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Historians Propose National Park To Preserve Manhattan Project Sites
Hugh Pickens writes writes "William J. Broad writes that a plan now before Congress would create a national park to protect the aging remnants of the atomic bomb project from World War II, including hundreds of buildings and artifacts scattered across New Mexico, Washington and Tennessee — among them the rustic Los Alamos home of Dr. Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, and a large Quonset hut, also in New Mexico, where scientists assembled components for the plutonium bomb dropped on Japan. 'It's a way to help educate the next generation,' says Cynthia C. Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, a private group in Washington that helped develop the preservation plan. 'This is a major chapter of American and world history. We should preserve what's left.' Critics have faulted the plan as celebrating a weapon of mass destruction, and have argued that the government should avoid that kind of advocacy. 'At a time when we should be organizing the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species,' says Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich. Historians and federal agencies reply that preservation does not imply moral endorsement, and that the remains of so monumental a project should be saved as a way to encourage comprehension and public discussion. A park would be a commemoration, not a celebration, says Heather McClenahan, director of the Los Alamos Historical Society pointing out there are national parks commemorating slavery, Civil War battles and American Indian massacres. 'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" '"
It's Christmas at ground zero
There's music in the air
The sleigh bells are ringing and the carolers are singing
While the air raid sirens blare
It's Christmas at ground zero
The button has been pressed
The radio just let us know
That this is not a test
Everywhere the atom bombs are dropping
It's the end of all humanity
No more time for last-minute shopping
It's time to face your final destiny
It's Christmas at ground zero
There's panic in the crowd
We can dodge debris while we trim the tree
Underneath the mushroom cloud
Ronald Reagan:
Well, the big day is only a few hours away now.
I'm sure you're all looking forward to it
as much as we are.
You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop
Or Jack Frost on your windowsill
But if someone's climbing down your chimney
You better load your gun and shoot to kill
It's Christmas at ground zero
And if the radiation level's okay
I'll go out with you and see all the new
Mutations on New Year's Day
It's Christmas at ground zero
Just seconds left to go
I'll duck and cover with my Yuletide lover
Underneath the mistletoe
It's Christmas at ground zero
Now the missiles are on their way
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday!
--Wierd Al Yankovic
Christmas At Ground Zero
are condemned to repeat it. This is one piece of history that no one wishes to see repeated.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
But it all depends on the execution. As with any museum/park/etc. how you structure it sets the tone.
Great example would be German museums dealing with the events surrounding their involvement in the World Wars and the Holocaust. You go into any of those, and while they talk a lot about the Nazi Party, National Socialism, Hitler and the rest, you would be hard pressed to say that anyone would think any of it is an endorsement. Everything I saw really had a tone of: "My God, we screwed the pooch BIGTIME. Let's put this all out here, so maybe people won't let it happen again"
Granted, the atomic bomb isn't quite as clear of a moral area, since while it did kill many, many people, it also ended the war much earlier than was likely without it, and therefore all the casualties that would have entailed didn't occur. Instead of glorifying a WMD, it can help foster discussion about them, and past them.
Why don't we just bulldoze concentration camps too? You know, just so we don't appear to be supporting the Holocaust.
then build it in hiroshima stupid people
been done
arc de triomphe, Trafalgar square, brandenburg gate, etc?
Whatever you may think of the two bombings in particular lots of countries have killed a lot more people in their wars, and built varying types of monuments. Should the war museums in britain not have lancaster bombers given how they were used to obliterate cities? How about any monument to the royal navy which was basically built to starve continental adversaries into submission?
For all it's faults the manhattan project was also one of the largest research projects in history, if not the largest, and I think it's important to remember just went into making it, how much money and resources can be spent testing ideas in a desperate hope to find one that works, and a tribute to the people who did the work to make it happen at all. It's important to recognize the consequences of that work too, but it really was tremendous work and genius to realize the potential of uranium and plutonium, good and bad.
