No matter the cost, and no matter the means ?
No matter the cost to the enemy, yes.
So… torture OK ? Rape of Nanking-style atrocities ? Spreading typhus or ebola ? Slow broiling children alive on live television ? British cuisine ? If any or all of the above can/will shorten a war, they’re cool ?
(Beyond that and as a side note, it could be argued that the use of atomic weapons had a very dear price to the Allies as well - the proof that the US not only had them, but was clearly willing to use them made Russia very, very afraid, and with good reasons. Cue the Cold War, and all the shit that came with it. Would that have happened absent those two bright double flashes, I wonder ?)
Okay, yeah, those things might not be okay (except the speading disease one, I have no objection to that). I thought we were talking about “the cost” in terms of pure numbers of enemy deaths. If it had taken exterminating every last Japanese man, woman and child to put a stop to the war, I’d have been okay with it, but no, there’s no need for outright cruelty for the sake of cruelty.
The sin was on the Japanese government officials who did not immediately surrender, and who had started the war and committed atrocities comparable to the Nazis if not greater. Ask the Chinese who endured years of Japanese occupation and atrocities.
Kobal2 is trying to get you to back peddle and score points by bringing up a bunch of irrelevant horseshit. Whether we tortured or didn’t torture is irrelevant, as it wouldn’t have gotten the Japanese to end the war any quicker. In fact, torture was an accepted practice during WWII, but no one thought it would end the war faster…certainly the idea that the Japanese would surrender if we tortured their prisoners is ludicrous, considering that the normal treatment of POWs by the Japanese would be considered torture today…and those were the prisoners the Japanese weren’t going out of their way to ACTUALLY torture.
In the end, dropping the bombs was what finally caused the Japanese to surrender, so it was worth the price. To answer the title of the OP, it wasn’t even a lesser sin by the US. All this revisionist history horseshit has been done to death on this board, and there are myriad threads on this subject if one wants to search for them. Every one follows the same trajectory, with revisionists bringing up false dilemmas and attempting to spin out mistranslation or revise history in such a way that the Japanese were really on the verge of surrender (despite the obvious fact that they were preparing for a last ditch defense) or misquotes from prominent US Generals or politicians indicating that we shouldn’t drop the bomb…oh, plus the every popular ‘we did it to scare the Soviets’.
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I don’t have the energy to read through yet another “should we have dropped the bomb” thread, but the idea that we should have waited on dropping the second bomb or that a demonstration explosion be made of the first bomb almost always comes up. That and the mistaken idea that either the second bomb was dropped as a warning to the Soviets or that the Soviets were somehow taking advantage of the situation by going to war with Japan after the first bomb. The US expected and had asked for Soviet intervention, Stalin pledged to go to war with Japan within 3 months of the defeat of Germany at the Yalta conference, and the USSR attacked Japan exactly 90 days after the German surrender.
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Exactly…especially on the “I don’t have the energy to read through yet another “should we have dropped the bomb” thread, but the idea that we should have waited on dropping the second bomb or that a demonstration explosion be made of the first bomb almost always comes up.” bit.
Considering that was The Second Stone’s only contribution to the thread, and he made it after my latest post (prior to this one anyway), I’m not sure how I would have been trying to get him to do anything, much less back pedal. I’m not Emmet Brown.
Next time, try and follow the flow of a conversation before joining it with a non sequitur.
Killing less people is better than killing more people is a pretty simple moral system.
Almost certainly. The Cold War had already begun before Hiroshima. The Cold War had begun even before Germany surrendered.
It could just as well be argued that Russian knowledge of America’s nukes stopped them from moving further west and scooping up some more shattered European countries than they did. Or scooping up more of China once they started the war with Japan.
Cite?
Good point..to this I would add that famine had already broken out in Japan-children were being born with classic signs of malnutrition, and people were eating wild plants and tree roots. The military junta that ruled Japan didn’t care-they were interested in a “glorious death”-civilians didn’t mean a thing.
So, the used of the Atomic Bombs saved hundreds of thousands of (Japanese) lives.
Hahahaha. You’re a hoot. We were discussing the use of a 2nd atomic bomb. Remember? Maybe you’d like to discuss the fact that several Japanese island commanders had killed POW’s so their officers could eat a human being’s fresh liver or is that the wrong kind of red herring? I know, you want to discuss the imperial military orders to kill all the POWs and dispose of any evidence.
Concentrate. It’s more than just a word on the side of an orange juice container.
If you don’t want to answer Kobal2’s question, you don’t have to. But posting snide remarks and borderline insults is not the way to go.
I only meant the examples Kobal brought up (Nanking, torture, etc), wasn’t agreeing with him about the Cold War part.
My mistake. I forgot I was posting in “Great Debates”.
I don’t see much of a difference between killing everyone with nukes or firebombs. Nukes are worse due to long term genetic abnormalities and cancers, but it’s not like burning to death or asphyxiating are pleasant either.
My view is simple. We were at war to save our lives, freedom, territory and property against as ruthless an enemy as the world has ever seen. We fire bombed cities and nuked them. We did a bunch of other things as policy too. We were forced to it by the fascist tyranny that threatened to overrun the world. By the end of it, who would win was clear, but fine tuning our moral compass at that point was not practical, possible, nor would it have made the world a better place. A quick end to the most awful bloodletting in human history was necessary. Convincing the enemy that we would kill every one of them and would only stop on unconditional surrender saved millions of lives. Millions. It may have prevented the Soviets and the US from starting WWIII.
War is utterly brutal. War is hell on earth.
A ‘greater sin’? In context, not even close.
These are the key points. And, to anyone showing such poor perspective as to complain about the atomic bombings, I would ask How much WWII history have you read? Have you heard of the Rape of Nanking just to give one example?