I want to know what you think. For me Chomsky said it the best: “Amongst the most unspeakable crimes in history.” The greatest realization of state terrorism.
It’s the one issue through which you distinguish the conservative from the neo-conservative.
If he says it was a good thing, then you know that he believes in the Trotskyite ideas of international policing that are disguised as “neoconservatism”.
If he says that morals are absolute, killing is an absolute wrong, and the nuclear bombings were an absolute wrong, then you know that you have spoken to the rare and true conservative.
It’s also the issue on which you distinguish the libertarian from the “Right Wing”.
The libertarian sees crimes on people abroad on the same level as crimes on people in one’s own nation.
The Right Wing person simply thinks that his nationalist ideas and his belief in moral inequality justify killing any number of people abroad.
everyone involved in that bombing should’ve been burnt at the stake.
As an ex-trotskyst, can you explain ? Trotsky was against any war, exept the “revolutionary wars” I think…
(I’m not saying that trotskysm doesn’t suck here :p)
I’m not convinced they were at all necessary.
An absolutely evil act.
Chomsky realizes very well that it’s innocent civilians who suffer particularly and completely unjustifiably under war.
The logical conclusion of the total state and total war.
In any case, I believe incendiary bombs killed more people than these pinnacles of government’s ingenuity in mass murder?
my readings were that japan was bullying some other asian peoples like the spanish and likelthe americans had done centureies and decades bfore. for some reason the us supplied attack planes to china to retalliate…which i have read by some is an act of war.
i have also read that japan was basically decimated prior to any atomic bombs from haevy conventional bombing and succesful blockades and oil embagoes.
if that info is true the atomic bombs certainly seem like an overkill to an aleady suffering people.
Q: “I want to know what you think.”
A: Genocide.
An abhorrent act of mass murder.
I don’t care if it would have saved 100,000 American lives, American lives aren’t worth more than Japanese lives, especially not military lives for civilian.
I’ve never understood why we didn’t drop the bomb on Iwo Jima or some other relatively unpopulated military target. We could have demonstrated to Japan that we had the bomb while destroying an important military base, killing very few civilians, and sparing the lives of about 7,000 Americans.
Not only is war bad in general, and atomic bombs bad in particular, we used two of them in just about the worst way imaginable.
"The logical conclusion of the total state and total war.
In any case, I believe incendiary bombs killed more people than these pinnacles of government’s ingenuity in mass murder?"
Yup. Napalm bombing over Tokyo killed 120k folks. Victims wise, the atomic bombs were no worse than many other things during the war, but it was surely impressive, so I don’t think it’s more or less evil than other bombings.
Mass murder. Like all wars.
As others said, Hiroshima and Nagasaki where nothing special if measured against the backdrop of that horrible war. Incendiary bomb killed many, many more.
Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,[75][76] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials),[74] and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.[77]
- "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.[[67]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-CD-66)
- "The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman.[[78]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#cite_note-77)
if there wasnt the two bombings and then this would happen instead
any lost of lives is horrible though but it total war
BUT THE BIGGER ATROCITY IS OPERATION KEELHAUL
here is a link to operation keelhaul
It’s easy to look back at the picture of the entire war and call it a bad thing by nature of being a widespread act of aggression, but like most conflicts going into the specifics of the scenario makes for a more complicated, less clean cut story. We may consider for example the analysis made by US military planners during the preliminary construction of Operation Downfall, the conventional invasion plan for the Japanese mainland. This includes the following assumptions made:
- That from a geographic perspective the island of Kyushu was the most viable point of invasion, a fact that would be obvious to the Japanese as well
- That this region and the mainland as a whole would be defended by both all available military personel and a a fanatically hostile population.
- That allied dead or missing for the initial invasion would range between 100,000 and 150,000 men, with many more wounded
- That the conquest of Japan would produce between 400,000 and 800,000 American fatalities. In addition, estimates of Japanese fatalities ran as high as 10 million people. One in every seven Japanese would die.
You wouldn’t need to look up the number of dead from both atomic bombings (~246,000) to know that this would have made for a far bloodier, more prolonged scenario. What’s more, the notion that the Japanese government was prepared to surrender and that the bombings were simply beating a dead horse are not well founded. The military dominated cabinet of Prime Minister Suziki favored continuing the war, and for the people as a whole, who have never been invaded or lost a war to an external foe in a history of 2,000 years, surrender was unthinkable. Talks of developing some sort of peace may well have been developed, but certainly not on terms favorable with the Allies. Even if it’s to be believed that the Prime Minister and his apologists were preparing in secret for a more favorable peace as they have claimed, this news comes after the fact to American planners who were in no position to contemplate this rumor.