For those who've never visited, a tour of the museums at Los Alamos (the town) is incredibly humbling and thought-provoking. Except perhaps for psychopaths, there is nothing celebratory about it. On the contrary, the atmosphere is deeply troubling and anxiety producing. However, I for one would appreciate the opportunity to visit the lab grounds as a national park, to better understand how the Manhattan Project transpired. I believe this is important for humankind to grasp the darker sides of its nature.
Critics have faulted the plan as celebrating a weapon of mass destruction, and have argued that the government should avoid that kind of advocacy.
I've been to plenty of Holocaust museums and memorials and I don't recall any of them focusing on a celebration but rather the educational aspect.
It shortened the war by years, sparing millions of lives at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Also, there is a difference between honoring something like this and remembering something like this.
Go to Dachau, take the tour - the difference between honoring and remembering becomes obvious.
There is a difference between a National Park and a National Historic Park. The proposed "National Park" is a National Historic Park, about 3 notches below a National Park in terms of visitors, staff, and funding.
The sooner the Americans come, the better...One hundred million die proudly.
-- Japanese slogan in the summer of 1945.
Japan was finished as a warmaking nation, in spite of its four million men still under arms. But...Japan was not going to quit. Despite the fact that she was militarily finished, Japan's leaders were going to fight right on. To not lose "face" was more important than hundreds and hundreds of thousands of lives. And the people concurred, in silence, without protest. To continue was no longer a question of Japanese military thinking, it was an aspect of Japanese culture and psychology.
-- James Jones, WWII
We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" (kamikaze) planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions.
-- Imperial General HQ army staff officer in July 1945, from Weintraub's "The Last Great Victory"
"We hated the Japs but nobody had the slightest desire to go there and fight them because the one thing we knew was that we'd all be killed. I mean we really knew it. I never used to think that, I used to say the Japs would never get me. But there was no question about the mainland. How the hell are you going to storm a country where women and children, everybody would be fighting you? Of course we'd have won eventually but I don't think anybody who hasn't actually seen the Japanese fight can have any idea of what it would have cost."
-- Austin Aria, veteran of the Okinawa campaign
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But but, you spoiled the little Hate-America-First poster boys cleverly set up one liner.
Still one has to fear the pablum that would be spat by perky Park Service summer intern "interpreters".
I've seen my fair share of parks, and the drivel that flows is pretty annoying.
Ask them anything off script and they are at sea.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This is very true. When I was in Germany I went to the dachau camp. It was a very somber experience. There was plenty explaining exactly what happened on the grounds. It was preserved and rebuilt in some ways, but it was never "endorsed"
I felt some pride at the gate looking at the plaques commemorating the U.S. 20th Armored Division and U.S. 42nd Infantry Division, they liberated the camp. A member of my family was in the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and they liberated of one of the sub-camps nearby. I was proud of the guys who shut down these camps and destroyed the government that created them.
But, yeah, once my eyes moved from the plaques to the original motto on the gate things became quite somber.
Sorry, no. Just make sure it's not contaminated. If it is, clean it up. If it isn't, let the current owners enjoy it. Historic preservation and environmentalism have to have limits. If they don't, everything will eventually become historic, and nothing will be farmed or lived on.
I think the reality would have been that that USA would have used conventional weapons to firebomb Japanese cities, getting to the same result as nuclear weapons but more slowly. The "shock & awe" of nuclear weapons made it clear that Japan didn't have a choice... they could surrender, or be annihilated.
Given the, um, totally excellent, standards for handling of radioactive goodies that were adhered to by unpracticed people rushing like crazy and shielded by secrecy, declaring the whole thing a "national park" and forgetting about it is probably cheaper than rehabilitating the place....
arc de triomphe, Trafalgar square, brandenburg gate, etc?
Nothing in comparison.
Brandenburg Gate: Built to represent peace, so Napoleon could come and visit the city.
Trafalgar square: built after Napoleon's defeat, to remind the British Nation that French people are funny.
The Arc de Triomphe: built after Napoleon's victory, to remind the French Nation not to discriminate against short people.
No need for a boondoggle national historic park to understand this history. Just read Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." It's really the history of 20th century physics relevant to the Manhattan Project. Many insights, including how important the now-ignored Leo Szillard was to the whole enterprise.
