I think the interesting question about Hiroshima is not whether it can be justified or not,

[howard112211]

it is how sincere people are in generalizing the premises upon which they are building up their argument.

People who argue that the bombing was justified generally point out that Japan committed atrocities in China, that Japan started the war against the USA and that the USA was justified in using what ever means necessary because of the losses it was taking. These are actually reasonable arguments that can be made. And I think there is a lot of validity in them.

The question is however, how would the very same people evaluate the situation if it were other countries. Let's say someone makes the argument that "9/11 was justified because of the Highway of Death". A person who argues that Japan deserved the A-Bomb because of Nanking would have to agree with this. Let's say Saddam Hussein actually had posessed a nuke, and had shot it into New York city in 2003 during the invasion. By above reasoning he would have had every right to do so, correct?

If one cannot abstract from a particular event into a general principle that applies to any country equally, then I think one is not making a valid argument.

[sharp_stick]

1. I think you are mistaking the main justification

posited by the Allied Governments at the time and through history which is that by nuking Hiroshima it would make it unnecessary to actually invade the home islands of Japan. The Imperial Japanese leadership had at the time of the bombing pulled vast numbers of soldiers back to the islands in preparation for an invasion.

The invasion of Japan would have been a brutal affair of that there is no question. The question brought up by historians is would it have been brutal enough to justify the bombing. If the allies were to invade Japan and use conventional weapons you can bet that Tokyo would have looked a lot like Berlin did just a few months earlier.

My personal grievance with the nuclear attacks wasn't the attack on Hiroshima, it's the attack on Nagasaki. Allied command wanted to make sure the Japanese knew that the Hiroshima bomb wasn't the only one but I think they could have waited a bit longer after giving the Japanese the surrender ultimatum.

[Bigmack]

3. Read the other Hiroshima threads on DU...

My threads, at least, point out that the invasion wouldn't have happened. The war was over before the bombs were dropped.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4493757&mesg_id=4494715

[david13]

31. The war was in no way, shape or form over. The Japanese, due to a culture and

society very different from ours, very difficult for us to understand now and then, had every intention of fighting to the death. The Emperor emphasized that to every man, woman and child.
Have you ever heard of Kamikaze fighters? I still don't understand that one. To me the only battle I want, is the one I get out of alive.
dc

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. The use needs to be evaluated in historical context with knowledge available at the time

In that context, it was a correct and even moral decision. Some may not see it that way today.

[geckosfeet]

4. Some did not see it that way then either.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. Clearly they were a tiny minority at the time

[H2O Man]

8. "In matters of conscience,

the law of the majority has no place. It is slavery to be amenable to the majority no matter what its decisions are." -- Gandhi

I think that people can make solid cases for and against the bombing. And I've had the chance to hear from people who held both positions at the time. However, I do not think anyone with a grasp of issues of morality would consider claiming it was "moral" to drop atomic weapons on cities occupied by human beings. That sounds like something that Curtis LeMay would have said. Even if it were the "correct" decision in the context of politics and war, it was absolutely the opposite of moral.

[geckosfeet]

17. Well, I wouldn't say Japan was a minority.

[Hangingon]

10. Thank you. You are correct.

[Ricochet21]

12. I agree

I agree

[Curmudgeoness]

13. Evaluating in historical context, it was not correct or moral.

From what we know now, the Japanese were about to surrender anyways. It was not going to be necessary to have troops invade Japan, and it was not necessary to drop the bombs. At the time, people were being fed the same lines of bs that we are fed today from the press of the day. They thought this was the only sane decision because they did not have all the facts. Looking back now, I cannot see how it can be justified.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

26. You are missing the point...based on what the leadership knew and reasonably believed was it a

reasonable conclusion to come to? The widely held answer is yes.

In the fullness of time with markedly better knowledge was 2nd bomb, or either required? That is a much more difficult question, and honorable people will continue to disagree. Its not like its going to be settled as a mathematical certainty.

[Curmudgeoness]

34. You miss my point. I say that the leadership knew more than

the US people. Just like with the WMDs in Iraq. We depend on the leaders to tell us the truth so that we can form opinions based on fact---but what we are told is often not the truth, and the leaders know the truth at the time. Public opinion is easily swayed to what the leadership wants to do.

