Smokescreen. Based on what. that makes no sense. Even people who are not desperate in trying to believe we were not cruel in dropping two, count them two, A bombs, never questioned whether USSR could have been used to communicate that Japan wanted it to end. That is how it is done. We have back door communications with Iran right now. That is world politics.
Yes. A peace on their terms. That’s why we needed two, count them two, A bombs to force them to a surrender on our terms. There is a world of difference.
Which of these pictures shows the aftermath of a nuclear bomb attack?
Answer:
None of them, of course.
People have been fighting in the streets for as long as there have been streets.
Well, a coupla A-Bombs sped the process along nicely.
Where does this crap come from. Do you really think an A bomb that wipes out a city in millisecond and irradiates the entire area with radiation is just another weapon. A weapon that gives birth defects for generations is just another weapon. That is unforgivable.
So, gonzo… Okinawa: mass suicides and banzai charges, yes or no?
You’ve already been shown that civilians were conscripted for a homeland attack and that they were taught to kill themselves rather than surrender. Where on your cruelty meter do you see a continuation of the war? It’s as if you think conventional war is an organized event where soldiers get wounded and marry the nurses who care for them. You should be forced to watch Saving Private Ryan 10 times until it sinks in. This is what it would have been like for civilians fighting alongside soldiers.
Japan chose it’s destiny. It was done deliberately in the face of clear warnings both from the US and from within. Truman was responsible to his country and the soldiers he commanded. It would have been cruel and irresponsible for him to act otherwise.
I don’t always agree with Magiver, but he nailed this one. The Japanese populace was sold completely on the Death Before Dishonor meme. I’m as liberal as the next guy, and as cowardly as the guy after him, but even cowards have their limits, if enough BS is piled on their heads.
At the time, Truman made the only logical suggestion given him. With foresight, he still called it right.
Yes, there are some differences–some of which did not become apparent until after war. (The long-term effects of radiation really were poorly understood at the time.)
But it was better than an invasion, or your ridiculous assertion that we should just have given them a bit of time to make their minds about this whole ‘unconditional surrender’ thing. Even after Nagasaki there were those that wanted to fight on. How long do it think it would have taken the voices of reason to win out if we didn’t have the bomb? They were convinced that would be able to extract a favourable peace through fighting on the mainland. Other than defeating them in conventional battle, there’s not much else we could have done.
Imperial Japan apparently thought it was just another weapon, since wiping out a city in a millisecond didn’t impress them enough. They needed to see a second city get wiped off the map before they realized that it constituted a threat worth surrender.
It sure is; Nagasaki fell because Imperial Japan saw the bomb that wiped out Hiroshima in a millisecond as just another weapon. Tragic, really.
During that same period, Osaka city looked very much like that Tokyo photo you posted (judging by photos I saw at the Osaka Peace Museum).
I never really understood how 90% of a city can be turned into complete rubble but a random 10% of the city remain more or less intact (at least to the naked eye).
Is it because fire damage only affected the building made of flammable materials, but the ones made of stone remained? I have no other hypothesis.
I thing the problem gonzo is looking at is this: He sees us as saying “Dulce et decorum est that we nuked Hirohima an Nagasaki,” and reasonably feels aghast that anyone would take that stance.
No one is saying it was intrinsically good to drop the atomic bombs on those two cities. Rather, what is being said is that, faced with several high-casualty options, Truman with his advisors made the proper choice in selecting the one that would causae relatively the least, though horrific, casualties long run.
The peace party in the Japanese government was relatively small and impotent, even in the summer of '45, until a series of events tipped their hand. While the USSR entry into the war ws one factor, there is quite a lot of consensus that the two bombs wee deciding factors, the tipping point that made it possible for the Emperor to surrender.
Well, it can also be chalked up to a quirk of the wind. If you start a fire in the center of town and there’s a wind blowing south, the north side may be unaffected (or less affected). Even if the wind later dies down or changes direction, the fire can’t get back to the north side because everything in that direction has already been reduced to ash.
Not impressed? You are making shit up. Everybody was impressed. They were horrified and shocked.Before they could even react and decide what to do we dropped another one. If we had more of them we probably would have dropped them too. Every 3 days until they were gone.
By your own claims, they were on the very edge of surrendering anyway. Why would this “shock” cause them to hesitate, and for three days?
So, are you ignoring my question about Okinawa? Here it is again: Were there mass suicides and banzai charges on Okinawa?
So not only can you conjure quotes at will and assume they are more relevant merely because they support your position, and not only can you IGNORE repeated requests to clarify a position or agree if a historically documented fact happened or not, but now you can read minds in the past to let us know that the Japanese were horrified and shocked. You’re amazing.
Hell, there was a guy, as I posted above, who was in the first city. He survived. He was badly burned. But 3 days later he had arrived at his new job. In the second city to be a-bombed.
So shocked and stunned he couldn’t wait to get back to work. Horrified him so badly that he reported with an APOLOGY to his new boss for being late due to the city he was living in being vaporized.
I’m going to try reporting on this thread.
In for a penny, in for a pound (or kiloton) I always say.
Nah, it’s just looking like religious zeal, no different from the witnessing that is already commonplace in this forum. Just as a fundamentalist Christian will studiously ignore any and all contradictions in the tenets of his faith, gonzomax has, by all indication, a mental block regarding anything that even suggests nuclear weapons are not irredeemable, unforgivable evil.
I get the impression it wouldn’t matter if Japanese soldiers were routinely eating Chinese babies, or if we had in the archives signed oaths from every Japanese person in 1945 swearing to attack invaders with any and all weapons down to sharpened chopsticks and clenched fists before surrendering - nukes are wrong and that’s it.
Heck, I could think of at least ten other GD regulars who have similar blind spots.
Sorry to jump in without reading the entire thread but what the hell is this supposed to mean? Just because he refused to keel over and die like the Americans wanted, he was somehow not horrified and shocked? Funny how when a British milkman goes on a walk it’s bravery, and when a Japanese man tries to keep some semblance of normality in his life it means that the A-bombs weren’t so bad after all.