Slashdot Mirror
China Strangles Tor Ahead of National Day
TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run-up to China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves governments launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."
It's actually quite interesting what Chinese goverment is capable of on technical terms. Most of the goverments are quite clueless when it comes to computer and internet stuff, but Chinese seem to be on the track always.
It gives me hope to see how people can get around this sort of oppression, I am hoping that it stays that way, that we will always have the option of communicating with each other, that no corporation or government will strangle.
I truly hope it stays that way.
An open Internet is power to the people.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks. Many of the EU states have similar capabilities. We look at China as an example of government censorship, but maybe we ought to look at our own homes as well.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
"TIME FOR GO TO BED!"
That Tor just cracks me up...
Bow-ties are cool.
If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors. They started the killing; then they reaped what they had sowed.
Do I feel sorry they Japanese had to die? Yes. Do I think there was any other choice? No. When someone points a gun at you, you don't hold up a target to help them aim better. You fire back.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre for evidence to invalidate your claim.
The dead of Nanking would like to courteously disagree with that assertion.
After reading the headline, I thought China was doing harm to my favorite book publisher. "How could they be a threat to China?" I wondered. "Sure some of their books are thought-provoking, but really!"
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
joust at that hydra
control freaks have at their psychological root a toxic amount of insecurity. the grumpy old men in beijing have to make sure society is "harmonious" even if that's nothing more than media shorthand for placid lies. the truth is often ugly, dissent is always ugly. but when you expose yourself to dissent and ugliness, you do nothing but strengthen your mind and your convictions and your bullshit detector. all china is doing with the massive amount of societal control is producing a generation of chinese minds that have nothing but cotton candy between the ears: unable to handle anything except the most stultifying of platitudes about the world and its nature, wilting at the slightest sign of trouble
china is supposed to be emerging world power? when chinese raised in the hermetically sealed climate controlled media environment of modern china interact with their compatriots from india, brazil, japan, usa, germany... what are these dunderheads going to be like? when they encounter the slightest bit of provocation or contrasting opinion to the almighty sense of "harmony" what are their social skills for that resistance? censor? ignore? run away?
a "harmonious society" seems nothing more to me than a way to ensure chinese minds in the generations to come are weak brittle minds incapable of understanding or processing criticism of any kind, because it's not "harmonious". "harmony": what a fucking bullshit codeword for "i'm insecure at the top, don't think anything that might make me feel threatened". this isn't about cultural differences, this is is about a colossal social weakness of modern china completely of chinese making, a society-wide achilles heel: "we can't handle criticism, cover your ears"
enjoy your cottonheaded future china, so sorry for my dissent. you can just ignore, dismiss, and censor me. that's obviously the best way to handle these words. pffffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Even if it's true that the Japanese only fought against other countries' militaries and avoided civilian deaths (it's not), it's irrelevant. When you go to war, you go to war completely. Which means you kill every man, woman, and child in your enemy's country.
Don't want to do that? Don't go to war.
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?
That's what total war is. Every resource of the nation-state is poured into the war effort. Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
That's not the "logical conclusion". That's a straw man that you set up.
It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general
Why is that relevant?
And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians
You mean after we gave them months of warnings that they should evacuate their cities?
at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.
No further military threat? Ask the 12,500 dead Allied soldiers on Okinawa if the Japanese still posed a military threat. Ask the hundreds of thousands that were expected to die during Operation Downfall if they still posed a military threat. Then consider the alternative to invasion (continuing the economic blockade) and ask yourself how many millions of Japanese civilians would have starved to death.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
>>>So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?
