Do you really think that the US would have, no, _could_ have reconstructed Japan if the US hadn't won decisively?
Yes. Clearly an offer of economic reconstruction would have sweetened any negotiated settlement.
Also, you are SERIOUSLY confused as to what was offered by the Japanese. Japan never offered the conditional surrender you describe to the US.
AFAIK, it was not offered formally, but it was well known within the US government that a significant faction within Japan were prepared to accept those terms, and certainly many senior ppl within or close to the government are on the record as thinking that a negotiated settlement was possible.
Whether you agree with how they did it or not, the US had to do something to end things decisively. They had to ensure it wouldn't happen again. They chose the bomb. It worked.
The US ensured it didn't happen again by reconstructing Japan and becoming their economic allies, not by defeating them. They could have done this just as well after a negotiated settlement.
Next: If you really think the US dropped the bomb to humiliate Japan, wow...You've got a big chip on your shoulder buddy.
Well, you said that Japan had to be shown that it had been utterly defeated, etc. etc. In other words, it had to be humiliated. Why mince words?
the problem was the Japanese couldn't give _conditional_ surrender. All the Japanese offered as surrender was a statement that they would withdraw and cease hostilities.
Not true. It was well known that a signficant faction in Japan was willing to surrender, with the only condition being that the safety of the emperor was assured (and his power was only symbolic). In any case, withdrawing and ceasing hostilities would have amounted to a conditional surrender, given that Japan was devastated and in no position to demand any concessions from the US.
How do you know exactly what powers they would really have agreed to?
Obviously I don't, not being a prophet. However there was a significant faction in Japan who were prepared to surreder totally so long as the emperor remained. That option was more or less on the table, but the US ignored it.
The Allies wanted to make sure Japan didn't rise again in a few years like Germany had done. To insure a new goverment was in place that met that criteria, they had to have unconditional control.
As I said, the allies did not ensure that Japan didn't rise again by defeating them. Instead they did so by making sure that Japan was reconstructed by the West. They could have done this after a negotiated settlement just as well, if not better.
[pesimistic discussion of negotiations]
Negotiations are never certain to work, but at some point you have to negotiate, right? Otherwise you'd have perpetual war.
Really? Then why did the US refuse to consider a conditional surrender whose only condition was that the emperor would retain his position (which was purely symbolic).
History has shown that hammering an enemy into the dust can be just as damaging in the long term as "letting them go home" (otherwise known as negotiating a reasonable settlement with the preservation of human life in mind). That's the best way for a war to end, with everyone going home. Victory in war is hollow. And the suggestion that Japan would have come back stronger...Japan was devastated well before the end of the war. The US secured peace in the long term by reconstructing Japan, not by defeating it.
If they were really ready to surrender before the first nuke was dropped, wouldn't they have surrendered right away afterwords?
They would probably have surrendered much earlier if the US had accepted a conditional surrender. A conditional surrender in a purely technical sense -- they just wanted to keep the emperor, who had no real political power.
With the much more limited knowledge they had at the time, I'd say they made the right call. Especially since one bomb apparently wasn't enough to convince them to surrender.
It was the right call not to make a serious effort to negotiate a peace with Japan? Hardly. Sure, a serious peace effort might have failed, but it should have been tried.
Saying that the terror tactics these people employ are 'the will of the people' or a 'revolution against tyranny' is simply naive and insulting.
The poster you're replying to didn't say anything of the sort. He pointed out that, just as Americans feel violence against Iraqis is justified by previous violence against Americans, so (many) Iraqis now feel that violence against Americans is justified by American violence against Iraqis. Are the Iraqis who think this wrong? Yes. But so are the Americans.
Obviously you can't actually view webpages in Galeon without a GUI,
Yes, that is the point you were missing. Come on, we're talking about apps with a significant degree of command line functionality here. Not just apps which can be launched from a command line (which includes all Windows apps).
As I pointed out in my original post, the access to.NET libraries will go along way to make up for the lack of command line utlities in Windows.
Well, those arguing that something ought to have been done differently from the way it was actually done always have the problem that their arguments rest on hypotheticals. Of course no-one can prove that there was a better alternative to dropping an atom bomb on a city, but why should they have to? You know, personally I'd be willing to give the people who weren't in favour of a small nuclear holocaust the benefit of the doubt.
Did you forget how Japan came into the war in the first place?
Yes, two wrongs make a right. The first principle of American foreign policy;)
If you really think that the only reason that the bomb was dropped, and not only one, but 2, is just to 'make some petty psychological point', well shit...I strongly suggest you dig into some history of the past few hundred years, especially the parts involving conflict and warfare.