[RandomThoughts]

5. eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Unless people think the retaliation is just.


heh, I have posted on this concept before, third time repeat question in an hour.

[theoldman]

7. The Japanese were fanatics and were willing to fight to the death.

If the US had not dropped the atom bombs a lot more people would have been killed. Don't forget that the Japanese killed a lot more people in just one city in China than we killed with both bombs in Japan. I sometimes wonder if the war in Afghanistan could be stopped if we wiped out one city. I don't think the Afghans are as fanatic and the Japanese.

[customerserviceguy]

14. Saw the Ken Burns special on WWII

and what really brought your point home was the Battle of Saipan. This island had only been a Japanese possession since the end of WWI, and even though it was about 1,500 miles away from the main Japanese islands, it was heavily settled by Japanese military and civilian populations by 1944.

Not only did 30,000 Japanese troops die, but nearly the entire civilian population did, as well. About 10,000 of them were from suicide, ordered by Emperor Hirohito, himself. The cost in American lives was nearly 3,000, and it's reasonable to believe that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have seen the same losses. Something had to be done to break the mentality of the Emperor, or else he would have ordered his entire people to die needlessly.

I see the Afghan factions as having the same sort of fighting mentality. When you factor in the simple truths that they had already pushed the Soviet Union out, and have held off the United States and its allies for almost a decade, along with the knowledge that if the US fights like it did in Vietnam, they will eventually prevail, you strengthen that resolve in a way even the Japanese didn't have.

It's just that since WWII, we don't fight that way anymore.

[Bigmack]

15. Jesus Fucking Christ!....

WTF are you talking about! "Wiping out a city." Ever hear of "civilians"? Why don't we just nuke anybody who pisses us off? You realize, of course, that what goes around comes around, and you can bet your ass there are people out there who would love to put us in the position of the Japanese and lay a nice low-yield nuke on one of our cities. And of course, they'd defend their barbarism by pointing out all the civilians we've killed in our march to Empire.

Why do I just KNOW you've never heard a shot fired in anger. Armchair Generals all think they're the re-incarnation of Curtis LeMay and the lovechild of "Buck" Turgidson.

Thanks for the bullshit history lesson, tho.

If you read some of the other posts on DU, you'll find that some people here find our use of those bombs barbaric. Truman's own chief of Staff called it that.

Mine quotes all the top military brass that the war was over before the bombs were dropped and that it was not necessary.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

I know you're not a freeper, but you sure believe like them on this one.

[Froward69]

20. Some thing you are missing... Historical context.

As at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "radiation poisoning" was unknown. as well as the amount of destruction was largely a theory.

Yes in hindsight the war was over long before the bombs were dropped. Midway, The battle of the Marianas (or the Marianas turkey shoot) coupled with Truck. were the points where Japan could not sustain war any longer. (yet like republicans) the Japanese were unwilling to surrender. EVEN Between the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese military were unwilling to unconditionally surrender.

It took a directive from the Emperor Himself to bring the USS Missouri into Tokyo Harbor, to sign an unconditional surrender.

The fear of 1,000,000+ casualties on BOTH sides dropped those bombs.

Doing the math each US service person could draw upon more than 2tons of supplies. whereas a Japanese service-member had 2 pounds. add Germany to japan and they still only had 4 pounds each, of supply to draw upon.

so based upon the (supply) numbers WWII was over before Pearl harbor happened.

[Bigmack]

22. Tell me what historical context...

...I'm missing. The historical context of the US Empire and the Japanese Empire in contention in the Western Pacific? The barbarism of the Japanese in their drive to Empire? They win that one hands down.... they killed 4 million in China, and we were responsible for the deaths of only 1 million Filipinos. The take-no-prisoners warfare? The Island Hopping Campaign? The Naval Blockade? The devastating fire raids? The lack of target cities in Japan (except the one "protected" to be targets for the Bomb) after about June of 1945?
Tell me about my lack of historical perspective.

