I think it's important to remember Hiroshima, to remember that even though, perhaps, evil is necessary to stop evil, we should never forget that we, as a country, did commit evil and work to never have to be in that position again.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Eh. More people died at Dresden. More people died in the camps. I don't deny that Hiroshima was an evil deed, though possibly the lesser of evils; but 'the saddest day in history' is hyperbole caused by superstitions about nuclear weapons.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
Nuclear weapons are the unwanted gift that keeps on giving. That may have been hyperbole, but I'd still like to know what the heck superstition has to do with it.
And remember, the biggest prolferator in the world today of nuclear weapons is the United States of America. Posts: 410 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
But the people who died in concentration camps didn't all die in one day. I think it's fair to say that Hiroshima was the saddest day in history.
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
The ones who died at Dresden did die all in one day, though. And people are superstitious about nukes in the sense that they have a dread of them all out of proportion even to the rather nasty things that they are, and they don't understand radiation, so they are unable to think rationally about fallout.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
The death count of Hiroshima isn't that of two bombings. It's a count that continues to grow. This year alone, the count has risen by 5,373.
Posts: 3 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
If evil is necessary to stop evil how is it evil? Considering the fact that both of my grandfathers would have been put in extremely prolonged extreme danger had Hiroshima and Nagasaki not been bombed I think Truman's decision was far from evil. On top of that if an invasion of Japan was necessary far more Japanese and Americans would have died if the bomb had not been used.
Although six million Jews didn't actually die on that day, I would consider the day Hitler actually came to power was a far sadder day than the day that lead to the end of the war.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
actually there has been numerous studies regarding the short term and long term effects of a nuclear halocaust and quite frankly those superstitions are underestimating the potential disaster of nuclear weapons.
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:But the people who died in concentration camps didn't all die in one day. I think it's fair to say that Hiroshima was the saddest day in history.
I would say the saddest day would be the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Talk about the one event that caused the human race to fall backward for 1000 years with only a lifespan of 30 or 40 years.
Also I think we need to celebrate the end of the war. It was a choice between a couple hundred thousand dead or many millions dead. It's sad that it had to come to that, but in the end it saved millions of lives by ending the war early.
It was a horrific day. And their culture has been changed because of it. All you need for proof of that is to watch a little bit of anime. You can't get through any without some form of huge explosion or apocolypic event.
[ August 06, 2005, 05:58 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
You know, as sad as Hiroshima is -- and I agree that it was sad, even monstrous -- I think there have been plenty of sadder days in history.
Consider that the Romans had a word for "methodically kill every tenth person," which they applied to towns.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
I think the slaughter of the slaves after Spartacus' revolt was considerably worse than decimation.
And I'm not familiar with decimation ever being used on a town, only military units (and that was considered barbarous if technically lawful by the time of the late republic) and sometimes slave populations.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Can I just point out that you guys are jumping all over a statement that I'm pretty sure was meant to be more emotionally evocative of a person's feelings than objectively factually accurate? That 'saddest' clearly has no objective reality and is totally subjective? That, in essence, you're arguing against a straw man?
If you guys feel more connection with another event in history, that's great, but why trivialize what one person feels when doing so doesn't achieve anything?
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
While innocent children did indeed in the atomic bombings, it is important to remember that 1945 was an age without laser guided bombs and cruise missiles and that the Japanese were our enemies. We were in a war with an entire nation, not just two cities full of civilians. Furthermore, the analogy between me killing a child to save my family and Hiroshima is flawed, because the true equivalent would be choosing whether to kill that child or to kill my family and that child's family. By sending in an invasion Truman would have been sending American soldiers and Japanese civilains just as much to their deaths as he sent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims to their deaths. In both cases the death is random because you don't which soldiers would die and you don't know which citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are going to perish in the explosions.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote: While innocent children did indeed in the atomic bombings, it is important to remember that 1945 was an age without laser guided bombs and cruise missiles and that the Japanese were our enemies. We were in a war with an entire nation, not just two cities full of civilians.
