dropping the bomb on japan? yes or no?

[BlackMunz]

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.

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.

Oh boy this will become great...
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.

lol, yeah, the Japanese were prepared to stop fighting, take for example, Shoichi Yokoi, who finally surrendered in 1972.

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...

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.

 

[emeraldrafael]

No, its just hard to reason with people that dont like to see facts. Numbers are numbers, thats what it comes down to. Money is money, thats another thing it comes down to. It was the least costly, least expensive option. And that means its a go. FOR ANY COUNTRY IN A TIME A WAR. Wars are costly, so the lest you spend, the better you are off in the end.

Worthless point, since America would have spent the least money if they would have simply accepted Japan's conditional surrender.

And again, revenge comes into it. besides, that, You also need retributions, and an almost complete knowledge that this wont happen agian. We wanted them to know we werent taking this shit again, and we wouldnt give them the chance. We also needed to show that we didnt take kindly to a sneak bombing on a navel base on US territory.

 

[Knight Templar]

With the power of retrospect we can say it was not necessary to use nuclear weapons. But that was not so clear at the time.

 

[zombays]

Well, let's see from the whole form, USA would send Japan oil, World War 2 happens, news spreads around about the Camps and USA, doing the absolute moral thing, start pulling back their oil. Obviously, Japan goes batshit angry and Pearl Harbor happens, 1 or 2 years of fighting, USA says "FUCK THIS SHIT!" and bombs Hiroshima. For some reason, Japan doesn't surrender, WUH-BLAM! Nagaski happens. THEN they surrender, only 1 survivor of BOTH nukes was alive but died earlier this year. So, yeah, I don't know what was wrong with either bombs.

 

[YesConsiderably]

No it doesn't.

I informed you of Japan's size as a way of illustrating that one guy's behaviour really doesn't reflect on the whole of the country.

We were talking about Japan's willingness to cease fighting, yeah? He may have been residing on Guam, but that doesn't bring Guam or its people into the discussion.

He was on Guam for 27 years, stop playing stupid. You said Japan was a big place, but failed to actually look into where this man surrendered. You talk about average American intelligence like you're anything special. Clearly, you are not.

You cannot possibly be this dense.

Step 1. We were talking about Japan's willingness to surrender.
Step 2. You cited one man's actions as though they were representative of the way the rest of Japan would react.
Step 3. I said they were not representative of the way the rest of Japan would react.
Step 4. You started crying about Guam, as though it had any relevance to the discussion.

No, I specifically stated the man's name, because I was pulling you into looking like the typical stupid American you asserted I was. You walked right into it, and are now attempting to skirt the issue by feigning stupidity.

No... it pretty much went down as i just described. Guam has nothing to do with the discussion, so maybe you should try a little harder with your next carefully laid out trap?

Maybe you could explain why his being on Guam is so significant to whether or not Japan would have surrendered?

As for your next post... Of course you get extremists, like your man in Guam, but the vast majority of the population stopped fighting when Japan surrendered.

I can't make it any clearer. Japan surrendered and most of her people stopped fighting.

 

[spinFX]

I've seen this thread 3 times. This being the 3rd. The previous 2 times had much better original posts. Including facts, links, famous quotes (one of them did). This one has poor grammar and no thought into it :S

Anyway on topic, same thing I said last time: I'm a vengeful person. It's the whole "wake the sleeping giant" thing.

 

[archvile93]

I have to agree simply because far more lives would've been lost on both sides (and not just millitary losses). It also prevented the Russians from invading as and demanding part of Japan as well, creating the same situation as there was in Germany after the war.

 

[zahr]

The Japanese were monsters, war criminals; they deserved complete annihilation. Pity America only had two bombs ready.

 

[lordswift]

Its in the past and it ended the war. i say it was a tough call but it worked out ok. Yes it killed thousands and we humans are probabaly paying for that decision in rises in cancer and stuff possibly due to radiation from nukes.
no real need to discuss whether or not it was a good thing to do considering it was done. cant change the past

 

[the clockmaker]

Like I said somewhere else in this thread, the bombs were the best thing for all parties involved, including Japan (excluding Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of course). Looking at East Germany surrendering to the USA was the best option for Japan.
Talking about Goetterdaemmerung, such actions mostly fail because once the enemy troops actually arrive civilians tend to lose their will to fight despite previous claims.
It one thing to talk about your commitment but a whole different story to give up everything you own and engage forces that greatly overwhelm you in guerillia warfare.
Germans actually weren't all that reasonable before the big guns came.

Well I will concede that it is impossible to entirely know for certain how they would have reacted, but such a risk, taken unessecarily, could not have been taken by the allies. But from all sources, the people of Japan actually had the fanatisim (christ my spelling just gets worse and worse) that the Germans claimed to have. Consider, from 1941-45 35000 japanese soldiers surrendered. from 1941-1945, 1400000 germans surrendered. That points to, amongst situational differances, a massive cultural gap between the two. But for the most part I agree with you.

 

[Lord_Panzer]

The Americans think the nuke won the war.
The Russians think their entry into the war ended the war.
The Japanese think they were about ready to give up and both Hiroshima and USSR invasion tipped them over.

Personally, I think the nuke was what really did it. The firebombing campaign did more damage and killed more people, but it was routine by that point. The ability to obliterate a city in an instant? That's new, and from the Japanese perspective pants-shittingly terrifying. I don't think the second bombing would have been necessary, but by Jesus it sure drove the point home.