The theories about the bomb included scientists in the project who thought it would start a chain reaction that would take out all of New Mexico, as well as scientists who thought it wouldn't work at all. Trinity worked, but what next? What better place to really test it than on a modern city? The results of the experiment certainly explain Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

There never was going to be an invasion and a million US casualties. Truman knew that if he sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths in an unnecessary invasion, he'd be impeached or worse. The military knew the invasion was unnecessary, and that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender.

I keep posting this, but apparently it's in invisible ink, because nobody seems to understand that all the military brass knew the war was over and we didn't need to use the bomb.

I'll post it again in case somebody actually will read it.

Here's the views of the top Army and Naval and Air Force Officers (find the originals at the site mentioned below.)

In his memoirs Admiral William D. Leahy, the President's Chief of Staff--and the top official who presided over meetings of both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined U.S.-U.K. Chiefs of Staff--minced few words:
" he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.
n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." (See p. 3, Introduction)
Privately, on June 18, 1945--almost a month before the Emperor's July intervention to seek an end to the war and seven weeks before the atomic bomb was used--Leahy recorded in his diary: "It is my opinion at the present time that a surrender of Japan can be arranged with terms that can be accepted by Japan and that will make fully satisfactory provisions for America's defense against future trans-Pacific aggression." (See p. 324, Chapter 26)

Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet stated in a public address given at the Washington Monument on October 5, 1945:
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war." (See p. 329, Chapter 26) . . .
In a private 1946 letter to Walter Michels of the Association of Philadelphia Scientists, Nimitz observed that "the decision to employ the atomic bomb on Japanese cities was made on a level higher than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." (See pp. 330-331, Chapter 26)

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946:
"The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment. . . . It was a mistake to ever drop it. . . . had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before." (See p. 331, Chapter 26)

The commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, gave a strong indication of his views in a public statement only eleven days after Hiroshima was attacked. Asked on August 17 by a New York Times reporter whether the atomic bomb caused Japan to surrender, Arnold said:
"The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air."

On September 20, 1945 the famous "hawk" who commanded the Twenty-First Bomber Command, Major General Curtis E. LeMay (as reported in The New York Herald Tribune) publicly: He said flatly at one press conference that the atomic bomb "had nothing to do with the end of the war." He said the war would have been over in two weeks without the use of the atomic bomb or the Russian entry into the war. (See p. 336, Chapter 27)

On the 40th Anniversary of the bombing former President Richard M. Nixon reported that:
" MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the Bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. . . . MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off. . . . "(See p. 352, Chapter 28)

In his memoirs President Dwight D. Eisenhower reports the following reaction when Secretary of War Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used:
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. . . . "(See p. 4, Introduction)
Eisenhower made similar private and public statements on numerous occasions. For instance, in a 1963 interview he said simply: ". . . it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." (See pp. 352-358, Chapter 28)


http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec....

[hunter]

28. Precisely.

We used the bomb because we had the bomb, we had it first, and we had the industrial capacity to make many more.

It was raw monkey logic. By the use of atomic weapons the U.S.A. became the dominant monkey.

[Froward69]

16. I do not think the afgans are that fanatic either

however the entire Muslim world would grow that fanatic overnight should we drop one. especially on a city.

[inna]

9. I'll just say one thing. I'm so SICKENED by those who attempt to justify that crime against humanity

that... I simply don't want to have anything to do with them, period.

:nuke:

[Ricochet21]

11. I agree

I agree

[proteus_lives]

18. And I'm sickened by those would have rather the war been longer and bloodier.

So you would have preferred it if Japan had been invaded and millions more lives lost?

:eyes:

[bahrbearian]

24. So , What if we didn't invade and no lives were lost?

[proteus_lives]

25. The other options were much worse.

I suggest you do some research.

[bahrbearian]

27. I suggest you do some searching for your sole.

[david13]

29. I have inspected my shoes quite well, thank you. dc

[proteus_lives]

35. My shoes are fine, thank you.

I repeat, research is your friend.

