Hiroshima Marks Atomic Bomb Anniversary

[Izzy]

I'm sure they felt great, they saved more American Lives than they did end Japanese lives that day, and that was their goal.

The bombs were dropped because the Americans wished to see what they could do - isn't it somewhat strange they refused to warn the Japanese in advance?

Isn't it somewhat strange that after Hiroshima they didn't give the Japanese time to surrender - less than 48 hours and they hit them again!

Isn't it strange that the two nukes were different designs offering different yields that needed to be compared?

Isn't it also strange that from January 1945 General Curtis Lemay in charge of US bombers was ordered to leave 2 cities untouched so the full effects of a new 'weapon' could be fully guaged?

The whole invasion angle is a comforting lie - Japan was going to surrender anyway and didn't have anything left to fight an invasion with!

[gilld1]

Maybe a month or so ago, China got all in an uproar about some new Japanese textbooks that glossed over the war in China. ?The article I read stated that Japan had still not apologized for some of their actions in China. ?I took it and made it a blanket statement and you called me on it, fair enough. ?I am man enough to admit when I'm wrong. ?I said some inaacurate things and that's all that's focused on. ?I also said some valid satements that all chose to ignore because it was contrary to your thinking. ?That's great intellect, ignore differing opinions, your just like Bush and all his cronies. ?You too Canada boy, if your unwilling to see others perspectives from up there in utopia then you too are like Bush. ?But some of you people sound like Iran and think the US is the Great Satan because of what happened 60 years ago. ?Every country has their skeletons in the closet so lets all get off their high horses.

Slam me but not Purdue! ?I said one of the finest, I never said Top 5. ?2001 graduate in School of Liberal Arts. ?So whoever can go ask their uncle anout my "claim". ?Why would I make it up? ?To impress people I'll never meet? ?Who I don't give a shit about? ?Anyway asshole, 40k students go to Purdue soI'm sure your Uncle would remember. ?At any rate, Purdue's programs in Agriculture, Pharmacy, Engineering, and Business are highly rated. ?Famous alum include Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Orville Redenbacher (the popcorn guy). ?Purdue has the largest # or foreign students of all schools in the US, so it's not just an Indiana thing. ?The school also brings in some of the finest entertainers in the world too, Dylan, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Miles Davis, Dave Matthews, STP, Pearl Jam, Bill Cosby, and more.

All right, let me have it you vile cunts!!!!

[Where is Hassan Nasrallah ?]

74, 000 people died on august 9th 1945, in Nagazaki ...

74 thousands ... i will never process that number. it's too big.

gosh. i wonder how the people who decided that strike felt after it was done ...
i wonder if these people, christian i'm sure, are in heaven now ?
 

I'm sure they felt great, they saved more American Lives than they did end Japanese lives that day, and that was their goal.

what ever .... you're going to hell.

[W. Botaxl Rose]

Hey people, all's fair in love & war. Those fucking zips had it coming in a big way & everyone knows it. I guess the moral of the story is don't go around starting wars with countries that can blow u up. Lesson learned.

On the flip side, America has just put a bullseye on its' back by starting a war based on lies over in Iraq. We now deserve anything we get cause we started shit that we didn't need to. It's an excuse for all those people to attack us even more vigorously. Should of just caught Bin Laden & cleaned up Afghanistan/Pakistan. But now the U.S. is no better than anyone else, cause technically, we are terroists as well.

[SLCPUNK]

Slam me but not Purdue!  I said one of the finest, I never said Top 5.  2001 graduate in School of Liberal Arts.  So whoever can go ask their uncle anout my "claim". 

All right, let me have it you vile cunts!!!!

You are vile.

I said my brother was a professor there and can easily look up your info to back your claim. If you don't want to give me that information, then scan and post your degree.

This is your can of worms that you opened. If you are going to slam people and use a supposed to degree to back it up (which is a logical fallacy anyway) then show us, or shut up about it.

[C0ma]

74, 000 people died on august 9th 1945, in Nagazaki ...

74 thousands ... i will never process that number. it's too big.

gosh. i wonder how the people who decided that strike felt after it was done ...
i wonder if these people, christian i'm sure, are in heaven now ?
 

I'm sure they felt great, they saved more American Lives than they did end Japanese lives that day, and that was their goal.

what ever .... you're going to hell.

You asked for an answer.....

[Surfrider]

74, 000 people died on august 9th 1945, in Nagazaki ...

