The Hiroshima Rorschach Test

WAll Street Journal ^ | August 6, 2009 | WARREN KOZAK

[libstripper]

On this day 64 years ago, an American B-29 named the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. We know that as many as 80,000 Japanese died instantly. We know the city was pulverized, and we know that an estimated 100,000 additional people died later from radiation poisoning. We also are aware that the Hiroshima bomb, and the Nagasaki bomb dropped three days later, ushered in the atomic era.

At the time of the event, 85% of the American public favored dropping the atomic bombs, according to a Gallup poll (10% disapproved). Over the years, that attitude has changed. By 2005, Gallup found only 57% of Americans thought the bomb was necessary, while 38% disapproved. Most of those polled were born after the event.

[Northern Yankee]

I think of this often.

My father could have been one of them.

My father flew B-29's out of Guam. There is no doubt they would have been involved. Even though the Japanese air force was pretty well defeated, you never assumed anything on missions over Japan.

[Talisker]

Not sure what this is supposed to tell me about Fukagawa.

It's supposed to make you hate America and love Fukagawa - black and white, period.

And if you don't believe me, show the passage to a liberal and ask for their interpretation. They'll make it very clear - black and white.

[Talisker]

The road not taken was to negotiate a peace in slightly better faith, instead of in implacable self righteousness.

Better faith based on what, exactly? And given that we were fighting an entire country which had openly and repeatedly declared they lived by an interpretation of Bushido that meant that they would all fight to the death, and had murdered millions of people to prove it, what is your criterion for determining the difference between implacable common sense, and implacable self-rightiousness?

Quite frankly, your position seems to be based on that same implacable self-rightiousness you are decrying, as if situational pursuit of peace is unarguably superior to fighting by default. In which case, just exactly how would you propose people muster the implacable violence necessary to destroy totalitarian monsters?

Or is that a debunked postmodern dichotomy which has been found to be the cause of inciting self-defense aggression in poor, misunderstood totalitarians, and so serves as it's own negation?

[Poe White Trash]

I think that the idea that the Reds would pin down the Japanese army in Manchuria and provide the US with logistical help (e.g., access to Soviet air bases) took form early on. Stalin promised Soviet entry into the war at Tehran (1943), and again at Yalta in February 1945.

So, if what you claimed earlier is true —

>>> >>> Once Russia agreed to attack Manchuria and actually did so, there was nothing whatever left to gain from it [unconditional surrender]. <<<

— then I don’t see either why there would be any necessity to keep with the idea after November 1943 (if what was needed was just an agreement for the Soviets to invade) or how you could say that the US stopped gaining from it in relation to Soviets “actually” invading since the Soviets started their invasion 3 days after Hiroshima was nuked.

Then again, as I stated earlier, the reasons for the (not-so-) “unconditional” policy with Japan were many and ever-changing.

The “unconditional surrender” policy wasn’t remotely symmetrical in the sense that for the Allies the “unconditional” for Germany was very strong, whereas it was “weaker” for Japan, whose “unconditional” surrender was actually given conditions early on. And Japan DID want to split the allies; they were just unable to do so (the Soviets ignored their diplomatic overtures).

What the US COULD do and what it WANTED to do were two different things that changed with the winds of war and diplomacy. Given the Soviet’s untrustworthiness as an ally — especially after Yalta — I don’t doubt that Truman would have been happy if Uncle Joe stayed out of the conflict if he didn’t feel the need to have him there to help reduce US casualties. A necessary evil, as it were. The A-bomb changed all that. In the end, many of the Soviet Union’s ambitions — a post-war Japan occupied by US and Soviet armies — were not realized thanks to our use of it. I gather that what Truman wanted was a prompt and relatively bloodless — in terms of American casualties — end to the Pacific War. That’s what he got with the use of the A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately, what Grew and Stimson wanted was irrelevant because — luckily for us, the Japanese and many others — Truman decided he didn’t want to wait... and wait... and wait for the Japanese to get off their duffs, stop killing people, and FINALLY surrender.

>>> A peace reached without that unconditionality and also without the atomic bombings would have been less draconian, sure... <<<

...And apparently was not a real possibility at the time —according to every military historian I’ve read who was not driven by a pacifist agenda or blinded by an anti-American or anti-Truman animus.

>>> What isn’t beside the point is the *moral requirement* to *seek peace* without *unnecessary loss of life*, if it can be had without sacrifice of the just political goals of the war. Grinding their noses in it isn’t such a just goal, and removing the emperor wasn’t one we actually sought. Killing more people just to avoid any need to offer it, was not morally justified. <<<

Truman was *seeking peace.* He got it — the war ended. What constitutes *unnecessary loss of life* was in large part the basis for his decision to use the A-bombs: Truman wanted to avoid the slaughterhouse that would have been Operation DOWNFALL. Many offers of peace had been made to the Japanese Imperial Gov’t — the Potsdam Declaration being the latest — and they were *rejected.* Your notion that the Japanese were suing for peace in the sping and summer of 1945 and that, if only we had guaranteed the personal safety of the Emperor, we would have had peace overnight is a fantasy unsupported by what I’ve seen on the historiography on the topic.

