As President Harry S. Truman ate lunch on the Augusta, returning home from his meeting at Potsdam with Churchill and Stalin, he was given the news of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Elated, he told the group of sailors around him, "This is the greatest thing in history."
If ever there is a discussion point with the potential to end in an unpredictable bloody mess, it is this one.
Ever since Aug 6th 1945, the dropping of the first Atomic bomb on Japan has been a hot topic, mostly around it's moral and ethical use and whether it was used primarily as a show of strength to the USSR.
So was the killing of over 200,000 Japanese, only 20,000 military personnel with the overwhelming majority civilians, indeed the greatest thing in history, a heavy hearted necessity to end the war or an unjustified slaughter?
6 comments:
It was absolutely not necessary. And its not just us peaceniks saying that. It's the likes of General Eisenhower and General MacArthur saying that as well.
Seems to me it's a little from column B and a little from column C.
Certainly the bomb could have been used on a purely (or overwhelmingly) military target, thus slaughtering conscripts in uniform rather than civilians, and achieved the same "Holy shit!" reaction from the Soviets and "we give up" reaction from the Japanese.
I mean, the war with Japan was all but over when the bomb was dropped ... it only served to speed up the process. And even assuming the Japanese weren't all but beaten, using a civilian target, and taking 200K lives was excessive. But then, the Allies had set precedent with slaughter in Dresden.
Nagasaki, however, is undefensible.
Ook ook
sshhhhh...don't tell George Dubya. Don't need to plant any ideas.
No matter how i try, i cannot see any justification for dropping the bomb on a heavily civilian populated city, knowing that it will kill so many of them.
And then to do it again at Nagasaki is indefensible.
Dropping it on an uninhabited island off the coast of Japan as the Manhatten Project scientists suggested, or even in the sea off the coast would have had the same effect in the Japanese government.
As the Japanese were as good as beaten already and were activly seeking Soviet help to bring about an end to the war, it does smack of a show of strength for the Soviets attention.
The only silver lining is that the results were so shocking, we have a constant reminder of the power of these catastrophic weapons that serves, hopefully, to stop us from ever using them again.
I guess after the carpet bombing of Germany the precedent was set. And 'Bigger is Better' seems to be a guiding principle of human behavior.
George will soon become the first President to use nukes. If the world survives Bush, I wonder what future Presidents will do to outdo their predecessors?
Humans are the worst enemies we have!
I think we need to remember that the idea of racial superiority was not reserved to Hitler - America was fighting it's own bitter race war in the Pacific.
Indeed, I would argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the worlds worst ever racist attacks in human history. Vaporising 200,000 people in a bat of an eye lid was something the German's could only dream of.
American WWII leaders thought of the Japanese as a malignant race, there was never ever a 'good' Japanese, they were all thought of as being sub-human like rats. It's the only explanation that fit's.
The atomic bomb was the white man's bomb and they certainly weren't going to use it on the German's. As far as US war leaders were concerned, they had temporally fallen out with Germany, but Japan was a different matter altogether. That's why the US used what is to all intents and purpose a terror weapon on Japan.
The Japanese were still assessing the damage of Hiroshima when two days later the US hit them with another atomic bombardment - then the US tried to argue that this was a 'humanitarian gesture' - how perverse is that?
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