to make it sound simple is foolish. In war, there are things that happen that undeniably should not--I won't justify that. But there are too many people that question things that a) can't be changed and b) try to make all war seem evil.
A) is not so bad, as we can learn from past mistakes--and I think that the military would avoid using nuclear weapons (talking about US military, as well as European militaries) at all costs. There can be, however, a point beyond which it is no use to travel in your inspection of the past.
B) is foolish in the extreme. I had a coworker who, at one point, stated that she felt ALL war was wrong, and there was no point at which it would be justified to fight a war. This is foolish. At some point (and what point that is is debatable) there comes a time where if you do not fight, you allow innocent civilians to be slaughtered by an enemy who will torture and rape and abuse, just because the enemy has the ability to do so (I don't think that the majority of us would have liked it if Nazi Germany had won). In the case of WWII, if no one had opposed Hitler, then we still would have had concentration camps and the Holocaust. I don't think that appeals to most of us.
Does that justify, then, the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know. I do know, however, that there is NO way that you can ever be certain that if we hadn't done that that the Japanese (at that time) wouldn't have ended up winning the war. Maybe we would have had to use the nuclear bomb, but instead of hitting Japan, an enemy-occupied US city (possible). From a military standpoint, you always stop the enemy before they take your land. Especially when it is a war across oceans, where if Japan had taken and held Hawaii, it would have given them a major advantage.
So, "just following orders" is more complicated than you seem to think. That's why we aren't in the military (or I assume you are not). I, at the very least, would want to know why I should storm a particular hill or destroy a particular area. Sometimes an action may seem odd, or even wrong, but in the interest of winning a war, it may be absolutely essential. Without knowing the entire picture, however, you can't always be certain that an action is not the best thing. I'm not talking about rape or abuse or defying the Geneva conventions (those are always wrong, and then the soldier should take the moral ground and refuse, knowing that the senior officer might just have him severely punished (and in some cases killed), but defying the orders all the same), but about taking a village or bombing a particular target. So while I agree that there are some situations and actions that are extremely hard to justify (rape is never justified in my mind), don't be quick to judge a soldier's defense that he was just following orders. If the Milgram studies taught us anything it was that authority is more powerful than we tend to think, and that most people will obey orders when asked to do something the would never do on their own (shocking someone with a supposedly lethal charge)--just because they were told to do it by someone with authority (experimenter). Think about it a little more before you discount that particular defense!
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
1. That's as may be. It's entirely possible our intervention in WWI turned out to be a mistake. That still does not speak to my question, which was "How was our that intervention the work of nothing more than a bully?"
2. Churchill was not always right.
Might I suggest All About Radiation
by L. Ron Hubbard
but thats just a guess, and I'm from the US.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
I've heard a story that may be just an Urban legand, about a Japanese man who survived the Hiroshima bomb by being in an underground lab at the time. After the explosion, he walked out unharmed and seeing the ruins of his former place of employment headed home to his family. He arrived home in Nagasaki just in time to survive the SECOND bomb in the basement of his home with his family!!! (Oh no not AGAIN!!!)
were the Japanese used slave-labor to manufacture ships, torpedo and other war machines.
1) Who said they *had* to invade Japan to get a surrender? At this point of the war the Japanese had almost no reserve stocks or transport capability needed to keep the economy going (and the population fed).
2) Who said the *US* had to invade? On August 8th the Soviet Union declared war on the Japanese. Sure that might have meant a communist Japan, but that's a whole different argument than millions of dead. And besides the Japanese Army had quit a healthy respect for the Red Army. Perhaps they would have surrendered anyway.
3) Why did they drop the bombs on a heavily populated civilian area? They could have at least started by bombing some small, unpopulated island. One of the reasons the Manhattan project was so expensive is that they didn't just build a bomb, they build the entire infrastructure to mass-produce bombs.
4) Why did they need *unconditional* surrender? It's clear that Japan was quite aware of its unwinnable position quite early on. By the end of the war a serious offer to negotiate might have worked a lot better than clinging to the unconditional line, which in the end wasn't even achieved (the armed forces surrendered unconditionally, the Japanese nation didn't.
Bless you. Someone with a mind and capable of using it. I have no idea what people's knee-jerk reaction to common sense is when it proves that common sense says that killing people is the best way to stop people from being killed.
Bless you, sir/madam, for having the open-mindedness to look at the facts, and the courage to speak the truth.
May your Code never SEGFAULT.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Every Slashdot poster should be required to visit the D-Day museum in New Orleans -- especially the Pacific's exhibit. After seeing that, I have no qualms about decisions made by the US to try to end the war.
Heck, had they not dropped the bombs, my grandfather would not likely be here right now (and subsequently me either), since he was a Marine scheduled to make that invasion of Japan.
Considering that Aussie troops would have been hitting the beaches alongside the American, Canadian, and British troops, Australia would have taken heavy casualties as well.
Best Slashdot Co
A month later (which is when he visited), radiation levels would have fallen well below safe levels.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
They had to. Japan was already amassing forces in expectation of an invasion, forces that outnumbered American ones. Women and Children were being trained to fight. And all were expected to fight to the death and not surrender. A ground invasion would have led to the total annihilation of the Japanese people, or a large majority of them.
I refer you to the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb, but the second. The fact that they did not surrender after such an awesome display of raw power would point to the fact that they had never intended to surrender, but, as afore mentioned, fight to the last man, woman, and child.
Both of the cities were also military targets, and the civilian populations were mobilized to give resistance, i.e., fight to the death. Hiroshima had Army Headquarters and the HQ for Southern Japan's defense. Nagasaki was a strategically vital seaport and ordinance factory.
It's partly cultural. During the Second World War, there were still a vast majority of persons in Japan, pretty much the whole population, that believe in "Death Before Dishonor." Surrender was shameful, and they would have died first. Many of them did on outlying islands, after they had been routed to caves and, when soldiers called for their surrender, they generally fired back, and when they didn't they just stayed in there.
Unconditional Surrender was needed to force the concept fully across into Japanese Society that they had been defeated. And as to them being willing to surrender before the bombs, they didn't surrender after the first one, as I have said afore. That's why we dropped two.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I think you and Churchill underestimate the sin of Greed.
WW1 was not the first, nor would it have been the last war fought in Europe.
Please reread history and rethink the BIG PICTURE of human nature. We have not ended war by having 2 massive wars. We have simply changed the nature of it. The rich countries, USA, Europe, Russia, Japan, fight them with expensive pinpoint weapons. The poorer countries such as those in Africa do it the old fashioned way, with dumb bullets, and bayonet charges. The cruelty in poor wars is beyond belief. Yet, these are never reported to the civilised world. And you, who feels that America is a bully, have no knowledge or care of them, do you?
To quote an African soldier who machine gunned his enemy: "We kill them like sheep."
They Live, We Sleep
First British Bombing raid on Berlin: 23 Aug 1940
First German Bombing raid on London: 7 September 1940
I used to think that was the case, but having read the Wikipedia article posted above, I'm now not so sure. It seems there were several alternative ways to end the war:
Operation Starvation (as described here): 160 planes planted around 2,000 sea mines in many of the major ports of Japan in April 1945. This proved to be so effective that 35/47 convoy routes had to be abandoned due to the risk to shipping. This would have had a major impact on supplies and logistics. Quoth Wikipedia: "After the war, the commander of Japan's minesweeping operations noted that he thought this mining campaign could have directly led to the defeat of Japan on its own had it began earlier.". Of course, the death by starvation would have probably been as painful as the nuclear attacks.
Operation August Storm (Here): This was to be the initial Russian foray into the war, which started after the Russian declaration of war on August 8th. The Soviets were planning to head through China, and launch a land invasion long before the planned American invasion in March 1946. Having the Russians suddenly transform from weary neutral to enemy, with a major military campaign to boot, would surely have had some effect on the morale of the Japanese military command.
Of course, this would have also resulted in heavy civilian casualties. But if the Soviets didn't get anywhere, there would've been no reason why the Americans couldn't have dropped the bomb later (after warning the Soviet allies, of course).
And finally, they could have always performed a demonstration blast, before actually attacking civilian targets. To their credits, the Americans did drop leaflets to warn the Japanese about their new weapons.
-- Dramatisation - May Not Have Happened
Now, whether this is a "Your Rights Online" piece or not is debatable, and I think you and I would fall on the same side in that argument. However, the posting is about a reporter who observed, firsthand, what the "technology" of the 1940s had wrought. Sounds like an interesting read to me. And I'm not even a nuclear physicist.
Broaden your mind. There are still nerds in the sciences, and they might actually outnumber the actual nerds who are in the IT field (the mercenaries who are out to make a buck as quickly as possible do not count as nerds). Nerds are not only about "technology" (which, as Joanna Russ has pointed out, is a bullshit term, anyhow).
That about them not knowing what happened at Hiroshima until after Nagasaki was bombed is a bold faced lie.
Many people noticed that suddenly virtually all telephone and telegraph lines leading to and from the city were cut, and that the city was no longer broadcasting Radio. The Japanese Military dispatched two Officers in a plane to go and see what had happened. Within 4 hours they had gotten there and had made report as to the damage. Keep in mind that by the time they got 100 miles away from the city, they could still see the mushroom cloud and could see the city burning. Still.
For information: The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Hiroshima: The Bombing.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
They had to. Japan was already amassing forces in expectation of an invasion
The fact that Japan was amassing forces doesn't mean that America had to invade.
I refer you to the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb, but the second. The fact that they did not surrender after such an awesome display of raw power would point to the fact that they had never intended to surrender, but, as afore mentioned, fight to the last man, woman, and child.
That's one interpretation. A more plausible interpretation would be that displays of military force were largely ineffective as a means of inducing Japanese surrender. Negotiations for a conditional surrender would probably have been far more effective.
Both of the cities were also military targets, and the civilian populations were mobilized to give resistance, i.e., fight to the death. Hiroshima had Army Headquarters and the HQ for Southern Japan's defense. Nagasaki was a strategically vital seaport and ordinance factory.
Yeah, and the cities contained a lot of civilians too. So they were civilian targets, there's no getting around it.
Unconditional Surrender was needed to force the concept fully across into Japanese Society that they had been defeated.
It wasn't necessary to get that concept fully across into Japanese society. A little delusion can go a long way to saving lives. And as has already been pointed out, the bombs didn't even achieve conditional surrender, so even by your standards they were actually a complete failure as well as a waste of 1000s of lives.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
There are even places in Scotland, and probably elsewhere, where the natural background radiation is so high that you can get more than the maximum recommended dosage just by walking around outside.
You should also know that people like General Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur and Fleet Admiral William Leahy opposed the use of the bomb and thought it was unnecessary for Japan's surrender.
You should also know that any talk of saving japanese lives is utter hypocrisy coming from a nation that carpet bombed Tokyo.
Furthermore, you can't ignore the lot less noble power struggle with the up-and-coming Soviets. The bombs were a show of power in this struggle.
They Japanese were big on forced labor camps. Given this, I'd say there is a pretty obvious reason for the camp to be located near manufacturing facilities.
Why?
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.
At least it was for Japan.
.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because the U.S. decided to cut off Japan's oil supply. Japan has no oil supply and very insignificant amounts of natural gas. Without oil, the Japanese empire was doomed.
It should be stressed that the primary reason for implementing Kamikazes was the lack of fuel. One way tickets require less fuel . .
Finally, for those that say the atomic bombs SAVED lives, you are quite right as long as you stay within the constraints of the "American Empire" condition, that MUST always be decisive and never show compromise.
However, indulge me for a moment, and imagine an island nation that has been defeated overseas and is now isolated from the resources (oil) that brought it to civilization. What if, at this point, the U.S. worked with its allies to make sure Japan was completely cut off from the outside world. The U.S. could then use the promise of trade as carrot to lead what was left of the Japanese empire to a peaceful end of the war WITHOUT invasion of the mainland. But, that would take time, perhaps require inspections, and even help from other allies, like the damn commies.
No, the U.S. was too self righteous to compromise and show moderations then . . . and some would argue things have not changed since.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The question you really have to ask yourself is, by this one horrendous action, can I save many more lives?? In the case of Nagasaki, arms and munitions plants were *also* knocked out, so that even if Japan had not surrendered, their means for continuing the war was greatly reduced. Does that outweigh the aftermath of two nuclear weapons?? I don't know.
I'm a strong opponent against nuclear weapons and that's the very reason for discussing the only actual use of them.
Nuclear bombs and other war atrocities like them can never be reduced to "war is hell, whatcha gonna do about it?"
Maybe there was no real options in 1945. Discussing it now might help to create options in future wars, however. With the development on nuclear arms in the world deteriorating, it's a highly relevant discussion.
haha - no surprise on my part from your response.
To answer your question, no I don't think more firebombing would have been better. It wasn't the only other option though. - One option was to do nothing militarily and await the outcome of the surrender negotiations which were underway.
You wouldn't have liked him when he was angry though.
what kind of sick fraternity did you belong to?
how about this, gimme your address, so i can come by your house tonight, tie you up and beat you for a while. maybe i'll sodomize you with a lightstick. piss on you a few times. you know, good old fasioned hazing stuff.
hopefully, you won't get beaten so bad you'll die, like that cab driver in basura.
anyhoo, at the end, while you're lying tied up in a pool of your own excrement, i'll bring you a nice steak burrito, which will obviously make it all better.
frat pledges, my ass.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
As long as you're paying taxes, you're paying the soldier to burn that child.
Nobody wants to kill children. Sometimes, however, avoiding what you don't want to do means much greater evils happen.
-- I speak only for myself
WW1 was not the first, nor would it have been the last war fought in Europe.
Of course not, europe has been in a state of war since the end of the last ice age. What made WW1 siginificant that US intervention changed the end result to something else than a stalemate (whis was the end result of most conflicts in europe before that). Balance of power you see. "The war that ends all wars" was not the kind of futile bloodfest that it could and should have been. Because of (probably well meaning) US intervention, other side won quite handsomely and that sow the seeds for much larger destruction later on.
Those "big bully" -references are mostly reactions to US actions in 1950's and onwards. I wouldn't call them well meaning at all. Imperialistic, vicious and murderous are words that come to mind to describe them.
This is so true, McNamara actually mentions this in relation to the excessive firebombing of japanese cities (which killed and destroyed more than the two H-bombs). Would you rather not firebomb the cities? And then have to send 500,000 american troops to land on the beaches of a country which evidently had a large portion of the population who were prepared to fight to the death? At what point is it permissible to do something in war because it is too henious?
McNamara goes through all this in "The Fog of War" documentary, and actually calls for restrictions to nuclear weapons and to "total war". And as General LeMay said, if they had lost the war, they would have been prosecuted as war criminals.
The documentary, Fog of war has 8.3 on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/ which would put it in the top 50 movies of all time on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/chart/top - if they put documentaries in there.
Truely a great piece, must see. Get it now.
Oh my god you are so right. We had this guy who was pledging for our frat so we tied him up, beat him until he shit all over himself, and then left him there. Hahahahaha Then we came back in later and fucked him in the ass.
We had this other guy who we beat up pretty good. He ended up dying on us when we beat his legs so hard we shattered his leg bones into a pulp. He ended up dying from blood clots going into his heart and lungs. Fuckin pussy.
It's cool though cause they ate well.
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
This is always an interesting question, and makes pops in all these "what-if" war books. It does ignore that Russia and Italy were facing major defeats, and that france was requiring unconditional surrender which was not going to happen; and Germany was still ready for a fight.
However to put the quote into place. This was said 20 years after WW1, when it was looking like what became WW2 was going to happen.
In his books on WW1 he never makes this comment or anything similar to it. In his on WW2 books he never makes a comment like this or anything similar.
During this time period Churchill made his living by writing, and he wrote numerous article which he personnally disagreed with in addition to some he later disagreed with.
Also there was a lawsuit over this because Churchill claims he never said it. IIRC the lawsuit was finally settled in Churchills favor because the other person never showed up in court.
I don't necessarily see how "all war is evil" necessarily equates to "we must never go to war." I'm sorry, but all war is evil. But sometimes, if there are no other viable alternatives, we have to deal with that necessary evil. Try to avoid war at almost all costs...but sometimes it is necessary to step up to the plate. But there's no use in glorifying war or trying to make it sound better than it is; war is hell. People die. Civilians and soldiers. Teenagers will be screaming for their mother as they try to keep their guts from spilling out. Civilians will be burnt alive or killed by shrapnel. Children will see their parents cut down in front of their eyes. War is an evil act. Period. But in very specific instances, it does do some good. Sometimes evil acts have that effect. That doesn't make them less evil.
it was the 'Military-Industrial Complex' that Ike warned about.