>>> But those are the vanity of the prince and not a legitimate right. <<<

It seems to me that you are less interested in understanding the end of the Pacific War, and the use of the A-bombs to achieve this, than in trying to besmirch Truman’s actions at the time.

[Poe White Trash]

>>> “Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”

“Any act of war aimed at the indiscriminate destruction of cities or of extensive geographic areas together with their population, is a crime against God and against humanity itself. It is firmly and unequivocally condemned.”

These are not obscure sentences. I, for one, can find the subjects and verbs. <<<

These are not obscure sentences, although when seen in its fuller context the statement from “Total Warfare” — section 80 of _Gaudium et Spes_ — seems more directed at the possibility of all-out nuclear war per se, not the limited use of nuclear weapons during a war.

>>> They share a rather “firm and unequivocating” tone because they come from the same source, “Gaudium et Spes,” the Seconde Vatican Council’s “Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.” <<<

Your juxtaposition of abortion/infanticide and acts of war “aimed at the indicriminate destruction of cities” is curious. Abortion is not an act of war, nor is it indiscrimate. I write as someone who is not a Catholic but who is both firmly against the legality of elective abortion AND sypathetic to the US’s use of A-bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

>>> They stem from one and the same moral principle, which is that you must not kill indiscriminately, nor target the innocent (the noncombatant, the civilian population, the child) for destruction. <<<

Once again, abortion is not the indiscrimate killing of innocents. The abortionist & mother, in the US at least, are quite discriminating.

But let’s focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: in what sense was the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” the indiscriminate killing of individuals, and in what sense was the US targeting the innocent for destruction? I’m not asking these questions to be captious; I’d just like to have you clarify your position. As for me, I would argue that

A.) Although the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) killed many individuals, it was not indiscriminate killing. Also, it was not murder.

B.) The US was not targeting the innocent for destruction.

>>> The reference here is in the commandment prohibiting murder. <<<

“THOU SHALT NOT MURDER” — I think this what Catholics would call “divine law,” correct? However, those who defend the use of the A-bombs in Japan deny that what happened was murder. Be careful that you don’t beg the question that is at issue here.

>>> you’ll find few who believe in “absolute moral law,” and most of the brainwashed in the Enemedia scoff at the very idea of “God”. <<<

I, for one, find the notion of God’s Eternal Law ==> Divine Law ==> Natural Law, where “==>” means “is a reflection of,” quite compelling.

>>> But for those of us who take God and moral law seriously -— well, there you are. <<<

I try to take God and moral law seriously, and yet I do not see how the dropping of the A-bomb on Hiroskima during WWII was an evil act. Perhaps you could explain to me how I am in error.

[Poe White Trash]

>>> but the offensive fact is that the atomic bomb was not “targeted” on the military targets, it was intrinsically and intentionally indiscriminate. <<<

Actually, I think that both cities as cities were considered to be legitimate military targets (based upon international criteria), and had been for some time. I don’t think “indiscriminate” applies here. “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, not 10 miles out in the suburbs of Hiroshima.

>>> However the ordinary people of Hiroshima were noncombatants. In any society, the gardener gardens. The mother mothers. The just man, as Hopkins says, justices. <<<

The ordinary people of Hiroshima had the misfortune of living in a military target during a time of war. Perhaps they would have been better served by their (Imperial Japanese) government had the Army barracks, war industries and docking facilities for warships had been located far away from where their urban homes.

>>> The point of the prohibition of the targeting of civilians, or the intentionaly indiscriminate destruction of a city as target (city=target bombing) is that even in war this is not permitted. <<<

You have not established that the US was targeting civilians. Just because civilians were killed doesn’t mean that they were targeted. If the US had wanted to maximize civilian casualties, they would have deployed their A-bombs differently.

Actually, if the US had wanted to maximize civilian casualties amongst the Japanese it would have not used the A-bombs at all, and instead would gone ahead with Operation DOWNFALL.

>>> If the intentional killing of tens of thousands of civilians does not count as murder, it is hard to maintain with a straight face that the commandment aganst murder actually prohibits anything at all, if you’ve got a “good enough reason.” <<<

Once again, why should I believe that the killing of tens of thousands of people by dropping an A-bomb during wartime IS MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO the hundreds of thousands of infants killed in the US each year by their mothers’ use of elective abortion? I honestly don’t see how your “argument by analogy” works in this case.

