Military Buffs I need your help.

[minipol]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
aside from the invasion arguement, i hadn't heard most of that...but only the arguement that less lives, and less civilian lives would be lost, is important to me. i'm not suggesting that military lives are less important than military lives, but there's no children in the military. in addition, i have to wonder if the bombs had to be dropped on a city. weren't there any isolated military bases?

Well, if they wouldn't have dropped the bomb, IMO more children would have suffered. An invasion is preceded by areal bombardments (dumb bombs), shore bombardements, city being shot it ruins and eventually lead to big populations seeking refuge. I think this would have affected more children than what happened with the bombs.
Off course this would have all depended on how long the Japanese would have defended their country before they would have surrendered. If they ever would surrender...
And being the proud people that they are, i think it could have been a LOOOOONG war.

Edit: i just saw that Erax also referred to the German Cities bombardements. People shouldn't really forget those.
About the aerial bombings taking more toll than the A-bombs in the long run:
Quote from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/A1138385:
"...With the city's population swollen with refugees from the east, the death toll from fire and suffocation is unknown, but probably lies between 40,000 and 100,000. ... "
And that's just 1 city: Dresden. Not to mention people will have died later because of sustained wounds that where not properly looked after, hunger, drinking contaminated water of bodies floating in it and so on.

[ December 11, 2003, 15:40: Message edited by: minipol ]

[Puke]

Yeah, there really is no history, except as written by the victors. Some stories about the founding of America are downright comical, and we are still re-learing what the world was like just a few hundred years ago. odds are, we will never get it right.

alot of what we know is propaganda, not just revisionist propaganda, but propaganda from the times that has been adopted and believed. The firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden were brutally destructive, far beyond the nuclear devices we used in the war. Just as much contraversy surrounds those:

Dresden was esentially a civilian target, with some railroads that were used by the military. but every city had at least some reason to make it a target. the reason (in my opinion) that Dresden was targeted, was that it had no military importance, it was out of the way - far from our line of advance. we would have gone far far around it, and the city would never have been important in the war. By devoting massive ammounts of resources to destroying it, we were sending a message. that message was "look, we have all these resources to waste on a target that has no importance whatsoever. why dont you give up?"

and so we dropped blockbuster bombs on it to crack open all the buildings. then we waited for people to come out and inspect the damage, and bombed it again when everyone was outside. then we firebombed it, once it was cracked open and the flamable materials on the interior of buildings were exposed - and the place got hot enough to melt STONE. the next morning, we sent in dive bombers to shoot anyone walking through the streets, that might have survived.

Needless to say, Germany didnt take it well, and fought on until we reached Berlin. Tokyo was much the same, but their buildings were made of wood rather than stone. Now you can hear all sorts of arguements about why the firebombings were performed or why it might have been a crime, and it can get about as impassioned as with the nukes.

but the point (which i have strayed far from) is that even though we have this nicely composed history fed to us, there are not necessarily conspiricays and coverups everywhere. most conspiracy theories stem from the fact that you are looking for a rational explination for why people have done something stupid or unexplainable.

people, yes governments, are largely big, dumb, and uncoordinated. Some people probably thought we needed to drop the A-bombs - and perhaps we did. maybe it was a calculated show of force to the Russians. maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time. maybe certain decision makers didnt think the Japanese were really going to surrender. nobody will know - but it probably isnt a plot, and theres about f*ck-all to be done about it now.

the only thing you can do, is assemble your own evidence, consider the sources, and form your own oppinion. relying on someone elses Version of history is never going to get you anywhere, becase its become such a subjective thing.

on a side note, i must applaud the rationality of this discussion, and how calm everyone has been. kudos to everyone providing historical sources and references and examples, and helping others to form their own opinions with information from multiple sources.

[geoschmo]

Ike's opinion not withstanding, we have no direct knowledge that Japan ws ready to surender. There are many theories of course. I do believe Emperor Hirohito was probably ready to call it quits. But there was a significant portion of the military establishment who wished to fight on to the Last man, woman and child. There was in fact an aborted military coup that occured after the bombs were dropped that, if it had been sucessful would have made the Emporers wishes on the matter totally irrelevant. It would have extended the war, and if the information about our lack of additional nuclear weapons was correct, would have neccesitated the dreaded blody invasion that people in support of the two bombings always suggest.