[david13]

30. Yes it is very sad that we do not know it all like you do. And that we are

not entitled to our opinions. Yet we think we are.
dc

[proteus_lives]

19. It was the best card in a bad hand.

I don't argue that Japan "deserved" the A-Bomb because it's genocidal rampage through Asia. I mention Japanese atrocities because many DUers are determined to ignore them and would rather focus on the standard "America/Americans are teh evil" meme.

Dropping the bombs was simply the best decision to force Japanese surrender.

[Peace Patriot]

21. It is very difficult to judge people who were living through the narrowing tunnel of war--

with its vast casualties on both sides up to that point, in a massive war involving much of the world. Such carnage traumatizes everybody. And in that narrowing tunnel, the desire to end it--the need to end it--may be very great. The humanity of the "enemy" may be entirely lost sight of. The weighing of various levels of casualties, to end it, may be very difficult, indeed. Because of this, I've been hesitant to conclude that Truman and others who made that decision were war criminals. I did not live through those times. I was born just as WW II ended. I never knew world war. So it is, as I said, hard to judge those who did live through it, especially those who had to make such decisions.

But I'm afraid that hindsight has given us another perspective on this matter that needs to be considered, and that is, that the dropping of TWO nuclear weapons on TWO cities full of civilians, was meant more as a warning to Soviet Russia than as the only way to end the war in the Pacific. If this were not the case, then the U.S. might have dropped The Bomb on an uninhabited island, as a demonstration of its power. Or may have taken onto themselves the horror of dropping it on ONE city, not two. Or one city, then (to show that they had more than one of these devastating bombs) on an uninhabited area. But why two nuclear bombs on two cities full of people? I think there is a very strong argument that this was political--to demonstrate to Soviet Russia that we would not hesitate to decimate its people, in the contest between capitalism and communism. The decision-makers in the U.S. were setting up the Cold War.

Stalin was well on his way to becoming as bloody-handed a dictator as there ever was, at that point. And the leaders of our country--who had allied with Stalin to win WW II (and who may well have lost the war in Europe without the tremendous sacrifices of the Russian people)--perhaps had some reason to worry that Stalin might go apeshit and instigate WW III, but this was not at all likely, given Russia's prostrate condition at the end of WW II. It might have been enough of a concern, in their minds, to require some demonstration of U.S. nuclear weapons power. But why demonstrate this on a city? And why on two cities--if not to emphasize U.S. power and ruthlessness, not to the Japanese, who were on the point of surrender, but to the Russians, who were in no position to start a third world war, but who DID pose a threat to our capitalists, on the economic front?

The U.S. had a convenient dictator, in Stalin, with which to flog socialist ideas, here and elsewhere. But the truth is that these ideas were a worldwide political movement--in Europe, in Africa, in South America, in Asia and here. Russia wasn't so much the leader of this movement--which was indigenous and had to do with simple fairness, in every case--as it was a product of this movement, which, in Russia, which had NO tradition of democracy whatsoever, became a dictatorship, just like the Tsarist dictatorships before it. And, as the U.S. descended into McCarthyism ("a communist under every bed") in the 1950s, the U.S. made this error, time and again--turning local movements for sovereignty, fair distribution of wealth, social improvements and democratic elections into enemies of the U.S., and slaughtering 2 million people in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, to make that point.

Look at the Vietnam War and consider what lengths U.S. corporations and the increasingly malevolent U.S. war profiteer establishment were willing to go to, to turn the world's triumph over nazism and imperialism into an endless gravy train. It is quite an arguable point that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the beginning of this--that is, use of the U.S. war machine to fight a battle against workers' rights and the rights of the poor majority, everywhere, and, more recently, to steal other peoples' resources. If this can be proven--that dropping nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, not just on one, but on two cities--was the opening act of the Cold War, then it is, without question, a war crime. I'm not sure it would be possible to determine this for certain. But it is something to consider. Were these acts merely the desperate acts of war traumatized leaders, perhaps miscalculating the devastation of The Bomb vs a few more months of conventional warfare? Was the second bomb merely a hedge against the first one failing (since, in those days, nuclear weapons technology was primitive)? Or was the whole thing intended as a "lesson" in U.S. economic warfare, at the outset of a U.S. war against socialism?

