Today is the 60th anniversary of the use of the first atomic weapon at Hiroshima, ***an. All the breast beaters, second and third guessers, appologists, etc are pounding on the subject again. How 'bout it boys, what do YOU think of the atomic raids? Where they needed to bring the war to a close and save lives, or did we blast 'em 'cause they were considered "sub-human", or we wanted to indirectly threaten the USSR? Give me your opinions. I'll hold mine until later.
Piss on the ***anese and anyone else who thought we shouldn't have used the a-bombs. They effectively brought about the end of the war and saved an untold number of American soldiers' lives. That's all I care about. As for whether they were considered subhuman at the time, I cannot answer. But the torture that they unleased in their prison camps . . . yeah, that was pretty subhuman.
I saw a story where the ***anese citizens were bemoaning the use of the atomic bombs and said that the bombs were dropped in areas where they would inflict the most damage to the innocent citizenry.
Oh well. I don't recall our troops at Pearl Harbor asking to be attacked. As far as I can tell in my history book, they brought us into the fight. They should've been prepared for the consequences.
Again I say: Piss on 'em.
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We must be the change we wish to see in the world -- Ghandi
http://www.rightminded.net
Anyone who has any doubts about the correctness of Ol' Harry's decision to use the bomb should watch the History Channel's movie THE FINAL BATTLE. It pretty much portrays what would have happened if we had been forced to invade the ***anese home islands!
It's just a horrible shame that the poor bastards (***s) didn't have sense enough to admit they were beaten, and surrendered before we had to use those bombs. They had every opportunity to quit earlier!!
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"Bitte, trinks du das Wasser nicht. Dahin haben die Kuhen gesheissen."
We gave them the opportunity to surrender, the refused, so we nuked them. Considering the other option was to invade the home islands, which would have cost countless American AND ***anese lives, I don't have a problem with it. As for aiming at the citizens, in my opinion they were fair game.
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You may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride!
They did what they had to do to end the war.
The world would be a much diffent place had our enemys had the nuks instead.
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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
I think that a lot can be learned from studying the last year of WWII. It was the last war in which America truely desimated an enemy, resulting in surrender.
A lot of thought was put into choosing the targets for the first and then second atomic bombs. You must remember, we only had two of them that were functional at the time.
The damage caused by the use of one of these weapons needed to be so great that the enemy had no choice but to surrender...and even then it took both of them to convince the enemyto throw in the towel.
I think that one of the mistakes of modern warfare is forgeting that you must first completely destroy an enemy before helping them re-build.
Sun-Tzu stated that a gracious victor will help re-build a defeated enemy, thus making them your ally. Most scholars and warriors know this passage from "The Art of War", as do the politicians. The passage that the politicians either forgot, of did not read is; before you can make 'em your friend, you gotta beat 'em into the ground.
The answer to the original question is; Yes. it was the right thing to do, and it did save lives...American lives. As far as the sub-human question; I believe that the answer is No. We did not attack ***an on the pretense that they were sub-human and we were superior. Of course it's natural for one army to hold the opposing army in contempt, and as a result slurs like Nips/monkeys/slant-eye etc. are used. Thats just the nature of the beast. The enemy that we are fighting now are considered the crap of the earth...As a result, troops adoptphrases likecamel jockey/sand ****** etc. You've gotta justify in your "own" mind that they are trash, before you can start killing them.
It was the Germans that killed six million Jews and millions of Poles and french because they thought they were the superior race.
It was the ***eneese that killed millions of Philipinoesand Chineese because they thought they were the superior race.
Calling an enemy a derogatory name because they are an enemy is completely different than killing millions of people because they are of a different race.
Me? I believe it was absolutely neccesary. Operation Olympic was projected to cost hundreds of thousands of lives, both US and ***anese.
Never quite understood why being killed in the atomic raids was a worse way to die than in the fire raids the USAAF had hammered the ***anese cities with form 1944 onwards. Dead is dead, and while it is catastrophic, I don't see the aplogists spanking the Condor legion for Guernica, the Luftwaffe for Warsaw, or the ***anese for the terror bombing both the JAAF and the JNAF inflicted on Chinese cities.
I'm old enough to have spoken to several veterans who were slated to be part of the ***anese homeland invasion force. EVERY ONE of them was convinced he would die during the invasion. After reading dozens more interviews, almost everyone who was going in felt they had been reborn when ***an unconditionaly surrendered after the atomic raids.
In the final analysis, the raids were a horror...but they prevented even more horrors.
The ***anese knew what was coming. The Trinity test (July 16th, 1945) wasn't exactly a secret to the world. The ***anese knew that we had successfully tested the atomic bomb, and the Potsdam Declaration (July 26th, 1945) clearly spelled out for the ***anese that if they did not surrender unconditionally that the United States and her allies would use any and all force necessary to bring ***an to her knees. We didn't flat tell them that we were going to nuke their butts, but considering that this very sternly worded ultimatum was issued just 10 days after we turned a nice sized chunk of New Mexico real estate into a glass crater the implied threat should was obvious. We gave the ***anese 11 days to mull it over and they didn't so much as blink until we had leveled not one but two of their cities over a 3 day period in August of 1945.
One cannot argue that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings caused an unprecidented amount of destruction, suffering and death in a very brief timespan, and that is what makes it such a shock to the senses of those who can't grasp that there would have been many-fold worse suffering had the war continued through to a conventional conclusion. The casualties, both civilian and military on both sides, would likely have been ten-fold greater than that inflicted by the atomic bombings, stretched over many months or years. The "shock and awe" of the atomic bombings did in seconds what over two years of fighting a losing war hadn't done and what two more years of bloody attrition wouldn't do, and that's shocked the ***anese into realizing that, bushido code or not, continuing the war was futile and that we would hold them to their promise of fighting to the last man, without giving them the opportunity to kill our guys in the process. The ***anese wanted war, they asked for it and in the end got it in spades. They were given ample warning and ignored it. Look at it this way, if those bombs hadn't ended that war in August of 1945, and we'd gone on to lose countless more American lives trying to take the mainland (I've seen estimates that number up to 1 MILLION more American GI's KIA in such an operation), then there's a good chance that several of us here, myself included, would not be around right now discussing in retrospect the ethics of nuclear weapons.
August 6, 1945