Yeah, right.
No, I can't imagine what it would have been like for a political ideal to somehow defeat armies of living, breathing, physical people. I imagine that would be quite a surreal event to witness.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
One gets the impression reading that paragraph that this wasn't what he really thought, but rather, that he already suspected he was going to get censored, and was trying to write as US-friendly an article as possible in order to try avoid being censored, so that his article could get to the US public.
You're posing your statements as if the US just decided out of a vacuum to cut off oil exports to japan, for no reason at all. Deliberately ignoring the context of the time, and japan's alliance with the axis powers.
The US cut off japan's oil to stop their expansionism.
Lets see now. Japan is cut off from american oil. The US demands Japan leave china and indochina. Japan can choose either diplomacy or war. Japan chose war, and the result was pearl harbor.
It's nice to play woulda-coulda-shoulda, but we already know from historical documents and first hand interviews that japan would never have chosen a diplomatic solution.
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
Now, granted, the Japanese culture of war was *extremely* harsh and the atrocities commited were extreme. But that doesn't make other atrocities okay.
War is about the demonization of the enemy - the psychology that makes a Japanese soldier feel okay about (horribly) torturing someone to death to maintain order in a camp is exactly the same as the one that lets someone feel okay about killing (horribly) tens of thousand of civilians in an attempt to force an opponent into surrender. War is a nasty, violent, terrible thing and glorifying it only leads to more atrocities - no matter how bad your enemy is.
How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?
Logical consequence of the decision to enter WW2. A decision that was not made easily, but as it turns out was the correct one to make. Oh, I'm not speaking on moral or ethical terms, but on economical - see "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (ISBN: 0679720197)
Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?
That one might be true. I still don't quite get it, makes little sense from a power-political POV. Then again, maybe I don't know the whole picture.
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
Preservation of US presence in southeast asia, an important part of the cold war strategy (same as Vietnam, really). The importance of South Korea to the US is comparable to that of Kuba to the Sovjets.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You win. I think it's time for a new poll?
Best Euphemism For An Atomic Attack?
[ ] Kitten Parade
[X] Neutron-Assisted Aliveness Readjustment
[ ] Celebration Of Freedom
[ ] 18.95 Candygrams/cm^3
[ ] Fission-Based BSOD
[ ] CowboyNeal's Post-Burrito Special
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Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki
It saved the lives of approximately One Million US Service Personnel,
Bullshit. "Years after the war, Secretary of State James Byrnes claimed that 500,000 American lives would have been lost - and that number has since been repeated "authoritatively", but in the summer of 1945 US military planners projected 20,000-110,000 combat deaths from the initial November 1945 invasion, with about three to four times that number wounded"
Also, killing civilians to save soldiers is hardly ok.
Note that, at the time the bombs were dropped, we (meaning everyone) did not know as much about the dangerous health effects of radiation, especially at smaller doses. Due to such ignorance, these bombs could have been seen more or less as oversized conventional bombs which cause a lot of physical destruction. Just something to keep in mind.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Radiation (i.e atomic, not just like any old radiation) is different to what a lot of people think. Chernobyl is now a nature park and you can go on a guided tour Article and Article
As well as walking round the erie cities themselves.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
Well, then by that ideology then 9/11 was justified. After all Osama Bin Laden declared war on the U.S. back in 1993. Conversely, the U.S. was fighting "terrorism and Osama". i've never understood this word, terrorism. It's actually a really silly word when you think of it, as all wars are fought through the terrorizing or use of fear of complete destruction of the enemy. So, if there are no innocents in war, then every person who died in the WTC were simply casualties of war. As everyone of those WTC casualties were aiding the American governments cause by living in the U.S. and paying taxes to help fund the Governments war actions, and therefore, target for destruction. So, I'm just making sure I understand your statement when you say, there are no innocents in war.
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.
So true -- and in general, the point that people take the nuclear weapons as something completely distinct from "strategic" bombing campaigns, on both sides of the war, is ever so appropriate to make. By the time we got to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moment, those were natural extensions of the logic of those campaigns. Truman (one of my least favorite Presidents) had authorized the use of the bombs as soon as they'd work, and they were used without another decision on his part basically. For us to look back and deal with them alone has to be deeply wrong.
That doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned, though, or that we should accept the rationale that you offer for why they "worked" even on those "logic of the war" terms without scrutiny.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
And now we're off in the land of wishfully-accepted wisdom, positing possible events and their potential consequences. This line of thinking is certainly out there, it's worth thinking about -- and it's exactly where people who want not to deal with the morality of those bombs would like us all to come to a full stop.
Unfortunately "it stopped the war earlier and saved lives on both sides" asks us to accept that those arguments are true when they're essentially speculative. There was very real debate within the US's own armed forces about the potential costs of an invasion. There were different plans among the different services for how the end could come with Japan. They disagreed about what to do, and to suggest that there was a clear answer is a lie. To lump all that together and say "Okay, but it worked because the war didn't go any longer" avoids several questions -- "Why not drop the first bombs somewhere other than on a densely-populated city?" and so on -- and can amount to self-censorship that's just about to that head-in-the-sand point by now.
For one example: When the Smithsonian exhibit around the Enola Gay got neutered in the 1990s, one of the suggested additions to the exhibit, supposedly for "balance," was a display with a purple heart and a (quite high) estimate of the number of Purple Hearts that were prevented by the bombings. Some pretty major right wing influences, stirred up partly by "Air Force" magazine (which is a trade publication largely for purchasers of modern air weapons), wanted those fictional body counts included in the exhibit. Alas, the good folks at the museum are not especially fond of the idea of displaying fictional Purple Hearts. Partly, you know, they feel a responsibility not to insult those who got the real thing. Partly they just don't want to make things up to put on display -- and the proposed revisions weren't to be attributed to any particular primary source, they were meant to be in the neutral narrative voice of the exhibition's information panels. They chose to simply display the plane with almost no exhibit at all. Just a shiny fuselage.
Second example, and the one that horrifies me: Chester Nimitz, judging by both remarks of his own in October of 1945 and by comments of his widow, regretted the bombs horribly.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
the Japanese were likely not the first, and certainly not the last to use prisoners as hostages in this manner.
Actually, in 1864 during the American Civil War, the Union Army held 600 captured Confederate officers and men in front of Foster's Battery on Morris Island for 45 days, partly out of revenge for the relocation of 600 prisoners into Charleston City and partly in an effort to prevent the Confederates holding Charleston Harbor from mounting effective counter-fire. It didn't work -- the Confederates artillery fired back anyway and Charleston didn't fall until the end of the War -- but luckily none of the prisoners were killed.
irony?
well, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron
(quoting Baldrick from Blackadder III)
I do that. Regularly. I consider it a quality I'm proud of.
Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself. The USS Arizona, if memory serves, is one of the most popular tourist magnets for Japanese tourists. Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans? The Japanese seem keen to remember their lessons.
Deciding that any race is worth more, or less, than another is a quality I never wish to have. Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Do you honestly expect me to think that it takes 100 Japanese lives to make up for a single American? Or do I add up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers and then decide how many Germans to slaughter to compensate for Nazi atrocities?
wrt glorifying war
MANOWAR ROOLZ.
I wish that I was a catfish.
So war is right because there always exists someone who is the aggressor? That's just saying everyone should defend themselves instead of being killed. Wow, that position is just so controversial.
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.
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
If my country commits attrocities, it doesn't give you the right to kill me.
Actually, under the rules of war, it does. You don't even have to commit atrocities, just be at war. Americans call it "collateral damage".
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
umm... no. Hitler was involved in WWII. The leader of Germany in WWI was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hitler was only a soldier in WWI.
It was both Sherlock. That's whay they called them the Axis (Germany + Japan).
I did some research on Radon when we found out our house had it. Seems that the acceptable dose was never really studied- but inferred from radon levels in mines which are much higher. Workers who worked in mines were in there 40 hours a week- and were fine until the amount of radon in the air reached 100ppm. In the home- they calculated 4ppm (in the us- 10ppm is allowable in Europe) to be safe based off of exposure times extrapolated from the data. Great math- but it could be poor science if this theory proves true.
Don't expect that when America's luck runs out the next big kid will be nicer.
...
China.
Sleep tight folks
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
You mentioning Hungary is quite bad, because it was the USA who messed it up for the 10 million Hungarians at that time.
Let me explain, at that specific date in 1956, the world was occupied with another crisis: the Suez-channel conflict. When the Hungarian revolution happened, a new hungarian goverment has been created and declared independency from the soviet union and asked the support of the western world. You know how did the soviets react? They basically waited. Waited for what position would the USA take. That was basically the biggest blown opportunity to liberate a country in the last 50 years, because the USA reacted in a way that diplomatically signaled the soviets that they don't care. So well, Hungary became an independent country in 1990, only because the USA couldn't have focused on two things at once.
Quoting from the wikipedia article you linked:
As someone familiar with the cold war actions taken by the USA and the former USSR, i'd welcome if you would not try to put the USA as some good guy. The past and present actions of the USA clearly show that it is not the case.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
Please, please tell me you are actually 8 years old and haven't even had history yet...
"We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold."
-- Hunter S. Tolkien
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?
that you end up not talking about. My grandfather died a few years ago and while my father was going threw his things he found a special medal from the navy along with a letter. He had been one of the first people on the ground at nagasaki after the bomb.
It's something he told no one about, and it he had not saved the medal and letter we still would not have known.
Type in all caps, swear, curse, insult and offer absolutely no intelligent content then post as an AC.
That'll show how smart you are and how absolutely correct your position is.
Four weeks, Twenty papers, that's two dollars
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?
WTF!!!! Dude, go take a 3rd grade history class! Hitler wasn't put into power until 1933, almost 15 years after the end of WW1. God, I hope you were kidding.
This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes "justified" by the previous atrocities.
... oh maybe 3 months between 6th and 7th grade.
And I think that lasted for about
The first culture that goes completely "pacifist" will be run over by one that doesn't believe in their ideals. While that might seem harsh, that's reality.
While the men went off to war, the women went to work in defense plants and other facilities to aid the war effort. Children helped with scrap metal drives and such, while seniors tended "Victory Gardens".
Would Japan have been justified in wiping out a couple of major US cities if it had developed the capability to do so?
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I wonder how much of this story and commentary has been twisted to support the current anti-nuke fad of today?
...that the only thing would have been needed is some diplomacy to liberate a lot of people from soviet opression. You brought a few examples when the USA for some reason, not necessary out of goodwill stepped in an did something. I brought you an example when there would have been an easy situation to solve and the USA didn't. Watching and not taking action wasn't very human thing to do. This occasion proves that the USA didn't or still doesn't care about human life more than the USSR did, you are just protecting your own interests, so there is no moral high horse for you to sit on.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I've heard of the Milgram experiment. Nobody would ever allow that sort of thing to be repeated nowadays, unfortunately {except maybe for a reality TV show}.
..... someone else will undoubtedly be given the order I refused, but perhaps my own actions might just have rekindled something that had been smouldering in my replacement ..... and my would-be executioners .....
Still, I maintain my position: Not only is obedience not a virtue in and of itself, but there are times when is is wrong to obey an order.
Not disobeying an order to shoot somebody who refused to obey an order to do something wrong is also wrong. So I would say let them threaten to kill me, if I saved that many lives
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
try to make all war seem evil.
ALL war is ALWAYS evil. Make no mistake about that.
It's just that, sometimes, it's the lesser evil.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
The difference is we didn't have total mobilization. We still had schools which educated children in math and literature, not spear drills. We still had hospitals servicing civilian needs, not off-limits to everyone but the military. We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects.
If you're asking me if the defense plants were valid targets, sure. If the Japanese had somehow been able to bomb Rosie the Riveter, that would've been entirely appropriate within the laws and customs of war. The instant a civilian starts working for a military purpose, they stop being a civilian. In wartime Japan, more than ninety percent of the population over age twelve was working for the war effort. Hence, there were very few civilians in Japan.
And so long as you let your plants live, you are providing oxygen for the flame that the soldier uses to burn that child.
I'm sure the POW camp was last thing on General LeMay's mind, after he firebombed the living crap out of Japan's civillian population for a few months, causing more death and destruction than the 2 A-bombs combined.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
What makes you think you're not in the same situation?
(Do I bother to mention Iraq, presidential elections, "napalm", or would that be underestimating the inteligence of Slashdot readers?)
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Also he was very being very opinionated about things he did not know much about. Even though he saw hair falling out of children, he dicounted the idea of radiation sickness. He did come back to it in the end though, I would have preferred to just read the guys observations without reading his opinions.
He spent some time on the war stories of POWs too. This was a digression.
It is a shame this story was not printed after it was written. But I think the reason decades passed before it was published is that this just was not very good.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
He did look a bit green afterwards.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Sorry, you are wrong. While the Japanese were no longer a threat outside of Japan, the taking of Okinawa to the tune of 30,000 american casualties pretty much convinced the american war effort that the nuke was preferable to trying to fight 5 million estimated civilian/military troops to land on Japans beaches.
Talk to a marine who served in the pacific and see what he thinks of the bomb. Its estimated to have actually saved a few million lives. The Japanese war commanders STILL thought they could win/"find advantagous surrender terms" even after the second bomb was dropped.
The crime in Japan was not the bomb, it was a whole host of customs and cultural problems that defeat/surrender was not an option.
Slightly OT: It's not like Japan didn't deserve it there, they (the Russians) were looking for revenge after their major, major losses during the Russio-Japan war of 1905, where Russia lost pretty much all of her pacific fleet, Port Arthur (What's it's modern name?) and also a large portion of her baltic fleet which was brought all the way over to help out... In short, the Russians were probably very, very eager to fight the Japanese.
Many people today point at the U.S. and use actions from WWII in their arguments regarding U.S. actions today. Of course, they only do themselves and their arguments a disservice. Allied Europeans helped to build the bombs, provided resources, condoned their use, etc. It was a question of justification at the time; it was just survival. In fact, those primitive nuclear weapons did far less damage than the many firebombings during WWII. They were something people had never seen. It was shocking and terrible. It was a more effective terrorism than the firebombing that had been engaged in previously. The firebombing that was initiated by the European Allies.
People continue to make all kinds of silly justifications, "Hiroshima was payback for Pearl Harbour,"(payback is justification?) and criticisms, "The U.S. is the only country to ever use a nuclear bomb"(the point being that, the U.S. is and always has been, evil). Of course, the truth is that it was a strategic action taken during the greatest(ie. most fucking horriffic) war of all of human history. The devastation caused by the atom bomb is a drop in the bucket in the context of WWII.
Was it justified? Was it wrong? Those questions have very little meaning. It is just not that simple; all meaning is lost when looked at in such simple terms. There is nothing to be learned when viewed out of its historic context.
OTOH, since the discussion here is veering all over the place, I submit that the current U.S. administration's discussion about deploying tactical nukes is pure fucking insanity and clearly shows just how stupid and ignorant they are, and further that the administration's lying to the public to further its agenda is a clear fucking sign regarding its (lack of) integrity and self-serving purposes.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Wow, so, that's probably what compells the Scotts to deep-fry Mars bars!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
And, of course, the people torturing your grandmother weren't the ones who got the bomb dropped on them.
Not the point - dropping the bomb led to Japan's surrender, which is why (presumably) the people torturing his grandmother stopped doing so, and released her. Otherwise, the torture would have continued.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I read this as a schoolboy, just weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962). It was pretty sobering. It made the prospect of nuclear war pretty real.
Later, it turned out that friends of my family were prisoners of the Japanese, and suffered horribly. Later still, it turned out that a classmate of my father (in Holland) had fled Holland in 1939 for the safety of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. The Japanese put him in a prison work force in -you guessed it- Nagasaki. He was in the bowels of a ship that was under construction when the bomb went off. He said it was the loudest sound he'd ever heard. He also said he just "ran like hell".
Anyone interested in what a "loose nuke" from Iran, or N Korea can do should read Trumbull's book. I guarantee that you'll never think about the subject in quite the same way as you did before the read.
Moralisticly, thats a hard claim to make. Thats the equivilent of the Presidents "We do not distinguish between Terrorists and their hairdressers" position.
Some sort of shared responsibility model is needed, but I'm afraid I don't have one ready made to help.