How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?
Well, one obvious solution is to kill everyone with some other superweapon so nobody is around to use atomic bombs in warfare. Otherwise, I think sooner or later atomic bombs will be used again. There are huge disincentives to using them, but there's no reason to expect those disincentives to always be good enough.
Consider for example, Syria's situation in the Middle East. The current government is facing its doom by a massive rebellion. But it might be able to hold on by using sarin nerve gas on the rebels. According to the media, various US military sources are claiming that Syria has mixed precursor chemicals for sarin and loaded it into warheads on aerial bombs.
Now it depends on whether a dying regime thinks it'll get better return from using sarin than not. A lot will depend on what sort of threat the rest of the world can and does choose to make with respect to these terrible weapons and whether Assad will be bold or desperate enough to call their bluff.
This is likely to be an occasional occurrence for dictatorships down the road as well. And some of those will be nuclear armed.
Sounds like the republican party platform!
I for one am very glad of the lesson taught to the world by the detonation of two bombs during wartime Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I live in Australia, and we were next on the invasion list. I regret the loss of civilian life that the Japanese people suffered as a consequence of war and I am glad that Japan is now one of our greatest friends and highly respected.
I think it was inevitable that we would discover some method for extremely large scale destruction and I'm glad that humanity has so far not used the technology since WWII for anything more serious than sabre rattling- and that's bad enough. We need to understand how to deal with this kind of power because as much as we may not like it, it exists and it has existed all along. There are worse things than nuclear weapons too, so the learning experience is useful in other areas.
I personally support the idea of a monument to those men who were part of the Manhattan Project and think its pretty shallow for people to call them murderers etc. Firstly: fuck you- you weren't there (and neither was I). WWII was a response, NOT an invasion.
I agree with jtownatpunk.net 's comments. Take advantage of the learning experience while there are still people alive who can look you in the eye and tell you what it was really like back then. Sadly for the Manhattan Project the time for that is likely past.
The Japanese have already agreed to capitulate
No, they didn't. What had happened is that some Japanese had decided to seek surrender through odd channels (such as via the USSR), but there's no indication either that the ones seeking surrender had the authority to do so or that the US knew that status either.
I see no reason stemming from those diplomatic activities to question the use of the atomic bombs or the allegation that the war would have continued otherwise and resulted in hundreds of thousands of allied deaths and millions of Japanese deaths.
Where is Major Kong!
I think the reality would have been that that USA would have used conventional weapons to firebomb Japanese cities
The reality also is that conventional weapons pf that era weren't that effective. The US had already been firebombing Japanese cities for years. And the Japanese could have made that effort very expensive for the result by investing in a lot of flak guns and otherwise spreading out their residual industry and military targets. So continued loss of bombers combined with reduced effectiveness from hitting hardened, dispersed targets.
At some point, the US would need to invade. Then it would be a bloodbath with a lot of allied deaths and a lot of Japanese dying for each of those deaths.
The atomic bombs changed that by greatly reducing the cost to the allies. One bomber now could take out one city. There was no hope to draw out the war or cause enough harm to get the US to give up.
How? The war was basically over. The main part of the Japanese Army was on the Chinese mainland. The Russians were already invading in the north. The Japanese were basically saying "We'll surrender but only if we get to keep the emperor" and the Americans said "Herp derp, no, unconditional!" And guess what, we kept the emperor on the throne anyway! The Tokyo trials basically was an orchestrated farce on both sides trying to lay blame everywhere but on him.
Again, the vast majority of the Japanese army was on the Japanese mainland.
The reason to use nukes was not because Japanese invasion would be all that difficult. It was a show of might, especially with the up and coming Russians -- who were invited by FDR in February of that year to invade, but Germany's surrender bought Americans face to face with them and their drastic gains in the Atlantic changed the higher-up minds. They did not want to split Japan like they did Germany, they wanted the whole thing.
The Japanese were negotiating in earnest with Truman
No, they weren't. I doubt even that the people who were attempting to negotiate with the US had the authority or power to do so.
