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Censored Nagasaki Bomb Story Found
EccentricAnomaly writes "In 1945 journalist George Weller snuck past the American occupying forces and became the first American Journalist to see the devastation left by the atomic bomb that fell on Nagasaki. His story infuriated MacArthur, who had it quashed. The Japanese paper, Mainichi, has now published Weller's account. CNN has a story discussing how it was found." From the Mainichi article: "As one whittles away at embroidery and checks the stories, the impression grows that the atomic bomb is a tremendous, but not a peculiar weapon. The Japanese have heard the legend from American radio that the ground preserves deadly irradiation. But hours of walking amid the ruins where the odor of decaying flesh is still strong produces in this writer nausea, but no sign or burns or debilitation."
Certainly he didn't walk away from that place perfectly healthy.
A lot of people go "OMG! teh nukes!" like Fallout is what would happen after a nuclear war :)
Nuclear myths
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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.
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
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):
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.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
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.
Which makes sense as the bomb was a small one (for a nuke) with a yield of approx 15 kiloton and was detonated at an altitude of 500 meters. This would have prevented the fireball from actually touching the ground and contaminate the ground. Thus only neutron activation would have created any lasting radioactivity on the ground below the bomb, and that was also reduced due to the distance.
The only permanent radioactivity would be trapped in the fireball and would have been deposited downwind by the 'black rain' (which would be dangerous).
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
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.
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.
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 believe the actual quote is Speak softly and carry a big stick.
. html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tr26
This Like That - fun with words!
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.
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.
Realistically speaking, what other options did the US have in the Pacific theater in WW2?
Japan had attacked us first. Japan indeed had brought us into the war. The fighting in the Pacific had been extremely bloody, with countless islands and other places won with much bloodshed and cost--and we weren't even to the Japanese mainland yet.
Kamikaze--divine wind--took a pretty rough toll. On the Japanese too for sure, but us as well. It's rather indicative of the extreme lengths to which some Japanese soldiers and commanders were willing to go to win.
Would you have rather we performed a manned ground invasion of the Japanese islands and subdued the entire place by force? The Japanese leaders PROVED by ignoring the nuclear bomb not only before it was detonated but more to the point, AFTER it was detonated, that they would not easily surrender.
Estimates I've read (and common sense as well) have point casualties and destruction on both sides from a ground invasion much higher than the nuclear bombings.
No side can be completely innocent in war. Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Tokyo for that matter were horrible. So too was the rape of Nanking, and the Japanese push throughout the Asia Pacific.
What choice did we have? This was not a war of our choice, or one that would end without a decisive victory or defeat. What better outcome could there have been?
General Patton once said something like 'no dumb bastard ever won a war by dying for his country--the trick is to make the other dumb bastard die for his.' Somewhat egalitarian if you really think about it.
Welcome to war-- it is never pretty.
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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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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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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
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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 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)
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!?"
First British Bombing raid on Berlin: 23 Aug 1940
First German Bombing raid on London: 7 September 1940
yes, it is urban legend. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are far apart and the man would not be working gin one town and living n another.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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!?"
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.
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.
You wouldn't have liked him when he was angry though.
As long as you're paying taxes, you're paying the soldier to burn that child.
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.
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.
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.
And just to correct this stupid goddamn "own civilians" thing, it doesn't matter, okay? They weren't "his" civilians any more than the Native Americans were "our" civilians or the Palestinians are Israels civilians. He gassed a bunch of people, and thats bad, and you don't need to try to make it "more bad".
By the way, according to your own logic here, there's no reason we should be upset about 9/11, OR the gassing of the Kurds - they aren't any more (or less) deserving of sympathy than civilian deaths in Nagasaki, or Dresden, or London.
A form of Pentagon-supported censorship... http://www.democracynow.org/static/hiroshima.shtml
summary:
After the bomb drop on Hiroshima, press are confined to a barge off the coast of Japan. Wilfred Burchett, an independent journalist, decides to go and see things first hand and writes about it ("I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.").