[JasonC]

First a metacomment. Ortega Gasset speaks of unqualified men handling dangerous ideas, that it stuck him as watching a child playing with a machinegun. Next a point too simple for you to understand - Henry Stimson, secretary of war of the greatest power in the greatest war in world history, having helped bring it to absolute victory, is not a post modern peacenik. Imaginary triumphs over strawmen between your own ears, today, do not defeat totalitarianism. But he sure as hell did.

The debate is not between a united front of participants at the time (plus you) and later critics that you wanted to paint as philosophically unreasonable. It was a live issue at the time, and the correct position was seen and advocated, by clear sighted, rational men holding the gravest responsibility. It just wasn't acted on.

Next reading comprehension. Good faith in negotiations is a term of art that means making demands that are one's actual demands, making them openly and plainly, being as good as one's word, and expecting the same. It means agreement is the actual goal of the negotiations, not playing to a gallery or other extraneous goals. It is usually contrasted with negotiating in bad faith, marked by taking positions that are not one's own policy demands, purely for bargaining purposes; holding out things one doesn't want as bargaining chips, negotiation purely for show and consumption by third parties rather than seeking agreement with the counterparty, deliberate "crossing" behavior of asking not for what one wants, but what one expects the counterparty to be reluctant to give, and the like.

It was in bad faith to demand terms that implied removal of the emperor when there was no need or intention to remove the emperor. It was done for the sake of third party consumption (the electorate, the Russians), and for glory or the appearance of power or of consistency - to appear not to need to negotiate.

What I called "implacable self righteous" is exact and means somehting, it is not a free floating denuncifier. The desire to appear implacable means "cannot be placated", means "will not negotiate". Men may feel a subjective sense of power in it and third parties may even so perceive it, but it is not a source of power itself. It consumes it, spends it. Power gets what it wants and minimizes and neutralizes opposition effectively.

An accepted ultimatum would not have ended the war any less effectively. A rejected one that had been more reasonable and in better faith, would not have precluded the course of action actually taken to win the war.

What you call "situational pursuit of peace" is simply the moral and reasonable demand that the aims of war be kept constantly in view throughout its course, and the continuation of war be subordinated to achieving them. This is in contrast to war for its own sake, war as punishment, war to annihilate the adversary rather than achieve his compliance and one's own political aims. It is the subordination of war to political direction and rational control of that direction for civilized ends - in contrast to, say, a deliberate war of annihilation as Germany proclaimed in Russia, to pick an example.

The US wanted Japan to cease hostilities and to submit to occupation and demilitarization. If it could achieve those ends with less loss of life and no cost to their actual achievement, it had a clear duty to do so. If that depended on the Japanese as well (it did), then the US's duty in the matter was limited to offering that outcome in good faith. It would then by Japan's duty to accept it, on recognizing that keeping the emperor was the only political aim for which they were fighting that the allies would conceed in practice, and that their military situation was hopeless.

Ambassador Grew and Stimson saw this, and Stimson in particular also clearly saw the gravity of the ultimatum. He knew what the atomic bomb meant, not just for the end of that war. As for what knowledge of Japan was behind their proposal, Grew knew Japan better than anyone else involved in the US decision making process. He knew what the emperor meant to the warrior code of the Japanese military. He knew how futile it was to threaten them with a destruction they gloried in accepting, compared to appealing to a point of honor. Stimson heard him out, and gave his mature judgment - among the best ever to serve the United States or any great power, on every sort of subject, I might add - that a clause saying the emperor could remain if Japan laid down arms, would materially increase the chances of the ultimatum being accepted.

There is every reason to believe that judgment is correct. It would have materially increased the chances of the ultimatum being accepted - without raising them to certainty, admittedly. It cost nothing, and it had a significant chance of saving the lives of half a million human beings.

It was wanton to reject that advice. Stimson was right, and Truman was wrong about it.

[Talisker]

First a metacomment. Ortega Gasset...

You really can't comprehend an actual disagreement, can you? You really think that by deluging me with pre-selected definitions, and wrapping them into targeted premises, I won't notice what you're doing. And as for your cheap insults, why bother writing so much if I'm too stupid to understand you? Well, put your wagging finger down. I know your position clearly, and it is wrong.

You deify Stimpson, but you don't go into why he was overruled. On the one hand, he wanted to seek a way to avoid the use of the bomb by allowing the emperor to stay on the throne. On the other hand, this same peacenik ordered the bomb to be used with utmost savagery when it was used. But you cite him as merely being overruled.

How convenient. But the fact is that Stimson went along with his overruling willingly, and only sought to distance himself from the decision when he wrote about it after the war, when people were horrified by the bomb. But Stimpson wanted to win the war with the least possible American deaths, and as you acknowledged fought like hell to accomplish this task. So is it too much to ask that you use your big brain to wonder, just a little bit, what the argument was that got him to so enthusiastically get behind using the bomb?