This doesn't change that, to get back to the original question, the act of taking innocent life. I say it is always evil. You are saying that it's not evil when it's done for the greater good.
quote: Furthermore, the analogy between me killing a child to save my family and Hiroshima is flawed, because the true equivalent would be choosing whether to kill that child or to kill my family and that child's family. By sending in an invasion Truman would have been sending American soldiers and Japanese civilains just as much to their deaths as he sent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims to their deaths. In both cases the death is random because you don't which soldiers would die and you don't know which citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are going to perish in the explosions.
I think this actually speaks to the issue at hand more directly. I do think that it's just an extension of your belief that evil is transmuted to good when it achieves a greater good.
I don't disagree that the atomic bombs saved lives, that they achieved, by their use, a greater good than if they had not been used.
Where you and I disagree is that this somehow makes the act of taking innocent life not evil.
I am saying that evil can lead to good.
You are saying that good can only lead to good. Isn't that correct?
The problem that I see with your logic is that it opens the door to abuse. If, depending on the end, evil is somehow transmuted to good, then people have no reason not to perform that action as long as the ends justifies the means.
Don't you see that this logic is extremely dangerous?
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Now that I think about it, the forceful taking of another human life is pretty much in the evil category, too, whether it's "innocent" or not.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote: You are saying that good can only lead to good. Isn't that correct?
No, because the Holocaust was evil, but it lead to the creation of Israel which was good. However, when there are two options and one is significantly worse than the other, and choosing the latter will save thousands, maybe millions of people than it is not evil.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
As far as I remember, this was not a thread entitled "What is the Single Most Evil Day in History," but one in which we remember the numerous innocent victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and think about how that was a pretty crappy deal for them.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: I think the slaughter of the slaves after Spartacus' revolt was considerably worse than decimation.
And I'm not familiar with decimation ever being used on a town, only military units (and that was considered barbarous if technically lawful by the time of the late republic) and sometimes slave populations.
I've never heard of it used on a town either. If it was ever used, it had to have been a one time thing, but even that would not have made much sense. If a Roman general was pissed at a town, he would have been more likely to kill everyone. Decimation was supposed to only be done to a cohort of soldiers who showed cowardice. That way they see that cowardice (or being inept) leads to death, but only 10% are killed.
As for the Spartacus revolt, Crassus decimated his own troops (loosing to a slaves is a good way to piss off a roman leader). He crucified all 6,000 of the captured slaves. info on roman armyPosts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote: I think it's important to remember Hiroshima, to remember that even though, perhaps, evil is necessary to stop evil, we should never forget that we, as a country, did commit evil and work to never have to be in that position again.
posted
Being at war with another country does not make it morally right to slaughter thousands of innocent people. If that were the case, then terrorist nations that have declared war on the U.S. have every right to target our schools, hospitals, and businesses if they believe that it will cause us to surrender to their wishes.
quote: By sending in an invasion Truman would have been sending American soldiers and Japanese civilains just as much to their deaths as he sent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims to their deaths
Ah, but the obvious difference that you neglect to mention is that some people were part of a war that they knew could result in death, whereas the other people were going about their daily lives, perhaps even lobbying their government to surrender to the U.S. You can't compare the two types of casualties and pretend that civilian casualties are the same as those of soldiers.
quote:Furthermore, the analogy between me killing a child to save my family and Hiroshima is flawed, because the true equivalent would be choosing whether to kill that child or to kill my family and that child's family.
This is flawed too. A better equivalent would be, would you burn the flesh off of one of your kids so that your other two kids would have a mathematically higher probability of survival? Or here's another example. Suppose someone tells you they are going to shoot you and your son. However, if you shoot your son yourself, he'll let you live. You think to yourself, well, if I shoot my son, at least one of us will live. Mathematically, one person surviving is infinitely greater than zero people survivng. So in order to create the greatest amount good, I have no choice but to shoot my son.
It is possible that more people may have died had the bombs not been dropped, but that cannot be said with any certainty. Forgive me for being skeptical, but I've learned the last few years that the government seems to have the ability to create justifications for certain actions based only on circumstantial evidence.
