Don't proclaim peace quite yet. Something bad will happen.
Was droping bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 evil?
by new hope and happiness 108 Replies latest jw friends
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little_Socrates
A question I have always wondered, is why didn't they surrender after the first bomb?
Then again why did they so quickly surrender after the second? Did they really think we had the ability or the will to nuke the entire island? I heard we had maybe one more oporational weapon and then would have taken months before we could make more.
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little_Socrates
Just to sum up my thinking on this matter...
While I think you may be able to concieve of some way of ending the war the would be more moral or ethical I don't think the nuking was inherently evil in the enviroment it happened in.
Also had never considered this one... how different would the world look today if half of Japan was part of the USSR? That was probably the most likely atlternate outcome to using the bomb.
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Laika
You're absolutely right. We should just leave ISIS alone and let them continue to spread...
Because the only options to the ISIS problem are to drop an a-bomb or to do nothing.
I suspect you might have more of a problem if you and your family were the ones who were unfortunate enough to live under a terrorist organisation or drug cartel...
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JeffT
A question I have always wondered, is why didn't they surrender after the first bomb?
Then again why did they so quickly surrender after the second? Did they really think we had the ability or the will to nuke the entire island? I heard we had maybe one more oporational weapon and then would have taken months before we could make more.
They didn't surrender right after Hiroshima because they didn't know quite what had happened to the city, only that something American destroyed it. Truman announced the attack sixteen hours later, I don't know if the Japanese believed what he said. Somewhere in this time frame (it may have been after Nagasaki) a captured American pilot told them told them we had hundreds of bombs just like it.
Probably the factor that really forced the surrender was the fact that the bombs knocked Hirohito's head out of his butt, and he recognized that he was cult leader not a God. His decision to end the war, and actions to bring that about were THE factor in the Japanese surrender. It's worth noting what he said in the Imperial Rescript announcing the decision " the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest." Understatement to say the least, but it illustrates the Japanese viewpoint at the time. Incidently, he read the speech in an anachronistic court Japanese, most of his subjects had no idea what he was saying. They also had never heard his voice before.
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designs
Nice details Jeff. The world before instant messaging....
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Apognophos
Just to back up what JeffT said:
"Some historians have argued that while the first bomb might have been required to achieve Japanese surrender, dropping the second constituted a needless barbarism. However, the record shows otherwise. American officials believed more than one bomb would be necessary because they assumed Japanese hard-liners would minimize the first explosion or attempt to explain it away as some sort of natural catastrophe, which is precisely what they did. In the three days between the bombings, the Japanese minister of war, for instance, refused even to admit that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic. A few hours after Nagasaki, he told the cabinet that 'the Americans appeared to have one hundred atomic bombs … they could drop three per day. The next target might well be Tokyo.'
Jerome Hagen indicates that War Minister Anami's revised briefing was partly based on interrogating captured American pilot Marcus McDilda. Under torture, McDilda reported that the Americans had 100 atomic bombs, and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be the next atomic bomb targets. Both were lies; McDilda was not involved or briefed on the Manhattan Project and simply told the Japanese what he thought they wanted to hear." -- Wikipedia
The Japanese nuclear program was too immature, and their intelligence on the Manhattan Project too sparse (unlike Germany and Russia), for them to really know how the U.S. might be capable of producing. So when McDilda, who didn't particularly know what an atom bomb was, said there were 100, it was a stroke of luck. If he'd underestimated how big of a deal the A-bomb was, and said "a thousand", they would have known he was lying. A hundred was somewhat plausible though.
Little did they know that the U.S. had no A-bombs, after Nagasaki. The process of refining the uranium was so time-consuming that (as far as I understand) it would take months to cook up another bomb. The U.S. "blew its wad" in four days with those two bombings. By doing that, they may have convinced the Japanese that there were lots more where that came from. After all, if you need months and millions of dollars to make one bomb and only have two prepared, surely you wouldn't use them in just four days?
So although I continue to be uncertain about whether it was the right thing to do, it's true that the two bombings may have saved many more Japanese lives than they took.
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JeffT
So when McDilda, who didn't particularly know what an atom bomb was
There were lots of rumors going around which is what McDilda (thanks for finding that, I couldn't remember his name) repeated. He said the bomb had a lot of pluses at one end and minuses at the other, separated by a lead wall. The bomb detonated by melting the lead wall and allowing the pluses and minuses to collide with each other, producing the explosion.
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new hope and happiness
As i stated im my orgional O.P i started this post based on a photo i saw of a lady holding her child fleeing from the bomb. Maybe my point is silly but it occured to me that i was very moved by that photo. It was very emotional and painful. I wonder if those that were involved in dropping that bomb from presidents too pilots could relate to that painful emotion before the bomb was dropped? And if so would they have done it?
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JeffT
New Hope, you are basing this on one side of the argument, here's one from the other side of the argument.
Baby in the bombed out remnants of the Shanghai rail road station, 1937.
I thought of posting a bunch of other pictures but decided they were inappropriate for this board. As I said previously, research the Rape of Nanking. Google images will yield pictures of Japanese bayonet practice with living prisoners, and other prisoners being beheaded or buries alive. "Rape" is literal in this historic event, sexual assault in China was widespread and brutal. Iris Chang's book contains a picture of a dead Chinese woman with a stick in her vagina.
I don't know if the use of the Bomb was moral or immoral. I do understand the thinking of those what wanted to put a complete and total stop to what the Japanese had been doing in the rest of Asia. Incidently, the scale of these atrocities was known to the Allied comand by 1945, although probably not to the puclic, at least not in full. The liberation of the Phillipines in particular would have provided proof of the brutality of the Japanese occupation forces.