Your juvenile invocation of good and bad faith might ring appropriate for a civil suit (but only if you've never met a lawyer). However in cases of what amounted to total war, it is the height of naivete'. You invoke the total war of Nazi Germany, but despite all of your verbosity leave out the firebombing of Tokyo and virtually all of the big cities in Japan, or the Japanese slaughter in China or the Phillipines, or their notorious sadism everywhere they went. How convenient for you to forget such extremities, especially since it allows you to invoke "negotiating in bad faith" during such a total war as not being up front with the enemy by being plain about your goals during discussions?

What a puppy you are - at least I hope you are. Otherwise you are clearly aware of your own lack of foundation, and are disingenuously scrambling to hide it. For these are people who, at that point in their history, would cut off your head, and those of your family, rather than talk with you at all - and tell you you were beneath humanity if you didn't die fighting them, because you wanted to negotiate rather than fight to the death! Hello? Do you get that?

That's why I invoked Bushido, but apparently it was "too simple a concept for you to understand." What was explained to Simpson, and what he not only went along with, but helped with it's savagery, was that the Japanese people of the time needed to be broken. Otherwise there would never be genuine peace with them, because they were driven by delusion.

That was why their fighting spirit itself, their belief in themselves as superior masters of the human race, their divine justifications for all of their rape and slaughter - in other words, the driving force behind their fighting - must be utterly destroyed. And the only way to do this was precisely to force their unqualified surrender with their own offering of their emperor. Nothing less would do, by their own value system.

You mock our allowing the emperor to remain after our use of the bombs and their resulting unqualified surrender, as if it brands us as hypocrites. But you just show your own ignorance - it was the offering of their emperor that was their moment of true collapse. Our offering of their emperor back to them was compassion on our part, as the issue was no longer a threat to us. Ask any Japanese person about the shame of having to offer their emperor to sue for peace - the offer was the key thing. that was what finally broke their arrogance.

You say Stimpson "knew how futile it was to threaten them with a destruction they gloried in accepting, compared to appealing to a point of honor ...that a clause saying the emperor could remain if Japan laid down arms, would materially increase the chances of the ultimatum being accepted."

Yet history shows you to be dead wrong - the two bombs broke these supposed "people of honor," who were actually delusional sadistic cowards, and had them groveling so hard they offered their emperor in order to escape the total destruction they loved to bray they would gladly accept. And that was why the bombs had to be dropped - to show the Japanese people themselves that they were self-deluded liars, that they were human beings like all of the other human beings on the planet, and that their reliance on sadistic brutality, force and murder was not something they lived above, but which could and would crush them just as they crushed others.

And most importantly, that they had no "divine protection" from such complete destruction, and so any belief in such protection was false. that was what Stimpson was told must be done to get "peace" from the Japanese, because - as Simpson well knew - that was the invincibility Japanese believed about their inner strength that allowed them to pursue war so savagely, and without any remorse whatever.

And that is what Stimpson finally agreed with, and why he then not only advocated using the bomb, but using it as savagely as possible. Because though the Japanese might have agreed to a surrender without the bomb, they still would believe that they had fought with honor - and they had not. Do you understand? Your equivalent morality does not apply - it is wrong. The Japanese did not fight with honor, or for honor. They were depraved. And because of that, they could never be trusted in any qualified surrender, and would have inevitably rebelled against America again. Their demented definition "honor" would have required it.

Stimpson came to understand this, and that's why he agreed with his overruling, and enthusiastically supported the most savage use of the bomb as possible - to save millions of American and Japanese lives.

And it worked. Japan has completely rejected their murderous, militaristic arrogance, and instead channeled their energies into peaceful, truly admirable world-class business concerns. And why? Because at that time, and for the correct reasons, breaking them to themselves was the right thing to do.

[JasonC]

"You really can't comprehend an actual disagreement, can you?"

Sure. But when you say things like "muster the implacable violence necessary to destroy" and "found to be the cause of inciting self-defense aggression in poor, misunderstood totalitarians", I see a child playing with a machinegun without the slightest idea what it is or does.

"I won't notice what you're doing."

It no doubt shocks you, given how alien good faith is to your entire life and mind, but in fact getting you to notice what I am doing is the sole point in explaining a rational argument to you.

"why bother writing so much if I'm too stupid to understand you?"

Good point. If there were no one else here, I would. I haven't the slightest respect for either your judgment or your morals, so what you think is utterly unimportant to me. The true assessment of the historical issue is my only concern.

"You deify Stimpson"

Actually I man-ify him. The tendency to deification is part and parcel of all the errors involved, both sides, and in practice deification of mortal men is demonization of those serving them.