If my family is building guns/bullets that I am using to kill-off your wife, your daughter, your parents, and so on...... then yes I think you have every right to stop them. If you can't find me, then you kill my suppliers so I don't have anything to fire.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
to honestly sit here and put forth the idea that the level of censorship in the west is anything remotely near what china does, you've arrived at intellectual fail. the SCALE of the effort matters. if the west, for example, tries to find kiddie porn, it is entirely in your right to debate that effort and question its relevancy, effectiveness, and the direction of such laws
now, if you were to actually engage in such criticism in china, a nice young man or woman in one of the many banks of party loyalists who actually monitor signs of dissent on the web would make note of you, track you, and actually admonish you or outright punish you. simply for stating your political opinion
do you really think that's anywhere remotely the same thing as trying to control kiddie porn? again, i'm not saying you don't have a right to criticize to western internet controls, but you have no right, in the least, to compare it to the colossal amount of censorship and control in china. the SCALE of the effort over there is off the charts
as proof, if you were in china, you would never have written what you just wrote in terms of criticising the chinese government. you'd be too scared to. but here on western servers in a western political environment, you have no problem criticizing western politics. as you have every right to. but don't be an ludicrous about your criticism by trying to mention it in the same breath as the lockdown environment in china
for example: i can call obama a moron if i want to. i can rant until blue in the face about how he is the devil incarnate. no big deal in the west. most wouldn't even care. now if i attempted to do the same about wen jiabao in china, they would actually track me, perhaps even show up at my doorstep, perhaps even send me to some prison camp for "political reeducation". do you doubt this is a reality? then why do you think chinese internet controls is a parallel to anything in the west? be intellectually honest. consider the idea of "scale"
now, if i actually sat here and threatened obama's life, someone in the west might try to track me. a case could be made that that's a valid reason for internet monitoring. a case could also be made that that's not valid. but at least in the west, i can actually question my government and its policies, argue about it in an open environment, and not worry about goons showing up at my door. well, besides the paranoid schizophrenic amongst us
<knock, knock/>
sorry, be right back, someone's at the door for some reason
pfffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So... it's cool to hold Hiroshima (a 20th century massacre of civilians) against the US, but mention Nanking (a 20th century massacre against civilians) and suddenly we're in "no that was a loooooong time ago!!1!" territory, solely because it's Japan?
Um, 8 years is not "a lot" later.
Furthermore, you should probably do a little research on:
a) Japans war with China
b) Japans request that we stop providing aid to China
c) why the U.S. placed an embargo on Japan
d) how that ties in to the bombing or Pearl Harbor.
Add a bit of general WWII history and then we can have an intelligent conversation about this topic
BTW:
The firebombs that Britain used in Germany were FAR more deadly than the 2 nukes the USA dropped. The nukes killed a few thousand, while the firebombs killed hundreds of thousands. Example: It is said the fires in Dresden raged so fiercely that the oxygen was sucked out of the air, and people suffocated to death. They just fell dead whereever they were - in bed, hiding in basements, running down the street.
To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.
Almost 70 million people died during WW2. Only 0.2% of them died by nuclear fission bomb.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
That's ridiculous; go read the Geneva Convention.
I was posting in a Hong Kong (note: not the mainland) Linux user group forum the other day and advising someone to use dyndns.org. The string "dyndns.org" got filtered into ">>>
I didn't know dyndns is a threat in HK.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
The Tor developers knew that it would be very easy for tyrannical regimes to download the directory list and block all the IPs in it, so they prepared for this by implementing bridge support about a year ago. The bridge model makes it very hard to block Tor. Technologyreview briefly mentions this. What really happened, and you can all go read more about this in the Tor blog at blog.torproject.org, is that what has happened the last few days is that the number of people using Tor-servers directly dropped to near zero while the number of people using bridges exploded. People simply switched to using bridges when they found that the Tor-network had been blocked.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Those nukes we're intentionally made to kill civilians and destroy normal cities - not to attack against military targets.
Your "few thousands" killed is a 'little' bit off too;
The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945,[4] with roughly half of those deaths occurring on the days of the bombings. Amongst these, 15–20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness.[5] Since then, more have died from leukemia (231 observed) and solid cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs.[6] In both cities, most of the dead were civilians.[7][8][9]
Yup. Cowards kill civilians. Stupid, savage cowards.
