Was the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan Justified?

Diomedes didn't say anything like this, but this is the second time you've hinted that you have an argument for racism playing a significant role, though you've never fleshed this argument out. You're raising a different issue now, that once the decision to drop the atomic bombs had been made, what should be the targets? One of the goals was to judge the atomic bombs' destructive powers, which would have been difficult in many other major Japanese cities because they'd already been largely destroyed by air attack. Hiroshima had only been rarely bombed, and it also included a military presence. Nagasaki had similar qualities.President Truman initially expressed a preference for prime military targets but was persuaded that urban centers might produce a greater impact on the will of the Japanese people to continue the fight. There was also the risk that prime military targets would be more staunchly defended, making dropping the bombs a more iffy proposition. His advisors also presented the argument about the importance of obtaining accurate measures of the bombs' destructive powers.--Percy

I didn't see Percy's Message 115. Well, I saw it but then missed scoop. I blame my drugs. Anyway, after writing and posting this thing I'll just keep it up. Sorry Percy.An additional wrinkle to the decision was Okinawa. What the Japanese army did as the battle turned was to enforce civilian suicide and terrorized the population with the specter of the American devil.

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On Okinawa, the Imperial Japanese Army mobilized 1,780 schoolboys aged 14–17 years into front line service as an Iron and Blood Imperial Corps while female Himeyuri students were organized into a nursing unit. This mobilization was conducted by an ordinance of the Ministry of the Army, not by law. The ordinances mobilized the students as volunteer soldiers for form's sake; in reality, the military authorities ordered schools to force almost all students to "volunteer" as soldiers; sometimes they counterfeited the necessary documents.

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With the impending Japanese defeat, civilians often committed mass suicide, urged on by the Japanese soldiers who told locals that victorious American soldiers would go on a rampage of killing and raping. Ryūkyū Shimpō, one of the two major Okinawan newspapers, wrote in 2007: "There are many Okinawans who have testified that the Japanese Army directed them to commit suicide. There are also people who have testified that they were handed grenades by Japanese soldiers" to blow themselves up.

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The military was in total command of the population as it was throughout all of Japan at this late stage in the war.

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Some military historians believe that the Okinawa campaign led directly to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a means of avoiding the planned ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. This view is explained by Victor Davis Hanson in his book Ripples of Battle:

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... because the Japanese on Okinawa ... were so fierce in their defense (even when cut off and without supplies), and because casualties were so appalling, many American strategists looked for an alternative means to subdue mainland Japan, other than a direct invasion. This means presented itself, with the advent of atomic bombs, which worked admirably in convincing the Japanese to sue for peace [unconditionally], without American casualties.

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With 60 million civilians in Japan the prospect of many of them, as in Okinawa, sacrificing themselves, forcefully or otherwise, to kill Americans sent shock waves through the American military.Why a demonstration shot was not used before first use had more to do with the scarcity of plutonium/uranium. At the time we only had the two bombs. After Nagasaki we had no more and were about 2-3 weeks from having another. Generals don’t like not having extra bullets. They were not going to waste one.

Hi AZPaul3,Thanks for the reply. Yes, the reasons you and Diomedes supplied, might support using atom bombS on innocent civilians, including woman and children.HOWEVER, the lengthy post I created here Message 47 describes why there were much much much better reasons NOT to use atom bombS on innocent civilians, including woman and children.However, as I previously wrote and am writing again, I don't want to rehash that debate again, especially if people refuse to read my original post the first time. You all complain that Phat is repeatedly given posts that he refuses to read or learn from. Now you know how I feel. Sometimes creating a lengthy and multi-evidenced post here is pointless.____ Perhaps I should have created a new thread, but as I wrote in Message 114, it was about the movie Oppenheimer and why it COMPLETELY ignored the death of the Japanese civilians. I proposed the reason is that 'half' the american people are angry and anti-woke (70 million voted for tRump). Showing scenes of non-white people suffering would hurt the box office of the movie because people don't want to consider their own country's actions to be horrifically flawed. Same reason anti-wokes don't want to talk about slave reparations, or any of the other awareness of injustices that 'some' republicans rally against.Knowing that knowbody on this forum is a racist, and furthermore, I am not acccusing anybody on this forum of being a racist, let me ask a question:if, IF, you were an angry racist, would you be MORE LIKELY to agree with a limited amount of reasons to drop multiple atom bombS on innocent Japanese civilians, including women and children?

You seem to be of two minds regarding your interest in rehashing Message 47. It seems to have already received a lot of attention, so I don't see any need to discuss it further. My own position is that killing anyone for any reason is wrong, but the real world presents situations where even those who most sincerely believe this have to support the killing of others.But what is undeniably true is that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war earlier and saved a huge number of lives. Were there others ways and/or places the bombs could have been dropped that would have produced as good or even better results? Possibly, but it's hypothetical. What we know for sure is that there were 200,000 total casualties compared to potentially 10 to 20 million total casualties for an invasion.Could we have ended the war with only 100,000 atomic bomb casualties? 50,000? 10,000? Who knows? It's all speculation. But the facts before us say the dropping of the bombs preventsed millions of casualties and perhaps saved as many as a million lives. I think you need a new thread. The movie is based on an historical event but makes no original contributions to the record of history. You have issues with some of the movies directorial and editing decisions, and that has nothing to do with history. That's Hollywood. We're all racists. It's part of being human. Tribalism is an evolved trait. What matters is how one manages and expresses their racism.That being said, I don't think bombs or bullets or anything lethal should be directed at anyone anywhere ever, but the world isn't constructed in such a way as to make this possible. The Japanese were carrying out war against countries and committing atrocities against civilian populations all around the Pacific, and we were presented with the problem of how to make them stop. Peaceful means were not an option. Once killing people becomes an option it's difficult to figure out where to draw the lines. Whatever racist feelings those conducting the war might have held concerning the Japanese, they had little effect. If Japan had instead been populated with the British and if those British had bombed Pearl Harbor and committed all the same war acts and atrocities as the Japanese, we would have reacted the same.In other words, of course many people held racist feelings against the Japanese, but that had little impact on how the war was conducted.--Percy

Your opinion is but one on the subject. Better or worse doesn't matter. It lost.