74 thousands ... i will never process that number. it's too big.

gosh. i wonder how the people who decided that strike felt after it was done ...
i wonder if these people, christian i'm sure, are in heaven now ?
 

I'm sure they felt great, they saved more American Lives than they did end Japanese lives that day, and that was their goal.

what ever .... you're going to hell.

Going to hell for saving more lives than they killed?  Interesting.

[Surfrider]

Here is a defense of the bombing.  I think military strategy is very interesting looking at it from a moral perspective.  I think the most important factor, while of course not the only factor, to look at is the loss of life versus the amount of lives saved.  This thread simply shows that the numbers are disputed.  Considering the casualties before the bombs were dropped, it seems that more lives were probably saved with their use.  Of course, Izzy made a powerful argument to the contrary.


60 Years Later
Considering Hiroshima.



For 60 years the United States has agonized over its unleashing of the world?s first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. President Harry Truman?s decision to explode an atomic bomb over an ostensible military target ? the headquarters of the crack Japanese 2nd Army ? led to well over 100,000 fatalities, the vast majority of them civilians.



     
Critics immediately argued that we should have first targeted the bomb on an uninhabited area as a warning for the Japanese militarists to capitulate. Did a democratic America really wish to live with the burden of being the only state that had used nuclear weapons against another?

Later generals Hap Arnold, Dwight Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Douglas Macarthur, and Admirals William Leahy and William Halsey all reportedly felt the bomb was unnecessary, being either militarily redundant or unnecessarily punitive to an essentially defeated populace.

Yet such opponents of the decision shied away from providing a rough estimate of how many more would have died in the aggregate ? Americans, British, Australians, Asians, Japanese, and Russians ? through conventional bombing, continuous fighting in the Pacific, amphibious invasion of the mainland, or the ongoing onslaught of the Red Army had the conflict not come to an abrupt halt nine days later and only after a second nuclear drop on Nagasaki.

Truman?s supporters countered that, in fact, a blockade and negotiations had not forced the Japanese generals to surrender unconditionally. In their view, a million American casualties and countless Japanese dead were adverted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year in the planned two-pronged assault on the mainland, dubbed Operation Coronet and Olympic.

For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks.

As it was, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Tojo?s followers capitulated only through the intervention of the emperor. And it was not altogether clear even then that Japanese fanatics would not attack the Americans as they steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies.

These are the debates that matured in the relative peace of the postwar era. But in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1-July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks.

And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland ? as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge ? were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms.

About a month after Okinawa was finally declared secure came Hiroshima. Americans of that age were more likely to wonder not that the bomb had been dropped too early, but perhaps too late in not avoiding the carnage on Okinawa ? especially when by Spring 1945 there was optimism among the scientists in New Mexico that the successful completion of the bomb was not far away. My father, William Hanson, who flew 39 missions over Japan on a B-29, was troubled over the need for Okinawa ? where his first cousin Victor Hanson was killed in the last hours of the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill ? when the future bomb would have forced Japanese surrender without such terrible loss of life in 11th-hour infantry battles or even more horrific torching of the Japanese cities.

Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, ?Little Boy,? the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing ? its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier.

Americans of the time hardly thought the Japanese populace to be entirely innocent. The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad ? some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish ? throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military ? industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers ? Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000.

In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the ?mad bomber? LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.

Postwar generations argued over whether the two atomic bombs, the fire raids, or the August Soviet invasion of Manchuria ? or all three combined ? prompted Japan to capitulate, whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a stain on American democracy, or whether the atomic bombs were the last-gasp antidote to the plague of Japanese militarism that had led to millions of innocents butchered without much domestic opposition or criticism from the triumphalist Japanese people.

But our own generation has more recently once again grappled with Hiroshima, and so the debate rages on in the new age of terrorism and handheld weapons of mass destruction, brought home after an attack on our shores worse than Pearl Harbor ? with more promised to come. Perhaps the horror of the suicide bombers of Japan does not seem so distant any more. Nor does the notion of an extreme perversion of an otherwise mainstream religion filling millions with hatred of a supposedly decadent West.

The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.

[gilld1]

Punk, if you made some statement about having a degree I would have no reason to think you're lying.  Why would you?  I don't doubt that Izzy has a degree, I just made a sarcastic remark about it.  But never did I say you're full of shit Izzy, prove it.  Get over yourself , man.  Maybe you gave it the ol' college try but couldn't quite make to Grad day but trust me, people do actually graduate from college. 