Pax -- Ob
Well, I don't offer any special insight here. I've lived in Japan for 6 years, even married a Japanese, and look forward to having kids one day. But I don't claim insight into this. It's too big, too deep, and I'm not talking about Japan, I'm talking about anyone caught up in a World War, something many of us on this forum, in all fairness, don't know shit all about.
There is confusion here in Japan on both sides about the war, the Bomb, the right , the wrong. Would Japan be here today with it or without it? The bottom line is, we don't know. Hundreds disappeard under military rule in Japan in the 1930's for speaking out against the march to war. There is no shrine to these people as they have been deleted.
Much of Tokyo was firebombed. The town where I used to live in Kanagawa-ken was razed by Allied bombing. Then again, my home town in Europe was firebombed, and as my grandmother said, the heat from the burning paper mills made the glass melt in the nearby houses. Burning people.
The obsession with Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a suffering point of view is a morbid curiosity about the technology, not the event. Ask the people of Dresden. Of Coventry. It's been used to show the Japanese people as victims. Indeed they were during that raid, but not just from the Bomb, but from their own government, from the act of War. Many Asian people suffered under Japanese beliefs of superiority - something I see the echoes of. It's not nice, it's not pretty, but it's real.
We cannot judge 60 years ago, but as it says on many memorials, never again, and in the [paraphrased] words of Thomas Paine 'may I live in a time of suffering so my children might know peace'. We might think our lives are hard, but virtually none of us have watched people burn to death, been a party to the genocide of millions and hid behind our own fears. I glad I don't have to live with that, I'm glad I don't need to make those decisions.
Zenwalk 4 - GNU/Linux Athlon XP2500+
Mac OS X 10.4.x MacBook Core Duo 2GHz
WinXP Athlon64 3700+ DFI/Nvidia6800
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
If I where to be ordered to kill someone else (an enemy) or get shot myself I know what I would choose.
:(
In Soviet America, Uncle Sam wants YOU! (pathetic, isn't it?
if i was a country in some of those US black lists I'd be developing WMD like mad
And just imagine how surprised you would be when you were invaded anyway. Nuclear weapons are really not very practical for many reasons, which is one reason why they have never been used except for that one time in WWII. As for chem/bio they are not much of a serious threat either. Show me an example in modern warfare where they have helped win a war and I may change my mind.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
"As long as you're paying taxes, you're paying the soldier to burn that child."
Erm. So what do you do when you want your local police and fire services to be active, but don't want soldiers to burn children?
"Derp de derp."
I think this is a silly perception of 'evil'. When faced with two choices, choosing the option that causes the greatest good, or the least harm is not evil. As you said, sometimes war is that option. Thus, war is not always "evil".
Trumpeting the blanket statement "war is evil" is just plain wrong. Saying it's the "lesser evil" is simply acknowledging that you are uncomfortable with the idea of taking a firm stance on what delineates good and evil choices.
War is harsh, war often contains atrocious acts, war is sometimes necessary, but it is not itself evil.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
So? Let them have their amassed forces (not exactly crack troops by the way). My point is that by this stage of the war Japan had lost most of its transportation and a large part of its production capability. Since the Japanese islands are resource poor, this meant no possibility of doing anything against the US forces (No new planes or ships and even if they could build them: no fuel to run them). Meanwhile the population is slowly starving and the Russians might invade any minute. Seems like a good time to surrender (something that, despite stereotypes nad common knowledge, *was* discussed at high levels)
Then why did they surrender after the second? Beside the fact that it took time to get a clear picture of what had actually happened in Hiroshima and the fact that the US didn't really give them a lot of time to do this, my point was that it still isn't clear what was most important in triggering the surrender: the military importance of the bombs (resistance is futile), the excuse this gave the surrender faction of the government, the Russian declaration of war or the guarantee given that the Emperor would remain. If they 'never intended to surrender' why did they after the second bomb?
Military significance is unimportant. The goal of the bombings wasn't to hit the military; it was to demonstrate the new weapon. Why choose a target with civilians at all? The power of the new weapon could have been amply demonstrated by removing some landscape. Arguing that civilians who have been mobilised to resist invaders count as military targets is a very slippery slope by the way. By that reasoning you could very easily declare *everyone* a combatant
I call bullshit. Yes, that's the racist argument used at the time, but the higher echelons knew that certain factions within the Japanese government had been trying to make a deal for years. Hell, that was the whole war plan: to cripple the US, build a strong position, then negotiate a great deal. As the war turned sour the ambitions were tuned down (though they were still unrealistically high: they expected to keep at least Korea and Manchuria). Japanese soldiers where a special breed: indoctrination started immideatly after grammar school and was brutal. And even then there were plent of surrenders.
The problem was on the US side. The United States has always had a dislike for compromises at the end of a war. This was increased by the German nazi propaganda, which stated Germany hadn't been *really* lost
If the main intention is to destroy the war manufacturing facilities at Nagasaki, then I wonder if anybody gave warning to the civilians to escape? Did Japanese government knows the target? Did the US inform the Japanese government? Or directly to the civilians (paper leaflets)? At that point in the the Japanese barely has any air force left as I recall from books.
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.
The aggressor is always wrong. No, the really interesting question is: at what point is a threat sufficient to warrant a response? A threat is an act of aggression, but there are credible threats, and non-credible ones. I think we know where Saddam falls on this scale. The question is, where is that line beyond which we are justified in acting?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Ahh, moral absolutism. Great.
must... stay... awake...
"Terrorism" isn't really about the method; it's about who's doing it. Yes, when a country is in a declared state of war, civilians might be considered targets. There are some attempts at rules (such as Geneva Conventions), but it seems in an all out war these get thrown out the window. (As long as you win the war, it really doesn't matter how. Your enemies won't be in a position to complain).
But, OBL does not represent any country, and therefore he has no authority to declare war. His actions, therefore, quite simply, make him a criminal. This particular crime is called terrorism.
This is very important distinction, since a nation has to consider the protection of it's own citizens. It can't go off bombing anyone it has a grudge against for fear of retaliation. Someone like OBL can, (as long as he has someplace to hide).
you are either
a) stupid,
b) ignorant, or
c) trolling
take a fracking history class. in WWI, hitler was a corprol in the german army. in WWII, he was the guy-in-charge. japan was germany's ally in WWII, they didn't have anything to do with WWI (AFAIK)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I would agree that everybody in that chain-of-command has part responsibility. However, I would argue that the workers or the pilot or the likes are that much responsible as the generals up there who make the decision. Did the worker or the pilot really have a say in this? If they did and refuse to take the order, that'll be considered treason and probably sent to prison for life. Did the worker or the pilot comes up with the idea of such attack? Nobody wants to be responsible for the decision, but ultimately somebody made the decision, and the pilot/worker has no say in this.
That having been said, the effects of these bombs are shocking. The shock is so great, people are willing to do anything to avoid these bombs. That's what makes them attractive as weapons of war, but also makes them targets for banning.
I disagree to the highest degree imaginable. I'm basically saying that the end justifies the means. You're saying that the end vindicates the means. They are completely different concepts, and frankly, I find yours to be infinitely more silly than my own. Obviously, these are opinions. But I would never be able to accept yours. Sorry.
Other countries doing terrible things is not a justification for US actions. Same reasoning comes up today when a terrorist cuts off someone's head and then flag-waivers use that as an some sort of justification for US wrongs.
There are better arguments for the use of the a-bomb, like ending the war earlier and saving lives that way or even crass realpolitik arguments that make more sense. But pointing to other wrongdoing is not helpful.
And this is the nonsense logic I am concerned with. It is not relevant that they had rice pilaf with their chicken breast fillet, New York strip or a 2 year old MRE.
My concern over this is that there is very limited access to information and tons of ass covering. Bush has been "shocked" by each of the dozen or so disclosures over the last year and a bit and claims it is the action of a few bad apples, Cheney pretty much says he doesn't give a damn with a "kill'em all and let the devil sort them out" attitude, Rumsfeld says I approved these "interogation techniques" but only based on Kafka "The Trial" like criteria for when the rules apply and when they do not...don't ask don't tell but don't blame me if you are confused and cross the line. As tight as this gang is I would expect a more consistent story line.
Do not for a moment think that I am sympathetic to the terrorists and their methods. My concern is when our government speaks in terms of vengence and measuring moral conduct with a scale where GOOD is anything north of PURE EVIL we begin to sound and act like them.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
You have a man in your rifle sights. He is holding a knife to your wife. You have reason to believe he will stab or cut your wife with intent to kill. Would you shoot the man?
If you can live with yourself for not preventing someone from murdering your wife because killing is an evil act, then so be it. I would not consider you to be a man though.
Japan pre 1950 is a very different culture from post 1950. The atrocities that Japan committed in WWII, and prior to that, were as bad the holocaust in Nazi Germany or the Genocide under Stalin in the Ukraine. Some evil is so bad that you do what you have to, to put a stop to it.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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.
The early end of the war also saved the lives of countless numbers in China, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere. Those people did nothing to start the war. Those people are grateful for the early end of the war. And given the horrible Japanese actions they saw, it's not surprising that they don't object to the use of the A-bombs. I've traveled a lot over there, and never heard a word of complant outside of Japan. Never. Not once.
"Just following orders" is not an acceptable defense, according to the Nuremberg trials at least.
When the bombs dropped they knew it had saved their own asses and probably lots of Japanese too.
It's easy to make high moral judgements like "we never should have dropped the bombs" without your own life on the line.
They are completely different concepts, and frankly, I find yours to be infinitely more silly than my own.
That's because you haven't thought about it carefully enough. They are certainly different concepts, but "the ends justifies the means" as a moral theory is corrupt. What kind of ethics requires you to violate them to achieve a desirable outcome? An inconsistent or incomplete one.
If you support true consequentialism as a basis for ethics (as your "ends justifies the means" suggests), then it is never evil to go to war if the alternative is worse. That you would still believe yourself committing evil when you are choosing the best possible outcome is the height of silliness. Going to war would totally suck, would have horrible consequences, but in that context it is not evil.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You know, when you repeatedly use a derogatory term, at least spell it correctly. I mean, you might as well say "moran."
Geezuz, you clueless plebeian.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
It's not moral absolutism. He didn't say "you are completely morally responsible for the soldier burning the child." He says, correctly, that you are paying for it.
And thus are part of a shared responsibility for it. If we live in a society with a representative government, then the policies of that government are the responsibility, to some extent, of the people who live in it. Responsibility is not exactly the same thing as moral culpability: responsibility can be collective (e.g., a company has to honor its debts even if no person who created the debt is still there.)
But it is a problem to think that you can enjoy all the benefits of a nation-state without sharing in the responsibility for the actions of that nation-state, particularly if there is some representative system at hand.
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.
In other words, nothing to see here...
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
... museum is pure propoganda? Of course a museum in New Orleans (America!) and funded by the American government will present history in a very pro-American way. Of course they'll demonize the Japanese and the Germans, while never mentioning any of their own horrific acts. I mean, come on. This is fairly common sense stuff here. If you can't see through such obvious propoganda, I fear that you're completely oblivious to some of the more obscured government brainwashing.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's great to see so many people trying to be philosphical about something that they can not comprehend. I am completely speculating (but so is most everyone else here), but I would think at least 95% of the people posting were not born or even in gestation during WWII. Heck, your parents probably were not either.
You have read a couple of history books that give you some highlights about a war. The highlights often have some spin, or perhaps your history teacher adds some spin to them. Here is a news flash... people die during war. Sometimes they die a gruesome death. Sometimes war is necessary. Many times, we would rather not go to war, but we must, so we do. And in all of the times that we go to war, people die. It is a tradgedy to lose a human life, but it does become necessary. It is painful. It sucks. It is life.
Quit trying to condemn people. You have not been there. You can say what you would have done... but not even you know what you actually would have done. It is the same BS that is going on right now. Just give it a rest, because you really do not know what you are talking about.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
Also, please read "Nine Who Survivied Hiroshima and Nagasaki", the accounts of nine refugees from Hiroshima, who went to Nagasaki, and survived that as well. A sobering read.
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
Those who live in fear like scared little children are the one's who believe such lies as you just said.
I would say that walking around in a heavy fallout zone is an extremely unhealthy activity
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both classical airburst detonations. These typically produce low local fallout as the radioactive material is mostly swept up into the stratosphere as the fireball rises. Although there were certainly many cancer cases, most of these were caused by prompt radiation (ie gamma and neutrons directly from the nuclear reactions in the fireball), and that prompt radiation dies away very quickly (hours rather than days).
I wouldn't like to walk around in a heavy fallout zone either, but those are generally associated with groundbursts or radiological devices rather than airbursts. So I think this reporter was probably okay. See the FAQ at nuclearweaponarchive.org for more info.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I don't know what you think I was saying, but that was exactly my point.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki" by Trumbull [1957] documents the stories of nine refugees from the Hiroshima bombing. These poor sods wound up in Nagasaki. Got bombed again there, and lived to tell the story. An incredible read.
ALL war is ALWAYS evil. Make no mistake about that.
It's just that, sometimes, it's the lesser evil.
I think the "lesser evil" is a silly argument. If it truly is the "lesser evil" then choosing it over the alternative is not evil. You are assigning a moral character to something that has no character. Good or evil is a characteristic of our choice given the circumstances.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Yes, their leader was one of the very, very few pacifist Japanese in the 30's, and right through the war. He was jailed, and badly mistreated in jail. After the war, that gave the organization a really good name. A lot of Japanese politicos joined. It's a Budhist sect.
I didn't read past this :
"b) try to make all war seem evil."
I was hoping you could explain to us what war it is exactly that is 'Good(TM)'?
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
The firebombing set off a firestorm that was the largest of WWII. May 10, 1945.
Wouldn't this be uncensored, as the later articles were censored???
Video Production Support
". . .and I would have preferred another way."
Yet you never offer "another way" that achieves the desired result: the elimination of totalitarian regimes like Imperial Japan.
"Another way" seems to always mean appeasement of the very real evil that manifests itself in the form of brutal dictatorships that murder not only their neighbors but their own citizens, and if history has taught us one thing, appeasement never works.
In the context of the times, the use of atomic bombs against Imperial Japan was the correct decsion both militarily and politically.
Too bad for the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as it was too bad for the millions of victims of Imperial Japans aggression.
"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
And don't let me hear you bitch about your civil rights.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Basically, that 4 ppm (picoCuries/L, as they say) seems to be a really low number here in the US. According to the EPA, if you don't smoke and your house is tested and comes in at 4 pCi/L, then there is a 0.2% chance that you MIGHT get lung cancer. (By the way, radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer).
It's not that I don't think that radon is bad (I run a radon inspection business), it's just that I think that the US has way too high of standards when it comes to "acceptable" levels. Europe's standards are a lot better at 10 pCi/L (though if you don't smoke there's still only a 0.4% chance you might get lung cancer), but at least they're being reasonable.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way"
Um... how? In the example specified, how would "full-blown pacifism" have stopped the torture mentioned in the parent post?
This wasn't a one-time event, people were being put through this on a daily basis both within Japan as well as in Japanese holdings in China, before, during, and even after both atomic bombings. This is one of the reasons why Nagasaki was only three days after Hiroshima, to put a stop to the continual torture.
Of course, if no bombs were dropped and insteaed of forcing surrender out of Japan the US went "full-blown pacifist" and simply stopped prosecuting the war, things wouldn't have changed. There'd be no reason for Japan to release all its Chinese and Western prisoners (they were spoils of war gained "fair and square" as far as the IJA were concerned), they would have continued to be abused until their deaths, at which point they'd be replaced by even more Chinese slaves (and probably more Westerners, too, once Japan decided they needed even more natural resources). The violence wouldn't have ended, in many ways it would have gotten worse, the only difference is that, in your version, Pilate would have been able to wash his hands of it.
They had to be nuked. Sure, that's not something to be happy about, but simpy disliking something doesn't make it less necessary. Contrary to popular belief, violence does solve things, and this is a shining example of it.
And as for the civillian deaths, there was little (if any) difference between "civillian" and "soldier" in the eyes of Japan, both for their enemies as well as their own people. Many (if not most) of those civillians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drafted by the government to work in factories making war materiel. With Japan prosecuting "total war" like that, it's very difficult to say who was really a civillian and who wasn't.
if he ingested no materials, if the ambient ionizing radiation was low, and the heavy radio active dust had settled, then it's not surprising he didn't get sick. He might also have very good DNA repair mechanisms which would prevent cancer.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
The original poster of this thread is arguing that instead of 'nobody is to blame', he's saying everybody is to blame. Every level of officer has to make the decision of whether the order was lawful or not, and that makes them partly responsible, however, they were NEVER in position to make decisions like 'lets make a nuke', or 'lets drop a nuke'. Military is not a democratic process.