I think there are certain ethics and moral guidelines that should never be infringed upon. That is what made us the good guys right, the fact that we don't use barbaric means to accomplish our purposes, the fact that we uphold a higher standard than lowly terrorists?
Could you possibly be saying that any act can and should be used as long as more people are benefitting than suffering? So who gets to decide who suffers and who benefits? WWII dictated that people that were unfortunate enough to have been born within a certain geographical region were to be sacrificed. Hitler decided that the Jews would suffer for the benefit of Aryan nations.
In an army, why might a whole division of soldiers risk all their lives to go save the life of one soldier left behind? Mathematically, the majority would be better off leaving their friend behind. But humanity isn't about mathamatical probabilities, it's about honor, dignity, and moral integrity. You can't make the value of a human life fit into a mathematical equation. The moment we forsake ethics is the moment we lose our humanity.
Posts: 1256 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote: And people are superstitious about nukes in the sense that they have a dread of them all out of proportion even to the rather nasty things that they are, and they don't understand radiation, so they are unable to think rationally about fallout.
Even if you look at radiation "rationally", I'm not so sure that you could come to any conclusion that didn't label it insane to contemplate as an acceptable byproduct for anything. They didn't call it the MAD doctrine for nothing.
Posts: 410 | Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by crabbypants: The death count of Hiroshima isn't that of two bombings. It's a count that continues to grow. This year alone, the count has risen by 5,373.
It's been 60 yrs... I'm honestly surprised there are that many survivors of the attack still around to die.
We also shouldn't forget that Japanese citizens were being urged to fight, women and children included, to the death...
Or that American pilots risked their lives to drop leaflets warning Japanese citizens what we were going to do...
Or that when they balance the casualties with the estimate of 1,000,000 lives saved, they are *only* talking about American and British soldiers. Who knows how many Japanese deaths on the mainland it would have taken to get them to surrender?
For a radically different perspective: Thank God for the Atom Bomb Edit to warn: article is written by a American WWII soldier and not very kind towards the Japanese on occasion
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
The even worse tragedy of all this is that you all are under the assumption that they was only "It's either them or us" mentality, what about the 3rd or 4th option? What ever happened to just keep on blockading for additional months? They were starving, with almost no petrol and resources to fuel their munitions industry the movie Hiroshima showed that the Japanese had been discussion surrender and also there has been plenty of documentation that the Japanese as early as 1943 were sending peace feelers to the US and as things got desparate showed a willingness to surrender on the condition that the Emperor is not to be tried for war crimes and for Hirohito to remain on the throne, a request that the American's allowed them to do anyways after dropping the bombs.
And then what about just simply dropping the bombs if you had to use them on non civilian targets? Say outside Hiroshima and Nagasaki? So that noone dies and the Japanese see what could or will happen if they continue resisting?
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote: as things got desparate showed a willingness to surrender on the condition that the Emperor is not to be tried for war crimes and for Hirohito to remain on the throne
I've never heard anything similar to this. Do you have any links to back this up?
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm just thinking... "yeah, blockading them and starving them out... that's humane to the civilian population"
Meanwhile, excerpted from the linked article:
quote:On the other hand, John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, "a difference, at most, of two or three weeks." But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. "Two or three weeks," says Galbraitn. Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That's a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith.
Finally, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were military (that is, strategic) targets, as much as Ploesti or Hamburg. The main difference with the atomic attack(apart from the radiation) is that one plane and bomb did what it took hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs to do to Dresden.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
Scroll down for the text of the Chicago Tribune article published in August, 1945 on the offer, an offer virtually identical to the terms that were accepted by the allies shortly before the article was published.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Here is Wikipedia's article on the bombings. It presents both sides as to whether or not the bombs should have been used.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
No indication surrender was on the way? Lets see, they had already tried to surrender, and I'm pretty certain we knew they were holding constant privy council meetings on the subject.
The unilateral rejection of the Potsdam terms by the military in late july was an unfortunate setback, and may well have made the first atomic bomb an unavoidable choice for the allies.