It was a heinous act, even if done out of ignorance and especially if contemplated as a show of force to deter the Russians ambition to claim Japan as their own.
And even if that were true, that probably saved millions to tens of millions of lives by stopping a hot war between the USSR and the "First World".
Aside from which a National Park should be preserved for its natural beauty and source of recreation through the appreciation of the out of doors, as has been the tradition since Theodore Roosevelt advocated for Yellowstone NP. Los Alamos doesn't begin to qualify for consideration in that regard. In addition, the National Park Service budget has been under assault for years out of sheer ignorance on the part of those who believe we should cater to the RV set and those who believe that every non-essential service of the federal government should be paid for on a fee-for-service basis.
Whine whine whine. I guess it's better to not pay for a National Park Service and simply let people and businesses do whatever they want on NPS land Fee for service at least funds some protection of those lands which is more than you can say for its absence.
At a time when legislators on both sides of the aisle argue for fiscal responsibility, I can find absolutely no justification for the acquisition of this land, let alone its designation as a National Landmark. For once I'll side the Potty Tea People of America, this NOT an acceptable use of federal funds, especially if you are at all concerned about the budget, and even if you're not. I'd put it as one of the most important moments in human history on the scale of discovering fire or inventing writing. That's the justification for making some of these sites national historical parks.
Without nuclear weapons the cost would be too high to be paid. US would have to back down eventually. For much less than that the pressure in Vietnam and more recently in the middle East shows that US population, with reason, doesn't like very much the idea to lose their husbands and sons in mass to a war that already lost its reason to be.
When WW2 began, there were highly placed members in the imperial cabinet who made predictions. Predictions such as "Japan will win all naval engagements with the US for at least the first 2 1/2 years", or "It will take the US at least 18 months to take any location where they can base bombing runs against the Japanese mainland.". Both of these predictions, and many similar ones turned out to be directly, factually wrong. The Doolittle raid was a successful strategic bombing mission against the mainland, only four months and eleven days after the Pearl Harbor attack. The Battle of Midway was a Japanese loss six months after Pearl, a loss where the Japanese saw four of six carriers sunk to take down one US carrier. The people who made these erronious predictions were promoted and rewarded after they proved wrong. They enjoyed support sufficient that when some Japanese military personel pointed out that they had been wrong, they were able to have their critics disgraced, and in some cases summarily executed, in a few cases alongside their families. The war wasn't going to be "basically over" until they were removed from power, period.
Who is John Cabal?
The war was basically over. The main part of the Japanese Army was on the Chinese mainland.
The forces in Japan were more than sufficient to inflict massive casualties on the US. Look at what they managed at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the previous two battles on Japanese soil. Plus they were training their civilians to resist and fight. Plus we now know they were planning on using chemical weapons on the invasion beaches when the US landed. Plus they had been holding back kamikaze aircraft and suicide boats, again look at Okinawa. Plus they had also perfected the aerial dropping of bubonic plague infected fleas, they even tested it on Chinese villages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. Marry this with their new submarines that could launch 2 or 3 aircraft, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine, and they would have the capability to target San Francisco not just invasion beaches. We have no idea what would have happened if the war went on until Spring 1946, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_japan.
The Russians were already invading in the north.
Wrong, Russia did not invade Japan until after the atomic bomb was dropped, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan.
Even if Russia would have attacked with the atomic bombing they would be quite busy on the mainland for many more months. Plus the Russians did not have an amphibious capability, they could not invade the Japanese home islands in force even if they wanted to.
Again, the vast majority of the Japanese army was on the Japanese mainland.
The millions of Japanese casualties that the previous poster referred to would have been predominately civilian. Some fighting, some caught in the middle, some suiciding ... again see Okinawa.
The reality also is that conventional weapons pf that era weren't that effective.
The fire bombing of Tokyo produced more casualties than the atomic bombings, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo.
The US had already been firebombing Japanese cities for years. And the Japanese could have made that effort very expensive for the result ...