---------------------------------------------

A further aspect of the use of nuclear weapons to impose our will on the world:

Today, the use of nuclear weapons could well mean the end of Planet Earth. Carl Sagan established, in his book, "The Cold and the Dark," that even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons, given the power of these arsenals by the 1970s, would kill the planet itself, within months, with a worldwide dust cloud that would end plant growth and food production, and that would be that. After the initial carnage, some additional portion of humanity would die from direct and indirect impacts of the moving cloud of nuclear radiation; the other half would die of hunger. Given what we now know about nuclear weapons, their use is unthinkable today. Scientists at the end of WW II did not know all of this. We do. The cavalier remark, above, that we ought to do to an Afghan city what was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, represents truly dangerous ignorance--especially given Pakistan's and India's possession of nuclear weapons. Dropping a nuclear bomb on an Afghan city--quite aside from the heinous war crime that that would be--might not trigger "the Cold and the Dark" by itself, but who is to say that such an action would not trigger a conflagration in the region which would spread the "Cold and the Dark" around the planet? In addition to everything else, we now know that our ORDINARY pollution is radically changing our planet's climate. Add in detonating nuclear weapons, even one, and that may be an end to it all, right there. Does this idiot know what he is saying? Good God!

[The Magistrate]

23. Then You Might, Sir, Find a Brief Summary Of Aerial Bombing And Its Mores Of Interest

Dropping projectiles from flying machines on undefended cities was banned by the Hague treaty well before doing so was much of a practical proposition. In the years immediately before the Great War, people of the sort called 'air-minded' in those days, wrote vigorously various predictions of how aeroplanes would be able to paralyze a country by pin-point attacks on vital centers of government and finance and production and communication, as well as killing great numbers of people in the urban centers, and causing mass panics, mobs, even insurrection demanding peace.

During World War One, it became possible, at the full stretch of contemporary engineering, to make a practical proposition of attacking targets well behind the front lines. Most of these were directly related to military operations; large stores of ammunition, reserves of troops, choke-points on the rail and road networks. The French made raids into the Ruhr aimed at specific factories manufacturing war materiel, ranging from rifles to poison gas: 'aimed at' is specified, because of course aim was very poor, and more of the bombs generally fell in the surrounding town than within even the confines of the factory yards. Germany had, with the employment of large lighter than air dirigibles, resolved early on a project of attacking England from the air. The stated intention here, also, was to bomb precisely specific industrial or military targets, but in the event, Zeppellin commanders were doing to be right about which county they over, and the bombs fell essentially at random. The small numbers killed produced tremendous outrage in England, and in at least one instance, a coroner's jury convened in due form for the death certification brought in a verdict of willfull murder by the Kaiser. As the German raids persisted and turned from dirigibles to large aeroplanes, the English government resolved on a policy of reprisal, and from the middle of 1917 turned a great deal of industrial effort towards constructing a force of aeroplanes to make large raids on German cities. The war ended before a great deal had been done along those lines by the Royal Air Force, but the drive towards it left an imprint on that service's guiding theories.

Aerial operations in the decade or so after the Great War focused on policing colonial possessions. Some of it was what we would call today 'close support' for forces engaged in battle with the natives on the ground; much of it was reprisal, taking the form of attacking the home village of a native leader, or of a tribe or clan with many men in the field against the colonial power. The scale was generally small, the people attacked regarded as 'lesser breeds without the Law'. Where wars occurred between developed nations, such as the Greco-Turkish War, the contenders lacked any significant air power, so the question of using aerial means against the enemy's populated centers could not arise.