They also ran Unit 731, conducted horrible experiments and vivisections on civilians and prisoners of war, butchered their own schoolchildren out of fears the invading enemy would be as brutal as they are, cannibalized Australians and live in a culture of institutionalized racism to this very day.
Man, historical revisionism is AWESOME! *beats off to 2chan instead of going outside*
Well, it is clear that the CCP is implementing a more strict online blocking and censoring policy, OCT.1 is just one example of those that is exposed to the outside world. 2009 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square 4JUN1989, CCP instructed all website in China, to disable comment functions through out the country, majority of the websites complied and rest of the simply shut down the their website claim as 'maintenance' as a protest, it was the official 'Chinese website maintenance day'. I would expect such policy to carried out repeatedly in the future. I am lucky enough to personally experience the internet, CCP style from Jun to Sep this year! Let me give you an example what it is like: 1st thing I get online I openned www.google.com and dare you search for anything, I really mean it, anything, you will be reset to death after click into page 2, 3 of the results if you are lucky not to be blocked immdieatly after click 'Google search' or 'I'm feeling not so lucky in China' button. Google image search is worse, you are assured by the CCP to not see anything that is in anyway related to harm a harmonious society. Youtube is certainly not working for like a year now, as long with victims such as blogger, worldpress,livejournal, facebook,twitter, basically anything that can help people find useful, uncensored information, or anything that can help 'words' getting around. Picasa was among the laest victim of the GFW, I have about 7G of photo stored on it, which I cannot show or share with 1/4 of the world population. I rarely use flickr, but words are it was ultra-unusually unblocked by the GFW afetr I fled China before OTC.1, my assumption is the journalist all over the world flocked the OCT.1 ceremony may get very very angry when they find they cannot upload to flickr. And when you just about to think can media freedom in China to be any worse? The answer is YES. Media censorship extents to movies, tvs, newspapers, almost anything you can think of! The Summer Olympic Games was as much as freedom the CCP can give to foreigners, which CCP immediately took back after the event, followed by the unrest in Tibet and Urumqi, and Taiwan. It is very likely the conflict between those parts I mentioned to get worse in the near future, and the GFW will further enforced by the CCP as a way to maintain their one-party-ruling.
"stop them" != "hunt down and disintegrate"
According to LOAC, you could target their bullet-building factory (home?) and if they are inside, then that's tough luck. But you can't directly target them under current international law.
If they tried building another factory/house, you (you are a country, right??) could occupy their territory, imposing martial law, and send to jail any non-combatants that aided the enemy. But you can't just shoot then w/o trial for making ammo them unless they become unlawful combatants (pick up a gun and shoot at you).
Unfortunately, the Japanese school system doesn't bother teaching children about all the horrible things the Japanese military did in the past. A lot of them simply don't know things like the Rape of Nanjing, the medical experiments on POWs, and so on even happened.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
That's ridiculous; go read the Geneva Convention.
You are ridiculous.
http://www.icrc.org/IHL.NSF/WebSign?ReadForm&id=375&ps=P
If you think that there are NO countries, signatories or not, that would violate the shit out of the Geneva Convention should it suit their purposes; you are more than ridiculous; you are criminally naive.
It's a freaking piece of paper, and more useless than most.
The conventions never applied to signatories who were fighting adversaries that refused to follow them. Given the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the fact that their soldiers would often use white flags as cover to get close enough to kill our troops, I'd say that they forfeited whatever protections the civilized world had previously agreed to.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
not like we did not warn them
and the bomb was no worse then Japans actions
Ah, the "our actions were no worse than their actions" argument. So what does that make us, and how does it justify it? I would say that it wasn't any better either. I don't see how one country's atrocity justifies another country's atrocity. Moral relativism, at its finest.
