RE: Genocide in the Old Testament
September 19, 2013 at 11:14 am
(This post was last modified: September 19, 2013 at 11:15 am by Cyberman.)
(September 19, 2013 at 9:22 am)Zone Wrote: They bombed Nagasaki when Japan failed to surrender the first time around to show they weren't joking they even had another one lined up for another city.
Nagasaki wasn't even meant to be a target. The list of possible targets originally drawn up was Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura. Nagasaki was later added to the list, being a major sea port, but the high civilian population was a concern. Hiroshima was a major military and communications base, so it was an obvious choice for primary target. Also, it was felt that the mountains in the region might contain the blast and enhance the destruction. Kyoto was the seat of Emperor Hirohito's palace, so another obvious choice.
It was only because Secretary of War Henry Stimson had spent his honeymoon in Kyoto and argued that it would be a shame to destroy a beautiful city of such cultural importance, that the secondary target was changed. To Kokura, another military stronghold.
In the event, heavy cloud cover prevented the crew of B-29 Bockscar from dropping "Fat Man" on Kokura. A major worry was that their bomb was already armed on take-off; that, plus dwindling fuel reserves (dwindled even more by repeated bombing passes over the city) forced them to select a secondary target: Nagasaki.
The rest is history.
Source
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