When I look into history, I see a whole lot of stupid and immoral things done for stupid and immoral reasons. To require an enemy to humiliate themselves before you end a war is insane. If you've won the war, stop it as soon as you can, even if that means making some concessions to the other side. It's often forgotten, I think, that human life ought to be worth more than any political or military objective.
Those mistakes were not repeated at the end of WWII. Those mistakes were most certainly taken into concideration when looking for ways to end WWII.
Indeed. Which rather suggests that the American requirement of unconditional Japanese surrender was not entirely sincere, and in fact rather foolish.
The Americans knew that harsh surrender terms were actually against their interests, since they didn't want Japan to align with the Soviets (one or other of the superpowers was going to reconstruct Japan, and the US wanted it to be them). The initial demand for uncoditional surrender was just posturing, and posturing that cost a lot of human lives.
Look, Japan entered the war unprovoked. It would not have been acceptable to just let Japan 'withdraw' from the war. (The only 'conditional' surrender situation ever put forth by Japan)
And there was no choice to have conditional surrender. It had already been rejected. The Japanese had to know that they had been defeated, utterly and completely.
Your casualty figures prove my point: that the casualty figures for a land invasion seem extremely pessimistic. It was well known at the time that there was a significant amount of support within the Japanese government (not so much the military) for a conditional surrender. It was not necessary for the Japanese to know that they had been defeated "utterly and completely". It was only necessary to end the war with terms favorable to the Americans and with the minimal loss of life. This was very likely possible without the use of atomic weapons. And in fact, the use of atomic weapons did not bring about an unconditional surrender anyway.
Sometimes it doesn't work, but in the case of Japan it did, and it did more good than harm.
It did not do more good than harm. It would have been far better to negotiate a conditional surrender in the first place, instead of dropping two atomic bombs and then getting a conditional surrender anyway.
Which is exactly what they did. On one side of the scales they put the lives that would be taken by dropping the bombs (about 200,000). On the other side they put the lives that would be lost in invading ( 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities out of 1.7 to 4 million total casualties, and that's just the US Military Casualties) and found that the lesser evil was to drop the bombs.
What about the third alternative, negotiating a conditional surrender? And the casualty figures for a land invasion are clearly very, very worst case. I'm pretty sure that's more casualties than the US military had sufffered in the Pacific theatre to date.
They had to. Japan was already amassing forces in expectation of an invasion
The fact that Japan was amassing forces doesn't mean that America had to invade.
I refer you to the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb, but the second. The fact that they did not surrender after such an awesome display of raw power would point to the fact that they had never intended to surrender, but, as afore mentioned, fight to the last man, woman, and child.
That's one interpretation. A more plausible interpretation would be that displays of military force were largely ineffective as a means of inducing Japanese surrender. Negotiations for a conditional surrender would probably have been far more effective.
Both of the cities were also military targets, and the civilian populations were mobilized to give resistance, i.e., fight to the death. Hiroshima had Army Headquarters and the HQ for Southern Japan's defense. Nagasaki was a strategically vital seaport and ordinance factory.
Yeah, and the cities contained a lot of civilians too. So they were civilian targets, there's no getting around it.
Unconditional Surrender was needed to force the concept fully across into Japanese Society that they had been defeated.
It wasn't necessary to get that concept fully across into Japanese society. A little delusion can go a long way to saving lives. And as has already been pointed out, the bombs didn't even achieve conditional surrender, so even by your standards they were actually a complete failure as well as a waste of 1000s of lives.
I am saying that War is Waged by Humans, and Humans are Imperfect, and therefore they make Mistakes, and shit happens. And when 'shit happens' around 'weapons' and 'soft squishy things,' it's generally not 'fun for the whole family.'
You're missing the point. The fact that bad things happen in war is not a justification for doing bad things, any more than the fact that people get murdered is a justification for being a murderer. The military should try to minimize the number of bad things that happen, for example by not commiting war crimes.
he Point is, no matter what concessions we were going to make, we wanted unconditional surrender to get the point fully across that they had been defeated.
Part of war is psychology, you know.
That's sick. It's not worth killing that number of people just to make some petty psychological point. Look what happened when we took the "unconditional surrender" idea to extremes after WW1.
Oh really? I started this browser (Galeon)--from a terminal shell, e.g Konsole, on KDE.
1) You can start GUI apps from the terminal in Windows. 2) You're completely missing the point. Galeon does not have any browsing functionality which is not dependant on a GUI interface; you can start it from a command line but you can't do anything else with it.
The real world.
How many method invocations will your structured 10kb of data require to find the relevant data items? Think about it--there's a reason xml stream parsers are much faster than parsers which load the entire xml doc into an object model.