"This, of course, is why people decided that full-blown pacifism is the only way - because once a cycle of violence starts ever step simply escalates and becomes 'justified' by the previous atrocities."
What bothers me about this position is that it is purely self-serving. Much like the smug vegan or self-assured decrier of the death penalty, the entire position of 'pacifism' is one of putting your own moral/mental comfort above the physical well-being and reality of others.
Pacifists rarely think through their position enough to find alternatives to the actions they dislike. They simply separate themselves to absolve themselves of responsibility - to make themselves feel good. And I find that reprehensible.
It is the easiest thing in the world to be against something, or to judge it with all the knowledge of history. And it is no better to be blindly 'against' something than to be blindly 'for' it.
I agree with your comments about Dresden.
Don't forget the firestorm at Hamburg, or the firestorm in Tokyo (both done on purpose, though Tokyo got out of hand due to the wooden houses and lack of firefighting equipment).
I've read a couple of people replying to this, and they try and justify Dresden. Read a couple of books on the subject and you'll see that everyone from the flyers, to the POWs on the ground, to Bomber Command could not justify bombing Dresden. More than likely it was "punishment" in the eyes of the commanders (Harris believed in civilian casualties as a part of the war effort - it's the cost to Germany to support wounded and killed civilians).
1) It was not significant in supporting the Eastern Front.
2) It had a high number of refugees coming from the east.
3) It had no significant military targets
There can be little to no justification for Dresden, and little to no justification is ever given in the official records. It just happened.
How you can be certain that the Japanese would not have won the war if the US hadn't nuked them: The Japanese already sued for surrender twice before the nukes dropped.
Another thing for you students of the Jengiz Khan school of warfare: I do not regard attacks on civilians as worthy of true warriors. If anyone had any doubt over the extreme dishonor of the American military up until the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are none now.
Attempts at comparing the American military favorably with others that our educators want us to consider evil (Soviets, Nazis, Maoists, Mongols) simply do not interest me. By sanctioning attacks on civilians, the United States has placed itself in the exact same category as all the other murderers.
Good or evil is a characteristic of our choice given the circumstances.
If you define good and evil as you have chosen to define them, then yes. I neither agree nor disagree with your definitions; the words we use are fuzzy and ambiguous, and these words have both the meanings which you've chosen, and the ones that I was using implicitly.
However, I think that "the lesser evil" is a *better* way to think about it. If we always keep in mind that the horrific things we do are "evil", even though it's for the best that we do them, then we're less likely to be accepting of horrors that are only claimed to be for the good.
I would prefer to be the man who cries himself to sleep after killing the enemy in righteous battle than the one who glories in the goodness of my horrific, though necessary, act.
In this case, I think it's a good thing that people continue to question the rightness of the horrors of WWII. Not because they were wrong, but because they might have been wrong. I actually believe Truman was right to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I hope that had I been in his shoes I would have had the guts to do the same -- that had to be a damned hard decision to make, and to live with. But I think the questions should be asked and answered, all over again, by each and every generation, because that's the best way to make sure that if it happens again, it's because it was the best option there was after deep and heart-wrenching consideration of all known facts.
You can choose definitions of "good" and "evil" so that the notion of the lesser evil makes no sense, but I don't think those definitions serve the greater good as well as definitions that force us to agonize over fine differences in shades of gray.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The people working in the factories were civilians, plain and simple. If people are actually carrying weapons then they aren't, but making parts in a factory doesn't make you non-civilian, and it sure as hell doesn't make you a legitimate military target. If people are part of the actual armed forces, or part of some unit having the properties " that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; that of carrying arms openly;", are legitimate military targets. People working in factories aren't.
I am trolling
Yes, the military censored the executions and brutal treatment the Japanese gave President's Bush's friends after they crashed and were captured. They did this for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was simple. The things the Japanese did were unimaginable to the American public; should the public have discovered at the time, the sentiment towards the Japanese may have turned from conquering them to annihilating them.
You think the Vietnam war was tough? Go back and find out what really happened in the Japanese conflict. Vietnam vets have no right to complain. When the Pacific Theater vets came back, they didn't complain. My own grandfather has never talked about what happened in Guadalcanal as a Marine foot soldier. All we know is that he was one of the handful of surviving troops. Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand.
One story I heard from a Pacific War vet told how he felt so bad for shooting a Japanese in the back as he was preparing to throw a grenade on his friends. He thought shooting someone in the back was unconscionable! He thought maybe he should've whistled or yelled to get him to turn around. All the while, he knew that his friends would go to get water and the Japanese snipers would wait until their backs are turned to shoot them. He knew the torture that his captured friends would endure. He knew that the Japanese would wrap themselves with bamboo so they could stay alive for a few moments longer after getting shot. I mean, the Japanese were far, far, worse than anything you or I could imagine.
And as you know, none of this was let out to the public. No one knew what was really happening there except the military. All these parents would get messages saying their children died honorably in battle defending their troops, when in truth, they were brutally beaten, tortured, and executed, usually by beheading. That's what was censored.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Or it could have been hormesis - turns out, the correct, small dose of radiation can actually be benificial
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Killing another human is the ultimate in putting your own more and mental comfort above the phsycial well-being of another - even more so when you then convince yourself that it's justified. At the very least, the position of the pacifist is consistent - logically, a bombing of US troops in Iraq is a fully justified action of self-defense by an oppressed populace.
So you have never heard of frat hazing killing people? People literally dying of fright? I am not condoning either but the prisoners was more understandable.
You have some kids guarding these insurgents. They have no training on how to be guard in a prison. You know either the prisoners or other in thier organization are responsible for injuring or killing your comrades. Some of these prisoners are surely linked to the the beheadings of American citizens. It is understandable that some rage manifests.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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.
Exactly. When one force dosen't follow the rules the other wants to (usually the larger force), they disgrace their tactics.
A guerilla war back then was dishonorable from the English aspect. Our guys aimed for their officers, also considered dishonorable.
I don't see so much difference between what the terrorists do and what our founding fathers did... Except perhaps aiming for civilians--I don't think they did that.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"...condoned what they had done and dreamed up ways to kill more people faster and easier ..."
actualy, we have created weapons that allows us to accomplish a mission and kill fewer people.
Right now the military is R&Ding ways to accomplish a mission with taking zero lives.
While war is horrible, it is nice to know that fewer people are dying. Each one tragic, sure, but stil a lot less.
" Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others."
How many people would have died in IRAQ if we used 1940's methods?
because we are developing ways to kill few people, I would say that there are better ways of making War.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The only way to remove conflict with a people committed to your destruction is to eliminate everyone of them.
Anything less is just prolonging the problem and putting yourself at risk that they will grow strong enough to succeed at their goal.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Because it shows that the US censors information about their wartime atrocities? I'd say that's pretty relevant to my rights online.
I am trolling
As an American I do not deny that there were colonial terrorists during the Revolution. I am not saying that the Revolution itself was an act of terrorism--it was perfectly justified (and despite the image of guerilla warfare some like to paint, it was mainly fought by the Continental army). However, people who did things like tar and feather members of the East India Company and pour boiling tea down their throats were terrorists. And frankly, I do not think it at all unpatriotic to say that they properly should have been hanged at the time.
English is easier said than done.
The reason people don't accept any justification is because they believe some things are wrong regardless of what caused them. If you believe eating babies is wrong, you won't accept any justification someone tries to give you for having eaten babies. You'll just say they did wrong.
I am trolling
You can choose definitions of "good" and "evil" so that the notion of the lesser evil makes no sense, but I don't think those definitions serve the greater good as well as definitions that force us to agonize over fine differences in shades of gray.
We should really abolish romantic notions of good and evil, because they simply muddy the debate and polarize people on the issues which don't matter. 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.
Poorly defined meanings in debate is just asking for trouble. There is no circumventing debate in such charged circumstances, but at least putting it on a clearly understood foundation helps us see the real issues.
Furthermore, I understand your concerns regarding losing sight that we are committing a horrible act simply because it's justified. But labeling a horrible act we are forced to take as 'good', doesn't automatically erase from our minds the fact that it was horrible. I may have to kill someone in self-defence, but I'm sure will never forget it, despite that I was justified in defending myself. People who have been through such scenarios will testify to the truth of this.
Ultimately, good and evil can only be determined by justification. Are we rationally justified in such actions? If we can answer in the affirmative, then we are not committing evil. Good and evil are loaded terms, so justification is perhaps a better term that helps us focus on the real issues.
For instance, the initiator of violence is always wrong, but when are justified in acting on a threat? This is particularly poignant with the "war on terrorism" and Bush's Iraq invasion. I think there are enough real issues to concern ourselves with that we shouldn't get tripped up by poor definitions.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
In searching for something in a similar vein, I just realized you and I have debated a similar subject before. I don't know if you remember, but I reproduced the thread on my discussion forums. It was very interesting. :-)
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I actually know the truth... but I have only confided in Bob Dole.
I don't know enough about Omaha Beach to comment, but WWI was very much about looking out for their own. US didn't care until a) a US passenger ship got sunk b) the Zimmerman telegram showed Hitler had plans to attack the US c) it was pretty clear the Brits and French were winning. That looks very much like a nation that cares only about itself. South Korea was also about their own interest. The invasion had a fair bit of popular support, and I can't imagine the US would think fighting back up the country (everything except the very tip had been invaded by the time the US got involved) would be the best thing for its people. No, they intervened to show the USSR that they wouldn't accept the spread of communism, and that they were in control of the world. Sounds like an overgrown bully to me.
I am trolling
Okay, you can't say that to a bunch of science-geeks and not actually give us any details! Please share some of the tastybits!
Given that the US was taking very aggressive steps in the Pacific and threatening Japan on many fronts (having held its trade captive for something like 60 years) are you surprised they attacked when it became clear that US diplomacy was nothing of the sort and the US had no interest in peace except on its own terms? How times change eh?
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
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.
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.
At the time the dangers of low-level exposure were not well known. Hence all the sicknesses in people living downstream of US aboveground tests, for example. And radium watches (*) were still being made then. And ambulance-chasing trial-lawyering had not become a major industry.
h tm
(*) Not dangerous for wearers, but certainly hazardous for manufacturers and as waste. See: http://www.roger-russell.com/jeffers/radiumdials.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I have to disagree-think about it like this:
a pacifist states that it doesn't matter how much anyone suffers as a result of their non-action, it is still wrong to fight. This means that regardless of how strongly the oposition states, "we are going to torture, rape, torture, pillage, rape and murder all of you and your children", they will only say, "Let's talk."
To me that is not an acceptable position. I do not believe that it will lead to peace. I believe it will lead to one group of people getting slaughtered.
That said, I have a great deal of respect for those who, because of their interpretation of scripture, or their personal beliefs in some deity, have adopted this approach. I think everyone has a right to believe according to their own will, and should not be forced to violate deeply held beliefs.
However, there is absolutely no way that a civilization can base their existence on pacifism unless they have something with which to protect themselves that is not easily overcome. A good (viable) example of this is Switzerland. I know they maintain nuetrality, but they have an interesting (and perhaps unique) position--if they are attacked by any one group or nation, virtually every other nation on the planet will leap to their defense. So while this means that they could easily take the position of pacificism, they do it at the cost of everyone else either a) being pacifistic or b) everyone else fighting and getting killed to protect their ability to pacifistic and remain free. In order to be TRULY pacifistic without asking others to die for you should you be attacked, you MUST have an ULTIMATE defense--a method of protecting yourself (without causing damage to those attacking you) indefinitely. There is no technology to accomplish this at this time.
This is why there is no logical conclusion as to which is better in terms of justification--one requires you to accept the slaughter of innocents while you do nothing (even though you might be able to protect them by fighting back), and the other requires you to kill one person in order to protect others. Are these positions equally dispicable? I personally favor the protection of innocents, even if it means that I must kill someone in order to protect them. I could not sit by and watch my family get killed while I said, "No, it is wrong to fight." I would rather die (and even in doing so fail) to protect my family than do nothing.
The position that pacifism is the only way to prevent ever-increasing violence is patently false. History has shown that a sufficient show of force to demonstrate that you are superior on the battle field (bombing Nagasaki) can lead to bringing folks to the discussion table, and even lead to an eventual alliance between two previously warring parties (US & Japan are on pretty good terms). This has happened in other situations as well, and I think it demonstrates that the tenet of "avoiding increasing violence" is false.
I will not comment on the current situation--there is evidence that those who are rebelling against US Troops are not in majority, so the justification you supply is flawed.
If what you imply were true, then you would be correct. But I think (at least I hope) that if the majority of Iraqis told us to "get the hell out", then we would do so, but under the conditions that they never seek to attack us. Right now, however, I think that the majority do not want us out immediately.
Finally, I don't think that pacifism is the answer, but neither is aggression. Militaries exist for a single reason (in my mind)--to protect the country which they serve. Not to expand it, but to protect it. I personally support the war in Iraq (notice it is NOT the war ON Iraq), because I feel we are protecting ourselves. Many disagree with the concept that we are protecting ourselves, and say that it is all about oil. That position is debatable (but the only real reason for being there other than protection would be oil), and I recognize that.
If,
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
My comments above were not strictly related to this kind of argument. First of all your example seems to assume a few things.
First, it assumes in such a situation, I would be able to successfully shoot the man in a way that will prevent him from hurting her. One could probably argue that I could do as much damage as I could do good in such a situation. Who's to say that I wouldn't miss the hostage taker and hit my wife instead? Sure, you could state that some persons (such as a military sniper) wouldn't worry about that, but that isn't me. Second, the example is very arbitrary.
Finally, if you look at others who have avoided using violence to achieve their ends, (Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Day as two examples) their humanity or in King's case (manhood) isn't to be questioned just because they didn't resort to violence to address evil. My thought (and perhaps my entire point) is that our imaginations are so captured by violence as the solution to evil that we completely miss other ways (perhaps more effective ways) to address situations. What about the way persons were mistreated in South Africa under apartheid? They found a solution that didn't involve violence.
To be sure, my rejection of violence isn't out of a basic humanism, altruism, or pragmatism. For me, that rejection is a conviction based on Christianity. While many "christians" seems to have no problem with war or violence, there is a consistent tradition of those who reject violence (King and Day are both examples-Also the Amish, Mennonites, Quakers, some Anglicans and Roman Catholics, even a few evangelical protestants like me!). I don't pretend for a moment that Christian nonviolence makes sense outside of the community shaped by the Cross, but I would state that nonviolence offers a counter example to those whose imaginations are captured by violence.
I don't want to sound preachy or as if I have all of the answers to the tough questions of life. I'm simply trying to honestly respond to your comments.
If you are never moderated, do you really exist?
Fortunaty, there hasn't been a need to use chem/bio weapons to win a war.
To deny that they could be used in that matter is foolish.
Nukes have been used to prevent war. MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. Have a way to deliver a payload that will kill the politicains who send those men and women to war is one sure way to prevent war.
Without Nukes, I beleive threre would have been a WWIII in europe with the US and Russia.
I could be wrong, but Based on thr world event of that era, I am mostly likly to be correct.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IIRC, Copyright mark is the date of first publication, otherwise it would be listed as "unpublished work Copr. 1946". If first publication is on 2005, then the copyright is then and lasts for another 90 years from that date or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter. Since the 120 years would be shorter, although the copyright is 2005, the end of the copyright happens 120 years from creation, 2066.
Aye, but if one wrong stops 1,000 future wrongs, does that make it right?
No matter how big of an idealist you are, there's always a point at which the ends justify the means.
As a short aside, there is a lot unknown about long term radiation effects, particularly low dose.
There are three basic models about what happens at low doses. The first is that the relationship between exposure and damage is linear, so 0 dose equals no damge, but a little causes a little damage and a lot causes a lot of damage. This is the most conservative model and is adovcated as the one to use by radiation safety experts.
The second is that the relationship is linear above a threshold. So 0 dose equals no damage, a little also equals no damage, and above a certain point, the relationship is linear. The question is, what is the threshold, and is it the same for everyone.
The third model, and this is the most interesting one to me, is that the relationship is 'U' shaped. That is 0 dose equals no damage, a lot of dose equals a lot of damage, but a little dose is actually less damaging than either. In other words, actually beneficial somehow! There is some evidence for it, but the mechanism is poorly understood. There is anecdotal evidence that those on the outskirts of the Japanese atomic blasts lived longer than those closer or farther from the blast radius.
