The Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Post Reply New Topic

Well with Obama over in Japan visiting Hiroshima and sort of apologizing for it, this is an age old question; was dropping a-bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the right right decision?

CBS just released a poll showing for the first time that a plurality of Americans now disagree with the decision 44% to 43% down from 57% who approved in 2005.

I'll post my own opinion in a bit but I'm just wondering what the opinion of the board is and whether or not there is a difference between what Americans and non-Americans think

No, because I don't think it's ever okay to use atomic weapons.

Also, Japan is my special interest, and I don't like the idea of anyone destroying it. >.<

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the Japanese were flying explosive kamikaze planes into American ships. If the bombs weren't dropped then the war would have kept going for a while and although there is no way to know for sure it's very possible and even likely that the bombs saved lives in the long run.

The firebombing was absolutely brutal which people tend to forget, if that carried on god knows how many more would have perished and how much more razed to the ground across the country. A land invasion would have been appalling and unacceptable in losses for the americans, that island is not easy to get at by the ocean either. What always compels me is that even if Hitler didn't sabotage his own success by believing he knew better than anybody else in his rancid outfit, Berlin was going to be a radioactive car park by 1945 anyway, the bomb was still going to be delivered somewhere.

I think surrender negotiations could have been made without the bombings, but the American government didn't want to miss a chance to show off their new superweapon.

The Rabbit-Hole of the Path of the Professional Conspiracy Theorist has actually led me to question as to whether such an Atomic-Bomb actually exists or not. From some information that I looked at recently, a case was presented that takes footage of the structures around that city, revealing what appears to be more of a type of rubble that would be expected of raze-style bombings of an entire civilian-population than that of an actual so-called nuclear-explosion, for various reasons. Footage of the Atomic-Explosions are put into question when scenes are shown of witnessing entire buildings being blasted into smitherines yet somehow nothing seemed to have affected the camera doing the filming. I also cannot agree with any kind of war-mongering actions due to the amount of deception and thus insane amount of karmic-consequences involved.

The United States had very little knowledge about the long-term effects of exposure to nuclear explosions. By dropping the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world became aware of the destructive potential of nukes almost instantly after their invention (only 3 weeks after the Trinity Test).

If the US had opted not to use nukes against Japan in august 1945, there is thus a possibility that they would not have been deterred from using them at a later date. This would likely:

(1) result in more casualties, as US scientists were constantly increasing the blast yield potential of nukes in the 1940s and 1950s. The US was also developing hydrogen bombs and massively miscalculated their blast yield in 1954 during an actual detonation.

(2) risk nuclear war, as other nations (the Soviet Union in particular) would likely also have acquired nukes in the meantime... Recall that he USSR started their own nuclear project in 1943...

So the primary argument *against* the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (that it was a horrible act of mass murder) can actually be considered the best argument *for* the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki... Better sooner than later...

Imagine how the Cuban Missile Crisis (when the "Mad Bomber" Curtis LeMay - who was the architect behind the firebombing of Japan, BTW, which killed a lot more people than the two nukes - was in charge of the US Air Force) could have played out if people hadn't already observed nukes in action in Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

The fact it took a second bomb to make Japan surrender is all the proof I need that it was the correct call.

The Japanese would have fought to the last otherwise. They're a unique case that justified this. Also, the allies were quite capable of wiping out cities, erasing them off the map, with conventional weapons, and did so.

I'm astonished more Americans than not now think it was wrong. I can only put it down to a lack of education about World War Two and the mentality of 1940s Japanese.

Targeting civilians is always a dirty and cheap strategy. The USA could have targeted military areas, government buildings, intelligence centres, etc. But instead they dropped the most destructive bomb of the time on Japans largest in-tact city (Tokyo was already majority ruble).

The bombs killed 90,000–146,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. The majority of that being innocent men, women and children. Yes, there was a large portion of hostile enemies in that mix too. The argument at the time was that there is no point bombing Tokyo as it was already flattened mostly. The bomb would be wasted there. Also, the Japanese manufactured a lot of arms in their homes, so there weren't many ways to bomb Japan with a single bomb and take out lots of military infrastructure. So Hiroshima was the obvious target.

All of the reasons make sense, and half justify it. But only when you're thinking "how do I use my massive bomb". There were other ways to go about it. I'm undecided with this one. I think it really illustrates the horrificness of war, and that the innocent country defending itself is still a monster. No good ever comes from war, and there is never justice in killing. At the end of the day, hundreds of thousands of innocent people died. A lot of them bystanders in the war, and not enemies. That blood is on America's hands.

For the record, I think it made strategic sense, desperate times and desperate measures, etc. But I really don't know if it was the right decision or not, I'm undecided.

You all know that you're debating the justification of an event that happened more than 70 years ago, right?

The event happened before any of us were born, and the people who ordered the event -as well as those who carried it out - are all dead.

There is no one left alive who can issue a meaningful apology - no one can apologize for the actions of someone else.

Justified or not, it happened. Looking back and judging the actions of those who made it happen is pointless. Obviously, those who built and deployed the bomb felt that their actions were justified.

We can ask ourselves if we'd ever use them again given the justification, just that there's no possible way of knowing the consequences of having not done it. GGPViper brought in a pretty thoughtful argument on that, and if our only option was to invade Japan on foot we don't know what that would have been like. If the stories of Japanese propaganda - ie. the emperor being God on earth, the enemies being demons, and whole villages committing suicide rather than surrender, there's a good possibility that there'd be very few Japanese people alive today who hadn't either been shot attacking the incoming troops or died at their own hands.

One thing this does bring up is the value of understanding mass psychology with respect to catastrophic events and considering whether this sort of tapering of support for an increasingly long-bygone action really indicates much of significance.

This is not a black and white question, and so I've neglected to answer your poll.

Can justifications be found? Certainly. Not least the simple fact that Japan has not so much as glanced in America's direction since.

It would be churlish of us to apply our ethical or moral standards to a world which we can never fully understand or appreciate. I think the important question is whether or not anyone living today should be asked to find justifications. To answer that, look no further than Fnord's post.

George Carlin would like to have a word with you.

"The limits of debate are established in this country before the debate even begins. Everybody else is marginalized, made to seem like Communists or some other disloyal person. Kook, there’s a word! Now it’s conspiracy. They’ve made that something that can’t even be entertained for a minute – that powerful people might get together and have a plan? Doesn’t happen! You’re a kook, you’re a conspiracy buff!" -George Carlin

Have a couple of descriptions from the Urban-Dictionary as well...

I used to be psychotic myself so I factually know of many methods in which to deceive the masses.
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain