Current Events > How many of you believe that the dropping of nuclear bombs on hiroshima and

(+) Yeah! (+)

...nagasaki were "wrong?" Just saw a documentary on the bombing on a dvd i checked out. It interviewed a lot of the survivors of the bombing and some of the people who piloted the planes etc... Do some of you believe that the 1st one was justified but the 2nd one wasn't? Have heard some people say that.

It happened. Whether it's right or wrong is way out of my pay grade

Both were wrong

Truman was just a racist shitbag and any attempt at justification for them is propaganda

Nagasaki was definitely wrong and unnecessary, even by war standards (and this would hold true even if they'd bombed Kokura as originally intended instead). Hiroshima is not as black and white.

War is bad

i would be against doing it again

I used an a.i program to see the bomb drop from the pilots perspective. It was scary berries.

If you think it's right to drop nuclear bombs on others, don't be surprised when someone does it to you.

It was the best course of action for several reasons

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8FAS2kjrgP8

Japan had a plan where if they were invaded every single person of the country would fight to death and there would have been even more casualties.

The other reason was Soviet Union was coming and that would mean Japan being split just like Germany was.

It was a crime against humanity and was no better then all the atrocities Japan itself committed.

ColdOne666 posted...

It was a crime against humanity and was no better then all the atrocities Japan itself committed.

but what do you say to the many people who say that it saved a huge number of american soldiers had there been an invasion of japan? what do you say to that?

Whether you kill one civilian or thousands, murder is murder and the overwhelming majority of the casualties from the bombings we're civilians, with Nagasaki's casualties being almost exclusively so

Its hard to defend any civilian targeting to me. I do get the argument that in total war there is no such thing as a purely civilian target. Still a tough pill to swallow. I dont see much difference between dropping 1 bomb to kill 100,000 people or dropping 10,000 bombs to kill 100,000 people. If one is acceptable, the other is.

at the end of the day, it was probably the right decision to target civilians and take the total war approach. Seems likely to me it reduced total deaths.

In the same vein that torturing someone that successfully led to valuable information is wrong.

the available primary source info shows clearly that prior to hiroshima, the emperor was not moved to overrule his council (go-seidan), and councilor Anami (representing the army) specifically was explicitly opposed to any form of surrender that did not allow japan to maintain their army and protect their war criminals, going so far as to threaten a coup following hiroshima and the go-seidan

prior to nagasaki, the emperor dictated a request for surrender with only one term, which was maintenance of the emperor ("national polity")--which ran counter to the publicly-stated US policy of unconditional surrender

it's tough to argue hiroshima wasn't necessary. it broke the filibuster-like status of the high council's disagreements. hiroshima was also the site of the japanese army's high command. so it was a very explicitly military target.

nagasaki was clearly a much more politically motivated decision than one of expediency/need. it was a ship manufacturing site, not a miltiary command nexus.

Plenty of the Allies actions in ww2 were warcrimes and indefensible. This is no different.

If it was necessary and saved lives is another question however.

I'd say it was a wrong decision in a horrible situation with no right ones. We have the benefit of the knowledge of history, they didn't.

They saved more lives than they took. The regular bombings we were doing had already killed more people than the nukes did.

Pearl Harbor retaliation TC

This is something that will be debated forever. I hate to be a both sides type of guy but both sides do have points.

HorrorReturns posted...

I'd say it was a wrong decision in a horrible situation with no right ones. We have the benefit of the knowledge of history, they didn't.

Very true

Our entire way of life was defined by those bombings so we have a much, much different perspective than the people involved in the decision than everyone involved in the process that led to it

El_Marsh posted...

Our entire way of life was defined by those bombings so we have a much, much different perspective than the people involved in the decision than everyone involved in the process that led to it

We also know what the world turned out like because of the bombings, but we can only speculate how things would have turned out if they had never happened.
Maybe more people would have died on both sides if the bombs had never been dropped. Maybe the horrors of those bombings kept future governments from being quite as trigger happy with nukes.

Whether or not we needed to invade Japan is irrelevant. What mattered was that enough American policy makers were convinced at the time that an invasion was necessary, and based on allied, enemy, and civilian casualties suffered throughout the Pacific, they believed that any such invasion would be staggeringly costly to all sides. There's a reason why the US started mass minting hundreds of thousands of purple hearts in preparation for the invasion.

Plus, other things to consider. The Soviets were about to get involved, and if they were involved longterm in a destructive unraveling of Japanese forces, they would've been able to take all of Korea and likely been able to demand an occupation zone in at least Hokkaido and likely northern Honshu. If you think that a split Japan and a wholly Communist Korea would've been good for either country, I don't know what to tell you.

Finally, the casualties were still staggering throughout China, and were getting even more desperate and brutal. Drag on the war even longer, and you're killing hundreds of thousands of additional Chinese people.

Everything about WWII sucked, and the US took what our policymakers believed was a least shitty option of multiple shitty options.

I mean, mass murdering civillians is obviously a war crime. Like, it's obvious and nobody would disagree, so why do you hold a different standard when it comes to these nukes?

There really wasnt any other viable option sadly :(

It was regrettable but saved millions of Japanese lives as well as ours.

COVxy posted...

I mean, mass murdering civillians is obviously a war crime. Like, it's obvious and nobody would disagree, so why do you hold a different standard when it comes to these nukes?

Bombing cities wasn't considered a war crime in WWII. WWII was just godawful.

K181 posted...

Bombing cities wasn't considered a war crime in WWII.

Yes, obviously a lot of ethical codes were written in response to the many atrocities commited during wwii. That doesn't change the morals. That's the point of those codes, to say "this shit is awful, officially"

It's an undeniable tragedy and an extreme loss of life, but in the course of history I think it's grimly necessary that we, as a society and a planet, have seen how fucked up nuclear weapons really are.

It was the "right" decision at the time, showcasing a new weapon to scare our enemies into submission, but it was a horrible event in human history.

The only reason dropping the bombs was "necessary" was due to the pig-headed Allied insistence on an unconditional surrender. IIRC, the sticking point for Japan is that they wanted certain assurances about the territorial integrity of the home islands and the status of the emperor. The fact that their response to an American demand to surrender was mistranslated (they had meant they were weighing their options, but it was mistranslated as contempt for the idea) likely helped drive the decision to drop the bombs.

However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria likely had much more to do with convincing Japan to surrender unconditionally than the atomic bombings: it drove home the fact that their military was spent.
Really, the atomic bombings were the final and most dramatic instance of Allied terror bombings of (primarily or totally) civilian targets, a tactic infamously illustrated by the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. It showed a basic contempt for the value of Japanese lives. An actual invasion of Japan would almost certainly have been needless in either case.

We wound up giving the Japanese most of what they asked for anyways, despite the fact that Hirohito was 1000% guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.

Yeah both were obviously wrong.

It wasnt any worse than the fire bombings that were going on before it.

Nukes did the same thing, just faster.

The US nuked Japan twice, but nuked the US about a thousand times.
Even the UK got to nuke the US a few times.

kage_53 posted...

It was the best course of action for several reasons

Dropping the bombs was best, from a strategic standpoint. Ill support that stance.

The controversy or conflict here is that what people really want to resolve from a modern perspective is whether or not the bombings were the best moral action. Its hard to maintain the moral high ground and also tell other countries not to pursue a nuclear weapons program, when the US turned hundreds of thousands of old men, women and children to ash through the atomic bombs and the constant fire bombings, which were arguably worse.

It was the absolute correct course of action and anyone that disagrees is out of touch with the reality of the situation.

Yes they were.
I would maybe feel a little more bad for the people of Japan, but we did warn the cities beforehand. The citizens had ample time.

if they didn't do it, the emperor wouldn't have surrendered, most civilians would have fought to the death. You'd still be fighting Japanese terrorist attacks to this day.

