The Nuking of Japan

[System of Solace]

Russia declared war on Japan the day before the first bomb was dropped. Look it up, if you don't believe me. Not even a kamikaze pilot would be nuts enough to think it could take Russia and the United States. Remember, the European part of the war was already over. Japan was fucked. China hated Japan, thanks to their recent indiscretions. Russia was turning its eyes to Japan like fucking Sauron on his fucking period and the United States was fast making it possible to attack the mainland, which had been a major strategic problem since the start of the Pacific conflict.

You might be surprised as to how fanatical they were. Besides, I did look it up. Thanks for proving yourself wrong.

Prove it.

Must I? I grow tired of doing it.

• Suicide of thousands of citizens
  
• Buildings being destroyed and bombed
  
• Citizens being killed by careless soldiers
  
• Fanatical Japanese fighting for their homeland
  
• Major kamikaze attacks
  
• We would have to take a LOT of Japan to induce surrender, even capture of Tokyo does not guarantee it immediately
  

They declared war on Japan, which had fast fading resources, thanks to the U.S. refusal to do trade with them unless they pulled out of China, which led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their greatest ally was defeated and they had absolutely no means of sustaining their country with goods from elsewhere. Do you think Japan has all of the natural resources needed for war? Russia and the U.S. could have easily put up a naval blockade, particularly if China cooperated. The only strategy problem they had was fuel.

As far as we know, Russia only wanted Manchuria. And the US objective was to induce surrender as quickly as possible with the least amount of casualties. Truman was shocked to hear an estimate of US landing casualties-bloodier than D-Day, I believe. 50-100k, and that's only US soldiers establishing a beachhead. China was pretty ravaged, but I'm sure they wanted revenge.

What the fuck are you talking about? Help the U.S.? Germany declared war on Russia before Pearl Harbor even happened, so well before the United States entered the war. The Cold War had everything to do with the aftermath of World War II and who would take the bulk of power. It had fuckall to do with what happened before or even during the war, unless you count the nuclear arms race.

My point was that Stalin was very reluctant to ask for our help and if he thanked us he did not do so very sincerely. Russia would not have launched a mainland invasion of Japan and if they did it would be because we were just sitting on our asses for months. US-Soviet hatred was also due to differing governmental ideals, which continued from before WW2 until the 90's.


Creed, I was about to suggest the same things be posted. Thanks.

[Mystic]

The line I said was too general...you are right.

In way anything you can do onto others you can justify. Anything others can do onto you is utterly without justification.

This is how people think unfortunately.

I don't believe Iran was right in taking hostages. I don't believe they are right to stir up anti-US death slogans.

I believe in diplomacy. And I do believe in compromise.

What we have to lose is this "us vs them" mentality.

Muslims unfortunately are the worse at this double standard stuff.

Look at Iraq. Sunnis started killing Shias there like crazy, them the Mahdi army started slaughtering sunnis as retaliation, the Sunnis ofcourse all then played victim card and talked about how monstrous shias are.

Of course if Mahdi Army didn't do that, there would be no balance, and Shias would've been slaughtered even more.

Some people want to turn a blind eye, and will say no Mahdi amry never killed civilians but they did.

But everyone paints each other as the bad guy.

Reality is the Europe were filled with colonialist counties, and Germany wanted a piece of the pie.

The same mentality of England was presented by Hitler to his people.

But Hitler ofcourse is super evil and colonialism of England and France of course no big deal right?

Politics is dirty and has been dirty, but some of us believe in trying to make it clean.

[Creed of Heresy]

I completely understand that what was done then was done under the duress of war. I even said that I don't think the extent of what they were doing was even remotely clear. We had just made the fucking things. To be fair, though, they could just as easily have dropped pesticide byproduct chemicals and had roughly the same result without the property damage and carnage.

Well. We could have dropped that, yes. But that wouldn't have had the same effect of trying to scare the Japanese into submission, which was the entire goal.

