***Well, almost a week later... ***
I didn’t know till 1968 that the US bombed japan with conventional bombs after the a-bombs were dropped.
The only reason the libs have their panties in a wad is we accomplished with two bombs what would normally been done with 100 planes loaded with twenty thousand pounds each of high explosives.
Had we hit Hiro and Nag with conventional weapons, killed the same number, nothing owuld have been said.
That's a deliberate, straight-out repudiation of God. The notion that good ends justify evil means is a moral theory condemned ever since St. Paul wrote Romans 3:7-8:
"But if through my falsehood God's truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just."
Some people say 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. Historians record that most of America's WWII military leadership thought Japan was already n the verge of collapse before the atom bombs were used:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3321050/posts
"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.
But the real problem isn't not that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were strategically unnecessary. The real problem is 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 the 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.
Intentionally killing one single innocent person, or indiscriminately killing 250,000 persons, is murder. "Nukes or "incendiaries" doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether they were killed with a bomb, abortion, or a baseball bat.
I dunno. I think they’d probably be bitching about fire storms’ effect on civilians or whatever. As with Germany. They don’t need a logical reason.
Cheers,
Jim