We all agree that the Japanese did probably some of the most horrific shit any country could during WWII, but your argument implies that it was perfectly fine to nuke their civilians as well, most of whom had nothing to do with the atrocities in Nanking.
By the way, if you read the wikipedia article you linked to, it says that the Japanese asked the Chinese to surrender before the massacre, which they refused to do. That sounds similar to your "not like we did not warn them" argument.
And it's wrong. It was wrong for the soldiers in Nanking to commit rape and murder on civilians (or anyone, for that matter), even though they warned them in advance. The prior warning shouldn't give a green light to do whatever you want to do.
Best "String" Ever!
100% pure bullshit.
For one thing - the purple hearts awarded throughout WW2 were ordered before each campaign or major action. The bean counters got really, really accurate when estimating how many to order. They seldom missed by more than a couple percent. Look it up, google is your friend.
The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
Then, the bombs fell. Japan surrendered. Those 1/4 million purple hearts are STILL being used today. Casualties from every single conflict that we've been involved in are wearing medals that were intended for the invasion of Japan.
And, that 1/4 million is ONLY American casualties. Estimates for Japanese casualties? Look 'em up. You'll be amazed. Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise.
The rest of your post is just as ridiculous. Japan would never have been "contained" in 1945. Fanatical supporters of the Emperor were still coming out of the hills in the 1970's. Contain? Yeah, right.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time. The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
It's easy to transpose a specific ideology onto history if one does not actually look at said history with its full complexity and inherent ambiguities.
The estimate of hundreds of thousands of lives lost was created after the end of the war to justify dropping the bombs. No, seriously, go look it up.
The vast majority of urban infrastructure was already destroyed, many estimates placed Japanese capitulation just weeks later if the bombs had not been dropped. The civilian population was training to fight off the invaders with bamboo poles. The civilian population was primarily women, children and the elderly at this point. How long do you think they would have lasted against Americans armed with flamethrowers and machine guns? You could base your estimate after the situation in Okinawa, but the defense in depth doctrine played out to the extreme on that island. There were no in-depth military fortifications to nearly the same extent on the home islands and the military to civilian ratio was not nearly at the same level. In addition, official Japanese government racism towards the islanders of Okinawa led them to disregard a great deal of the loss of life there. This would not have held true for Japan.
You would like to think that the Emperor looked at the atomic bombs and said "Gee, I must capitulate so these things don't destroy the World." Well, they may have played a role. The Soviet Union entering the war against Japan and immediately taking over most of Manchuria on August 8 just might have had something to do with it as well. Japan hardly expected this at the time, since they had a neutrality pact with the USSR and were working intermittently through the Soviets at trying to find some kind of ceasefire agreement with the United States. Consequently, the Soviets were poised to take over Japan in one fell swoop and were already on their way by the time Japan did get around to indicating their intent to surrender a week later.
So, while you could look at it as the Emperor surrendering to the United States due to the atomic bombs. You could also look at it as the Emperor surrendering to the United States, so he would not be forced to surrender to the USSR under much worse circumstances. Of course, the Emperor and his cabinet would claim the atomic bomb as a primary reason to surrender, because this would be the best way to save face, an excellent trump card to pull from the deck to justify 'enduring the unendurable.' Admitting to surrendering primarily because the Soviets were knocking at the door would have been far more shameful. The United States, on the other hand, needed this particular justification of the end-war scenario so they could justify their exclusive post-war occupation of Japan. They could hardly share Japan with the USSR when rumblings of the Cold War were already brewing and things were quickly going downhill in a divided Germany. The U.S. wanted Japan to itself and the atomic bomb justification was a perfect way to diplomiticize the situation.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Besides, we killed more Japanese civilians with conventional weapons in any one air raid than we did with Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It wasn't the number of deaths that got the Emperor to take notice, it was the fact that we did it with just one bomb each time.
Indeed.