"why he was overruled"

Actually I spent quite a few words on condemning that "why", which is obvious to all concerned, even yourself. You speak of a need to "break" a people, when the actual political goal of the war was to get Japan to cease hostilities, to occupy it and demilitarize it.

"this same peacenik"

Why are you deliberately idiotic? Do you think it good rhetoric?

"only sought to distance himself from the decision"

Quite false, he never did. I laid out his own position at the time and he never ducked any of his role in a particle of it. As usual, you are reduced to slandering a man whose shoes you are not fit to shine.

"Stimpson wanted to win the war with the least possible American deaths"

Plenty of people wanted that, he also wanted to end it with the least possible loss of all human life. Which is why he was a civilized man and you are a barbarian.

"in cases of what amounted to total war, it is the height of naivete"

On the contrary, that is where it matters most. Clausewitz described the entire tendency and also the need for political direction of war to remain paramount. No one involved is naive in the slightest. You merely confuse your bloodthirsty cynical barbarism for wisdom, when it is mere drift with the current of human folly.

"forget such extremities"

I forget nothing, and know as much about the war as any man alive. You seem to thinks lots of atrocity makes atrocity wonderful and choiceworthy. It has no such effect.

"not being up front with the enemy by being plain about your goals during discussions?"

Yes exactly. If you are busy trying to plan a military operation and want to surprise someone, by all means surprise them. When instead you are delivering an ultimatum they can accept to end the war, or reject to continue the war, then lying about what you want has remarkably less point to it. Especially when you lie in the direction calculated to not end it.

"rather than talk with you at all"

I really pay remarkably little attention to what impotent defeated barbarians want, except to get their compliance. I don't care what you think or want for the same reason - it is of no moral weight whatsoever. You on the other hand think emulating barbarity is just cheeky, because I suppose the best thing about atrocity is the excuse it gives you to indulge your own taste for it.

"had them groveling so hard they offered their emperor"

Except, whoops, the military staged a coup instead. It was the emperor who intervened and changed the country's policy, not the Bushido code warriors. He did so as a civilized man and not as your cartoon. A man as civilized as Stimson, and vastly more civilized than those generals, or Truman, or you.

"their reliance on sadistic brutality, force and murder"

Behold, the beam is in thine own eye.

"they still would believe that they had fought with honor - and they had not."

Many of them did, some did not. The same is true on the US side. Your principles for example - and it is charity to call them that - are without honor.

Fortunately men like MacArthur and Stimson were wiser by far than you are.

[Talisker]

...a child playing with a machinegun without the slightest idea what it is or does. ...how alien good faith is to your entire life and mind... I haven't the slightest respect for either your judgment or your morals, so what you think is utterly unimportant to me. ...Why are you deliberately idiotic? ...you are reduced to slandering a man whose shoes you are not fit to shine. ...he was a civilized man and you are a barbarian. ...You merely confuse your bloodthirsty cynical barbarism for wisdom, when it is mere drift with the current of human folly. ...You seem to thinks lots of atrocity makes atrocity wonderful and choiceworthy. ...You on the other hand think emulating barbarity is just cheeky, because I suppose the best thing about atrocity is the excuse it gives you to indulge your own taste for it. ...vastly more civilized than those generals, or Truman, or you. ...Behold, the beam is in thine own eye. ...Your principles for example - and it is charity to call them that - are without honor.

These words of yours are some of the most hate-filled expressions I've ever read online. You purport to be honorable, and judge honor, and you spew acid like this? How dare you, sir - you are deliberately obscene.

And what have I done? Pointedly disagreed with you, and backed my argument? If you'd respond with such viciousness with words, what would you do if you could use physical weapons?

You write "Fortunately men like MacArthur and Stimson were wiser by far than you are" without noting that those men were 100% behind dropping the bomb, and - in fact - within their own capacities, DID so. That's MY argument, not yours. Do you imagine your beloved Stimson spewed your level of insult at those who argued against him - and whom he then agreed with, and followed to his utmost ability? Your foul words are indefensible.

Your lack of shame is utterly repulsive. You have not rebutted my argument, and you've thrown the slander of a lifetime of rage to cover that fact. You actually have the nerve to preen that "I forget nothing, and know as much about the war as any man alive," when men hardened in battle wouldn't think of spouting such shameful arrogance in a million years.

Your argument is full of holes, and so bankrupt you have to resort to personal abuse rather than address it's faults. And you try to take the high ground of honor while sneering at those who had the courage to do the level of killing that freed people like you to preen. Your extreme abusiveness makes you utterly revolting, and reveals your own argument as indefensible and cowardly.

