Oh boy this will become great...Swollen Goat said:Spoken like someone who has no concept of how war works. Sometimes you have to do some dirty work for the greater good. Fun fact: In the lead-up bombing of France to prepare for D-Day, we (US and UK) killed over 40,000 innocent Frenchmen. Did we want to? Of course not. BUt there was no way an amphibious assault on Fortress Europa would have succeeded without it. It may sound callous, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet. And since Japan opened hosilities (with a sneak attack, no less) I say they kinda lost their claim to compassionate treatment. Not to mention all the other atrocities they committed. You go ahead and keep your moral high ground. Me and the other winners will put something nice about it on your tombstone.BlackMunz said:The things any other person has done are NEVER an excuse for any of your own actions (except self-defense and its gonna be hard to explain how A-bombs were self-defense). That said the bombing of Hiroshima was plain wrong as wrong as the Bombing of London, Dresden and any other major city during the war. The A-Bombs however were a whole new dimension. There is never any excuse for mayor killings of civilians in any given situation in opposition to smale scale casualties that occur while i.e bombing a military convoy. For that sole reason where the bombings wrong and there is no point arguing over the justification of a war crime through the war crimes of others. Its like everytime any country does something horrible its like: "at least we are not like Germany in WWII" those are things that you can not relativize by comparing it to other things that were even worse and especially not by comparing the casualties to the loss of military personell during a combat operation(i.e invasion) especially not your own.
You know there is a difference between war and murder thats one point of the Geneva Conventions(Here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions] is the Wikipedia article in case you don't now what i'm talking about). Thats why we condem genocide and tape during wars because its unnecessary cruelty towards innocent civilans (which as you might already know is forbidden by virtually every ethical code ever imagined and therefore regarded as barbaric).
And now to the final point: lets see if you can follow me on this one ok?
If you condemn the horrible warcrimes commited by the Japanese which everyone here does, although according to your logic thats how war works and was therefore a really great plan(you see how incredibly stupid your argument is?), you can't justify a war to stop them by doing sth equally against any form of ethics. You know because at that point you aren't any better then the very people you fight because of their actions.
To explain this to you in a way that even you might understand my point: Its like fighting terrorist because they blow themselves up in your city by sending your soldiers to blow themselves up in their citys.
Thats the reason why we here in Germany hat an imense discussion about the bombing of an oil convoy controlled by taliban which might have killed up 142 civilians (thats the overall number of people killed in that bombing since you can't distinguish between taliban and civilans) or as little about 30 and therforce about 100 taliban. Whe had that discussion to define proportionality for our military actions.
Could we please stop to focus on this one guy? Who was almost certainly mentaly ill? It strongly reminds me on the way the media bashes on gamers after a shooting spree...Mornelithe said:lol, yeah, the Japanese were prepared to stop fighting, take for example, Shoichi Yokoi, who finally surrendered in 1972.
EDIT: All that said i can understand the strategic reasons to drop the bombs. I am just strongly against overriding ethics because of strategy.
EDIT2: The argument that the US didn't knew about the power of the bombs was certainly true for the first one but by the time they dropped the second one they most certainly knew about the power of those things.