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60 Years Since Hiroshima
cryptoz writes "Today is the 6th of August, 2005, exactly 60 years after the first nuclear device was used in a war. Japan remembers what happened, as do those around the world. Elswhere, we remember where the bomb hit, as well as how it worked." From the article about Japan's observation of the anniversary: "The anniversary comes as regional powers meet in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind rising calls in Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the United States. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was among those attending the ceremony in Hiroshima, 690 km (430 miles) southwest of Tokyo." We've previously reported on the anniversary of the first nuclear explosion.
I think its extremely important that we remember these events, to ensure that the situations and attitudes that led to them can be remembered and the contribution of people who died on both sides to bringing the world to the way it is today. We can't change the past, but we can try to avoid the same situations and circumstances. A generation now are being raised where full scale war between first world countries is a thing of the past, and its important that they can come to respect the happenings of the past.
Business Voyeur
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_pr eview.asp?idArticle=5894&R=C62A29C91
This is a wonderful article from the Weekly Standard concerning Truman's choice.
The most salient fact? About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries. Any alternative to the bombs that would have caused a one month delay would have wound up with more dead than the bombs themselves.
Remember this before you rattle off about some alternative scheme to end the war.
1) more people died previously in (single) conventional bomb strikes (firebombings);
2) Japan had, at that point, lost control of air and sea (over and around) their nation;
3) Japan was starving it's people and urging them to prepare for "millions of honorable deaths";
4) The Emperor wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military leadership refused to allow it;
5) Japan was warned repeatedly by the USA that refusing to surrender would exact a terrible toll;
6) Japan was seriously dragging their heels, taking weeks to decide, preparing for a defensive land war.
Finally, the US ended the stalemate, without a gruesome land war.
No one in the USA wanted to fight an "Iwo Jima" style battle, one in which hundreds of lives were lost just gaining or losing a couple of yards.
Fought on their home islands, the Japanese would have fought terribly, to the last man woman or child, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost on each side to starvation or this hellish land war.
The bomb, in many ways, was a gift for both sides.
Last I checked, most of the Americans being pillored as evil for dropping the bomb weren't even alive at the time.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I already know that there's going to be people arguing back and forth that a) Hiroshima was a tragedy that never should have happened, or b) Hiroshima was necessary because it ended the war/punished the Japanese/etc.
Well, you know what? I don't care about either of those perspectives. Maybe it was necessary, maybe it wasn't, it's history now, and let's treat it as such. But there's one thing about the bomb that nobody in the US seems to realize:
Any country, *any* country, that uses nuclear weapons against another country had better let it weigh on their soul for as long as that country exists. The discussion should be constant, and permanent, and without end. The empathy of the pain that the Japanese people went through should be part and parcel of every conversation about World War II. People should go to sleep every night knowing exactly how serious of a decision that was.
And that's the problem: For every other country whose government's have committed mass murder, whether justifiable or not, there is a sense of history, of ownership of the bad as well as the good, there is a conceivability that they are as much responsible for the past as they are for the present and future.
In the US, we don't have that sense. It's all abstract and textbook, it's all justifications and wartime terminoligy. It's all disconnected and abstracted to the point of science fiction.
So argue all you want about whether it was right, or wrong, or good, or bad, or justifiable, or unjustifiable. To me, I can understand both sides of that debate.
What I can't understand is how most Americans seem to care much about what it means that we sent two Japenese cities into a nuclear hell. Using the bomb was a horrible act, whether or not it was justifiable, and the real tragedy is that the Japanese people were forced to understand that, while we read the headlines, added some notes to the next year's schoolbooks, and then continued on with our lives.
The problem was this was during a time of carpet bombing. There were no smart bombs. Planes would fly over and just drop bombs over everybody. Also, Japan would NOT give up.. it took -TWO- atomic bombs to get them to give up. Without them the war probably would have went on for a LOT longer. This probably would have created more deaths/casualties on both sides in the long run.
Free Mac Mini
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Not sure how to file this aspect, though it's surely not amusing, but we might well have killed more Japanese and learned more about nuclear war by "humanely" hitting Mount Fuji first. A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
By the way, I've lived in Japan for many years. On a clear day, I can see Mount Fuji from my train station.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Using them the first time is the hardest; it's easier to do it again.
I'd say you've got that backwards.
The first time, with the two explosions in Japan, was the easiest. It was only afterwards that using them became an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the world.
This is a wildly different situation for many reasons, not the least of which is that "arabs" do not compose a nation which declare war as a whole.
Your analogy might be apt if all of asia were has been engaged in guerilla war with the US, but in fact, the Japanese were busy slaughtering their neighboring asian nations at the same time they were fighting us.
Also, this ignores the factors of Israel and its dependence upon US assistance to defend itself, as well as the fact that Saddam invited the second most recent major war between the US and iraq by invading, his rich but relatively defenseless neighbor.