If they could have resisted they would have done so already. The fire bombing raids were primarily at night and the Japanese fighters were few and the antiaircraft ineffective, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raids_on_Japan#Firebombing_attacks.
Randy Newman: built to remind us all that it's OK to discriminate against short people.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The war would have continued until Japan surrendered. Certainly the war in the Europe continued until the Germans surrendered, even though Hitler hoped until the end that the rather weird alliance between Stalin & the western powers could be broken. Also, Russia had it's eye on Japanese territory and was entering the war, and the Japanese knew (like everyone else) that they'd rather surrender to the Americans than the Russians.
And that is what the die-hards in Japan were counting on. Making it so costly to invade that the US and USSR would eventually give up. And you may be right, Japan might not be a threat thereafter.
I'll just point out that once before, Japan was just a ground force on an island they couldn't leave.
If they could have resisted they would have done so already.
Well, they were resisting.
Sorry, no. Just make sure it's not contaminated. If it is, clean it up. If it isn't, let the current owners enjoy it. Historic preservation and environmentalism have to have limits. If they don't, everything will eventually become historic, and nothing will be farmed or lived on.
How about the current owners pay for the cleanup themselves instead of having the taxpayers subsidize their enjoyment?
Point taken about everything becoming historic though.
Why are these weapons so different, in that "we must never use them again"? No one ever says that about, say, TNT, or even bullets.
Somehow it is accepted in war that we can shoot, blow up, stab, bludgeon, or strangle the enemy, but using an A-bomb is immoral.
Maybe what we should be concerned about is war itself.
I can't confirm it, but I think it was Sir Arthur Harris who said something like "Tell me one thing that is moral in war. Is sticking a bayonet in a man's belly moral?"
Or until they retreated to their islands and US got tired of trying to take them from there, as happened in Vietnam, Middle-East, etc. Japan could as well ally with Russia in the meantime.
Japan's industrial base was destroyed, they didn't have defense against air attacks, they no longer had any source of raw materials (one of the main reasons that they had gone to war)... they would have had to just hunker down and accept being destroyed from the air, without any way of fighting back. Do you really think that 6 years after Pearl Harbor, the USA would have given up the war when the enemy was down and out?
And pretty unlikely Japan and Russia would end up as allies. Russia was interested in grabbing territory, not forming an alliance.
'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
I have a couple of problems with this quote. First of all, stylistically, it resembles the sort of thing that a rather vacuous high school student might write. It also contains an egregious example of a planted assumption: "How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" Planted assumption=We HAD to use them in Japan. The truth of this proposition may be a matter for debate-- however, it is incredibly offensive to me that this lady (who considers herself a historian or at least a student of history) believes that it is self-evident.
From what I understand, recent scholarship tends to support the opposite view, based in large part on War Department studies which came out in 1945 and have only recently been declassified.
The Doolittle raid was a psychological attack. It was not something that we could replicate en masse, it required massive stripped of the bombers, and the bomb loads for the bombers did negligible damage to the Japanese.
Midway was weird. The US won predominantly because of better intelligence and some luck with the flight groups. The attack that sunk 3 of the Japanese flatops was an uncoordinated simultaneous attack which kind of overwhelmed anti-aircraft defenses for the flat tops. Had the uncoordinated attacks arrived separately the outcome very well could have been much different.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Even early in the war the assassinations were a very real threat. The Imperial Japanese Army was the problem in most cases. Yamamoto was asked to move to a more secure location because of the potential that he would be assassinated over opposing the aggression of the IJA.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
What makes you think a book is somehow better than preserving the places where history was made?
"History has been updated"
In the words of Will Rogers: "Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was"
History gets re-evaluated to match political doctrine all the time. North Korea just announced that they'd found a unicorn's lair, thus validating their assertion that the capital of an ancient kingdom was Pyongyang rather than some other possibilities.
You've defined your reality, and I doubt that anything could sway you, but it's unlikely that the Japanese leaders who had the ability to deliver on a peace proposal were the ones making backdoor overtures.