But I'll leave you with a photo that sums you up - here's a representative of the poor people you would defend with searing hatred in the name of their peace. And let it be known that the person YOU grieve for is HOLDING THE SWORD:

You are depraved, and defend the indefensible. I have made my points, and backed them up, and they have destroyed the very essence of your argument by pointing out the true nature of the Japanese people at that time. You got your butt kicked, and replied with slander, and in doing so made yourself irrelevant. I will not be replying to you again.

[FTJM]

I recall an article “Why We Dropped the Bomb” in Civilization magazine... stated that the Japanese envoy to the US was SHOWN a nuclear detonation in New Mexico. They phoned home to say “It is either a hoax or they can’t have any more, so continue the war”... not like they weren’t warned.

I've always thought that the US should have first dropped a bomb in Japan in an uninhabited or less inhabited part of the country as an example. It still may not have worked but the second bomb could have targeted a city. The Japanese reaction may still have been the same. IIRC, this was overruled but I didn't get a full understanding as to why.

There is little doubt that the bomb ended the war with Japan and it was unlikely that it would have ended any time soon otherwise.

[hocndoc]

It took 2 bombs - after “bombing’ the area with information pamphlets.

[FTJM]

That’s why I said that Japanese reaction might have been the same, necessitating the need for a second or third bomb.

[Talisker]

Imperial Japan was a horrific mad dog entity that had to be stopped. Th Hiroshima bomb was a huge shock treatment that brought the Japanese to their senses and saved millions of lives, most of them Japanese.

You are right, which is why we could not offer them qualified peace, or especially peace while still keeping their emperor. Their believe in their own divine right to savagery needed to be broken, and the only way that would happen was by forcing them to offer their own emperor to save their own skins. They needed to eat their arrogant words about wanting to die rather than surrender, and so the atom bombs were used to force them to admit their own hypocrisy to themselves - without which they could never be trusted under any so-called peace agreement because they would feel bound to violate it in the name of "honor."

Here's the mindset of these "honorable" people at the time the bombs needed to be dropped on them, from Japanese WWII Atrocities (as I have been viciously slandered for my "immorality" on this thread, let's take a look at some examples of the people who supposedly deserved trust, openness and an expectation of peaceful intent in surrender negotiations):

Nanking, China - Over 200,000 Chinese men used for bayonet practice, machine gunned, or set on fire. 20,000 women and girls were raped, killed or mutilated. The massacre of a quarter million people.

China - New officers were indoctrinated to the expectations of war by beheading Chinese captives. The last stage of the training of combat troops was to bayonet a living human and a trial of courage for the officers.

China - Japanese combat medical units moved to China where live bodies were plentiful. If the class was in sutures, a Chinaman was shot in the belly for doctors to practice. Amputations? - then arms were removed. Living people was more instructive than work on cadavers, the students need to get used to blood and screaming.

Manchuria - Bacterial warfare experiments conducted by the infamous medical unit 731. Bombs of anthrax and plague were tested on Chinese cities. This unit also practiced vivisection.

Korea - "Comfort Women" forced by the Imperial Japanese Army to repeatedly provide sex for Japanese soldiers throughout Asia are said to number between 80,000 and 200,000.

Malaya - Japanese troops decapitated 200 wounded Australians and Indians left behind when Australian troops withdrew through the jungle from Muar.

Singapore - Japanese soldiers bayonet 300 patients and staff of Alexandra military hospital 9 Feb 1942.  British women had their hands behind their backs and repeatedly raped. All Chinese residents were interviewed and 5,000 selected for execution.

Wake Island - A construction crew of 1,200 mostly Idaho youths, captured when Wake Island fell, were shipped to Japanese prison camps.  Five were beheaded to encourage good behavior on the trip. The Japanese decided to keep 100 of the civilian contractors on the island to complete the airbase, which became functional in 1943 . When US Navy planes attacked the island, the Japanese commander executed the civilians.

Dutch East Indies - Those Dutch accused of resisting Japan or participating in the destruction of the oil refineries had arms or legs chopped off.   20,000 men were forced into the ocean and machine gunned.  20,000 women and children were repeatedly raped, then many were killed.

Dutch Borneo - The entire white population of Balikpapan was executed.

Java - The entire white male population of Tjepu was executed.  Women were raped. Survivors of USS Edsall (DD-219) are beheaded.

Philippines - Any soldier captured before the surrender was executed.

The Bataan Death March - 7,000 surrendered men died. Those that could not keep up the pace were clubbed, stabbed, shot, beheaded or buried alive. Once the prison camp had been reached, disease, malnutrition and brutality claimed up to 400 American and Filipinos - each day.

Thailand - 15,000 military prisoners and 75,000 native laborers died building a railroad between Bangkok and Rangoon. Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Doolittle Raid, Japan - Three of eight US airmen captured were executed. China - Twenty five thousand Chinese in villages through which the US flyers escaped were slaughtered in a three month reign of terror.