You're really, really confused. Take a simple example, such as getting the process ID of a task from that task's name. The obvious way to do it in bash is to do a ps ax, then grep through the lines of output and finally use awk to separate out the process id field. With Monad, you could (probably) just make a method call like OperatingSystem.GetPID("TaskName") and get the information you wanted directly and efficiently, without any parsing overhead. If you think that the most efficient way of handling structured data is to serialize it into text streams and then parse it with primitive parsing tools, you're just plain nuts. The most efficient way to handle structured data is to actually process it as structured data, not as a text stream. Presumably, in those cases where your data actually is a text stream, Monad would allow you to process it as such. But text streams are a poor way of representing most structured data.
No, the objects will have to be rebuilt for each and every use
What on Earth do you mean by this? The objects will not have to be rebuilt every time one of their methods is called. Perhaps you mean something else, but it's hard to see what that might be.
Even just giving a cmdlet the location of a bunch of objects in memory and having it call their methods one by one will take time, much more time than running regular expressions over text streams.
Rubbish. A regexp parse itself will make many method/function calls. And why would you need to call the object's methods "one by one"? Surely you would only be interested in one or two of its methods?
Many Linux GUI programs are just frontends. There is very little I can't do from the command line and/or by editing a text file.
OK, fair point. But on the other hand, the ability to use all the libraries in the.NET framework will give a pretty decent equivalent to the library of command line tools on Linux. Say, fetching a webpage would still be easy.
When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
What do you mean by "command line compliant"? Most Linux GUI software isn't usable from the command line, so how is Linux any different in this regard? If anything, because of its.NET object base, Mono should be easier to integrate with GUI apps than bash.
And all of that will require processing power. All of those objects have to be converted each and every time they get passed. Even the conversion to text will take cycles.
It will be much more efficient than running regular expressins over unformatted text streams. Instead of the data being formatted and then parsed every time it's passed from one process to another, the data can be passed and accessed directly with no overhead. If you think about it, it will be a big improvement in terms of efficiency (not that efficiency matters in a command script language anyway...)
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Do you really think that the US would have, no, _could_ have reconstructed Japan if the US hadn't won decisively? Yes. Clearly an offer of economic reconstruction would have sweetened any negotiated settlement.
Also, you are SERIOUSLY confused as to what was offered by the Japanese. Japan never offered the conditional surrender you describe to the US.
AFAIK, it was not offered formally, but it was well known within the US government that a significant faction within Japan were prepared to accept those terms, and certainly many senior ppl within or close to the government are on the record as thinking that a negotiated settlement was possible.
Whether you agree with how they did it or not, the US had to do something to end things decisively. They had to ensure it wouldn't happen again. They chose the bomb. It worked.
The US ensured it didn't happen again by reconstructing Japan and becoming their economic allies, not by defeating them. They could have done this just as well after a negotiated settlement.
Next: If you really think the US dropped the bomb to humiliate Japan, wow...You've got a big chip on your shoulder buddy.
Well, you said that Japan had to be shown that it had been utterly defeated, etc. etc. In other words, it had to be humiliated. Why mince words?
the problem was the Japanese couldn't give _conditional_ surrender. All the Japanese offered as surrender was a statement that they would withdraw and cease hostilities.
Not true. It was well known that a signficant faction in Japan was willing to surrender, with the only condition being that the safety of the emperor was assured (and his power was only symbolic). In any case, withdrawing and ceasing hostilities would have amounted to a conditional surrender, given that Japan was devastated and in no position to demand any concessions from the US.
How do you know exactly what powers they would really have agreed to?
Obviously I don't, not being a prophet. However there was a significant faction in Japan who were prepared to surreder totally so long as the emperor remained. That option was more or less on the table, but the US ignored it.
The Allies wanted to make sure Japan didn't rise again in a few years like Germany had done. To insure a new goverment was in place that met that criteria, they had to have unconditional control.
As I said, the allies did not ensure that Japan didn't rise again by defeating them. Instead they did so by making sure that Japan was reconstructed by the West. They could have done this after a negotiated settlement just as well, if not better.
[pesimistic discussion of negotiations]
Negotiations are never certain to work, but at some point you have to negotiate, right? Otherwise you'd have perpetual war.
This has nothing to do with pride.
Really? Then why did the US refuse to consider a conditional surrender whose only condition was that the emperor would retain his position (which was purely symbolic).