Anyone who thinks differently has no concept of history, nor how radically different japanese culture is today, compared to during ww2.

ElatedVenusaur posted...

The only reason dropping the bombs was "necessary" was due to the pig-headed Allied insistence on an unconditional surrender.

The Allied powers had fresh memories of Versailles, and they didn't want a defeated power to stew in rage over a perceived slight at how they were screwed out a victory. The Allies of 1945 had no way of knowing that Germany and Japan were going to enter a multi-decade period of peaceful and allied relations with the West. They were worried about not finishing the second world war in the same way they didn't finish the first world war, thereby inviting a future third world war down the line.

Demanding unconditional surrender wasn't pigheaded at all, and the Allies got basically everything they wanted once they realized they could use the emperor as a puppet.

There was also a bluff about more nukes raining down, when the US already blew up the only three it actually had.

It's not out of my pay grade: totally wrong. Don't believe the propaganda that we HAD to:

the truth is the war in the east was racially charged from the start. we stopped bombing civilians in germany, but continue the war crimes in japan/tokyo like they are going out of style.

they 100% knew the effects of radiation and fallout, but they like to pretend like they didn't know. we built it, we tested it, we knew exactly what it did. the physicists knew it would be a total environmental disaster.

america had zero understanding of the japanese mentality, and couldnt see that japan WOULD surrender... it's just gonna take em a moment. they failed to think of the japanese people, and made civilians pay for the crimes of the elite generals.

and finally, we could have fired a warning shot and got the point across with diplomacy, it was just easier to vaporize 200,000 people.

Robot2600 posted...

It's not out of my pay grade: totally wrong. Don't believe the propaganda that we HAD to:

the truth is the war in the east was racially charged from the start. we stopped bombing civilians in germany, but continue the war crimes in japan/tokyo like they are going out of style.

they 100% knew the effects of radiation and fallout, but they like to pretend like they didn't know. we built it, we tested it, we knew exactly what it did. the physicists knew it would be a total environmental disaster.

america had zero understanding of the japanese mentality, and couldnt see that japan WOULD surrender... it's just gonna take em a moment. they failed to think of the japanese people, and made civilians pay for the crimes of the elite generals.

and finally, we could have fired a warning shot and got the point across with diplomacy, it was just easier to vaporize 200,000 people.

When did we stop bombing German cities? We were destroying cities left and right in Germany basically until it was clear that organized resistance had collapsed. That point was never reached in the Pacific.

Proof on the knowledge of fallout part? The top echelon of nuclear scientists for the Trinity test immediately walked about ground zero after it happened, with the sole precaution being taken being wearing little booties on their shoes. And that was only a handful of months before Hiroshima.

There was definitely a misunderstanding of Japanese people, but that was stemmed from brutal and suicidal resistance faced at a dozen battlefields and some blatantly horrific treatment of civilians to prevent them from surrendering in the Philippines and Okinawa. Allied policymakers simply could not believe that Japan would easily surrender based on the many examples they faced of Japanese refusing to surrender until their various garrisons were all but wiped out.

And the risk of a warning shot was that it was new tech and it couldve been a fizzle, which wouldve been a tremendous backfire. The Hiroshima bomb had only been tested once, and the Nagasaki bomb was completely untested.

^ Not even that re: time gap. Trinity was July 16th, about three weeks before Hiroshima.

Also, the Hiroshima bomb was the one that was untested. The Nagasaki one was the same design as Trinity.

it is obviously wrong to use a nuclear bomb on a city of civilians

im well aware of everything that up to it and there is no excusing any of the things that the Japanese military was doing either

look at what 9/11 did to our country, imagine if that hadnt been those buildings though but had been an entire major city

maybe there werent any better options, but it was still wrong and abhorrent to bomb cities where civilians live

Neither of those things were justified.

"But Tokyo!"

That wasn't justified either.

Any more questions?