 

[Staskala]

No, its just hard to reason with people that dont like to see facts. Numbers are numbers, thats what it comes down to. Money is money, thats another thing it comes down to. It was the least costly, least expensive option. And that means its a go. FOR ANY COUNTRY IN A TIME A WAR. Wars are costly, so the lest you spend, the better you are off in the end.

Worthless point, since America would have spent the least money if they would have simply accepted Japan's conditional surrender.

And again, revenge comes into it. besides, that, You also need retributions, and an almost complete knowledge that this wont happen agian. We wanted them to know we werent taking this shit again, and we wouldnt give them the chance. We also needed to show that we didnt take kindly to a sneak bombing on a navel base on US territory.

Retribution by killing civilians. That's rich.
Pointing your finger at others and saying "But they were worse!" will always be the most pathetic argument you can bring to the table.
Japan was ready to yield to all demands except removing the Emperor and the monarchy. And you know what the best part is? When japan surrendered after the nukes were dropped, the USA let Hirohito sit in his throne anyway.

 

[Therumancer]

Genocide is if you are trying to wipe out every single member of an ethnicity, and effectively erase an entire genotype from the planet. What happened during World War II was not even close. Even had we dropped dozens of A-bombs and literally wiped all of the islands clean of human life, it still wouldn't have been genocide. For us to attempt Genocide we would have had to not only murder every Japanese on American soil (rather than simply imprisoning them) and actively hunt them down throughout the entire world and kill them to a man. Nothing of the sort was even suggested.

One of the touchy things about Japan is that dropping those A-bombs was actually a great act of mercy. I think that despite many of the complaints, a lot of Japanese feel that way too which is one of the reasons there is such an odd love-hate thing with the US.

Japan during World War II was not like it was today, the entire culture was ignorant and pretty much brainwashed towards fanaticism. Had we actually invaded and tried to take them by conventional means we would have had to kill them to a man anyway. The level of fanatical opposition we would have received would have made the final days of fighting in Germany against The Volkssturm and groups like The Hitler Youth seem absolutly heavenly in comparsion as these guys threw themselves at us and died in a heroic last stand to the person. That's just how they were wired at that time.

Dropping the A-Bombs pretty much demonstrated that there would be no going out with a roar, or honorable last stand. They would either surrender, or die like dogs. Either way there was no honorable or "acceptable" way for this to end so they chose the lesser of two evils from their perspective.

It's hard to reconcile this with a lot of liberal viewpoints nowadays, but that's simply how it was at the time. I've read quite a bit about it from both perspectives. Even in Anime and the like you see a lot of things dealing with those events, not just anti-nuke attitudes, but arguements made by various factions that Japan should have chosen to die then rather than live on in it's current form... where they are under constant US occupation (we base a massive amount of military there and use it as a foothold into the far east). You see some referances to this kind of attitude among "honorable bad guys" in things like "Gasaraki" or even "Blue Seed". Of course Anime isn't really the best example of anything, but probably provides some examples that my fellow nerds will understand.


When I pick on liberalism here, understand that right now there has been an effort by the "Peace At Any Price" crowd and the UN to try and extend the definition of Genocide to simply trying to wiped out an idealogy or culture. This definition being sold largely to try and prevent the demonization of Muslims and the escalation of warfare and hostilities, as well as to provide rhetoric for other conflits.

I consider this inherantly ridiculous and naive, because when you get down to it what we did to the Nazis would also be considered Genocide, as we pretty much stomped that entire ideaology as far out of existance as one can. It got turned from a massive global movement into a lunatic fringe, and even after the end of the war you had Nazi Hunters (mostly from Isreal) hunting down and killing buck privates, janitors, and moron camp guards that were known to be Nazis, not to mention people who were just known to be sympathizers. It's been a nasty business going on for decades, and has died down largely because it's increasingly hard to find surviving Nazis from the war, because of the simple passage of time.

While it gets off subject, the point here being that I think people toss the word "Genocide" around with ridiculous ease. While one could call dropping the A-bombs an act of mass murder (though given it was during a properly fought war, I don't think it could be considered "murder" fairly), genocide is pushing it to a ridiculous degree, it wasn't even close.

 

[bl4ckh4wk64]

The Japanese were monsters, war criminals; they deserved complete annihilation. Pity America only had two bombs ready.

Fuck you. I had relatives in Japan during WWII.

 

[Canid117]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill

seriously guys words to live by.

 

[emeraldrafael]

No, its just hard to reason with people that dont like to see facts. Numbers are numbers, thats what it comes down to. Money is money, thats another thing it comes down to. It was the least costly, least expensive option. And that means its a go. FOR ANY COUNTRY IN A TIME A WAR. Wars are costly, so the lest you spend, the better you are off in the end.

Worthless point, since America would have spent the least money if they would have simply accepted Japan's conditional surrender.

And again, revenge comes into it. besides, that, You also need retributions, and an almost complete knowledge that this wont happen agian. We wanted them to know we werent taking this shit again, and we wouldnt give them the chance. We also needed to show that we didnt take kindly to a sneak bombing on a navel base on US territory.

Retribution by killing civilians. That's rich.
Pointing your finger at others and saying "But they were worse!" will always be the most pathetic argument you can bring to the table.
Japan was ready to yield to all demands except removing the Emperor and the monarchy. And you know what the best part is? When japan surrendered after the nukes were dropped, the USA let Hirohito sit in his throne anyway.

Yeah, but thats how war is always fought. We are right,t ehy are wrong for reasons a, b, and c. and hey, gotta let him feel he won something.

 

[Arehexes]

There are no rules to war, it's who ever has the biggest guns win. Much like which ever kid spends the most on yugioh cards wins.