William L. Laurence of the New York Times, and on the Pentagon payroll, writes a series of stories discrediting Burchett and gets the Pulitzer Price.
Democracy Now is trying to get the Pulitzer stripped from the NYT.
from http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn200 10806.html
Soon after the bombing, as reporters converged on a ship off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese, one independent reporter named Wilfred Burchett took a train for 30 hours to Hiroshima. He couldn't believe what he saw: people with their skin melting off them, images of people engraved on the sides of buildings. He sat down with his Hermes typewriter in the rubble, and tapped out the words, "I write this as a warning to the world." He talked about something he called, 'bomb sickness', that he had never seen before. Another reporter did a ten-part series on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was William Leonard Laurence of the New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the Pentagon. One of his headlines was, "No Bomb Sickness Found." He won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Wilfred Burchett died of cancer decades later, but always traced it to Hiroshima.
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.
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?
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.
There were hardly any civilians in Japan during World War Two.
Seriously. Read up on the war. The Japanese imperial government forced elementary-school children to drill with bamboo spears and take on military rank as preparations to 'defend the homefront'. Men unfit for military duty, as well as most women, were forced to work in factories making war materiel. The entire civilian population had been forcibly mobilized by the government into joining a military war effort. The entire population of Japan over age twelve were essentially military draftees. This is called "total war". Today, total war is considered by political thinkers to be a crime against one's own populace, because it makes the entire population a legitimate military target.
I agree that following orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime. I agree that giving orders specifically intended to result in civilian deaths is a war crime.
I just don't see there were very many civilians in Japan.
The moral calculus that makes civilian deaths a "necessary evil" is the scariest part, to me at least, of warfare in this day and age. Certainly from the beginning of human history we have dealt with the evils of humanity killing each other. I am not so naïve to believe that civilians were not killed in wars. I am sure that the raping and pillaging that accompanied victory included immeasurable harm to civilians.
The interesting (or scary) part to me is that in a day and era where war is (at least to some degree) governed by the Geneva conventions we still don't bat an eye at civilian deaths. Those who die (like those killed in the firebombing of Dresden, or when Sherman burned Atlanta, or as a result of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) are simply swept up into the category of "necessary evil." There deaths, we tell ourselves, are necessary so that our goals in warfare are to be achieved.
So my question is, when we start applying this kind of moral calculus to our decisions what is a human life worth? What are the lives of our children, our wives or husbands, our mothers and fathers or anyone else worth? Do we care if those who have no part in the combat die? Would "necessary evil" be a satisfying explanation to you if persons you love had to die?
Perhaps I am to soft, but "necessary evil" is not an explanation that I would accept, nor is it an explanation that I would be prepared to think some one else who may or may not be my "enemy" should accept.
If you are never moderated, do you really exist?
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.
The reprint is still spoofing the truth ... as shown on part 4 of the article. There it says, quoting roughly, that Disease-X was being treated on an experimental basis with ... [illegible] drug.
The drug was opium. It helps the immune system, mainly kidneys and liver, organize formation, collection and elimination of salts which contain radiation minerals, and thus accelerates curing. Withing a few years after the bombings, the contaminated populations had completely recovered, including hair, reproductive and immune system capacity, and etc.
The reason this is still "top secret" is that the planet's annual production capacity in opium is limited (by geographic and political availability of alkaline soil, accessible mountainous exposures with cheap labor, supervised by loyal warlords, dark nights, for complete formation of plant alkaloids, etc.) to approximately one-tenth of the size of the "national medical reserve" the U.S. alone would require to stabilize its own "designated survivor" population, in the event of a nuclear wars between the U.S. and Russia, China, France, etc. If amongst the powers on this planet, the U.S. maintained exclusive control of the entire production of the planet's maximum production capacity in opium-based pain killers, it would take the U.S. alone ten years to acquire its required "two-balled" military "entirety" for a nuclear war.