This is a bit like the conspiracy theories arguing that the invasion of Europe on D Day wasn't needed due to Rudolf Hess's alleged peace mission to England. Even if it did have the ok of the leader who could make such a deal (Hitler in this example), it ignores the truth that in war, longshot parallel diplomatic avenues are pursued, many of them not even seriously intended to succeed.
But, what the hey, it's great for justifying your own feelings. As most such theories are.
How is this different than if Russia set up a set of historical preservation sites of the nuclear facilities leading to its first nuclear bomb? Or China?
You may not have approved, but it IS history.
Else, you might as well be saying to demolish anything that reminds you of something negative.
Perhaps you'd like to see the Peenemunde Historical Technical Museum in Germany razed and forgotten?
How is your position any different than others who have tried to erase "inconvenient" histories?
It also proved/developed the atomic theories of Einstein and Oppenheimer and the rest. This paved the way for and made possible nuclear energy/reactors, letting harness the power of the atom for more than just bombs. Nuclear energy remains one of our best options to meet the energy demands of the world, particular as china and india modernize.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
No, the russians flatly refused to even enter into the pacific theater until less than three months before the Japanese surrendered.
They didnt even invade Manchuria until AFTER we dropped the first bomb, and the invasion was just as much them trying to grab as much land/influence in china as it was them honoring their treaty obligations from years earlier in the war.
They weren't doing it to fight the japanese. they were doing it to get china just like they had gotten control of nearly all of eastern europe in their push to germany. infact their invasion of manchuria and the push into the korean penninsula is how North Korea came to be in the first place.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
and your perception of the invasion is complete BS. my grandfather was with his battalion on one of the ships off the coast of okinawa when the bombs were dropped. they were there because they were waiting for the orders to sail to japan and begin the invasion. his battalion was to be the first on the beach. the plans were in place. they had already done their workups and planning for the invasion. everyone knew their role. and they knew they were probably going to die. news of the surrender was the first and last time in his entire life that he got drunk; so drunk that he lost 3 days.
so no, you have no fing clue what you are talking about.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Wrong. It took the shock of the second A-bomb at Nagasaki and the Russian declaration of War (they occurred on the same day) to convince the Emperor to "endure the unendurable" and surrender. Up to that time, the Japanese leadership was willing to see "One Hundred Million Die Together."
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.
Japan would be a much harder nut to crack in the Second World War, even without a healthy industrial base, than Vietnam was more than two decades later, without any industrial base. And yes, Pearl Harbor or not, I think USA would have given up much sooner than it would take to conquer Japan. USA is notoriously lax in prolonged conflicts.
Regarding Russia, it would probably ally to anyone that offered an advantage against US, especially considering that its industrial base was not in good shape either and it invading Japan would have been a very costly enterprise.
They didn't have a fighter that could reach a B-29s ceiling. Not that they didn't have any available, they didn't have a fighter deployed that could reach a B-29 at altitude.
Many aircrews heirs consider Lemay a bastard for ordering low level bombing of Japan. Granting it greatly increased the bomb loads, it got aircrews killed.
America had basically achieved air superiority over the Japanese Islands. That's still doctrinal warfare. Air superiority before invasion. Same reason Germany never invaded England.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They didn't have a fighter that could reach a B-29s ceiling.
And a bomber at the B-29's ceiling wouldn't be doing much. The US would use up a lot of bombs and planes even if they received no losses due to Japanese defenses.
America had basically achieved air superiority over the Japanese Islands. That's still doctrinal warfare. Air superiority before invasion.
And that's what I was getting to. At some point, the US would need to either invade or leave Japan alone. It's too costly to just bomb them unproductively year after year.
'At a time when we should be organizing the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species,' says Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich.
That's the sort of thing that you people elect to represent you. Wow.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Exactly. Nuclear weapoms have saved more lives than people could possibly imagine, simply by making all out war between the major powers unthinkable.
And regardless of how many died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, far more lives were spared from the hideously destructive ground war that would have occured had the US been forced to invade Japan. The military junta ruling Japan was training childred to fight with sharpened sticks and would have gladly sacrificed them to protect themselves.
