[PreciousLiberty]

“No. If the intent was the indiscriminate killing of the innocent, then the means is just a technical detail. It doesn’t matter whether you kill them with incendiaries or nukes, with a bomb, abortion or a baseball bat.”

The “intent” was to strike military targets in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as destroying the Japanese will to resist. The civilian deaths were “collateral damage”. In terms of intent, the firebombings of Tokyo, Dresden and other cities were less defensible. Note that even today, there is unavoidable collateral damage in military conflict. Are our soldiers “murderers”? I think not.

(As an aside, war in biblical times was typically in many ways much more barbaric than today.)

Personally, I think the decision to drop the bombs was a good one, for reasons given many other places in this thread.

You might also want to reflect on the fact that nuclear weapons, bolstered by the effects of their actual usage, have probably saved countless millions of lives since WWII by preventing another world war.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I think the number of strictly collateral civilian casualties incurred from hitting Hiroshima's military targets with incendiaries could have been very high, even possibly higher than using the A-bombs. That could have been justified if it could be shown that it was the best way to shorten the war by a month, avoid invading southern Kyushu and save a couple hundred thousand lives.

However, this raises questions:

• with the extremely heavy Japanese troop buildup in Kyushu, why would the US nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and NOT nuke Kyushu?

• If the aim was to shorten the war, why wouldn't the US stipulate beforehand that they would spare Hirohito and his family (as they ended up doing anyway)?

• And if the aim was not

  It seems to me that Truman made the decision to hit soft civilian targets rather than the available, hugely significant military targets; and that the war could have been shortened by stipulating in advance what we already were prepared to do anyway (spare the royal family and allow some of the Japanese leadership the opportunity to "save face"); and that the actual plan was to achieve a psychological shock/terror effect by slaughtering civilians.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Big typo, sorry. The last part of that second paragraph, followed by the third paragraph, was supposed to be this:

• And if the aim was not quite simply the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities together with their population, why did the USA choose precisely the weapons which would do that and nothing else?

It seems to me that Truman made the decision to hit soft civilian targets rather than the available, hugely significant military targets; and that the war could have been shortened by stipulating in advance what we already were prepared to do anyway (spare the royal family and allow some of the Japanese leadership the opportunity to "save face"); and that the actual plan was to achieve a psychological shock/terror effect by slaughtering civilians.