On August 6, 1945, for the first time, an atomic weapon was used against humans. ISTM that it is appropriate, no matter whether you feel it was right or wrong, to remember that.
Forgive, but never forget.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, we should forgive the Japanese for the war, but not forget it.
The Japanese knew (by 1944) that they were going to lose. Instead of surrendering, they kept fighting in a suicidal way. The bomb was necessary to end the fanatic’s grip-so it did save lives.
Shodan,
I agree
Agreed.
And I hope it remains the penultimate time.
The US had an alternative weapon - poison gas. Tens of thousands of tons of it.
In my opinion that weapon would have taken many more lives than the atom bomb. The Japanese believed in sacrifice of lives. Using gas would take lives and then more people would show up to continue the war effort.
Leveling square miles of industrial cities not only took lives it also demonstrated the ability to literally bomb the enemy’s war infrastructure back into the stone age.
It was a very harsh message but quite possibly the one that spared the most Japanese and Allied lives.
This is the part that so many people seem to have trouble with. Yes, the A-bomb is horrible and horrifying. No one really doubts that. But we HAD to use a horrible and horrifying weapon to get them to surrender. We were already dumping napalm on their cities by the ton and killing them in firestorms but they were still fighting. The Nuke did the same job in a fraction of a second and was such a hammer blow that stunned them into submitting. In a way, it allowed them to “save face” by being so terrible that NO ONE would hold out against it.
We’ve had threads before about the possibility of gassing Japan. IIRC, the news was that we did not have enough to be effective. We had a lot, but not enough for a full on invasion.
I am on record as supporting the Hiroshima bombing. But tens of thousands of people died.
I don’t think the US should be ashamed, or apologize, or that we should pretend we could have done something else. But tens of thousands of people died.
Regards,
Shodan
My thought has always been that if we hadn’t used it then, would something worse in terms of the whole planet have happened? Lets face it, develop a weapon and sooner or later someone is going to pull the trigger. So we have the bomb and don’t drop it on Japan; then Russia develops their bomb - and the first time anyone really learns of the horror of the nuclear option is a real exchange over something like the Berlin Airlift or something. I don’t know if it would make the Japanese feel any better about the whole thing but I sometimes think the horror they suffered, and still do to some extent, could have been what kept the Cold War cold.
Interesting article here (from NPR; you can read or listen) about the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima as opposed to using it in some less destructive demonstration.
(bolding mine)
That’s how I see it. There is the official line: the destruction wrought by Fat Man and Little Boy are reckoned to be less than what would have been realized had the war continued as it was.
But there’s more. Getting nuked and forced into bound-and-naked terms of surrender were probably the best thing to happen to Japan economically & industrially. Possibly even culturally if their ancient sites were at risk of annihilation in a full-scale occupation. Further, the horrors of nukes were fully and immediately realized and efforts were in place very early on to restrict access to the means of their production. Sure, they proliferated and some are in very shaky hands now, but the fact remains, only two were ever detonated in aggression.
What the hell is it with Americnas and their obscene views on “saving lives”, by bombing? :rolleyes:
Doctors and paramedics save lives, not bomber pilots.
Dropping the bomb was the absolute right thing to do. It was war. The Japanese were the enemy. The enemy had to be defeated and all resources to that end should and must have been employed.
But the bomb did not save any lives. It killed hundreds of thousand in an instant.
That’s not how you spell Americans.
If a criminal is holding a gun to a hostage’s head, threatening to kill him in 10 seconds if some demand is not met, and a police sniper kills the criminal, has the sniper saved the hostage’s life? If not, why not?
And getting away from semantics, do you agree that the two atomic bombings resulted in a smaller loss of life among Japanese than a full scale invasion would have?
Pretty much the same way that people save money by shopping around for the best price on an item they want to buy.
“I saved $2500 by buying my car from a dealer two states away instead of near my home.”
When it is a foregone conclusion that an expenditure is going to happen, most people conceptualize the lesser of the two expenditures as “saving money.”
Same logic applies here:
A) Use nuclear weapons, kill ~200,000 people
or
B) continue with conventional warfare for X more months/years, killing 1,000,000 people
Then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to regard option A as one that saves 800,000 lives.
Extrapolating from the percentage of the total population which died during the invasions of Saipan and Okinawa, something like six million Japanese would have died if the Allies invaded their homeland. Many of them at their own hands.
A lot of Japanese died instead of a lot of Americans.
It is too bad that the fellows who killed and ate POWs were not there.
There was a proposal (made by Oppenheimer?) to drop the first a-bomb on an island in Tokyo bay (Eta Jima). this would have afforded a demonstration, and not killed anybody. Would this have convinced the military dictatorship that ruled Japan?
Likely it would only have convinced them we lacked the intestinal fortitude to drop it on a city. AIUI, the Japanese picked their fight with the USA in part because they perceived us as weak-willed.