The problem, of course, is testing each of these models, controlling for exposure over the long term. Most people working with radiation use the ALARP (as low as reasonably possible) priniciple to guide their exposure...
just an fyi
Defining "terrorist" in terms of attacking civilian targets: this isn't very interesting. The first Gulf War was probably the only war in the 20th century in which all sides weren't deliberately going after civilians.
There are however, two useful definitions of terrorist. The first is a category of "unlawful combatant", because they are warfighters who do not wear uniforms. This is a very bad thing, because despite the tendency to attack the opponents civilains, it's generally considered bad form to *encourage* the enemy to attack *your* civilians. It's cowardly at best - warfighters are supposed to be in harm's way, protecting freindly civilians.
Even more despiciable is *deliberately* provoking enemy reprisals on friendly civilians to gain local political advantage. Nothing good can come of putting up with that sort of thing.
There are many people making apologies for terrorists on the basis that attacking civilians is the norm in war, but they are entirely missing the point.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
a straw-man argument. Try again.
I'd guess the reason it was censored is not so much the effects on the Japanese, for which few would have had sympathy then, but that he mentions the POW camps sited close to munitions factories and bombed regardless.
There is no maturing of the species. There is only the maturing of a person.
I strongly disagree... the Society as a system is much more than the sum of its parts, and certainly evolves in time.
I don't have a sig.
The whole debate of atom bomb v. land invasion is inherently flawed. In no, I repeat, in NO WAY were those our only two options. There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present. Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option. The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this, given the condition that the emperor stay in power. We of course did not accept this, nuked them, accepted their unconditional surrender, and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway.
The idea of this situation being binary is literally a lie.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
As someone who:
A. Went through USMC Bootcamp.
B. Wrote a report on The Manhattan Project.
C. Had to study the Nuremberg Trials.
Perhaps this will share light on the subject of the moral dilemma:
"The Ends Justify The Means"
As a soldier, as soon as you are issued your standard M16 Rifle you start a psycological process to assimilate the use of:
"Deadly Force"
Remember the phrase from Full Metal Jacket?
"The USMC doesn't want machines, it wants killers"
That phrase is truth to the core.
The first phrase you are instructed to repeat over oand over as soon you start rifle training is:
"One shot one kill"
Killing is taught not as a some form of automation but as a SKILL!
It takes some foretought and understanding to do it effectively. Ask anyone in you-know-where.
My drill instructor, when asked if we ought to kill women or children when commanded to do so (Direct Order from a superior officer) he responded:
"You are expected to follow orders, and for every action you take, YOU WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE.
Couldn't agree more.
This somewhat connects to the Nurembeg trials.
On the aspect making the big-kill(drop the big one) in my research on the historical data of the Manhattan project produced three main reasons (weight on each vary) of why the Atomic bomb was used:
A.- To Shorten the war.
B.- To do some human-test-drive for unproven brand-new technology.
C.- To tell Russia to back off!
I personally suscribe more to reason B considering how clueless the U.S. was about the effects of radiation by atmosferic exposure. Anyway.
To cap-up, on the Nuremberg Trials the question arose on wether a human can inflict pain on another with out making a concious decision. Pshycological studies demonstrated that remorse is not innate trade but an acquired one through childhood rearing meaning that if you are trying to prove that you felt no remorse for inflicting harm (no guilt) you must have been educated since childhood that doing harm to others as natural and acceptable. That did not fly and the nazi officers were found guilty and some of them, in a well thought conclusion, hanged for their crimes.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
One word: Godzilla
The amount of people killed by this "effect" of radiation are truly countless. It's a God damned shame.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
Göring
I am most certainly willing to say that all war is wrong, that alternatives always exist and that they should be pursued with much more energy and commitment than war. I am not saying that --violence-- should never be used. Disgusting as it may be, there are sometimes situations that cannot be solved by anything but power, and sometimes the only power that works is violence. Violence, however, should ALWAYS be minimized. War is one of the worst possible applications of violence.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
It was a military target. Just not one of the highest priority ones. As the reporter in the artcile noted, several factories producing military equipment in the town HAD been bombed before, although others had not.
Toward the end of the war when they thought they might have nukes to use, Hiroshima was specifically left off the list of targets to hit,even though it had quite a few factories producing weapons the Japanese were using against us. Why? So that they would have a fairly 'clean' target to hit to show Japan what the bomb was capable of. If you hit a target that had already been heavily bombed, it would be hard to decern what was destroyed by the big bomb, vs previous smaller ones. The nuke may have seemed less impressive, and less likely to influence the Japanese to surrender.
Many people state that Japan was rightly punished for their hprrible crimes in China.
The truth is that many bombings were/are not only immoral, but also senseless. Why punish a small Japanese child living in Nagasaki for somthing that a Japanese soldier did in China? This is called collective punishment. Want to talk about 1-2 million Vietnamese killed in the 60s and 70s? (Again many through carpet bombing with B52s just to pressure the North into some agreement in Paris in order to be able to withdraw).
Anyways, droppping one atomic bomb to demonstrate its power? OK! But two? On cities?
The fire bombings over Germany needed to be over the inner cities, because those had old houses that burned better. So the USAF and the RAF mainly bombed old inner cities in Germany instead of factories, because at that time aiming was really hard. It not only destroyed a large part of the Germany cultural heritage and a lot of German civillians. The flying personel of the bombers didn't have a very good chance of returning.
I am not shitting You. Factories were not the target! The whole thing with the bombing went very, very wrong.
And I am still very glad that the Americans and the British fought the Nazis (I am German) and freed this continent. This was very important. But the fact remains that the bombings did almost nothing to help that cause. The ground troops did it.
Even if a war is justified, it is not justified to do anything You like.
Because it's not "Your Online Rights", it's "Your Rights Online. Linguistically you could put the emphasis on "Your Rights", as in we are talking about rights in an online forum. But really, chill out...you're only the 10000th person to whine about such a petty detail.
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
"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
"I should point out that I'm not a pacifist, simply that many people become one because it's they can find no other way out of the cycle of violence."
But it is this very line of thought that I find offensive. Life is cyclical. All logic can be reduced to babble if it is examined closely enough. This is why I find pacifism, and other 'avoidance'-isms, to be the less honorable choice. I feel it takes more guts to dive in and try to figure out how far something should go than to throw your hands up and say 'I'm not getting involved' just because you fear what might happen.
"Now there's insurgence and rebellion against the US forces there, and they feel justified because US troops have been killing Iraq citizens."
This is a very loaded comment. Rather than drag out a whole argument about the war, I can just tell you that your statement is incorrect. First, the people 'rebelling' against the new government are not the majority, they are the minority. They are almost entirely Sunni muslims and al-Qaeda members. The Sunnis want their dictatorial power back (even though they are the ethnic minority), and al-Qaeda just wants to stir up the pot.
Saying that the terror tactics these people employ are 'the will of the people' or a 'revolution against tyranny' is simply naive and insulting. These are people who have no problems blowing up their own countrymen, taking out scores of innocent civilians. Their atrocities are well documented, from shooting up schools because they educate girls to assassinating police officers and teachers. These are crimes. They are simply painted with a romantic light by people who were against the war in an effort to justify their position - more self-serving rhetoric - similar to the way that Noam Chomsky first denied and then acted as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge-led genocide in Vietnam.
These types of crimes happen in numerous societies. Hell, in Mexico gunmen just killed the chief of police over a drug war. Nobody romanticizes that. People recognize it for what it is.
The terrorist acts in Iraq are a peoples' revolution as much as the L.A. riots were.
If you have an indefeatable defensive technology -- say a big force field around your border, then you can go ahead and be a pacifist. At the rate technology is advancing, I would be surprised if a similarly effective solution does not come to pass in our lifetimes.
This situation allows you to separate some sticky issues. Now how do you justify invading Iraq? They can't physically hurt you. It must be because you let yourself become addicted to their oil. (Actually, the physical threat Iraq posed has always been non-existent, so yup, we're there for the oil.)
What if everybody had personal defense shields, making guns obsolete? It would be the opposite of the Old West, where everyone carried guns and asshole behaviour could easily get you perforated. How would our behaviour change? Would we revel in the peace we had afforded, or would we all become obnoxious jerks who act without fear of reprisal?
"Sense that it may make, I still wouldn't want to be the guy to decide to drop an atom bomb within a mile of an allied pow camp."
It's really easier than you think - it's all about dilution of responsibility.
It is not that simple and it is also naive to apply Vietnam analogies to World War II. You do not seem to understand the admittedly evil mathematics of war. To spare lives at an enemy war materials factory may end up getting more of your soldiers killed. It may save more lives to end production at that factory and to deprive the enemy front line troops of the materials they need to offer effective resistance. In that context it is still a tough decision but a logical one. In short, the best strategy is often get the damn war over as fast as possible.
Switzerland is also a mountainous country with formidable defences, and they maintained those defences through the Cold War. Some history here and here. Still, what you said is true. A pacifist country like post-WWII Japan needs a strong ally for its defence.
We would exactly talking the same way as we are talking now..except the change in roles.
I do agree with this. I do not think nuclear weapons should ever be used. Then again, I don't see a potential future that is anything like WW2.
It was a horrible thing. But then, so is most of war.. imho, the key is to avoid war, rather than trying to make rules of war.
Without quite the same use of emotionally loaded language, I choose to rephrase your statement this way:
ALL war is ALWAYS horrible and awful. Make no mistake about that.
It's just that, sometimes, it's the right thing to do.
I'll expand upon this statement with the observation that those attempting to justify the attack on Iraq have yet to convince me that it was the right thing to do. The US entry into WWII was the right thing to do (would have been right even earlier).
But the neoconservatives assert that regular demonstrations of U.S. military superiority are necessary to maintain U.S. political control in today's world. And so, any reason at all will be pulled forward to "justify" the aggression of the U.S. military. As a Usian, I don't think my government does a very good job of demonstrating that it should have any control whatsoever, but that's just my opinion.
Regards,
Ross
... 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.
Saying that the terror tactics these people employ are 'the will of the people' or a 'revolution against tyranny' is simply naive and insulting.
The poster you're replying to didn't say anything of the sort. He pointed out that, just as Americans feel violence against Iraqis is justified by previous violence against Americans, so (many) Iraqis now feel that violence against Americans is justified by American violence against Iraqis. Are the Iraqis who think this wrong? Yes. But so are the Americans.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
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.
Logic like that makes the 9/11 attack OK!
"Civilians who" pay for "the weapons of war are not civilians."
Do you see now why you are SO wrong ?
CIA Factbook 2002 (US):"Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households
I think we're arguing semantics at this point. Define "good" and "evil".
If evil is a course of action which has tragic outcomes, then just about everything is evil. Having a kid is evil since it results in their eventual tragic death. Of course, most people would consider this a trivial argument, and not very useful.
Most people would argue that in all decisions people should do good and avoid evil. So, good is a decision which is the best possible one on moral grounds. Evil would be varying degrees of not complying with the good decision.
Sure, war will undoubtedly lead to tragedy, and I agree that it should be avoided at almost any cost. Now, there is a question as to whether the moral cost of going to war is EVER less than the moral cost of not going to war. If the cost of war is always higher, then war is always evil. If the cost of going to war is sometimes lower, then it is sometimes the right decision, and that by definition makes it "good".
Now, you can make all kinds of conclusions about the injustices of life itself in that a decision like going to war is sometimes the best moral decision. And you can talk about how in general that is a great "evil", but this is a different definition of evil which has no relevance to individual moral decisions. You can say that life itself is "evil" I suppose, but that doesn't help anybody run their day to day lives.
For morality to be of any use it must be practical. For it to be practical it must deal with the environment that we must make a decision and not simply wish for our decisions to be easier ones. If we're confronted with a beligerant agressor who is out to harm a great many people, then sometimes we must be compelled out of love for the victims of aggression to stand up for what is right, and sometimes that means war. Now, we could wish that we could have some magical ability to only take out the enemy leadership, or that the bad guys would see the error of their ways and shape up, and if those things happened then war would be wrong. However, we live in the real world, and we must make decisions based on what we have, not what we'd like to have.
I'm not trying to blur the lines of right and wrong. I'm simply pointing out that when a decisoin is the right decision we don't need to pretend that it is "evil" simply because we wish things were otherwise.
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.
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Everyone opposed to the dropping of the A-Bombs should consider themselves to be extremely fortunate they are allowed to have the freedom to express their opinions and are not killed for showing dissent. Under a world led by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, you would have no such freedom. Just ask the millions of Chinese the Japanese murdered during the time, which Japan has never apologized for or acknowledged (indeed, it is being left out of history books). The only way to meet violent fascists is with force. Japan got what it deserved, and today has evolved to a better nation because of it. I do not bear any ill will towards the Japanese of today, but the violent fascist aggressors who started WW2 got what they deserved. And you should be happy that we won, and were able to do so decisively and strategically through nuclear weapons. Funny, the power to end the war in our favor, save American lives and keep the world the free, and people still whine. Thank the power of the atom. Don't whine about it.
Sure, I could go on a guided tour there, but I sure as hell wouldn't drink any of the water.
You know either the prisoners or other in thier organization are responsible for injuring or killing your comrades.
According to the military's own investigations, around 70% of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib were innocent. The Red Cross figured it was closer to 90%.
So no, they don't know. That's the point. No trials. No records. No information. No accountability.
While you may be philosophically right, it would be an error to imagine that those atrocities were the reason the Allies were fighting in that war. It's pleasing to consider simple moral decisions on Slashdot, but World War II was not fought over moral terms. It's easy to say it should have been, after the fact, but that doesn't change the facts. If some things are so evil that you do what you have to to put a stop to it, why didn't we put a stop to Stalin's genocide?
That is the reason why I could never be in the military. I couldn't just take orders from a commander when it came to decisions of life or death of other people.
For instance, if I was in Iraq right now, I'd prefer death to shooting anyone there. If Iraq invaded us, then it would probably be a different story.
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.
Let's be perfectly honest here. Even your approach is flawed (as I explain below). Why? Because people who commit atrocious acts generally aren't thinking. We should promote the practice of thought, rather than trying to stifle it with deceptive absolutes.
IMO, American society is entirely too accepting of war now.
Because they are so far removed from it and its consequences.
We hear no end of people proclaiming that the war in Iraq is good because it is "defending our freedom".
Because people are far too ignorant and trusting and thus believe the propaganda.
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.
Because they don't think for themselves.
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.
So you advocate countering lies with other lies. I would far prefer spreading truth and getting people thinking, because it ultimately results in a greater good (or less trouble).
Instead of plainly stating we are justified in acting thusly because of x, y and z, people will demonize the threat and make it appear to be "absolute evil" (Abu Grahib? police brutality?). Evil must be eradicated, so rather than stopping the conflict when x, y and z are no longer an issue, we will pursue and eliminate the threat at all costs.
People who would otherwise have to justify their actions no longer do because their enemy is clearly evil. The thought process of weighing the benefits and costs of the outcomes is entirely bypassed.
As I'm sure you've noticed, Bush is a strong advocate of this approach, and it's not looking so rosy. The fact is, war has been demonized for a long time, and a large percentge of people already think as you do, ie. war is evil. It has and will change nothing, because people have justifications for what they do, whether rational or not.
Ultimately, ANY approach can be manipulated to suit undesirable outcomes. The least we can do is make it clearer for those who are actually interested in the truth which is what I'm trying to achieve. Encouraging thought can only be good. Encouraging baseless absolutes serves no one. In fact, it can even cause harm by hesitation.
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.
No conversation is meaningless if we learn from it, and there's always the possibility of changing people's perceptions.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
War industrys are ligitimate military targets. Period.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, it was. Got those axioms nailed down yet? :-)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Do you understand the difference between a camp holding irregular fighters (who are NOT covered by the geneva convention) and camps dedicated to genocide?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Changes water properties? Did you read what you wrote? The radon is not chemically reacting (being inert) with the water and neither is it causing a nuclear reaction.
If you can't get your government's attention through the vote, you're much more likely to get their attention by failing to pay taxes, than by burning your garden.
Why am I not surprised that some dumbass reporter ignored the rules, went to into a restricted area, then reported what we now know to be incorrect information?
Sure maybe people were not turned into shriviling piles of flesh from the residual raditation, but given what little was known about nuclear weapons, it was stupid thing to do.