Japan had already decided to surrender by the time they found out the second one had dropped, and the privy council was merely debating what terms (with the ones for the full potsdam terms winning).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
By any means necessary: the United States and Japan Paul Rogers 4 - 8 - 2005 If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not worked, the United States had a plan for winning the war against Japan that involved massive use of chemical weapons. ------------------------------------------
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains a focus of historical controversy even sixty years later. Until the 1970s, most historians accepted the view that the weapons were used to prevent the need for an American invasion of the Japanese mainland scheduled to start in November 1945. Subsequently, “revisionist” critics argued that there were other motives, not least the need to bring the war to an early end because of the rise of Soviet influence in the region. In this view, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were early shots in the cold war, at a time when Japan was actually close to surrender.
A later generation of historians argued that the release of previously secret intelligence material dating from early 1945 establishes that Japan was not ready to surrender, and that its army planned to defend the homeland so formidably, and at such cost to American invaders, that Japan could force a ceasefire on favourable terms (see Richard B Frank, "Why Truman Dropped the Bomb", Weekly Standard, 8 August 2005).
The arguments and counter-arguments will not easily be concluded, and it is certainly the case that the United States was prepared to continue the use of atomic weapons against Japanese cities until surrender was forced; the Manhattan Project was thought to be capable of producing two more atom bombs a month through to the end of 1945. In the event, the formal Japanese surrender on 2 September 1945 brought the war to an end without further nuclear attacks.
But what would have happened if the Manhattan Project had not had its effect and the United States’s projected invasion of Japan had indeed gone ahead? The sudden end of the war precipitated by the two atomic bombs, and subsequent secrecy on the part of the United States, disguised for many years the fact that the US had prepared a remarkable back-up plan. This was the mass-production of enormous quantities of chemical weapons to be used against Japanese cities, that envisaged killing as many as 5 million people.
This previously secret plan came to light with the declassification of sensitive papers after the end of the cold war, and was written up some years later in a paper for the authoritative Proceedings of the US Naval Institute by two military historians, Norman Polmar & Thomas B Allen ("The Most Deadly Plan", Proceedings, January 1998).
It scarcely reached the public domain at the time, yet it says much about the approach to warfare that had developed by 1945, including a willingness to inflict mass civilian casualties on a scale far higher even than the carpet-bombing of Tokyo, Hamburg or Dresden or the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: I started typing before you posted, it was in response to the quotation in Jim-Me's post:
quote:But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way
Remember he's writing about the soldier's perspective... there was no sign of anyone letting up on anything... in fact, if there are peace negotiations going on, it's customary to have a cease fire during the time. The fact that the fighting was still so intense (3 ships gone down, prisoners executed, etc.) right up to the end, really does point to their surrender being a huge last minute and drastic change, rather than the culmination of a series of negotiations.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
Some of those dates seem off... he cites an atricle written later than his? and I thought the Japanese surrendered on 15 Aug, not 2 Sep?
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
There weren't negotiations, there was an offer which was being considered; many Japanese felt that America was about to invade Japan, and that a cease-fire would merely have been an excuse to prepare, or even do it.
I find those casualties numbers very interesting as well, I would love to hear a source. Are we sure they aren't averaged numbers from the whole war?
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't know where his numbers are from... just linked the article for an opposed perspective to it being the saddest day in history.
Posts: 3846 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
I read this article awhile ago, I seem to remember it making a pretty strong case that Japan would have surrendered before even the first bomb was dropped if they knew their Emperor would not be tried.
Posts: 3564 | Registered: Sep 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I think the first line of that article highlights the point of confusion:
quote:In the morning of 2 September 1945, more that two weeks after acceping the Allies terms, Japan formally surrendered.
To a soldier, VJ day, August 15, is the date they surrendered. Had the formalities not taken place and fighting resumed, it wouldn't be remembered that way. But to the guy wondering when he's going to have to storm another beach, 8/15 is the important one.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Grumble]](graemlins/grumble.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