The alternative was to invade the Japanese home islands, which, by conservative estimates, would've meant hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Japanese. Truman made the right call in dropping the bombs.
While that is the simplified history, it doesn't really represent the real choice that was being made.
I once read a transcript of one of Truman's cabinet meetings shortly before the end of the war, when they were deliberating on what to do. It was actually a pretty fascinating read.
While they were obviously considering every option, and the Department of War had drawn up detailed plans for a possible invasion (which is where the estimate above comes from) it's clear that Truman and his advisers were not seriously considering it at that point. They knew Japan was on the ropes and surrender was inevitable without needing to set foot on the island. With the Japanese navy serving as fish condos, there was nothing they could do to fight back or even feed themselves.
The main options under discussion were:
1 - Drop the bomb on multiple Japanese cities, multiple being important so as to suggest that we could continue doing so ad-infinitum rather than it being a one-off, forcing an unconditional surrender.
2 - Drop the bombs in the ocean as a demonstration. The biggest concern here was that they would not be suitably impressed or think it was somehow a trick, and then we wouldn't have enough to implement option 1.
3 - Wait for the Russians to get involved. Truman and his advisers were convinced that once Russia declared war, Japan would quickly surrender. The big problem here was that we wanted them to surrender just to us, not to the Russians. Cold War politics had already started to enter the picture, and we were "Allies" in name only.
4 - Accept conditional surrender. The Japanese had already made an offer to surrender, but due to communication problems the actual terms of this surrender were unknown. Certainly anything that allowed the Japanese to wage war again was completely unacceptable. It turns out all they really wanted was to retain a ceremonial role for the Emperor to save face, something which General MacArthur wisely gave them anyway. But at the time of the discussion, they didn't know. In any case, it was decided that no matter what the terms, nothing less than complete unconditional surrender would do for the enemy who had initiated the war.
Which is basically why the actual invasion was off the table. It was unnecessary in any event, and by the time it could have been implemented, Russia would have been involved and we would have been dealing with a joint surrender in any case.
By the way, my point isn't to second guess Truman. It was a difficult decision with no good options as you say, and as another poster mentioned he wasn't really aware of the impact the bomb would have in terms of radiation sickness etc. I don't think anyone really understood. Neither is my point to say with the benefit of hindsight that it was the wrong decision. I can't speak for the Japanese, but I have to imagine they were better off surrendering to us than ending up with a North Japan/South Japan situation.
My point is that the situation was much more complicated than the simple moral calculus implied by "drop the bombs and kill 200,000, or invade and kill millions". The real decision was not that clear-cut, and I think it dose a disservice both to the people who made it, and to ourselves in our efforts to learn from history, to pretend that it was.
The enemies of Democracy are
That's not the end of the story. After the Emperor recorded his formal surrender, to be broadcast over radio to the Japanese people, the Army tried to kill their own leader. If the Japanese are willing to kill their own God-emperor, what would they be willing to do to keep the Americans from landing? They would fight to the last man - it would make our current war in Afghanistan look easy.
Um, that wasn't "The Japanese", that was the top Generals and some of their loyalists who were concerned about their own careers and their own necks and most certainly did not consider their Emperor to be a God.
The rest of the country, including most of what remained of the Army, put down their arms and surrendered when the Emperor told them to.
Besides, as I explain in another reply, there were a number of other options Truman was considering and invasion was never a serious contender.
The enemies of Democracy are
The estimated number of purple hearts required for an invasion of the Japanese homeland was 1/4 million. The medals were ordered, and plans were progressing. The allies knew we were about to sacrifice those 1/4 million men.
No, they weren't. Truman was never seriously considering invasion when deliberating on how to end the war. Him, his cabinet and advisers, and all his generals were convinced that Japan would surrender without invasion. In particular, they were sure that once Russia declared war on Japan, they would soon surrender before any invasion could actually take place. Part of the decision to use the bomb was to fend off the eventuality that Japan would surrender to Russia and the U.S., which would have created a North/South Japan situation similar to Germany.
