To be clear, it isn’t the question that is the story.
The story is that the question came up again, in the news, because Tucker Carlson said it was “evil.”
“My ‘side’ has spent the last 80 years defending the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians… like, are you joking? If you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil.”
Tucker is on his way to going Full Glenn Beck. Never go Full Glenn Beck.
In a perfect world Japan would have seen the error of their ways and not spend 60 year rampaging over the east killing around sixteen million civilians. Or we could have worked things out with hugs. We do not live in a perfect world.
We live in a world where the Japanese solders had contests to see who could chop off the most civilian heads in a certain time span.
We had a world where of the millions of Chinese POWs captured only 56 survived the war. Not 56 thousand. Not 56 hundred. 56.
We had a world where the Japanese forced civilian females into brothels.
We had a world where the Japanese soldiers would pour liquid nitrogen on living POWs and civilians and break their limbs off. And that was the least nightmarish of the medical torture.
I will not mention the cannibalism because that was not the official government policy. The rest of what I listed was approved by the Japanese government.
Imperial Japan was a horror show that refused to stop.
When we had offered terms earlier in 1945 they took it as a sign of weakness and doubled down.
I have lived in Japan, I like the Japanese people and culture, but from the 1880s through 1945 they went stark staring bonkers. They shocked and horrified the Nazis.
They had to be stopped and honestly I do not think anything less would have worked. They thought that they could hold out until they could unleash on the world their weaponize version of the Yersinia pestis on the world. That was planned for fall of 1945. They figured they could hold out until that point. Until they lost two cities in a week.