A quick rumination, here: It's amazing how easy it is for us to discuss this, without the consequence of "pushing the button" resting on our shoulders, isn't it? Can you imagine if we actually had to deal with the decision itself AND its consequences being on our heads?? That shit would break me like a twig.

[jonb]

Everything Shel B says is right, but it does not take into account the psychology of the Japanese leaders, who were in some part preparing themselves for a heroic fight to the death.
Any logical person would make decisions as Shel B states, but the Japanese leadership were not acting normally, I could put out many instances of this but what that comes foremost to my mind is that they refused to protect their own merchant ships because these were less important than the military even though it meant they ran out of supplies, or that there were more aeroplanes defending iwo jima than Britain had in the battle of Britain, but they chose to throw them away in suicide attacks.

[Shell B]

CoH, yep. Strawman, though. Sorry, dude. I never said the Japanese were being good guys. In fact, their propaganda was the reason why every single civilian committed suicide in Saipan rather than surrender to the United States. They even threw their babies off of the cliff. I believe it was all of them, but I do know it was at least most of them. They ran and killed themselves.

---

Everything Shel B says is right, but it does not take into account the psychology of the Japanese leaders, who were in some part preparing themselves for a heroic fight to the death.
Any logical person would make decisions as Shel B states, but the Japanese leadership were not acting normally, I could put out many instances of this but what that comes foremost to my mind is that they refused to protect their own merchant ships because these were less important than the military even though it meant they ran out of supplies, or that there were more aeroplanes defending iwo jima than Britain had in the battle of Britain, but they chose to throw them away in suicide attacks.

Yes, they were crazed. They were also really effective. The bottom line is that their generals were not stupid. Pearl Harbor alone is enough to show this.

[System of Solace]

So this can be a conspiracy but everything you are told by winner side that would never come out and say, we nuked them to show off our power, is reliable?

This sentence hardly makes sense. We would not nuke them to show off our power. We had no more nukes after Nagasaki. We had 3. 2 on cities, 1 desert test.

This is how they present it, but what they mean by that, is surrender on total terms of US and Allies. This is a trick of semantics. They were willing to surrender.

"Who was the winning side vs. Who gets their preferred terms of surrender"

So basically you nuke two cities over a chance of Facist Japanese rising again?

So it's not all about saving lives, it's about getting everything your way.

Why not admit the other thing they got their way with the nuking? Power in the eyes of the world.

Way to totally misrepresent what I said and attempt to use it against me, douchebag.

So your saying US was threatening Japan with something they believe was immoral? How does that make it better anyways?

Not quite what I meant. But it's not immoral if it will cause surrender without any more casualties. It's just a bluff.

IT's something in the words of the OP, US would have done. Why is what US would have done any less worse then actually having done it?

How do you know they would have continued with the nukes? (I have to ask ONCE AGAIN)

This is a red herring. If you can justify nuking two cities, you can justify terrorism easy.

This is fucking idiotic. Terrorism is mostly because some religious radical wants to kill for his god. The two situations are completely different.
"If you can justify shooting somebody who was about to stab your family, steal all your valuables, and burn down your house, you can justify gunning random people down in the street."
That is, of course, an exaggeration.


I'm done with this for now, I have things to do and people are posting faster than I can respond. Besides, I'm almost agreeing with Minimalist's "Position C" now. However, I still believe Position A to be more moral than B, which was really what I was trying to argue and why I said a few of Shell's idea may have been better if they could have worked.

[Mystic]

Semi-off-topic: What did you guys pick in Mass effect for those whom played all three, did you justify putting the disease on the Krogan or did you say it was wrong?

[Ryantology]

Nukes terrify me like nothing else. I've never seen a horror movie which gave me nightmares, but I still sometimes wish I'd never seen Threads because that one sure as hell still likes to creep in on my sleep thoughts and ruin my day.

That said, I'll just quote what I've written before on the subject on another forum. Please bear in mind, if it is not obvious from what I've written, that this is not a defense of the attacks on a moral basis. I'm not justifying them as much as I am pointing out (what I view as) their ultimate necessity in the grand scheme of things.