Midway - Japanese destroyers rescued three U.S. naval aviators; after interrogation, all three were murdered. One has stuck in the head with an axe and his hand chopped as he clung to the ship's railing. Two had weighted cans tied to their legs and were thrown overboard.

Attu - Japanese troops overran the medical aid station; after killing the doctors, they bayoneted the wounded.

Makin Atoll - Nine of Carlson's Marine raiders were left behind, hid for two weeks and surrendered. They were beheaded a few weeks later when a ship was not available to take them to a prisoner of war camp.

Milne Bay - In their few days at Milne Bay the Japanese had displayed remarkable brutality. Fifty-nine local people were murdered by the Japanese, often being bayoneted while held prisoner, and in many cases being tortured or mutilated. Not one of the 36 Australians captured by the Japanese survived. All were killed, and some were badly mutilated.

USS Sculpin - Forty-two of submarine Sculpin's crew were picked up by Yamagumo. One, severely wounded, was thrown overboard. Survivors were forced to work in the copper mines at Ashio until released at the end of the war.

Indian Ocean - Capt Ariizumi, ComSubRon One, commanded submarine I-8. He collected from the water and massacred 98 unarmed survivors of the Dutch merchantman he'd sunk. He repeated this performance with 96 prisoners from the American Jean Nicolet in the Maldives. He destroyed the lifeboats and dived, leaving 35 bound survivors on deck. 23 managed to untie their bonds and escape. I-26 was known to have rammed merchant lifeboats from Richard Hovey and machine-gunned those in the water.

Japan - Eight US airmen were used for medical dissection at Kyushu Imperial University with organs removed while the prisoners were still alive.

[Poe White Trash]

Lord Russell of Liverpool’s _The Knights of Bushido_ is still worth reading.

[JasonC]

They were afraid it might not go off, and would leave the Japanese less willing to surrender.

[JasonC]

The Japanese people is an abstraction, guilt is personal. On the principle behind my judgment of you, Acton said it best. "The accomplice is no better than the assassin. The theorist is worse."

On the role of honor in the use of arms, there was a time it was tolerably clear to every schoolboy. Men kill in war to disarm the adversary, to render him unable to harm innocents. When the end can be reached without killing unarmed civilians it should be. To kill the defenseless and unarmed, or to kill for spite or to "break wills" or see men grovel, is shameful, not honorable.

It was honorable to offer the terms actually required politically to end the war, and it was wanton to reject that proposal and insist instead on things not wanted for consistency or prestige, when hundreds of thousands of civilian lives were at stake. None of your obscene desire to "break" a people justifies taking one civilian life; only a necessity to prevent further killing can do so. You allege a necessity but then reject the principle, as well as a way of conforming to that principle. You state your own clearly enough - men may slaughter civilians wholesale until their enemies grovel, the political ends of the war be damned.

You don't seem to notice that is precisely the principle you are condemning Japan for acting upon. But I do.

[Talisker]

The entirety of this subject is a consideration of the psychology of the Japanese of the time, and the nature of the warfare necessary to get them to cease their hostilities - hostilities which pass every definition of mass murder, crimes against humanity, and atrocities so vile their very descriptions make sane people pale to read them.

Additionally, the position I am taking is the one that was not only agreed to by the person you have held up as a paragon of morality - Secretary of War Stimpson, but actually enacted by him, with his complete agreement as to it's severity in it's unexpected use against a mostly civilian population.

So why would you choose Stimpson, of all people, to bathe in your adulation? You claim it's because after the war he wrote that he advised against the use of the bomb as opposed to offering Japan qualified surrender based on leaving their emperor intact, and so this position makes Stimpson some sort of ignored hero of morality.

But you ignore the fact that Stimpson - in reality - went along with the bombing. He didn't resign. He didn't refuse participation. He didn't argue for a lesser impact. No - he thoroughly involved himself in the most savage use of the bomb possible.

And he did it twice.

Why? Because, as I have explained, he was convinced that the position of morality that you are espousing was wrong, because it was based on faulty premises. It was pointed out to him, with the massive backing of the known Japanese atrocities at the time, as well as their collective rule under Bushido, that the Japanese people were not to be considered as a free people. That the collective mindset was so complete, so compelling, so utterly devoid of any acceptence of compassion, and so absolutely cut off from personal morality, that unless the entirety of that collective will was broken, the people would still follow the collective imperative, no matter what surrender document was signed.

Of course, you are well aware of this fundamental premise, and you have been all along. It's why you started your latest post by saying: "The Japanese people is an abstraction, guilt is personal." For you know that, under normal conditions, your statement is a truism. But you also know that the very root of the argument for the need for the bomb was that, for WWII Japan, you statement was exactly wrong. For the Japanese of the time, collective guilt WAS personal guilt. And conversely, personal guilt had the potential to be collective - which is why people committed suicide for their personal guilt, to protect the collective from their personal taint.