History has shown that hammering an enemy into the dust can be just as damaging in the long term as "letting them go home" (otherwise known as negotiating a reasonable settlement with the preservation of human life in mind). That's the best way for a war to end, with everyone going home. Victory in war is hollow. And the suggestion that Japan would have come back stronger...Japan was devastated well before the end of the war. The US secured peace in the long term by reconstructing Japan, not by defeating it.
If they were really ready to surrender before the first nuke was dropped, wouldn't they have surrendered right away afterwords?
They would probably have surrendered much earlier if the US had accepted a conditional surrender. A conditional surrender in a purely technical sense -- they just wanted to keep the emperor, who had no real political power.
With the much more limited knowledge they had at the time, I'd say they made the right call. Especially since one bomb apparently wasn't enough to convince them to surrender.
It was the right call not to make a serious effort to negotiate a peace with Japan? Hardly. Sure, a serious peace effort might have failed, but it should have been tried.
Saying that the terror tactics these people employ are 'the will of the people' or a 'revolution against tyranny' is simply naive and insulting.
The poster you're replying to didn't say anything of the sort. He pointed out that, just as Americans feel violence against Iraqis is justified by previous violence against Americans, so (many) Iraqis now feel that violence against Americans is justified by American violence against Iraqis. Are the Iraqis who think this wrong? Yes. But so are the Americans.
Obviously you can't actually view webpages in Galeon without a GUI,
Yes, that is the point you were missing. Come on, we're talking about apps with a significant degree of command line functionality here. Not just apps which can be launched from a command line (which includes all Windows apps).
As I pointed out in my original post, the access to .NET libraries will go along way to make up for the lack of command line utlities in Windows.
Well, those arguing that something ought to have been done differently from the way it was actually done always have the problem that their arguments rest on hypotheticals. Of course no-one can prove that there was a better alternative to dropping an atom bomb on a city, but why should they have to? You know, personally I'd be willing to give the people who weren't in favour of a small nuclear holocaust the benefit of the doubt.
Did you forget how Japan came into the war in the first place?
Yes, two wrongs make a right. The first principle of American foreign policy ;)
If you really think that the only reason that the bomb was dropped, and not only one, but 2, is just to 'make some petty psychological point', well shit...I strongly suggest you dig into some history of the past few hundred years, especially the parts involving conflict and warfare.
When I look into history, I see a whole lot of stupid and immoral things done for stupid and immoral reasons. To require an enemy to humiliate themselves before you end a war is insane. If you've won the war, stop it as soon as you can, even if that means making some concessions to the other side. It's often forgotten, I think, that human life ought to be worth more than any political or military objective.
Those mistakes were not repeated at the end of WWII. Those mistakes were most certainly taken into concideration when looking for ways to end WWII.
Indeed. Which rather suggests that the American requirement of unconditional Japanese surrender was not entirely sincere, and in fact rather foolish.
The Americans knew that harsh surrender terms were actually against their interests, since they didn't want Japan to align with the Soviets (one or other of the superpowers was going to reconstruct Japan, and the US wanted it to be them). The initial demand for uncoditional surrender was just posturing, and posturing that cost a lot of human lives.
Look, Japan entered the war unprovoked. It would not have been acceptable to just let Japan 'withdraw' from the war. (The only 'conditional' surrender situation ever put forth by Japan)
Why not? Is pride worth more than human life?
But the surrender was not conditional. They got part of what they wanted by our grace, not by their actions.
I'm sure American politicians tried to make out that this was because of their "grace", but I doubt it.
And there was no choice to have conditional surrender. It had already been rejected. The Japanese had to know that they had been defeated, utterly and completely.
Your casualty figures prove my point: that the casualty figures for a land invasion seem extremely pessimistic. It was well known at the time that there was a significant amount of support within the Japanese government (not so much the military) for a conditional surrender. It was not necessary for the Japanese to know that they had been defeated "utterly and completely". It was only necessary to end the war with terms favorable to the Americans and with the minimal loss of life. This was very likely possible without the use of atomic weapons. And in fact, the use of atomic weapons did not bring about an unconditional surrender anyway.
Sometimes it doesn't work, but in the case of Japan it did, and it did more good than harm.
It did not do more good than harm. It would have been far better to negotiate a conditional surrender in the first place, instead of dropping two atomic bombs and then getting a conditional surrender anyway.
Which is exactly what they did. On one side of the scales they put the lives that would be taken by dropping the bombs (about 200,000). On the other side they put the lives that would be lost in invading ( 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities out of 1.7 to 4 million total casualties, and that's just the US Military Casualties) and found that the lesser evil was to drop the bombs.
What about the third alternative, negotiating a conditional surrender? And the casualty figures for a land invasion are clearly very, very worst case. I'm pretty sure that's more casualties than the US military had sufffered in the Pacific theatre to date.