Oddly, or contrary to our Hollywood-created popular opinion, survival ("continuity of government") in a nuclear war is not determined by the bombing phase, which is relatively shortlived, using missiles which the media generally portrays as "sexy" and/or "terrifying. Survival in a war by mass contamination, and diplomacy by threat of mass contamination (read: state-sponsored terrorism), is based on not on the bombing phase, but on the longer and economically more arduous restoration phase. This more crucial phase starts with medication-stabilization programs of the government/military/fema, to treat the "designated survivors." The only know treatment for 500rem+ radiation sickness, on a mass contamination basis, is by production control and medical delivery of opium-based painkillers and treatment alkaloids.
That was the purpose of the experiments on Tuskeegee prisonors. (The controlled contamination and experimental treatment of black prisoners was for national-security dosage determinations, required for determination of (a) the size of the designation population which could be expected to survive (with any degree of continuing political stability), and then the ten-year annual production capacity of the planet, for treatment of the U.S.'s designation survivor population alone.
Is it by accident that this article just happens to blotch out and make that word illegible, while be bomb and control the most critical of the opium production areas of the planet, Afghanistan?
This, 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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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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+
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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 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.
"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).
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
"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.
... to the pilot who is "just following orders" ...
That is a myth. Only sociopaths think that way and the military is pretty good at weeding those out. More likely is that at the time of weapon release the pilot honestly believed that there was a valuable military target below. Only later do they find out the intel was completely wrong. Do you think President Clinton knowingly had an aspirin factory or the Chinese embassy bombed?
"Just following orders" was a last ditch defense strategy used by war criminals at trial. There were SS soldiers who after arriving at the concentration camps refused to be a part of the murder of women and children. They were transfered to front line combat units and were not court martialed. To court martial them would have required publication of the order that were disobeyed. No one wanted that on paper.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
Complete nonsense. Have you spoken to many combat vets? Especially those from World War II where everyone believed their caused was just and moral. The World War II vets that I knew felt guilty about killing the armed men who were shooting at them. The only ones they wanted to kill were the "sons-of-bitches who started the damn war". They guys they had to shoot in order to protect themselves and their friends were just "unlucky bastards" like themselves.
Hell, a World War II vet I knew felt guilty just feeding anti-aircraft shells into a hopper and this was while his ship was under attack.
More recently I had a college buddy who served in the first Gulf War and was involved in target selection. They prayed hard that their intel was correct and that their interpretation of photos and other data was correct. They felt responsible for whatever happened, the pilot pulled the trigger but they aimed the gun.
This is interesting in that I completely agree with what you mean, but think the way you say it is sub-optimal. People are entirely too good at rationalizing away nearly anything if given permission to call it "good". They're so good at it that very quickly they feel no *need* to try to justify it. That being the case, I think society is better served if we think of war as inherently "evil", and therefore something that must be fully justified at every turn.
IMO, American society is entirely too accepting of war now. We hear no end of people proclaiming that the war in Iraq is good because it is "defending our freedom". That notion is wrong on many levels, starting with the erroneous idea that it's possible for any military force to defend freedom and continuing on through questions about whether or not Iraq has anything to do with American freedoms at all. A healthy dose of the "war is unconditionally evil" meme would do us all a lot of good because it would force us to consider whether or not this particular evil is justified.
In a nutshell, viewing war as evil-but-sometimes-justified forces the common man to justify it to himself, because otherwise he's evil. Viewing war as good-when-justified makes it easy for him, after a few years of justified war, to assume that war waged by his country is good, period. Frankly, I think that the American populace was taught during WWI and WWII and throughout the long Cold War that this was the case, and that perception continues to fuel our overly aggressive posture today.
While your arguments are logically sound, they fail to take into account the ways in which most people think.