It reminds me of an idiot who ignores the sign warning of thin ice, walks out onto the lake, and jumps up and down proclaiming..."see the ice isn't thin!"
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
Or when the US came to the aid of South Korea when it was invaded by Communist armies?
And on the same coin, when the Chinese "volunteer army" came to the aid of the North Korean. The Chinese had issued warnings that they would react if the US encroached on the frontier at the Yalu River. Indeed fresh from memories of Hiroshima, MacArthur mentioned that atomic weapons might be used in the Korean War sounds like bullying to me.
Oh no, I'm not so presumpuous to think it would be so trivial. I think the solution will be simple, but it usually is in hindsight right? ;-)
:-)
I'm still reading, debating and thinking. I'm certainly making progress though. As you can probably see from my forums, I have lots of material/information (over 500 pages worth).
If I'm going to do it, I'm going to get it right. No hurry.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
And you need to learn how to write with less spittle and venom if you want anyone to care about what you have to say.
You just wasted 10 minutes.
The Zimmerman telegram showed that Kaiser Wilhelm was trying to entice Mexico into the war. Hitler was a corporal about that time, and had no real input into policy.
And why does everything have to be 100% one thing? There were elements of self and other interest, in my opinion, in intervening in South Korea.
emt 377 emt 4
So you advocate countering lies with other lies.
Lies? What lies? You're saying that "war is always evil" is a lie? But it's not a lie, unless we apply your definition of "evil". Don't get so caught up in your attempt to formulate a consistent moral structure that you forget that not everyone shares your definitions.
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From the CNN story:
In a September 8, 1945 dispatch, Weller walked through the city -- a "wasteland of war" -- and found evidence to back the talk of radiation fallout from American radio reports.
Though thousands of burn victims had died within a week after the attack, doctors were stumped by "this mysterious 'disease X"' which sickened and was killing many Japanese as well as allied soldiers freed from prison camps a month later.
From the actual 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.
Nobody here in Nagasaki has yet been able to show that the bomb is different than any other, except in a broader extent flash and a more powerful knock-out.
----------
What's up with this?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I think that the Japanese could have read this quote in American history books:
"War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want." - General William T. Sherman
Understanding that one American maxim could have saved them a lot of grief.
As a matter of fact, Imperial Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who designed the attack on Pearl Harbor, studied at Harvard University opposed going to war with the US. He also served in Washington, DC as Japanese Naval Attaché to the United States in 1925-28. His statement, when he was told of the attack on Pearl Harbor was "We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve."
Vote.
SRSLY.
"There was a strong voice in the Navy urging that we simply blockade Japan, saving more lives than either of the options you present."
Not quite. What they were actually saying was "give the blockade more time." It had been up for months prior, slowly starving the islands, but there was no sign of wavering in the Japanese military command. Instead, they send the Yamato off with no fuel (thanks to the blockade), with the intent of beaching her on Okinawa and acting as static guns.
"Then there is the whole world of diplomacy and surrender, which, I assure you, was in fact an option."
Diplomacy? With the same country that had negotiators pretending to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their invasion of China with the US while an attack fleet was steeming towards Pearl Harbor at the same time? "Fool me once, shame on you..."
What conditions would they push for in that diplomacy? That the US abandon support for China? Hang on to some of the islands they grabbed in 1941?
Yes, there were parts of the Japanese government looking for peace, but they had no power in their government. Those in power were waiting for the eventual invasion of the home islands and forcing the US into a pyrrhic victory in order to negotiate from more strength. And to that end they gave spears to children. They only surrendered when the atomic bombs demonstrated there was no hope to make the victory costly for the US beyond the price tag of the bombs.
"The United States was very clear on insisting on unconditional surrender, and many parts of the Japanese power structure were ready for this,"
Yeah, the parts that had no power. These were some of the same voices that said going to war with the US was a bad idea back in 1941, but if anything they lost influence as Japan lost captured territories over the years (since it became easier to see us as filthy gaijin invaders).
"and then allowed the emperor to stay anyway."
Not in the way they wanted. The constitution MacArthur forced down their throats, the one that reduced the political influence of the emperor to that of a figurehead at best, is not one that they would have accepted voluntarily. One of the less etherial reasons parts of the Japanese government wanted to leave the emperor's office unchanged is that the military forces effectively ruling the country used their power in his name. They knew that, if their offices relied more on a popularly-elected legislature, they'd be replaced with people like the peaceniks they were busy supressing.
John of England got to keep his throne, too. But there was still the little matter of the Magna Carta...
Eisenhower was fighting in Europe against Germans who thought pretty much the way he did. The German Army didn't have a mindset that produced Kamikazes. Eisenhower didn't have any Okinawas or Iwo Jimas to fight so he didn't have any first hand experience with soldiers who knew they were fighting to the death. Just before the Japanese cabinet voted to surrender or continue in mid August, a Japanese general presented his plan for ultimate victory - he wanted the entire nation to become Kamikazes.
Moreover, the Japanese government was divided into the civilian half which wanted to surrender and the military half which wouldn't consider it. The military had the guns and the procedural ability to checkmate any move on the civilian side. They had consistently wielded that ability to thwart the civilian's motions to surrender. Without a decision to surrender, the default was to continue fighting. The bomb convinced Hirohito that if he wanted his nation to survive, he had to go against his military and choose to give up.
After the vote was taken to surrender and Hirohito had recorded his agreement, there was an aborted military coup. A coup was what the civilians had anticipated would happen if they ever succeeded in getting the government to surrender.
When Hirohito announced his surrender, he said the bomb played a part in that decision:
Eisenhower knew none of this when Stimson told him what was going to happen. Even still, if just for a moment you ignore the facts and you were right and the Japanese were indeed willing to surrender, did it matter? The perception was that they were not willing to surrender and we had to do whatever it took to get them to surrender.Almost forgot. The Lusitania was a British cargo and passenger ship. The American involvment was that there were Americans aboard her. A note on that, the Germans had publicized that they considered the waters around England as an area in which British flagged vessels were "liable for destruction". This in return for the British blockade of Germany. There is also a claim that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, which, if true, made her a legitimate target of the German navy. Also, according to my reading, the Lusitania was built with the capacity of conversion to what is called and "Armed Merchant Cruiser". This would mean that it was possible for the Luistania to be carrying guns, and serving as part of the Royal Navy. How much the captain of the sub that sank the Lusitania knew about this, I dont know.
emt 377 emt 4
Even we accepted you premise that the second bomb was more a political statement aimed a russia it was still justifed.
Anybody believe Stalin would not have gone into western europe without atomic weapons to restrain his ambitions? Anybody at all?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
America ( and Russia and China ) have a lot to loose, and a lot of reasons not to use Nuclear weapons. North Korea, Iraq under Saddam, Iran, and some others had much less ( percieved ) to lose, and more ( percieved ) reasons to want to use them.
I would much rather no one had them, but that is not reality. Name a reasonable path to that end.
I think that the current non-proliferation idea is about the best that we can manage.
emt 377 emt 4
After TWO citys got nuked the emperor personally decided to surrender (after Nagasaki). When this happened a group of Japanese officers decided to stage a coup because they believed the emperor was wrong to surrender (guess they decided he was'nt a god after all).
Get your history straight. They NEVER offered to disarm, they NEVER offered to take the emperors power away (he is only a figure head now).
IIRC the last 60 years it the longest peacefull period in recorded Japanese history (which is full of civil wars etc). Boshedo needed to end as a system of government.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
On pt #2.
Yes, they sanctioned their use, but I dont think that that means that they did not ponder the issue, that it was a glad/happy/joyful decision for them to make.
emt 377 emt 4
That's a very good post. Trying to make war simple is to be forced to abstract away relevent information until what you're judging isn't the actual situation.
Now, while we can't prove that Japan wouldn't have won the war if we didn't drop the bomb, I find it highly unlikely.
People tend to forget what stage the war was at when the bomb was dropped. We had already defeated their navy. While many of their factories were intact, they still had very little in the way of war-waging capability. We had a blockade around the island and were conducting uncontested air raids on a daily basis.
With the Japanese navy providing fish homes at the bottom of the ocean, the U.S. naval forces perched off their shores attacking their cities with abandon, and the Russian army barreling down on Japan, I find it highly unlikely that the atom bomb was the deciding factor in Japan's defeat. The only real question is what form that defeat would take and how much it would cost. E.g. extremely painful invasion, conditional surrender, or joint surrender to the U.S. and the Russians.
Of course in the process of defeating Japan many things were done that aren't necessarily any "better" than dropping nukes -- the firebombings done to prove the bomb wasn't necessary come to mind. Similarly the attrocities of Japan are well known and highly disturbing.
The Milgram Studies are very interesting, and everyone should know about them so silly questions like "How could do something like that only because they were ordered to?" don't get asked, and instead useful (but difficult) questions like "How do we prevent power structures like the ones that caused these things to happen from arising?"
The enemies of Democracy are
Show me link. Japan made peace offers, never offered to surrender.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Someone needs to check their facts. Both WWI and WWII involved Germany. The reason for Hitler's rise to power was that he blamed Germany's weaknesses and resultant loss in the first world war on the Jews. Towards the end of WWII the Allied forces defeated Germany and Hitler committed suicide thus ending Germany's fight. Japan happened to think it was a good idea to bomb Pearl Harbor in Hawaii starting the chain of events leading to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
"How do you explain Omaha Beach as the action of nothing more than an overgrown bully?"
Perhaps not, but I can think of another big US amphibious landing: Veracruz.
"Or for that matter, US intervention in WWI?"
We had our feelings hurt that we weren't allowed to continue playing both sides.
We got involved in a family feud among European royalty under the guise of "making the world safe for democracy." The specific democracy was the newfound democracy in Russia, to where we sent a lot of troops to actually fight against said democracy, trying to keep them in the war.
The history of the Twentieth Century might have been very different had we not gotten so involved in internal Russian affairs. Soviet communism might not have taken as much of a hard line as it did if the ostensibly democratic US weren't actively shooting at them (the bourgeois royalists from the UK were all but expected, but us?)
At any rate, don't forget that our involvement in WWI comes not long after the Spanish-American War.
BTW the 500,000 estimate was for US troops. Jap casualties would have been much higher.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Robert McNamara said it best- there are no rules of war- if the US had lost WWII- he and other US officials would have been tried as war criminals.
One wonders if people like you have ever gotten out of your wretched little white-bread suburbs, and actually gotten to know, or have even MET, any Japanese people. Not the racist caricatures of hollywood movies; but real, living, honest-to-god Japanese PEOPLE.
I have. And I have a damn sight more sympathy for my Japanese and Japanese-American friends than I have for trash like you.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Understandable given their ethnicity and political leanings. Hardly admirable.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Japanes officials who saw the Hiroshima devestation were in Tokyo, and discussed the matter in the War Council. The War Council, folowing the discussion, decided not to surrender. Recent memoirs from senior Japanese officals make this quite clear. Some in the war council pooh-poohed the devestating effects. Others thought that there weren't more bombs. But the simple fact is that they discussed it and decided to continue the war. It was a bad move, and had ugly, ugly consequences.
You don't have to go to Europe...you can come to Massachusetts or New Hampshire (the Granite state). Basically, the basements are carved out of solid granite which has radon trapped in it...old old houses have built up quite a bit of radioactivity because of the radon 'oozing' out of the granite underneath.
re the reason to make a robot base on the moon
prepare 10000000s of unemployed humans and robots working for $0
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War."
Sir Winston Churchill, New York Enquirer, 1936
What did you expect him to say? "As First Lord of the Admiralty, I manipulated the sinking of the Lusitania, filling the cargo holds of a 'passenger liner' with ammunition and deliberately routing her through waters filled with German submarines, for the very intent of dragging the US into the war. Because we needed something to break the stalemate." Heck, most of that stuff was still classified in the 1930's.
Oh, and don't forget what else he's not going to say to the American press at the time: "No, we're still not going to pay for all that stuff that we got from you during the war." No "Lend-Lease" stuff during that war, they were lucky we didn't demand cash up front (which, in hindsight, we probably should have). He was suggesting that they didn't need the materiel, anyway.
"Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism,"
We entered after the overthrow of the Czar. When Wilson urged Congress to "make the world safe for democracy," Russia was the democracy he was referring to. After the ousting of the Czar, it became the first and only democratic combattant. Before that, even with the Lusitania incident, Wilson was hard-pressed to convince Americans why we should get into a yet another royal family feud in Europe.
(And not long before, we were just as likely, if not more likely, to enter the war on the side of Germany and Austria. The UK was doing some of the same things the Germans were doing to our ships.)
"and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany."
Yeah, all our fault. We didn't even sign the damned treaty! The US negotiated a separate peace treaty because we didn't like the way it looked.
"If America had stayed out of the war, all these 'isms' wouldn't today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government"
What parliamentary government? The UK was really the only example of anything resembling decent democracy in Europe, as had been the trend for the past few centuries at that point. Mainlaind Europe, including/especially the countries he listed, had always been wracked with internal strife (communism was 30-40 years old by that point). The only difference, really, was that the Powers that Be bloodied themselves and each other enough during the Great War that the unwashed masses actually had a chance to overpower them for once.
Heck, Germany and Italy as unified countries was still a relatively new concept going into the Great War.
In major policy discussions of that type, every possible view comes up for analysis. So sure, the effects on the USSR came up. We should hope that to be the case.
But you suggest that it is the only, or at the very least a primary reason for A-bombs use. Truman said, in public, and on every reported private occasion, that the purpose was to bring an immediate end to hostilities. He was not only considering the impending invasion of the home islands of Japan, but also the continued mayhem and death being wrought throughout the Far East. For example, a delay of one month could easily have made mass starvation possible in both Korea and northern China.
Strom Thurman and Congress brain damage jokes may now start.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Congress brain-damages YOU.
Now where is that "Post Anonymously" button.... nope, that wasn't it.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
How would you have run the war?
emt 377 emt 4
By your logic, any one can organize a group of people to be only 1% involved with importing cocaine into usa, yeah each one does a tiny bit , does that mean they cannot be prosecuted, oh but by the DAs own rules, if you are even remotely partly involved you get the full force of law and punishment just as equal to doing it all your self. But common LAW isnt good enough for the govt or 'men in charge' isnt it... they are above the law.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
and "The second bomb was dropped before the Japanese government had actually made any official response"
The official response was Japan's continuation of hostilities. No Cease-Fire. Just more shooting.
There were Japanese officials in the War Council who had been to Hiroshima, and they wanted an immediate surrender, and said so in the War Council. They were overruled, and the War Council decided to "wait and see" rather than surrender. They decided to keep fighting. All this was before the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
In fact, after the second bomb (Nagasaki), some of the same "wait and see" officials tried to capture the Emperor and grab power, just so that the war could continue. Thank God they were stopped.
What's with everyone classifying the Japanese as a single entity? "The Japanese military did some terrible things, so it's fine to kill Japanese civilians." That logic can justify the murder of innocents in any country you want to name, including the US (except then, of course, we'd call it terrorism).
For Christ's sake, people are individuals, not units of a nation-state hive mind.
I should buy some cement.
Japanese tourists visit the infamous "Bridge Over the River Kwai" in large numbers. The tourist train that goes from Bangkok to Singapore makes a side trip to the real bridge, just for the tourists. That railway claimed the lives of huge numbers of prisoners of all nationalities and that is made plain at the site itself. Japanese tourists don't go there to celebrate "their past glory and victory against the might United States", not by any stretch of the imagination.
You say...
but I'm sure will never forget it, despite that I was justified in defending myself. People who have been through such scenarios will testify to the truth of this.
---
You forget or are unaware that in this century people in southern america had parties and celebrated killing negros and whites who sympathised with them. They felt no remorse or guilt and if they never forgot it, it was to remember it with fondness in their advancing years.
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The only reason we are against killing is because we have been trained (very recently) to think of killing other human beings as a bad thing. It is very easy for humans to not only learn to kill but learn to enjoy killing. It is very easy for them to learn to enjoy torturing them too.
Hell, more than a few of the yale students in the Milgrim psych test enjoyed themselves thinking they were really torturing the victims with painful electric shocks. And that was a -really- small sample size (a few hundreds) so the tendency has to be really common in humans.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The Japanese intentions can hardly be argued; they were preparing large scale deployments of chemical and biological weapons. In fact, large scale tests were conducted in China, and killed or maimed ten of thousands.
Are you trying to knock over a straw man? The Japanese had lots of killing potential left in their war machine, with more on the way. They also used, and intended to use, every nasty capability that they possessed.