Kinda takes the debating part out of a debating forum.

I didn't think you were debating but insisting.What you are 'debating' is an 80 year-old morality from a time of extreme emotional strife in a society you could never experience and yet are willing to judge. Others may go there but I'll pass.

I’m surprised how often this is foolishly used to overlook injustices in the past. Yes AZ, believe it or not, some people had ‘awareness’ many, many centuries ago. It was even taught by most religions . . .

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The Golden Rule

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The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one would expect to be treated themselves. Various expressions of this rule can be found in the tenets of most religions and creeds THROUGH THE AGES.

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The idea DATES at least to the early Confucian times (551–479 BCE), according to Rushworth Kidder, who identifies the concept appearing prominently in Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and "the rest of the world's major religions".

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Golden Rule - Wikipedia

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Thusly: I wouldn’t want my children targeted with atom bombS, so I shouldn’t target other children with atom bombs.Not that difficult to comprehend.___ A rather astonishing justification of inhumanity on woman and children.

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Robber: stick em’ up

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AZPaul: here’s my money, please don’t harm my children

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Robber: well, I already paid for the bullets, so I might as well use the gun anyways.

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AZPaul: Yeaaah, . . . I don’t blame you, it would be wasteful to not use bullets that you already paid for. Go ahead, kill me and my children. If you still have any bullets left, then shoot my children in the head a second or third time. Mustn’t waste bullets.

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(I noted Diomedes, Tanypt, xong cheered this post. Interesting.)__(Anybody remember the MASH television episode when Hawkeye answers a letter from a youngster whose brother ultimately died in action and the youngster irrationally and hatefully blamed the surgeons for fixing the brother up the first time, so the brother would be killed in action later?) Yes, agreed. The devastating emotion of losing your father/mother, son or brother in such a violent way would naturally unleash hateful thoughts/actions. Add irrational racism and that would naturally deepen the hate . . .__ Yeah, it wasn’t JUST plain everyday racism. My question deliberately included the word ANGRY. The government leveraged this raw anger when they propagandized the Japanese in poster and movies. And when the government forced internment on fellow Asian-Americans, how many non-asian Americans protested? It is easy to do the wrong thing when acting on ANGER and RACISM, isn't it? __Racism wasn’t the reason for using the atomic bombS (see Message 47), but governmental/institutional racism made the flimsy justifications (it would have been wasteful not to use atom bombS on woman and children) easier to use the atom bombS.From a money-priority POV, Nolan made the correct decision not to show a MILI-SECOND of Japanese woman and children suffering in a THREE-HOUR movie about the atom bomb.

*Chuckle* . . . I repeat, it is easy to do the wrong thing when acting on ANGER and RACISM, isn't it?

I don't want children or anyone else targeted with any kind of bombs.The fact is that we were in a long and bloody war with no end in sight and it was going to continue until one side won decisively. There were going to be lots and lots and lots more bombs and bullets killing lots and lots and lots more men, women and children. Japan started the war and committed numerous war crimes and atrocities and the United States fought back and ultimately ended the war, and then rebuilt Japan.I note that you haven't put up any Japanese portrayals of Americans from the same period. You seem to have the opinion that any other country would not use an atomic bomb if it would decisively end the war in their favor.The horror of the aftermath of 2 Japanese cities being destroyed may have served as a deterrent for the rest of the world, but it didn't stop every single country that acquired the technology from building their own arsenals of nuclear weapons.The U.S. has a horrible history when it comes to human rights and we all carry a national shame, but the Japanese really fucked up when they attacked us and I doubt that the U.S. would have gotten the same post war treatment they received if we had lost.

". . . with no end in sight."Wow, . . . that's . . . just . . . embarrassing. Message 47-

Yes. But not all actions of the past were made from anger and racism. In the case of the bomb there was more in play than just wartime hate and bigotry.In the case of Jan 6, the motivation there was just pure stupid.You're really reaching for this. Why this need to show our fault? Everyone knows they are there if not to the extreme degree you seem to insist. Human morality sucks. Everyone knows that. So what is your point in beating this to death?

I think everyone concedes racism. As I said earlier, tribalism is an inherent human trait. But you haven't offered any evidence or argument that racism was a factor in the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You start out here by expressing agreement: But then you descend into a nonsensical argument: Justifications like this were never offered or even thought of by those responsible for decisions regarding the conduct of the war. You're back to the movie again. My opinion remains that discussion of this movie belongs in another thread because it offered no new historical facts and in fact is a dramatization that takes liberties with the facts.--Percy

Why have you descended into trolling? Have you always been a troll?

Yes, agreed . . . Message 47As I previously wrote, I should have started a new thread, my deep apologies. For it was impossible for members to focus on the new highjacked subject which I unsuccessfully kept trying to steer back to . . . (Hey, I was pretty prescient with that last line, eh?)Anyways, regarding Oppenheimer . . .Out of the many, many replies, only Percy directly offered a long-winded alternative explanation to my Oppenheimer hypothesis: sigh