Never in history has peace resulted from merely wishing for it. Peace only exists when a nation is sufficiently strong to defend itself.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
That is what your delusions say. The US population union and morale wouldn't likely last a couple million losses of soldiers for basically nothing, rest assured.
And when the US war machine had finished to enfeeble itself by fighting a long attrition war with Japan of many more years, it would be the perfect opportunity of Russia to take action against the devastated Europe and agglutinate more territory. If they could keep US busy by helping Japan, even if not officially they certainly would as they did in the Korean War and all the proxy wars after it.
Without nuclear weapons, Japan could end in the communist block, more of Europe in Russian Hands, and the cold war wouldn't be so cold.
Remember, too, the attempted coup against the emperor by members of the Japanese military in an attempt to prevent him from surrendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_Incident .
The buildings celebrate glorious military victories in accordance with the inherited rules of warface. Or liberation from foreign despotism. Pro gloria et patria. A building is like a victory march, and the arc is a reference to the old Roman Titus Arc. Nuclear mass murder of civilians and "victory" by murder blackmail of the non-combattant population are not glorious.
But that means they stopped warfare and entered mass murder.
When in war you have to play by the rules of combat. Everything else is mass murder targetting non-combattants. There is nothing wrong about soldiers killing each other. But there is something wrong about murder of civilians, even "repressions" (customary revenge actions under an occupation) heavily fire back.
The mass murder using firebombs and the mass murder using atom bombs are on the same level. War crimes. Dishonourable warfare.
Have you read anything at all about World War II?
Yes. In war you have to abide to the rules.
Your guess about what would be the situation back them after twice or thrice the number of losses from US is just that a guess. You are entitled to believe in any fantasy you may feel fond of, but don't spew nonsense to me. Attempting to guess at what would have happened at this alternative timeline, thinking your guesses are certainties only shows how delusional you are.
You severely underestimate the Soviet Union rebuild capacity. It managed in 5 years to polarize the world, becoming one of the two super powers. If US resources kept being drained by a longer war with Japan sooner or later they would have taken a good part of the Occidental Europe, and after that, who knows what the political situation would be?
The historians I've seen say that if the US had put off the invasion from October 1945 to March/April 1946, it would be almost certain that between a quarter and a half of all Japanese are DEAD by that time - they'd have starved to death. I doubt even the Japanese leadership could have maintained social cohesion in the face of 20-30 million dead. Japan doesn't so much as surrender as fall apart, and the US "invades" a country that doesn't functionally exist anymore.
That's some good optimism there. You might even be right (though I think they would be able to scrounge enough food). I just don't see the evidence for your optimism.
Even if that many people die, what's going to break the social cohesion? Just let the dissenters and other problems die first, assuming there are enough of them to matter. It's a lot of people, but there's some evidence to indicate that it's not enough people.
It's worth remembering that the Japanese had at times experienced nearly 100% losses before they stopped fighting in the islands. And there are historical cases of people in similar circumstances fighting to lower population levels than that.
For example, consider the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870. This was a very similar situation with a fascist government and fanatical population keeping up a war beyond any level of common sense. Paraguay supposedly lost somewhere between 60% and 90% of its entire population before it stopped fighting. I believe the core provinces supporting the Taiping rebellion (1850-1864) probably experienced similar losses before they were overrun.
So I simply don't buy that a mere loss of 20-30% of Japan's population without an invasion, would be sufficient.
Any government that is seriously looking at a ground invasion of their primary territory is going to turn as much of their population as they can into a means of resisting that invasion whether directly by conscripting people to become soldiers or indirectly by forcing factories to switch to producing munitions. They are also going to put out propaganda demonising the enemy.
The strong line dividing civilians and soldiers we draw in the west today is a result of decades of having no real threat of ground invasion and of having techology that allows for a military force that is small in numbers but high on strength.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I think you replied to one of my other posts. I apologize, if I didn't quite grok your intent (as appears to be the case) in my reply to that post.
Vietnam was MUCH tougher than Japan at the end of the war. Vietnam had one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the world, courtesy of the Soviet Union.