This is exactly why you must never allow the past by itself to become justification for targeting some group of people.
It might be OK in some cases to go to war and kill some enemy combatants. But it is never OK to kill because
No person or group should ever reach the status where it's a priori OK to kill them because they are who they are. If we allow them to reach that status in our minds, then something is wrong with us.
Instead, you need to be sure that the war or the action you take will accomplish something that justifies it. And revenge or catharsis don't count as justification. It might, however, really be the best thing to kill them if you know they will try to and will have the opportunity to do something violent in the future, and if killing them is the only realistic way to stop them.
Humans have a big problem separating the motivation of hate from the motivation of accomplishing something positive. As the Bruce Cockburn song says, "Everybody loves to see justice done ...on somebody else."
All of this may sound like an argument in favor of pacifism, i.e. that all war is evil. In fact, what I'm trying to illustrate here is that there is such a thing as a wrong motivation for killing someone (as pacifists would agree), but there is also such a thing as a right motivation. It's true that even when we do have justification, we humans tend to muddy the waters and do stupid things like commit war crimes in a justified war. (Like when the Japanese attacked the US, and then we put innocent Japanese-Americans in internment camps.) It happens in virtually every war. It's a natural human reaction to hate another group of people, and it can even serve as motivation. No doubt in some cases the military cultivates hate for the enemy in order to keep the troops motivated.
But none of this changes the fact that sometimes attacking someone really could be the best thing to do. Only reacting in defensive ways can sometimes prolong a conflict. Perhaps the aggressor has stopped its attack temporarily while it develops a new weapon or regroups to attack at a later date (after winter passes or something). It might be in such a case that electing to strike while you have the upper hand will end the conflict sooner, causing more violence in the short term, but less in the long term. Choosing to initiate violence can be the best thing for everybody in some cases. Yes, it takes an extra level of certainty to justify that type of action (and to avoid overreacting due to fear of things that might not even happen). My problem with pacifism is that it seems to not even allow that this type of situation exists.
This is exactly why the US military is pressing it's research into 'smart' weapons, and starting to use unmanned combat vehicles: to make war more easy to swallow by the public due to fewer civilian casualties, and also sustain fewer combattant casualties of our own while also causing the maximum enemy combattant casualties. If this weren't true, well, it's alot cheaper to carpet-bomb with B-52s than fire smart bombs...
This war has been incredibly light on casualties compared to any previous major combat operation (Vietnam, Korea, WWII, WWI). Since the concept of 'total war' was instituted in WWII, we are at the lowest level of peripheral damage (# civilian casualties) and the highest level of weapon accuracy (# pounds of explosives required to destroy a target complex). That trend will continue.
Some day I envision (as I suspect military planners do) an army operating mostly by remote control and telepresience. Robotic aircraft, advanced armed surveillance drones, and robotic ground combat vehicles will be first. The next generation will come in the form smaller combat robots - perhaps smaller than a person, fast, maneuverable, armed to kill. The third generation will be even smaller - microbots or nanobots?
Each generation brings less risk to military personnel, more accurate target resolution (due to the fact you have no personnel risk, so you can get closer to potential targets), and lower collateral damage.
Hah! Deep-fry Mars bars?? Try 'em frozen - Mars Bars for Men! :)
I think he meant Hitler The Dictator, not Hitler The Soldier (He was in World War One, but as a Corporal or something like that).
http://wsulug.org
Actually, Nagasaki was a fleet headquarters, with huge shipyards, and supplier factories all over the city. And the workers in all those factories ranged from children to the elderly, along with large numbers of slave labor prisoners pulled from all over the Far East. The city was one big military shipyard. Some estimates are that 90% of the non-military population was manufacturing war goods.
You say: "Of course it was a civilian target, just the same as any other city would be", but the facts say otherwise.
Before anyone argues that the use of the two atomic bombs was isolated or necessary, what about the fire-bombing of Japanese cities that killed far more civilians?
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
You forget or are unaware that in this century people in southern america had parties and celebrated killing negros and whites who sympathised with them. They felt no remorse or guilt and if they never forgot it, it was to remember it with fondness in their advancing years.
YOU are neglecting the fact that such people were raised in an environment that promoted such actions. They were taught the view that negros were less than trash, so naturally they acted like it.
Humans are animals (in the biological sense, ie. creatures), and like animals they will do what they are trained to do. If they are trained to kill, they will kill. If they are trained to commit suicide, they will commit suicide. If they are trained to think for themselves, they will think for themselves.
Certainly there are deviations from this pattern (moreso than in less sophisticated/intelligent animals), but the trend is there.
The only reason we are against killing is because we have been trained (very recently) to think of killing other human beings as a bad thing. It is very easy for humans to not only learn to kill but learn to enjoy killing. It is very easy for them to learn to enjoy torturing them too.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem like a very recent development to me. We have religious manuscripts dating back thousands of years that outline similar "rules of conduct", ie. thou shalt not kill, etc.
Hell, more than a few of the yale students in the Milgrim psych test enjoyed themselves thinking they were really torturing the victims with painful electric shocks. And that was a -really- small sample size (a few hundreds) so the tendency has to be really common in humans.
Extrapolating from a limited sample size is the epitome of bad science. But if I were to hazard a theory from the psychological standpoint, I'd say it's because they relished the feeling of power, not that they enjoyed delivering pain. This results naturally from our animal instincts to dominate.
And as additional food for thought, my comment wasn't necessarily in the sense of "they will remember because killing was such a horrible act", but could also be taken to mean "they will remember because violence is generally so far removed from modern society".
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
If you read the article, it repeatedly mentions that the armor plate factories and shipyard were staffed with Allied POW slave labor. The reporter is able to debunk a few of the claims made by the Japanese and American governments based on the testimony of these workers.
The munitions plants, unsuprisingly, used Japanese workers.
I don't know where you get that idea from. Copyright applies from when a work is created. I think the following applies: US Copyright
Interesting questions: one could argue the material was written in Japan by a US Citizen. Which country's copyright laws apply? I'd say Japan's as in 1945.
Does providing the work to a censor count as publication? It's debatable, but I'd say yes: The legislative reports define "to the public" as distribution to persons under no explicit or implicit restrictions with respect to disclosure of the contents. Of coruse this is probably moot because it was created before 1976.
Regardless I object to someone slapping on the current year as the date of copyright. Maybe that is supposed to be a reference to the book the son is publishing, but the original work (and that's all the website is quoting) should become public domain much earlier than what the son is claiming. Not to mention applying his own name (and hence his own lifespan).
I object to the sloppiness that can curtail the growth of the public domain. Of course copyright is now so long that for all practical purposes it makes almost no difference in the here and now.
Unless you can successfully argue that the article was legally "published" by distribution to the censors in which case it would NOW be in the public domain.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
Hirohito and the military knew about that city's destruction later that day, but were paralyzed by indecision. Hirohito did not meet with his supreme war council until about 11 a.m. Aug. 9, within minutes of when the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Another choice quote: "The Japanese military did not want people to know about the atomic bomb," said Tsuia Etchu, founder of Nagasaki's Atomic Bomb museum. Etchu was an army officer in the city of Fukuoka when the bomb fell.
It stands to reason that the military didn't want people to know that America had these superweapons, so that people would still have some delusion about fighting to the death and taking as many American's with them as possible.
To anyone who has some knowledge of the mindset of the Japanese from feudal times to WW2, it is blindingly clear that Japan simply would not surrender. They created seppuku to preserve "honor" for chrissake. They had 12 year olds working in factories and schoolgirls throwing themselves off cliffs because the govt told them the Americans would rape them.
Can you really look at these facts and pretend that America was the agressor?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am not sure you mean 'division'. A division (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_(military)% 5Ddivision has 10,000-20,000 soldiers. I believe you meant "army" or "army group".
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not attacks on civilains. Regardless of what you might want the Japanese to have been, they were fanatics, stupidly loyal to the emperor, and believers in some twisted concept of "honor" that justified *forced* seppuku. They were arming children with bamboo spears! When the entire populace is trained to fight you, they are clearly not civilians.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It wasn't a question of Japanese victory, it was that we tried a "gentleman's agreement" surrender in WWI with Germany, punished them, and that just created enough unrest to allow WW2 to start, hence our unyielding position in WW2 demanding unconditional surrender.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I laugh maniacally!
So to avoid pitting American soldiers against Japanese kids with bamboo spears, we had to drop nuclear bombs on those kids.
While you believe that the Japanese had a twisted sense of honor, you claim what for yourself? NO honor?
And if you didn't vote for the government that took the decision... ?
It is about winning.
The only questions in Trumans mind should have been:
'Will this be the cheapest way (in terms of American lives) to win the war?'
'What will using this weapon do to the political situation after the war?'
It is'nt as complicated as you make it. You save more lives by shortening wars then you take by fighting ruthlessly.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have always thought that choosing the lesser evil is a moral obligation, and those that stick their head in the sands while ignoring the greater evil are cowards who bear the full responsibility of their inaction. Was dropping the bombs evil? Yep. Were the viable alternatives worse? Yep. It was an easy decision that even with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight was almost assuredly correct. Of course, no one can ever know for sure, as we are dealing with counter-factuals. But there is little indication that Japan was close to surrender and that the war could have been ended in a manner that better saved both the Japanese and Americans. The Japanese have gotten over this issue. You should, too.
Rosie the Riveter is not a legitimate military target. She's a civilian. The fearsome bamboo-spear-wielding Japanese kid is not a legitimate military target. He's a civilian.
This idea that it's ok to pulverize an enemy's industrial capability without regard to civilian lives in order to spare soldiers the inconvenience of having to take control of some buildings has got to go.
Even if that were ok with you, the nukes dropped on Japan killed people who did not work in military plants. They destroyed homes and killed babies. If that's ok with you then you have no honor. You are a machine pretending to be a man.
Japan had an active spy network among Japanese and American citizens. Many sent their childern back to Japan for indoctronation.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I think there is a lot of validity to that. On Sept. 11th, 2001, they targeted more than one site. They got the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Because they hit more than one target, a lot of people including myself were a bit panicked. My sister was very worried about my father because he works in a tall building in Dallas. Realistically, it's unlikely they were going to try to hit Dallas (not exactly filled with world-famous landmarks, unless you want to fly a plane into Southfork Ranch and try to hit JR Ewing), but one attack is an incident, and two or more is a pattern. You hit a whole new level of worry when you are trying to figure out the next item in the sequence. The uncertainty is huge -- what if your city is the next one?
Anyway, part of the point of the nuclear bombs was to change the attitude of the Japanese leadership. Destroying someone's factories and thereby reducing their ability to fight doesn't necessarily provoke them to surrender. Making them choose to surrender happens in psychological realm. You're trying to produce desperation, so that they'll consider an alternative they have been telling themselves is not an option. With one nuclear bomb, they might look at it as the loss of a city and some war production capacity -- as a setback, but something that could potentially be overcome. They might think the US doesn't have the resolve to use such a weapon except to use it once as a demonstration. When the second hits, the doubt goes out of control. They seriously question whether they'll ever be able to win the war. But more than that, they question whether they'll continue to exist as a nation or even continue to exist personally.
Basically, the psychological effect of two nuclear bombs on the leadership is much more than twice the effect of one nuclear bomb. And, obvious as this is, if one is not enough to convince them to surrender, then something else is needed. If two will have a much, much greater effect than one, then dropping a second is a reasonable strategy.
I'm not neglecting anything in particular.
I was addressing what seemed to be your point that people in general would feel horrible guilt over killing people when it is clearly not true.
People have to be specifically trained NOT to be violent, and even then, in a majority of cases the training doesn't take. Despite huge penalties (going to hell, going to prison, being executed) a lot of people enjoy injuring and hurting others- even to the point of killing them.
Humans repeatedly engage in these activities. It is a lot harder remain peaceful than it is to be violent. In fact, in some cases remaining peaceful will just get you killed. Given power over others, humans routinely abuse it. They don't need to be trained to do so.
The same religious documents relate how god "rewards" the faithful with the young women of the sinners after the faithful kills every male and every woman that is too old or young. (see the section dealing with Mose's flock laying waste to a city - of whom half the population at least (and probably more like 90%- had done nothing to him or his people).
Other religious documents go into exquisite detail on how to torture and kill other human beings as long as they are not among the faithful. (Check out the Koran for nice details).
Religions that have suceeded have done so by murdering large numbers of people who were not among the faithful (yup- even buddism and atheism).
I agree with you on the power point. Inflicting pain was probably merely an expression of having power.
As far as animals go- lots of predatory animals have a great deal of fun playing with their food before they finally kill it. Humans have the potential wired in to enjoy playing with their victims before they finally kill them.
Our ultra-pacifism really is very recent- mostly since the invention of TV where a few people could repeatedly hammer home messages like "animals are equal to humans", "good always wins in the end", "if we protect ourselves, we'll become monsters just like them" and other similar soft-headed notions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In wartime.
Enemy lives == negative value (they are threats).
Allied lives == positive value.
It IS that simple.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"We still had plumbers and electricians and carpenters building civilian housing, not forcibly conscripted into working exclusively on military projects."
Try again.
During World War II, manufacturing various "consumer items" (refrigerators, automobiles) was forbidden. This also included housing materials. I remember watching a documentary about how a model-train company switched to producing war materiel during World War II because they couldn't get any metal for trains or tracks.
Since most of the larger employers had switched to producing war materiel (because they couldn't get the necessary materials), the only jobs--and especially the better paying jobs--were at the war plants. If you had a family to feed, that's where you went.
- Didn't the Russian have far better equipment than the Japanese: Yes, the Russians had just fought a war against Germany, the Japanese had fought against peasants.
Just to add a little comment to this. During the invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese twice deliberately crossed into Russian territory and were soundly beaten. We already had a display of what might happend if the two armies met.
meh
Even if you're a shareholder that votes against a company's decision, you are both benefiting from any advantage gained from that decision and sharing in the responsibility (i.e., debts) from it. You do get "I told you so" rights, though.
Again, confusing responsibility and culpability is a mistake.
Were US voters allowed to vote on whether to drop A-bombs on Japan during WWII?
"Derp de derp."
Everyone expects casualties in war. Many times strategic bombing was thought to weaken morale but actually it hardens resolve. Both the British and the Germans (and the Japanese islands and the US in Indonesia) were bombed quite often, but people just got on with their work. None of these countries surrendered because of bombing. Yes it was scary, and you went into the air raid shelter, and sat it out. And if you were a survivor (and face it, most people were) you simply worked harder to do your bit to end the war.
.303 and keep patrolling the beaches.
Now destroy a whole city in one shot. OK, we adapt, we divert resources. We do damage control, and squash rumours. Then destroy another city. Now see it from the politician's point of view. Uh oh. You have almost everyone in your contry carrying a gun - you gave it to them and told them "go kill the enemy". How long until someone figures out that it would be MUCH easier to kill YOU and sue for peace than have more cities destroyed... how do you explain to your people that the enemy killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civillians (depending which numbers you choose to believe) in one WEEK but go with your
This, apart from the fact that such disasters by definition overwhelm a country's ability to cope with them logistically. "Yes I need you to keep manning your tank despite the fact that your family are probably starving to death in the ruins of Nagasaki IF they happened to survive. Oh and yes we are still are close winning the war and we're making good progress like I told you last week."
The leadership took a long dark look at the abyss that lay ahead of them and decided surrender to the allies was probably the lesser of two evils for themselves, and also for their country. It's very sad that so many people had to die pointlessly, but what's worse is that we humans don't seem to learn from our mistakes.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oh I've already had cancer but thanks all the same.
Yeah! Fer Men wifout teef! //ouch those are hard! :P
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Probably not, at least not with anger management problems like yours.
Yes, we are sending two bombers, one of which will care a nuclear weapon. They will be arriving in the Nagasaki area around 7am on August the 9th. Please evacuate the area before we attack. ...
Whether you like it or not, surprise is an element of any military attack, let alone one as precarious as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. Remember, we didn't even HAVE another nuke at that point. Fortunately, the Japanese didn't know this.
First, our bombing wasn't that accurate in WWII. Japanese civilian and military facilities were intertwined. Heck, it still hard now with GPS guided missiles. Second, your plan would not have ended the war. It was the utter shock of the bombs that caused the Japanese to quit. Yet another round of conventional bombs would have killed just as many people, but the war would have dragged on for months, killing far more.