And that was the entire damn MORAL problem - the personal had become collective, but - as YOU point out - the collective is, in fact "an abstraction." So, to reach the real people, the abstract collective had to be broken.

What you are also well aware of is that many, many people have considered these issues - I am not arguing anything new. But you have unceasingly defamed me for taking my position, right up to your latest post, with your latest poison being to declare me "worse... than the assassin."

More typically, however, you flood me with insults, most recently: tolerably clear to every schoolboy... to kill for spite or to "break wills" or see men grovel, is shameful... your obscene desire to "break" a people... your own clearly enough - men may slaughter civilians wholesale until their enemies grovel... You don't seem to notice.... All quite satisfying to you, I'm sure.

Yet - do these insults, these defamations, apply to your noble Stimpson, who actually gave the orders to drop the nukes? No! Somehow he is exempt, because he gave a half-assed mea culpa two years later, and found protective bedfellows in the likes of you who refuse - absolutely refuse - to address his overwhelming involvement and support of the bombing of Japan.

I've thought a lot about why you would take such an aggressive position in this issue, and refuse even a modicum of reasonableness in understanding morality of the opposing viewpoints, given the circumstances of the war. Hell, even the Japanese people are more understanding than you are, especially since they admit the bombings saved millions of their lives that would have been taken during an invasion.

But I think you are arguing to protect something else, and that something else is what is driving you. Nuking Japan was morally required because the Japanese people had allowed themselves to become a mind-locked collective. This psychological condition changed the extremity of what was morally required to stop them, by increasing it dramatically. The warfighters of the day, politcally incorrect as they were, recognized this and dealt with it as it needed to be dealt with. But people like you want to undermine that clarity by denying the non-personal collective force that America was really up against, in order to hide the level of aggression necessary to fight ANY collective.

So filth pours out of your mouth, and you claim a moral high ground that Moses couldn't climb, and you sneer about morality and quote literature about cretins who claim to be human.

But it's all just a big dustcloud you've created to hide the reality of a collective mindset, and need for it's total destruction in order to have any chance of freeing those caught in it's hold.

However, it's too late, you know. Too many people understand what is going on now - the internet has badly damaged the ignorance necessary to keep your game going. I know that has nothing to do with whether you will continue to flail away, because your motive is collective. But it is precisely the difference between collective activity and personal activity that is becoming very much a part of people's thinking these days. And the application of morality towards these two very different human psychological models will never be again as hidden as people like you need them to be, in order to successfully argue for the protection of monsters.

[BluesDuke]

One thing not generally known about Henry Stimson---he, and he had full support from then-Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, had hoped, months before the atomic bombing decision was made, that Japan could be steered toward what Forrestal biographers have called a "face-saving surrender," without atomic bombing, that would have the effect (Forrestal himself hinted at this, I think) of neutralising a particular Soviet interest: taking only too-full advantage of ravaged Asian countries and regions.

(The two had another ally one might deem unlikely, considering his not-always-accurate public image as the original Mr. Big Bang: Army Air Force Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, the eventual "Father of SAC," whom one biographer determined was actually against dropping the Big Ones: he may have believed Japan was coming toward a surrender, anyway, thanks in large part to his firebomb campaign on the main Japanese homeland, but also because, for all that they counted their wars by centuries, in a manner of speaking, the firebombing campaign had exhausted Japan enough that the last thing they really wanted was the heavy casualties a land war would bequeath. This didn't prevent LeMay from executing the orders to drop the Big Ones---he was nothing if not a theater commander who still heeded the word of his commander-in-chief---but LeMay was apparently determined not to have to use this weapon if he could avoid it, even if he was, to the day he died, the kind of commander who believed you simply didn't let your enemy know there was anything you wouldn't do to win a war.)

[Talisker]

I've no doubt that Stimpson and the Joint Chiefs, as well as Truman, would have accepted an unconditional surrender without dropping the bomb. And if Japan was truly as ravaged in their own minds as they appeared to be logistically, they would have given just such a surrender.

But instead they wanted to surrender conditionally, not just with the keeping of the emperor, but also with mitigated or even dropped war crimes tribunals, and that's just not the attitude of a beaten enemy. Psychologically they were still angling for a minimum-loss endgame. And if you look at their savagery during the war, it's hard to find a reason to allow such a maniacal and murderous opponant any breathing left before you stop fighting.

It's my opinion that this is why, though they were moral and ethical enough to at least consider not dropping the nukes, those in charge ended up going nuclear anyway. They just weren't seeing the level of defeat that would assure them that Japan really was defeated, and upon their call rested the lives of millions if they were wrong. So they made sure.