One of the most hotly-debated subjects of the last century has been whether or not America was justified in using atomic weapons against Japan to end the second World War.

I am not the man of black and white morality I was years ago, which is why I can only say that the ends justified the means in this particular scenario. Certainly, the reason America used the atomic bomb had everything to do with the short-term goal of defeating a very obstinate enemy. Certainly, there weren't too many people involved with the decision who were thinking of how this event would influence the course of human history thereafter. As we all know, the weapon had its effect: Japan realized that fiery nuclear death was the only alternative to surrender, and wisely decided against fiery nuclear death.

But, was this necessary? One opinion is that there is no justification for using nuclear weapons for any reason, towards any end--a laudable goal if perhaps too idealistic. Another is that one was necessary and two was overkill. Maybe this was true.

However, I am firmly convinced that the destruction of Hiroshima, in spite of how horrible it was for those who fell victim to it, the most fortunate decision of the entire 20th century.

Once atoms were confirmed to exist, it was probably inevitable that the potential of the atom to produce amazing amounts of energy would soon be realized. It was certainly inevitable that this revelation would result in a drive to weaponize this phenomenon. It is a simple, yet basically true, statement to say that nuclear weapons were going to happen after certain scientific discoveries were made.

The United States won the nuclear race by several lengths, thanks in large part to the defection of several genius physicists from Europe before and during the rise of National Socialism and Italian fascism. Germany and Japan both had at least some interest in developing atomic weapons, the Germans especially. Had they not been so relentlessly xenophobic, the Nazis may very well have acquired the bomb before the United States. Clearly, it was to the world's benefit that America won this race, because America was, in relation to Nazi Germany, not as crazy and bloodthirsty. I doubt anybody believes the Nazis would have hesitated to use atomic weapons with little or no discretion against anybody they liked, especially if they had exclusive access to the weapons. America simply has not been so inclined. But, America did use two of them, and on civilian population centers rather than military targets.

I believe this was absolutely necessary. Not for the purposes of making Japan surrender; any successful demonstration of the atomic bomb would have probably done that trick. In this, I think the Nagasaki bomb was dropped in the belief that it was necessary to prove to the Japanese military establishment that we weren't fucking around and we could keep on doing this if we wanted to. Maybe this is true, maybe this isn't true. Maybe the destruction of Hiroshima would have been enough to convince Japan to sit down and shut up. We'll never know for sure.

However, Hiroshima had to happen, and the people living there had to suffer and die. A terrible fate for them, and I don't wish to make light of it, but in a sense, they were sacrifices to the future of humanity. Their deaths were not in vain. In fact, I believe they may helped save the world.

Given the situation, completing the Manhattan Project and getting functional atomic weapons was a high priority of the Allies. They were some of the very first, and the destructive power may have been exponentially greater than anything mankind had come up with previously, but they were followed in the coming decades by warheads with yields exponentially more destructive still than even Fat Man or Little Boy. The bombs dropped on Japan were some of the weakest ever made until research into tactical nuclear weaponry began decades later.

This is important because we were able to see, firsthand, just what these things could do. There exists much visual material and in-depth description of the devastation, the death, the suffering, and the slow, terrible destruction to the body brought about by radiation poisoning and full-body burns. We needed to see these things. When the physicists and engineers tested prototypes in the New Mexico desert, they saw how much shit you could blow up, but they had no idea of what the true human toll would be if one of these things fell on a major city. Hiroshima gave us this lesson, and it is a lesson we absolutely had to have in a world in which nuclear weapons were inevitable.

Imagine if the bombs had not been used. A land invasion of Japan would have probably happened, and if the estimates were anywhere near accurate, the final death toll would have been far greater, for both sides, than what the bombs produced. This is, actually, rather beside the point. Once the United States had a nuclear weapons arsenal, the Soviet Union had to match it. As a result, ten years after the end of World War II, you had the world's two superpowers on their way to practically bristling with city-erasing weapons of doom and well on their way to inventing missile delivery systems to carry these things thousands of miles. Yet, the Cold War lasted close to 50 years without a single one of these things ever being exploded in anger. We like to attribute this to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. This is probably true.

