Posted on 08/05/2015 1:34:09 PM PDT by DFG
Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m wondering if we’ve come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world’s only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people — slowly and painfully — leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
This sort of bedwetting, handwringing rubbish is the mark of a senile intellectual movement that can no longer distinguish reality. No apology should ever be made to a bunch of sneak-attacking thugs who beheaded and tortured prisoners, invaded other countries to force them into a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”, and dropped poison gas onto villages that refused to grow their rice for them. Atomic war was a just and deserved response, and the fact that we only nuked two of their cities is a monument to their own stupidity and greed (if they conceded after the first one there would have not been a second) and a monument to our forbearance- the rational response would have been to continue nuking cities until none remained.
250k KIA in A-bombs ?
Somebody tell him that, that many people died in the Battle for Okinawa.
Now what ?
Great story.
We didn't have any more ... by August, 1945 we had produced enough material to make 3 devices. We detonated a plutonium device in New Mexico, to make sure it would work. We then detonated a uranium weapon in Hiroshima (much simpler design, no testing deemed necessary) and a second plutonium weapon in Nagasaki.
And that was IT.
By early 1946, though, we were crankin' 'em out.
Every year at this time of our annual rite of self-flagellation bums like this crawl out of the woodwork to spout their guilt tripe. I say f-that noise. My father was in Europe when the bombs fell on Japan and he and his comrades were more than happy to have the war end in our favor and head home instead of hitting the beach (again), only this time in Japan. That alone is reason enough for me not to be sorry they ended the war as they did.
Thank God for the Bomb.
Saved even more Japanese lives in the end, compared to what would have happened with an invasion.
Also kept the Soviets out of at least half of Japan.
“The B29’s bombing out of the Marianas killed magnitudes more people and destroyed more cities than the bombs at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”
Reading the FR threads of WWII+70 years it is heartbreaking to read almost every day of a new record of planes and tonnages dropped on Japan. (The other day they had a list of cities and the destruction was over 50% for all of them. One was listed as 98.5% destroyed.) The bombs will seem like a relief to me.
Just read an article written by some higher up in Japan at the time. It was written at the time of the bombs - and that the U.S. had given Japan a gift of grace by those bombs, and provided those in Japan that wanted peace the final argument that they should accept the unconditional surrender.
I am aware of that- I was merely pointing out what would have been the rational response, not the one we were actually capable of.
Heck - the Japs were still arguing about whether to sign the peace treaty and were in a meeting about it when they heard the news of the second bomb. And even after that the military die-hards tried to stop the peace treaty.
OK ... not everyone knows that.
As I recall, there was some effort put into convincing the Japanese leadership that we intended to keep nuking them, and that we were capable of doing so. Deception is an important tactic in warfare.
Japan got off easy....dropping the bombs was the compassionate thing to do considering the carnage that would have ensued had we not done it. They are better off now, we are better off now.
What really is sad is pretty soon, the only things they will teach about WWII are:
-How we didn’t negotiate in good faith with the Japanese, so they had no choice but to bomb Pearl Harbor.
-How we allowed The Holocaust to happen by not bombing the death camps.
-And they will talk about the Internment Camps ad nauseum, of course.
-The Soviet Union defeated Hitler alone, without any outside help, and we waited too long for D-Day, just to ensure more Russians died.
-We bombed Dresden out of sheer blood lust (ditto for Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
” Their figure: 40,000 — far below the half-million he would
after the war. “
Only 40,000 US soldiers would die. Tsk Tsk, You mean only forty thousand soidiers would die?
Even if this BS number was all that would have died that is 40,000 were saved by the bomb!
No one knew nor could have known how many would die if they was an invasion but the losses no doubt would have been huge and consider not only those that would give their lives but those that would have spent the rest of their lives maimed.
I have to keep telling myself that a majority of Americans don’t think this way and its only the looney left’s control of the media that makes it seem prevalent..
While I think you meant Iran, the effect is the same.
I think that , aside from nearing the anniversary of the event, there is the usual determination by those who ultimately push this crap to disarm us in the face of that.
Thankfully, they remain unable to sway public opinion, even after all these years.
The national Labour MP Harold Nicolson recorded in his war diaries that the Ministry of Information censors had refused to publish the wording of a leaflet, of which two million copies had been dropped over Berlin, on the grounds that "we are not allowed to disclose information that might be of value to the enemy."
When the enemy is less dangerous to government than the governed, democracy cannot long last.
Joe,
Yep, I meant Iran. I was working with OIF documents most of the day and thus typed it while meaning Iran.
And you’re right in your other comment.
G-F
More were killed in the bombing of Tokyo than either attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
First of all, I have never seen evidence of "most historians" agreeing on that. I've seen a whole lot of sober, measured skepticism expressed by historians on that point.
It depends on whether they thought the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering before August 6, 1945 --- or not. I would not be the one to make the call on that, because I haven't got the military experience and expertise.
But some people DO have that kind of expertise. As the article points out,
"Six of the seven five-star generals and admirals of that time believed that there was no reason to use them, that the Japanese were already defeated, knew it, and were likely to surrender before any American invasion could be launched. Several, like Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, also had moral objections to the weapon. Leahy considered the atomic bombing of Japan “barbarous” and a violation of 'every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.'"
I don't think these American military leaders were pinkos, pacifists or fools.
"What’s the problem with that."
In terms of an ethic of killing, there is a difference between targeting soldiers/combatants/military assets, and civilians/noncombatants/civilian values.
Most people in the world today at least profess to recognize this distinction (except for ISIS and their ilk).
It's hard to put it any clearer than this:
" Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and humankind itself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." (Gaudium et Spes, para. 80, 1962)
Utterly crushing thre Japanese military/political machine would have been justice. Incinerating civilians with a deliberately indiscriminate weapon of mass destruction, was murder. That should be clear when you consider that General Douglas MacArthur and his staff wrongly succeeded in exonerating Emperor Hirohito and all members of the imperial family from criminal prosecutions.
Thus in the end, 250,000 civilians were killed, and the Emperor Hirohito was not.
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