[SLCPUNK]

Punk, if you made some statement about having a degree I would have no reason to think you're lying.  Why would you?  I don't doubt that Izzy has a degree, I just made a sarcastic remark about it.  But never did I say you're full of shit Izzy, prove it.  Get over yourself , man.  Maybe you gave it the ol' college try but couldn't quite make to Grad day but trust me, people do actually graduate from college. 

Don't bring it up, if you are worried somebody might call you on it.

[gilld1]

Seriously, Punk, get a life.  You've put up a lot of posts in not very much time, that kind of screams "I don't have a fucking job so I'm on the computer all day!"  Worried?  Why would I be?  I'm secure which is more than I can say for you.  You could be some Methed out tweaker that steals IDs for your living so I will not put my full name on here.  Prove your brother works there, what's his name?  I can get on the alum site.  Put your fucking money where your mouth is loser.

[C0ma]

The bombs were dropped because the Americans wished to see what they could do - isn't it somewhat strange they refused to warn the Japanese in advance?
Isn't it somewhat strange that after Hiroshima they didn't give the Japanese time to surrender - less than 48 hours and they hit them again!

Warn them???
"here we come, this is probably gonna hurt......"
I guess the telephone operator the fielded the call from the Japanese Emporer just before they attempted to take out our entire Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor must have just forgot to relay the message that they were on the way.....
Did you think before you typed that??

[gilld1]

"Uh..hello?  Hirohito?  This is Truman.  We are gonna bomb the shit out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Might want to get all your troops and supplies and such on out of there.  Take it easy..."

[SLCPUNK]

Seriously, Punk, get a life.  You've put up a lot of posts in not very much time, that kind of screams "I don't have a fucking job so I'm on the computer all day!"  Worried?  Why would I be?  I'm secure which is more than I can say for you.  You could be some Methed out tweaker that steals IDs for your living so I will not put my full name on here.  Prove your brother works there, what's his name?  I can get on the alum site.  Put your fucking money where your mouth is loser.

I thought you'd say something like that. When all else fails just insult away.

Doesn't bother me a bit.

You crack me up, wanna compare financial statements? Assets? What? 

Where do you want to stop?

Wanna pull our dicks out and measure?

What are you trying to prove?

Bottom Line: Don't pull out personal info on yourself if you don't want to get questioned on it. It's that simple.

[gilld1]

Denial is more than just a river, Punk.  You seem to be quite an angry guy.  Life kinda sucks for ya, huh?  I assume you attack everyone's statements like this or just the ones you don't agree with?  Go ahead, pat yourself on the back, you sure showed some guy on the internet.  Go tell your friends if you have any other than cyberfriends.  I'm through with your clownish ways.

[SLCPUNK]

Denial is more than just a river, Punk.  You seem to be quite an angry guy.

Not angry, I just don't like assholes......

[jameslofton29]

Then you must have a self hatred complex.

[SLCPUNK]

Then you must have a self hatred complex.

The sound of one hand clapping is deafening.

Gonna talk about my Momma too?

 

[Where is Hassan Nasrallah ?]

Surfrider ... very interesting the " saved more lives than killed ..."

do you know a book called The Brothers Karamazov (by Fyodor Dostoevsky)

i havent read it. but i read a article a while ago , when the us was about to go to war. and there was this philosophical question, that is brought in the book at some point, i'd like you to answer ....
yes or no ...

would you kill or torture a little innocent girl if that would save humanity ? - like everybody will live in peace and harmony-

this little innovent girl get to be tortured for ever, but humanity is safe and happy ?

uh uh ?

you're sick man. you try to think logically " yeah, more life saved, rock n roll .. " but it's because you're on your computer, in your little home with your diet coke can ...

[Izzy]

The bombs were dropped because the Americans wished to see what they could do - isn't it somewhat strange they refused to warn the Japanese in advance?
Isn't it somewhat strange that after Hiroshima they didn't give the Japanese time to surrender - less than 48 hours and they hit them again!

Warn them???
"here we come, this is probably gonna hurt......"
I guess the telephone operator the fielded the call from the Japanese Emporer just before they attempted to take out our entire Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor must have just forgot to relay the message that they were on the way.....
Did you think before you typed that??

 

Ur so funny

America had the nukes in place by July and it was debated whether to detonate one somewhere uninhabited and invite the Japanese gov to watch - the idea being they would be so terrified of this mushroom cloud they would surrender and no one would be hurt

But, they decided against it - on the pathetic excuse that ''something might go wrong''!

That's fact by the way

They really could have warned them

I'm devestating u lot, come on - one of u has to have something!