But, imagine how differently this might have gone if MAD were based upon a theory, rather than the hard and terrible reality witnessed by Japan? One of the reasons America wasted little time in using its new bomb was that, as previously mentioned, we only had theories about how devastating its effects would be. People, both individuals and groups, are willing to do dangerous things if the dangers exist to them as mere hypotheses. Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave us stark evidence we absolutely had to have. We now knew just what these weapons could do. We now understood how terrible it would be to see our own cities destroyed, our own people incinerated. We were now able to comprehend that, if dozens, hundreds, even thousands, of these things were used at once, the actual end of the world could be a very real possibility.

If we did not have this lesson, is it so hard to imagine that some flashpoint might have seen either the United States or the Soviet Union launching in response to some real or perceived threat? To me, it is not hard at all, nor is it hard to imagine that the other party would respond in kind with everything it had, using hundreds of missiles with destructive power hundreds of times that of the bombs dropped on Japan. It is not hard to imagine that our world would be a nearly-lifeless hell afterwards. The lesson of nuclear warfare would be learned then, if anybody survived to learn it.

For that reason, it is plain to me that America's use of the bomb was necessary for the peace of the world, both in the immediate sense of ending the worst war mankind ever fought, and to giving people to come a very good reason to not ever want to launch any more of them.

[Mystic]

I picked wrong from the start till the end!

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I also picked "ends don't justify the means" option!

[Shell B]

[quote='System of Solace' pid='335413' dateline='1347413286']

You might be surprised as to how fanatical they were. Besides, I did look it up. Thanks for proving yourself wrong. [/quote]

I didn't prove myself wrong. Read the rest of the posts in this thread. I misstated which bomb we were talking about. A very small thing considering war declarations aren't "Holy shit. I never saw that coming." kinds of things.

[quote]
Must I? I grow tired of doing it.[/quote]

Of course you must. The burden of proof is on you.
[quote]
[*]Suicide of thousands of citizens
[*]Buildings being destroyed and bombed
[*]Citizens being killed by careless soldiers
[*]Fanatical Japanese fighting for their homeland
[*]Major kamikaze attacks
[*]We would have to take a LOT of Japan to induce surrender, even capture of Tokyo does not guarantee it immediately
[/list]

90% of what you just listed describes every single country involved in World War II. It's also not proof. It's, "Hey, they were nuts. They wouldn't have surrendered." But, they did. They did, even though their military was not crippled by the bombings. They did even though they were in slightly worse of shape military wise than they were before the bombs.



[quote='Shell B' pid='335386' dateline='1347411186']
As far as we know, Russia only wanted Manchuria. And the US objective was to induce surrender as quickly as possible with the least amount of casualties. Truman was shocked to hear an estimate of US landing casualties-bloodier than D-Day, I believe. 50-100k, and that's only US soldiers establishing a beachhead. China was pretty ravaged, but I'm sure they wanted revenge.[/quote]

It doesn't matter what Russia wanted. They had declared war and Japan could not maintain it. They were cut the fuck off. What would they have done? Thrown rice at us? (That's not racist. They have a lot of rice. I am proving a point about their natural resources.)


[quote]
My point was that Stalin was very reluctant to ask for our help and if he thanked us he did not do so very sincerely.[/quote]

Wait, you said they were helping us. That was not your point at all.

[quote]Russia would not have launched a mainland invasion of Japan[/quote]

They did not have to. Again, Japan was cut off.

[quote] because we were just sitting on our asses for months. US-Soviet hatred was also due to differing governmental ideals, which continued from before WW2 until the 90's.[/quote]

Sitting on our asses? Oh my. As for the differing governmental ideas, hell yeah, they helped cause it. They did not come about because of the war. You're backtracking. Russia was not "helping the United States." You got that wrong.

[quote]Creed, I was about to suggest the same things be posted. Thanks.
[/quote]

You like scarecrows too?