In your case, they will instead argue whether the ends justify "evil" means, rather than debating the facts of whether one choice really will lead to a better outcome than the other.
Ahh, but they will debate. And I think it's clear that if people are given a pass to see war as "good", they'll take it, because it's so much easier and more pleasant -- particularly if it doesn't really impact them personally.
In actual fact, this conversation is meaningless. We're debating which definition would be best if adopted universally, but no such adoption is going to happen.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
it's just that I think that the US has way too high of standards when it comes to "acceptable" levels.
Granite and marble are both naturally radioactive, as are bricks used for building materials. The US capitol building has a natural background radation of 30 microrems per hour. which is higher than EPA limits for "safe" LINK
Strom Thurman and Congress brain damage jokes may now start.
"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...
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
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.
I think it says something that of all the professional soldiers I know, none of them share your view. None. Zero. Their attitude is simple: violence is wrong. It is never morally right to engage in war. The only question is whether not engaging in war is an even worse moral choice.
"War is hell," as Sherman put it. A USMC gunnery sergeant described his job as "legally sanctioned murder". Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC (Ret.), one of the finest living riflemen today and founder of some terrific shooting schools, has said he'd far rather be a cop than a soldier: when a cop shoots someone, it's usually somebody who's made some really bad choices and is endangering lives, but when a soldier shoots someone, it's usually for no other reason than the other guy is wearing the wrong color of uniform. Cooper's said in the past that he thinks most of the people he killed in war, he would've really liked if he'd ever had the chance to sit down and have a beer with them.
Ask General Hal Moore, USAR (Ret.), or Sgt. Major Basil Plumley, USAR (Ret.), if they think what they did in the Ia Drang was "right". They'll be quite adamant: it was not right, it was a horror, a nightmare, and something no human being should ever inflict on another. What would've been worse is doing nothing.
I am not a pacifist. I've actually had to pull a twelve-gauge on someone before, and give a mugger a choice: he could keep on beating an unconscious victim with a tire iron, or he could go away. (He elected to go away, for which I am immensely grateful. I did not need that stain on my soul.) His victim survived, albeit with a lengthy stay in the intensive care unit.
After it was all over I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. I am glad I spent the next half-hour puking my guts out. That tells me that I'm still human. That tells me that I recognize other people are human beings and deserve to exist. That tells me that I'm not a bully. That tells me that I'm not evil.
People like you scare the living shit out of me, because the instant someone like you gets a weapon, you start to rationalize its use. I'm not worried about lunatics with tire irons who are beating the living shit out of unconscious people; in all my years I've only met one of those, so they're pretty uncommon.
But I know tons of people like you. People who talk about how the instant someone breaks into their home, they'd better have an ambulance handy. People who have their explanations and justifications prerationalized. People like you scare the living shit out of me.
I'm a firearms owner. Quite proud to be one. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment. But I'm just as big a fan of moral responsibility, which, I hate to say, is becoming harder and harder to find nowadays.
Yes.
I know what I wrote. And I am a chemist by the way.
Water is a very complex substance. You have both van-der-vaals (weak) and polar (strong) interactions between the water molecules and dissolved substances which tend to be much more organised and complex then most average lamerz think. These can be altered by many factors including magnetic field and ionising radiation. After being altered they stay altered for days and sometimes weeks.
A.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I understood your post just fine. Believing what you wrote is something else. Reading a post from some indoctrinated-since-birth worker drone does not convince me that Japan was a country of fanatics. It does not convince me that all, or most, of the people killed by nukes in Japan deserved their fate. It does not bring me into accord with the Jenghiz Khan school of warfare that you seem to espouse.
If you think Japan was unprovoked, please read the McCollum memo.
If you think that it was absolutely necessary to nuke Japan in order for the US to win World War II, read this. Apparently, General MacArthur did not consider the bamboo-spear-wielding Japanese kids as grave a threat as you would have.
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.