Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the reckoning

The Daily Telegraph ^ | August 13, 2012 | Dan Jones

[Cincinatus]

‘There are no civilians in Japan.” This was the judgment of a US Air Force intelligence report produced before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during August 1945. The meaning was clear. The global conflict that had raged since 1939 had become a total war. London, Coventry, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo and many other cities had all suffered “strategic bombing”. The leading participants in the Second World War did not view civilian population as pure collateral. By 1945 they were the principal targets.

The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 respectively were the ultimate expressions of total war. Little Boy and Fat Man were exploded over cities that had scant military value and were inhabited by large numbers of ordinary people, whose lives and properties were dramatically and cruelly destroyed. The broad military and political aim was supposedly to shock Japan into agreeing “unconditional surrender”.

But did the means – 180,000 total dead and wounded on the days that the bombs were dropped and tens of thousands more later as a result of radiation poisoning – justify the end of bringing the Second World War to a close? Was it necessary, indeed, to drop the bombs at all?

[Myrddin]

Check the population demographics. That will go a long way to understanding the difference.

[John O]

I can’t quite muster up your grim enthusiasm for mass slaughter. Dropping the A-Bomb was a neccessary evil, but it certainly wasn’t something to be inordinately proud of.

Never said I was proud. Dropping the bomb was a necessity. Dropping more of them could have been a necessity. I am however, guilt free about the whole thing. They attacked first, they deserved everything they got.

[John O]

John O->They gave up all right to exist at that time and exist now only because of our mercy.

Sopater->I intend to apply that well reasoned logic to anyone who attacks me, my family, my country, or anyone else without provocation. Thank you for putting it so well.

Exactly. An armed society is a polite society. If every one knows that attack will be met with extinction, only the most stupid will attack. (and will be quickly driven to extinction, resulting in a betterment of mankind and the world)

[Dilbert San Diego]

Also true, that liberal hero FDR rounded up American citizens and put them in the internment camps.

I have found that liberals don’t do well when confronted with inconvenient truths.

Was Al Gore “projecting” a bit, when he titled his book about global warming “An Inconvenient Truth”? I have gotten much mileage out of that book and title, and used it to poke fun at liberals on other issues.