The scope of the problem more clear, we must then consider the targets in question. It’s true that the majority of the dead were indeed civilians, owing no doubt to the urban nature of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What isn’t as well discussed is that both cities were also targets of strategic importance. Hiroshima housed a number of military camps, housed the headquarters of the 2nd General Army (which commanded the defense of all Southern Japan, such as Kyushu), and served as a communications center, a storage point and an assembly point. Nagasaki was in turn one of the largest sea ports and in turn was of great wartime importance for a wide range of industrial activity, including the production or ordnance, ships, equipment and all other war materials. All other factors aside, the objective of war is surely to dismantle your enemy’s ability to make war to the extent necessary to secure peace, and the destruction of these two cities ultimately fell in line with that objective in a most brutally efficient manner.
We can step back and debate the necessity of the entire conflict if you like. I don’t think US involvement was absolutely unavoidable myself, but what we do or say now isn’t going to change history. Had it been me I might have cursed my position more loudly that the pieces fell the way they did, but I would not have hesitated to secure peace in the most expedient, resource efficient way as I could have managed. Surely that is the most responsible course of action in the depravity that is warfare should it ever occur.
Hopefully there were never again be such a scenario so trying for our ethics as total war between entire continents of people.
An interesting post, but I must disagree.
Why where the States at war in the first place? To occupy Japan? Would that have been wise knowing that the soviets where just dying to engulf the region and a handful of commies where fighting in China? What was there to be gained at all? An occupation of China (or of southern China, as opposed to Japanese in the north) would have made much, much more sense. Why not let Japan and Russia quarrel, and the US keep southern China and ensure the survival of the European empires SE Asia (if that was the problem)?
Now, assume that war was inevitable: civilian where murdered! And I do not refer just to the a-bomb, but in general to the strategic bombing camping in Europe and Japan. Its barbarous! Wouldn’t a large financing of Chinese guerrillas have destroyed the Japs in china without a single American ever setting foot outside the US and at a fraction f the cost of producing tens of capital ships?
Assume that would not do: couldn’t a WW1-tupe peace be negotiated, with Japan being forbidden to have any navy at all? Even if the government would not agree, who cares? A ‘no swim’ zone would have been imposed, and all of Japan’s SEZ could have been seized by the yanks. No need to even touch the mainland, and this would have been much more effective in the long-run. Every friggin’ import and export form and too Japan could have been checked by the allies. Tariffs could have been collected. Keep in mind that would have been very, very easy for the US to enforce, after it victory at sea. What need where there to turn Japan into a crater?
Assume that an invasion of Japan was inevitable: where nukes the best option? Japan was sealed off. No fuel, no weapons, no steel, no chemicals, no goddamned clothes and food could enter. A few more months of that alone would have allowed the yanks to land pretty much unopposed as everyone would have been to busy starving to death and eating children to fight back. Without a single bullet being produced dues to lack of raw materials, what where they going to fight with, katanas? By bringing food to the liberated areas I’m sure that passivity of the general population could have been engineered.
What one could argue for here, is “would a hunger blockade have been more human than the bombing of two cities?” We just cannot know how many casualties would a hunger blockade have reaped. But I believe that the question needs to be at least taken into consideration.
I will offer a response to your points to the best of my knowledge.
To answer the question as to why the United States was at war to begin with, the first official declaration actually came from Germany a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor if my history is correct. Had that not occured it would be likely that US involvement may have been averted through the payment of reparations from the Japanese, but this move threw the entire Axis into consideration, which is also why American troops set foot in the European theater. More specific to this point of concern though, the Soviet preparations of invasion from the north came late into the game, and while at that point it may or may not have been suitable to burden them with the task of fighting the country (our relationship with them during this time was at best unusual in nature) it would certainly have raised humanitarian concerns on par with Operational Downfall to see such a plan through.
As for the barbarity of killing civilians, that’s certainly not at all in question. In scenarios of total war and especially in the case of the Empire of Japan the enemy sought to utilize their popuation as means of war. Killing civilians to dismantle these means to make war is par for the course, and calling it barbarous is only pointing out how all of war is barbarous. As for your guerilla statement, I’d be keen to remind you that Chinese killing civilians is still killing civilians, and as part of this objective to defeat the means to make war would only at best be means to an end.
For sake of brevity, I’ll quickly explain that such a treaty is a terrible idea for having changed absolutely nothing. The Japanese navy was destroyed by consequence of the war and putting it down on paper that they may not have it is a useless formality in the face of people who would clearly not abide by it.
Now, as outlined above, the enemy had little to no intent at all to surrender, a course of action that was unheard of in their long military history, even from the days of infighting amongst the daimyo. Even during the desperate formation of the Home Guard, children were given mere hand tools and told that to kill just one American with them was worth their death. In order to defeat the Japanese ability to make war, ultimately their will to make war must have been destroyed. This is what took not one, but both atomic bombs. While a single bomb might have been persuasive enough, uncertainty casts itself into the scenario if we imagine the possibility that the opponent sees this very unusual scenario of an entire city gone as a devastating but unique diplay. Destroying Nagasaki afterward made it positively clear that the warlords in government would never survive stubborness.
Inasmuch as war can be humane (which isn’t saying much), I’d easily rate a quick, emotionally shattering approach to breaking the enemy’s will as moreso than a slow, painful starvation that those in charge might more easily shield their eyes from.