Plans are not the same as intent. The military creates plans for every contingency. Hell, today the DoD has plans for an invasion of Canada. Being asked to make plans and estimate casualties isn't the same as actually intending to go though with them. Truman never did. It was not "drop the bomb or invade". It was "drop the bomb, wait for Russia to get involved, or accept the conditional surrender the Japanese had already offered".
Which isn't to say he made the wrong choice -- it's easy to be horrified by the bomb in hindsight, but compared to what had already gone on, it wasn't much. It is to say that the choice was not as simple as just doing some basic moral arithmetic with potential body counts.
The actual situation and decision to be made was much more complex and difficult than the retconned false dichotomy. It does a disservice to the men who made that difficult choice, and to ourselves today trying to learn from history, to simplify it and make it easy.
The enemies of Democracy are
To me it seems odd to single-out two bombs, while ignoring the millions of other bombs that had been dropped from 1939 through 45. Those non-nukes also killed people, including innocent girls and boys that didn't deserve to die but were caught in the middle of the fight. War is hell, no matter if you use nukes or TNT.
It's not odd to single them out. After all, no weapon anything like them had ever been unleashed. Even previous weapons that had changed the face of warfare -- the longbow, cannons, machine guns, iron-clad ships, armored infantry Blitzkrieg, and so on -- had required substantial time, effort, and masses of forces to be effective. The firebombings killed more people, but they consisted of extensive and sustained bombing campaigns, often over the course of days or weeks, starting with flights of bombers dropping conventional explosives, followed by flights of bombers dropping incendiary explosives. Then more flights.
This was two cities destroyed by two planes dropping one bomb each. Unprecedented.
Also, among all the nasty ways to die in war, radiation poisoning was a new and quite nasty way to die. One that was underestimated by Truman et. al.
So it's not surprising why the atom bombs get singled out. Why those civilian deaths -- in what were by the standards of WWII standards military targets, cities with factories in them -- receive so much scrutiny, I don't know for sure, but yes it's odd.
Almost 70 million people died during WW2. Only 0.2% of them died by nuclear fission bomb.
Pretty impressive for two bombs!
But yeah, precious few spend the same effort bemoaning the morality of fire bombing, or carpet bombing for that matter, or any of the other massive slaughters that took place in WWII. It was a nasty, nasty war. Ending it with two decisive explosions is not the worst thing that could happen (though as I mention elsewhere, land invasion of Japan though the worst was about the least likely way for it to end).
The enemies of Democracy are
The problem is they are NOT "helpless innocent" as I will point out from a tale my great uncle told me about WW2. He was one of those crossing into Germany when Goebbels had pumped everyone up with that "fight to the last" BS. He said he was talking with the guy next to him in the jeep when the whole back of the guy's head came off, splattering him with brains. He saw where the flash had come from and opened up with his BAR. When they got to where the sniper was they found it was an 8 month pregnant woman, still clutching the rifle in her hands.
I asked him "did it bother you to have killed a pregnant woman? and he said "Hell no. I had already lost more friends over there than I could count. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that the war was lost for Germany and those crazy bastards just kept fighting. And I had decided I was gonna go home on my feet and NOT in a body bag."
And let us not forget the Japanese had this little thing called Kamikaze and I'm sure would have had NO problems with getting men, women, AND kids to be used as human cannon fodder in an attack on the mainland. Just look at the amount of casualties we suffered on Okinawa and multiply that several times over for an invasion of the mainland. So while I am sorry civilians died from the bombs, the death count would have probably been even worse with a full scale invasion, and of course by that point it was pretty clear even to the most optimistic leaders in Japan that they had lost. They could have surrendered but THEY chose to continue the fight.
So I'm sorry, but the American military needed to worry about keeping American soldiers alive, not how many casualties the enemy that refused to surrender would take.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.