The kind of "democracy" where a single unelected political party controls the government and Lenin gets to order executions? Don't have any illusions about the Bolsheviks. Allied intervention in the Russian civil war didn't stop the Bolsheviks from setting up a democracy if that's really what they wanted.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Adjusted for population, Iraq civilians have a 911 every couple of weeks.. And since you went there, adjusted for troop levels and advancements in battlefield medicine, infantry duty in Iraq is every bit as tough as infantry duty in Vietnam. Now count the total of American casualties, pushing 2,000, and compare that to the last Gulf War. Then you can stfu about us "kicking ass".
> Let me guess. Yank?
He claims to be a New Zealander.
I guess racist and xenophobic warmongering trash who celebrate the murder of civilians by the most horrific weapon invented by man come in all nationalities.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
I never dropped bombs on anyone, nor did I ever shoot rockets at anyone. However......I did load those weapons onto F-16's during Desert Storm.
I accept the fact that I helped kill those people. I was just as responsible as the pilot that delivered those weapons, as well as the commander that ordered those weapons delivered to targets.
Don't think for a minute that those of us in uniform during wartime just "casually" perform our duty without thinking of the consequences. We all think about what we do.
Sometimes what we end up doing is just fucking awfull, but don't pretend that we are all telling ourselves lies.
We ALL take responsibility for the things we do.
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
Uhm, fuck radon. A jacuzzi and a few beers. Same feeling, less radiation.
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
It was actually IMHO less of an atrocity than the firebombings which burned to death MORE civilians than both atomic bombs combined.
Oh yes. My single vote makes such a difference that I should be held responsible for the actions of any other member of society! Right.
Ghandi wasn't trying to use pacifism defend a free people against invaders coming to enslave them. Ghandi was trying to free a people ruled by a small elite from a diminishing empire which possessed a basic decency. The Nazi Reich or Imperial Japan would have freely killed him and anyone who tried to resist, or failed to obey for that matter. Firing squads and gas chambers eliminated millions of non-violent resisters to Nazi evil. Ghandi must have recognized this himself despite the advice he had for the Jewish people as noted in The Ghandi Nobody Knows:
If you think Ghandi was a true pacifist, you should try reading up on the activities of Sergeant Major Ghandi in the Boer War. Follow that up with his views on Kashmir, and other matters involved in obtaining Indian independence. Here is a link or two, OK, three to get you going.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Ah, the old "think of the children" rouse. Might wanna do a little less "thinking of the children", and spend it on reading comprehension, then you'd notice that Japan was a country of fanatics. As to the ad homiem attack on my honor, you'd best reconsider your own first, trying to paint a country that indoctrinated its "citizens" since birth in fanaticism and that the lives of those in a lower class than you were worthless, and was an unprovoked agressor, as the victim.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
How about I show you an elected leader who sacrifices many hundreds of his own troops because he is a raving psychopath who lied to start the war in the first place and never had any intentions of it being a "cake-walk" over in "ten weeks", because war is just so damned profitable.
Oops. Pardon me. I can't do that. The example I wanted to point to wasn't actually elected.
-FL
I'd have the choice not to be a shareholder of a company's stock. I don't take responsibility for other people's actions.
Pacifism is good in theory but I don't know any people who advocate pacifism when their families are facing imminent death. And that's the real clincher, not many people are willing to die for an idea.
And just to clarify my previous post: I don't justify doing one bad thing because of another, but simply that when the whole world is trying to kill each other and your about to die there isn't much people won't do to save their own lives. For the record I don't hate Japan (in fact it's on my "A" list of places to visit).
In the case of WWII, if no one had opposed Hitler, then we still would have had concentration camps and the Holocaust. And you think Russians didn't have concentration camps? Besides, how would you define the actions in Chechenya, if not Holocaust?
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/
Barefoot Gen is a portrayal of the Atomic Bombing of Japan created by Artist Keiji Nakazawa.
It describes the situation in Japan before, during and after the bomb from the point of view of a joung boy.
I also think that the most important point is not: where the US right or not in dropping the bomb.
Some would arge that the Emperor was on the werge of surrounding, other would deny it, and yet other would say that a surrender without a complette shake up of the power structure would be useless.
But what is the most damning element in the story it the sensorship that the US occupation forces maintained on the occupied countries.
Accounts of the bombing where not only sensored in the US, but mainly in Japan, the penalty for trying to publish something about this was in theory at least death. In practice it was just impossible to get a printer, and trying a little to hard would get you into prison.
Freedom of speech is not something that can be only given when convenient.
The US also imposed a certain way of rebuilding the countries, and for instance in Germany it stopped many (most) emigrated intelectuals from returning to Germany, not just pro Soviet Communist, but anybody that would be "left leaning" would be seen as a potential "Communist Spy" and therefore barred from returning.
I also notice that many poster do not understand why europeans are not more thankful for the US role during WWI and WWII.
Well the US has over the years supported many right wing neo-facistic governments (in general to 'free' the citizens from the risk of getting 'left wing facists at their helm).
So the "ideological sanctity" of the US is very suspect.
The US intervention came quite late in both cases, and came at points where the economical interests of the US where at stake.
So I believe the Europeans are very thankful to the GI's that risked or gave their lives for freedom.
But do not expect this to extend to the US leadership.
Because we also remember that people that had to flee the Nazis often where a couple of years latter in a position of fleeing from Mac Carthy.
And you might want to ponder Göddels remark to the judje that gave him the US nationality:
(paraphrasing: Oh but now, I read the US constitution yesterday evening, and there are ways to build the same kind of police state I just left).
Good luck and Happy Dreams....
---
There is no excuse for Software Patents
"""
B) is foolish in the extreme. I had a coworker who, at one point, stated that she felt ALL war was wrong, and there was no point at which it would be justified to fight a war. This is foolish. At some point (and what point that is is debatable) there comes a time where if you do not fight, you allow innocent civilians to be slaughtered by an enemy who will torture and rape and abuse,"""
While I agree with you, your mindset and mine are alike. I have a great respect for people who can remain pacifist in the face of rape, torture and death. They have an ideal and who am I to say it is wrong. It is definately not foolish, it is easy to construct an aguement that it is the most sensible course of action.
Maybe in the next life they will be rewarded. Who knows!
Pablo
"what would Jesus do?"
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.
Nope. Civilians are never legitimate military targets. Never.
I am trolling
I don't say it was 100% one thing, but the post I was replying to seemed to think South Korea proved the US didn't just act out of self interest. It doesn't, because self interest was plenty of reason to intervene.
I am trolling
There's all sorts of conspiracy ideas, certainly the ship doesn't look to have been as innocent as was publicly claimed. It took an unusual route that almost seems as if it was trying to goad the sub into sinking her. A suggestion I've heard is it was overplayed to the public to give a plausible reason for American intervention when they wanted to keep the real one (the zimmerman telegram) secret (since they didn't want the Germans switching to stronger ciphers).
I am trolling
About a year ago, the US uncovered a sunken Japanese sub which contained Japanese bioweapons targetted for the west coast.
So please, if the US hadn't devastated Japan with that bomb, it was only a matter of time before it got hit.
In war we are all guilty. Guilty for letting the light of reason splutter and fail, inviting in the forces of chaos and hate.
But, if you must choose war, choose total war. Any war fought haphazardly and without conviction is going to lead inexorably to a doomed end. Killing an enemy soldier is good as he might kill 5 of your nation's soldiers. Killing a citizen making the bombs or making the planes, is just as good, as those bombs or planes might killed tens or hundreds of your nation's soldiers.
But when you get down to it, "guilty" really is just a point of view, usually forced upon the vanquished by the victors. Do Americans feel guilty for making and dropping an atomic bomb or carpet-bombing Vietnam where little children might burn to death? Or do the Japanese feel guilty for force marching prisoners-of-war to prison camps in order to thin them out or executing prisoners out of hand because they feel like it? Frankly, I doubt either do, and that's why wars must be a last resort for anyone, as it makes monsters of all of us.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
I have no idea why parent is modded funny. Hormesis is an acccepted phenomenon.
-Pinkoir
No, dammit.
Self-interest isn't the same thing as acting like an overblown bully, which the poster to whom I originally responded claimed was all the US ever was and is.
It's in my self-interest to get up in the morning, go to work, and collect a paycheck. I do not work for my employer out of altruism. But that's not at all the same thing as mugging people in alleys.
Yes, self-interest was plenty of reason to intervene. And yet our intervention was not the action of a bully.
Words mean things.
You can bet the British didnt want any hint of the German codes being broken to get out. The only reason the RN got a strategic victory at Jutland was because they were able to muster the entire fleet on the basis of codebreaking. It might have been a strategic as well as a tactical German victory otherwise. And the KM still had teeth after Jutland.
If Britain had not been able to command the English channel, she might have been pushed out of the war. And the French were already hanging on by the skin of their teeth with the British in the game.
emt 377 emt 4
Almost forgot... If the English had lost control of the English channel, there is reason to believe that the naval blockade of Germany would have been broken, which would probably have increased Germany's war fighting abilities.
emt 377 emt 4
But you claim your intervention shows you were not a bully. Which it doesn't, because self-interest would be enough reason for a bully to do it. Self interest doesn't necessarily show the US is a bully, but it means the intervention doesn't prove the US isn't a bully.
I am trolling
Yet you never offer "another way" that achieves the desired result: the elimination of totalitarian regimes like Imperial Japan.
:^(
There may be a better fit, but this smacks of "argumentum ad ignorantium". This fallacy is committed whenever it is argued that a proposition is false because it has not been proved true.
"Another way" seems to always mean appeasement of the very real evil
On the logical front this is called a [poorly-executed]* strawman. You've constructed an argument to disagree with, instead of sticking to the argument at hand.
*My 2-cents
BTW, have you noticed that "evil" is rather pragmatically and dynamically defined in US foreign policy endeavors? I mean, our Sec. of Def. shook Sadam's hand mighty enthusastically in the 1980s, did he not?
If you're intellectually honest, you have to acknowledge that the US will insert or bolster a dictatorship whenever it "best" serves our interest. Unfortunately for us, folks who make skilled dictators usually don't also make good lapdogs, and tend to go rogue eventually.
if history has taught us one thing, appeasement never works
Here's the fallacy of hasty generalilzation. BTW, diplomacy and politic is almost always less expensive, less damaging and more durably successful than war. That's the conclusion history actually tends to bear.
In the context of the times, the use of atomic bombs against Imperial Japan was the correct decsion both militarily and politically.
Perhaps. But you've not presented even one valid logical argument to support your assertion. That's the condition of critical thinking these days though.
I tend to agree that the hasty conclusion of the war was, on balance, preferable. Many lives were taken by these bombs, but by most accounts, more were spared by ending the war quickly.
Too bad for the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as it was too bad for the millions of victims of Imperial Japans aggression.
What a nice example of a "red herring" fallacy. A logician would only have to point to lessons learned from Sesame Street to debunk this one; two wrongs don't make a right.
According to Masuji Ibuse'sBlack Rain, a recollection of Hiroshima, it was because there was such chaos on the one hand and pride on the other that the Emperor, who still had supreme authority, didn't fully believe the reports.
Remember, in July, 1945 the Bomb was only a rumor. The American Air Force dropped leaflets over Hiroshima saying that it was coming, and the Japanese thought it was just propaganda. Communication with the region was confined to reports through the mouths of refugees.
A single bomb that can destroy a city? It was the stuff of science fiction. The Emperor may have also thought that there was only one bomb, or clinged to the dream of victory, until the second bomb dropped. Then he had to know that it was over.
sigs, as if you care.
You bite them slowly... :)
Wow, if your grandmother is still alive, I would really love talking with such a person.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
That's really well written, thanks. I pretty much agree with your points entirely from my reading of the situation.
I think actualy the result we got is probably the best we could have gotten. By "we" I mean everyone. History has momentum and the things that lead to WWII started a long, long time before 1937.
--Pete
Uh, did you read what the grandparent actually wrote?
its decay changes water properties.
(emphasis mine) You're right -- it's not chemically reacting, as it's inert, and it's not causing what we think of as nuclear reactions, but radiation can still change water's properties.
Yes, but they *knew* it wasn't Kokura, they weren't *that* lost. They didn't pick a specific target close to a POW camp, however, that park was an accident.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It isn't a "bold faced lie"(sic). At worst I was merely wrong. I based it on what was written in "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns". That book didn't say that they didn't realise something had happened they just didn't know what, only much later did they realise it was a nuclear weapon. Though some Japanese scientists feared a nuclear attack well before Hiroshima but were not listened to.
As for the burning city. Well when a single raid killed 100,000 in Tokyo from incendiaries do they automatically think this wasn't the result of a similar kind of attack?
Bitter and proud of it.
Every single country? That's sad. Being the imperial power is so expensive it leads slowly but inexorably to finacial disaster. I'd rather be Sweden, or Norway, some advanced country but one that didn't have to field huge navies and armies and spend vast sums to project power around the world. All empires eventually exhaust themselves. It happened to the British, to the Romans, etc. etc. It will happen to us. There is nothing we can do about it of course. lfen
If you don't like the facts I use, instead of absuing your mod points (ie modding something overrated that hasn't been modded and is at 1), go refute the facts.
Coward.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Actually, the bomb casing itself produced a lot
of fallout which came down to the ground as "black
rain".
People entering Hiroshima and Nagasaki 2 days after the explosion were in little danger.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
That's a possibility for the motive yes - that does mean that the bombings were not required to end the war though, which takes us back to my original comment.
The most horrible outcome might have been a surrender on the terms the Japanese were discussing. The Japanese would have kept their military, their Imperial system, no war crime trials, no occupation of Japan. This way they would have written the history to be that Japan had won the war.
Also, no post war food aid, and ~20 million Japanese civilians would have starved to death after the war.
What you do is:
Put FIRST priority on keeping personal religion out of government, development of international equality, high priority on human rights, and acceptance of differing political and social systems when you VOTE!
If your choosen candidate puts national interests (economic or cultural) before international stability, co-operation, and development - then you are voting TO burn the child.
If your choosen candidates first priority is building liberal diversity, international economic development, and the international diplomatic structure, then you are voting AGAINST burning the child.
War is not an environment like propogandists portray. The seeds of Atrocities are bred in all "Us vs.Them" thinking. We set up Police and external Media to (usually)prevent it during peace time, but in war the police join the "Us vs.Them" and are supported by the Media - by definition, war changes our limits.
In (effective) democratic systems, paying taxes is a statement of faith that the system of govt can correct the wrongs of the current govt. - so long as you didn't vote for those wrongs. If the current Govt is changing the System of govt such that the wrongs can not be corrected - then you have the same options that non-democratic (or broken-democratic) states have - revolt. I might support someone's decision to stop paying taxes in this phase, but I would not suggest that it is a Safe decision... at this point you become "Them".
I had an Great Uncle who participated in costal defense drills as Boy Scouts on the East Coast. It didn't involve weapons training, but mostly camping on the beach looking for U-Boats. But believe me... If things had gone poorly in Europe and German landing craft had established a beach head in New Foundland, every man, woman, and child would be learning to use some sort of weapon.
I think Boy Scouts in UK had weapons training, but I can't confirm that.
Soviets and Germans both had 13 years olds in the Military. I think Russians had actual Females. The German leadership had an aversion to Women even working in factories.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
There are only two reasons the Japanese surrendered.
1. Because the Emperor said so.
2. They got to keep the Emperor.
Otherwise we could have destroyed every city and they would have never gave up, Atomic bomb or not.
Remember, the Emperor had to force the surrender since the top brass had planned to remove him if he tried (hence the recording of the surrender).
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The Japanese did not start the conflict with the US, even though they did initiate this particular armed part of the conflict. The Americans under commodore Matthew Perry had initiated a completely unprovoked attack on Japan less than 100 years earlier, and Americans and Europeans swarmed around the area colonizing one country after the other. The Americans had led a war in the nearby Philippines a few decades earlier, and the French and the English had been involved in the opium wars against China in the 19th century, not to mention the events in Indochina and Indonesia. In China, the Western nations had until recently had large interest spheres which were basically controlled by the West. The only purpose of the West leading wars thousands of miles from home was self interest, and it built on a lack of respect of the local people.
It is hardly surprising that the Japanese felt threatened by Westerners in general, and that they wanted to do something about it.
This doesn't mean that the Japanese did the right thing of course. The Pearl Harbor incident was neither a clever move nor morally justified. However, the Western nations didn't behave in a clever or moral way either, and hadn't done so for several hundred years from an Asiatic perspective.