The first conflict between nations in which significant air power was available was between Imperial Japan and Nationalist China, commencing in 1931. Fighting in Shanghai early in 1932 was marked by the first effective attack from the air on an urban populace: Japanese bombers operating from an aircraft carrier in the harbor .dropped large quantities of incendiary bombs on the Little Chapie district, a ramshackle and poverty stricken quarter of the Chinese city, and ignited a 'line fire' with flames over a hundred feet high according to reliable newspapermen on the scene, killing thousands and rendering scores of thousands homeless. There was no particular military utility to the action, it bore no relation to the pattern of fighting between ground forces in the city. The act was widely denounced as a barbaric violation of the laws of war, and was not repeated in the course of fighting which continued in the north and northeast of China into 1934.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia 1935 produced no great attacks on urban centers, though it did feature widespread employment of poison gas from aircraft that was widely denounced. The use of gas from aircraft against urban centers became a fixture of writings, both pacifist and otherwise, predicting the horrors of the next war (it features prominently in H. G. wells' 'Things to Come', for instance). The Spanish Civil War commenced in 1936 featured attacks on populated centers from the air as soon as forces capable of it were available. Guernica is well known, but Madrid took much heavier blows over-all, attacks aimed purely at demoralizing the populace while a besieging force pressed against defense lines in the city's outskirts. Since the government's strength was centered on the cities and big towns, this sort of bombing was much more a feature of the Franco forces than otherwise. Again, the attacks were denounced widely as barbaric violations of the laws of war, but they continued, and the side employing them most energetically won.

The war between Imperial Japan and Nationalist China which broke out in 1937 featured aerial attacks on populated centers which dwarfed anything done in Spain in scale of force employed and casualties inflicted. The aerial campaign went on for years, and aerial attacks against Chinese cities were a leading feature. These attacks employed incendiary bombs (Chinese cities being about as flammable as Japanese cities), and frequently featured descent by escorting fighters to strafe people fleeing the city into the surrounding countryside to escape the fires. Again, there was round of the attacks as barbaric violations of the laws of war.

World War Two commenced with major German aerial attacks on Warsaw, though this could be presented legally as a fortress town. England and France did stick to the pre-war position bombing cities was not to be done, aiming attacks at strictly military targets, such as naval bases, and confining efforts against cities to dropping propaganda leaflets. Once it became a matter of England alone, this high-mindedness began to fray badly. The public wanted reprisals, and the Royal Air Force was incapable of accurate attacks on specific targets of military or industrial nature. Thus the doctrine of mass bombing arose, championed by Harris, with the justification that the 'target' was the workers who manned the machines that built the weapons, and so a populated place where some workers lived was 'legitimate'. This would probably never have survived a serious court challenge, but the fact remains there really was no other way England could hope to have some effect on the military machine of Nazi Germany, given the actual state of the military art at the time. When the U.S. entered the war in Europe, Army Air Force attempts at precision daylight bombing proved extremely costly, and apparently of dubious effectiveness. The conclusion from actual use of the aerial implement was that it could only be used to any effect for mass killing, in the hope of degrading both the capacity and the will of the enemy's leadership and populace to continue to take the punishment.

This was the understanding and the weapon turned eventually against Japan in the last phase of the Pacific War. There is no question it was complicated in its execution by racial animus. It was also complicated by the fact that, in the final analysis, it was really only a single mind, that of the Emperor, which was the target that had to be affected. The shock effect of a single bomber destroying a city with a single bomb had a great effect on that mind, as did the Russian invasion of Manchuria. The use of bombers for mass killing of urban populations had become, by then, routine practice by any nation capable of doing it.

[david13]

32. It would be nice for America to regret having dropped the bombs,

and I think generally, America does regret it. But those who made the decision at the time thought it was necessary.
For us to second guess them now does not un ring the bell. Once the bell rings, it has rung. The bombs can not be un dropped.
Having seen the bombs dropped, having known of the dropping of the bombs, fewer people today think they should be used again.
dc

[suston96]

33. Not about "justified". All about "necessary" Alternative horrendous.......

I posted this on an older thread........

"All we know is how it turned out"? Not so..........

We knew how it would turn out.

After watching "World War II - The Final Days" and specifically the invasion of and battles for Okinawa, there is no doubt that they were necessary to avoid prolonging a war that would have involved millions of deaths and casualties on all sides.

Japanese military and civilians fought to the death on Okinawa - considered part of the Japanese homeland - inflicting heavy casualties on the US and allies. Check out link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa

The US begged the Japanese to surrender after the first bomb. Answer was still no. A very sad but certainly not a regrettable decision by us.