[Geckomlis]

To Oleg,

1. Those statements were written after the fact by politicians in uniform, or uniforms that became politicians - take your pick.
2. At the time, both the US Army and Navy were totally defensive in trying to justify their existence – other politicians wanted to radically scale them down and rely on nuclear weapons for force projection and defense.


To all,

If you are interested in the debate over the use of the atomic bombs, there are many excellent resources out there. A good place to start would be:

Pathfinder: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
http://www.rhodes.edu/library/pathfi...omic_Bomb.html

The guide is not meant to all-inclusive, but should help you to locate books, journals, databases, and Internet resources.

Remember your critical thinking skills:

How to distinguish fact from opinion and bias from reason
How to distinguish between primary and secondary sources
How to evaluate information sources
How to recognize deceptive arguments
How to recognize ethnocentrism and stereotypes

-Gecko

[Chronon]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
i suppose i should find a good history book or two and add it to my mental note to reread up on physics and astronomy one of these days. any suggestions?

On the diplomatic reasons for dropping the bomb try Martin J. Sherwin "A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance." It's an excellent history of atomic policy within the United States, and the beginning of the Cold War. Some would call it a "revisionist history," but I think it's a very cogent argument. Martin Rhodes has a number of good (but huge) books about building of the bombs. You could also try Lawrence Badash "Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons," a very readable account of the science behind the bomb, the making of the bomb, and the scientific community.

"Revisionist history," by the way, is usually what historians' whose arguments are being superceded (and/or contradicted) by more recent work tend to call the new arguments. Often it has pejorative connotations.

As Erax has so eloquently pointed out, it is misleading to judge the decision to drop the bomb using our current assumptions about nuclear weapons. When exploring historical questions, the context is all important.

Historical context is the main reason why I, sadly, cannot agree with you Atrocities about history being 20/20. Historians are human, and like everyone else (including scientists, by the way) we are influenced by the culture in which we live (the historical context). Historians working in the immediate post-war period were living in an extremely nationalistic culture, had very little access to secret documents, and were loath to criticize the government. It is no surprise that they followed the party line on the bomb. It took some time for the documents to become available, and when they did the history of the bomb was "revised." This is natural; historians are constantly working out new interpretations of past events, based on new evidence and more extensive exploration of historical cultures.

This is not to say that any one interpretation (traditional or revisionist) is definitively correct. On most large historical questions there are no truly right answers, but different interpretations of the events. This can be frustrating but it's what makes debates about the bomb (and evolution and eugenics, to name a few others) so interesting. We can have alot of fun arguing about them for a long, long time.

[Chronon]

Wow! That's three Posts in the time it took me to write the Last one. Thanks for the link, Gecko - excellent material there.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by rextorres:
That the bomb ended the war is a myth that we Americans like to tell ourselves. The US was already killing 100,000s of civilians every night from fire bombings in the capital cities so please don't give me any altruistic crap about saving innocent civilian lives.

The Japanese were actually ready to surrender - they just wanted a guarantee that Hirohito would not be tried as a war criminal. The US would not agree to this. The US, however, agreed to this condition AFTER the bomb was dropped mainly because we didn't want the Russians to know that we were out of them.

We simply dropped the bomb out of revenge as Atrocities inadvertantly and explicitly highlights AND probably more importantly to show the Russians that we were willling to use them.

AND didn't want the Russians to take too much territory on the mainland of Asia. They had declared war as agreed and were advancing into the lands held by the Japanese. As in Europe they were not likely to let go of anything they took, even if they used proxies to hold it. Look at the course of events in Korea.

What if the Russians managed to get a foothold in Japan itself before the US could take control? That was a big risk if there was to be a long, bloody conquest. So you can see the incentive to accept this condition. And they actually turned it into an 'advantage' by turning the Emperor into a spokesman for their modernization campaign.

[ December 11, 2003, 18:02: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]