They had to. Japan was already amassing forces in expectation of an invasion
The fact that Japan was amassing forces doesn't mean that America had to invade.
I refer you to the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb, but the second. The fact that they did not surrender after such an awesome display of raw power would point to the fact that they had never intended to surrender, but, as afore mentioned, fight to the last man, woman, and child.
That's one interpretation. A more plausible interpretation would be that displays of military force were largely ineffective as a means of inducing Japanese surrender. Negotiations for a conditional surrender would probably have been far more effective.
Both of the cities were also military targets, and the civilian populations were mobilized to give resistance, i.e., fight to the death. Hiroshima had Army Headquarters and the HQ for Southern Japan's defense. Nagasaki was a strategically vital seaport and ordinance factory.
Yeah, and the cities contained a lot of civilians too. So they were civilian targets, there's no getting around it.
Unconditional Surrender was needed to force the concept fully across into Japanese Society that they had been defeated.
It wasn't necessary to get that concept fully across into Japanese society. A little delusion can go a long way to saving lives. And as has already been pointed out, the bombs didn't even achieve conditional surrender, so even by your standards they were actually a complete failure as well as a waste of 1000s of lives.
Yeah, all those animalistic Japanese kids. They sure deserved what was coming to them.
I am saying that War is Waged by Humans, and Humans are Imperfect, and therefore they make Mistakes, and shit happens. And when 'shit happens' around 'weapons' and 'soft squishy things,' it's generally not 'fun for the whole family.'
You're missing the point. The fact that bad things happen in war is not a justification for doing bad things, any more than the fact that people get murdered is a justification for being a murderer. The military should try to minimize the number of bad things that happen, for example by not commiting war crimes.
he Point is, no matter what concessions we were going to make, we wanted unconditional surrender to get the point fully across that they had been defeated. Part of war is psychology, you know.
That's sick. It's not worth killing that number of people just to make some petty psychological point. Look what happened when we took the "unconditional surrender" idea to extremes after WW1.
Oh really? I started this browser (Galeon)--from a terminal shell, e.g Konsole, on KDE.
1) You can start GUI apps from the terminal in Windows. 2) You're completely missing the point. Galeon does not have any browsing functionality which is not dependant on a GUI interface; you can start it from a command line but you can't do anything else with it.
The real world. How many method invocations will your structured 10kb of data require to find the relevant data items? Think about it--there's a reason xml stream parsers are much faster than parsers which load the entire xml doc into an object model.
You're really, really confused. Take a simple example, such as getting the process ID of a task from that task's name. The obvious way to do it in bash is to do a ps ax, then grep through the lines of output and finally use awk to separate out the process id field. With Monad, you could (probably) just make a method call like OperatingSystem.GetPID("TaskName") and get the information you wanted directly and efficiently, without any parsing overhead. If you think that the most efficient way of handling structured data is to serialize it into text streams and then parse it with primitive parsing tools, you're just plain nuts. The most efficient way to handle structured data is to actually process it as structured data, not as a text stream. Presumably, in those cases where your data actually is a text stream, Monad would allow you to process it as such. But text streams are a poor way of representing most structured data.
No, the objects will have to be rebuilt for each and every use
What on Earth do you mean by this? The objects will not have to be rebuilt every time one of their methods is called. Perhaps you mean something else, but it's hard to see what that might be.
Even just giving a cmdlet the location of a bunch of objects in memory and having it call their methods one by one will take time, much more time than running regular expressions over text streams.
Rubbish. A regexp parse itself will make many method/function calls. And why would you need to call the object's methods "one by one"? Surely you would only be interested in one or two of its methods?
Many Linux GUI programs are just frontends. There is very little I can't do from the command line and/or by editing a text file.
OK, fair point. But on the other hand, the ability to use all the libraries in the .NET framework will give a pretty decent equivalent to the library of command line tools on Linux. Say, fetching a webpage would still be easy.
When it comes right down to it, though, the Windows developers are not going to begin rewriting all of their software just to make it command line compliant.
What do you mean by "command line compliant"? Most Linux GUI software isn't usable from the command line, so how is Linux any different in this regard? If anything, because of its .NET object base, Mono should be easier to integrate with GUI apps than bash.
And all of that will require processing power. All of those objects have to be converted each and every time they get passed. Even the conversion to text will take cycles.
It will be much more efficient than running regular expressins over unformatted text streams. Instead of the data being formatted and then parsed every time it's passed from one process to another, the data can be passed and accessed directly with no overhead. If you think about it, it will be a big improvement in terms of efficiency (not that efficiency matters in a command script language anyway...)