LOL @ your arrogance. First, you can’t prove historical interpretations, especially about hypothetical alternate courses of events. All your doing is perpetuating this typical American war apologist myth. Let’s weigh the opinions of some people a little more involved than you or me:
General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: “My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.”
Not enough?
General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.”
…
In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):
… By April 1945, Japan’s leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States’ insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him …
Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America’s national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas.
…
In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the “great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world,” that “the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan.” In Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:
The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito’s realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve “unconditional surrender” that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan’s surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.
The first bomb is estimated to have wiped out 4.7 mi2 and the second less, but Tokyo had already had almost 16 mi2 destroyed by firebombing, let alone other targets like Osaka and Kobe that had already been under attack for over a year. If the purpose was to display the new type of weapon, a military target, versus urban area, could have been chosen.
Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:
It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon 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 … 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.
If the United States had been willing to wait, said Admiral Ernest King, US Chief of Naval Operations, “the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials.”
Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. “Japan was essentially defeated,” he said, and “it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon.” In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.”
The leadership in place from April 1945 understood that surrender was inevitable. Japan probably would have surrendered if the US simply dropped the demand for Hirohito to be subject to the allies.
There’s also a highly important concurrent event of August 8th-9th. The Soviets had dropped their treaty with Japan and begun the Manchurian campaign.
Let’s check again what you said:
The part about the pollution is particularly telling. When we think of radioactive fallout, the first source we might turn to are the afereffects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in several rather gruesome deaths at the hands of radiation poisoning and related maladies. What few people are aware of in modern times though is just how inefficient (and thus dirty) the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs were compared to later thermonuclear devices. These newer developments have considerably less fallout compared to the older, more popularly known examples from history. We’re not really there just yet; there are still issues with how to achieve a high state of efficiency in a small package, but compared to the earliest nuclear devices the current weapons might as well be glorified high explosive.
I don’t see why you are concerned with the efficiency of the reaction. The only “improvements” have been to increase the magnitude of the explosions. Hydrogen bombs are just as radioactive as “nukes” and create much larger explosions.
I don’t see where you are getting the idea of a nuke with less fallout. The article I linked shows that the newer “bunker-buster” warheads come nowhere close to burying the warhead deep enough to contain fallout. We simply don’t have kinetic weapons capable of burying it deep enough. This is just more BS military apologeia.
Like your previous entries, you made the exact same mistake in presuming that the only potential use of any kind of nuclear device is widespread aggressive destruction,
I never said “any kind of nuclear device”. In fact, I am all for nuclear power and believe that Thorium reactors would be rapidly adopted in a free society. They are safer, the raw material more abundant, and don’t produce plutonium that states crave for weapons, versus conventional reactors.
Once again, when I say that “nuclear weapons” cannot be used without harming innocent people, thus there mere possession constitutes a threat, I mean weapons which behave this way. If you can’t figure this out, you’re hopeless. No government is working on developing nuclear weapons which would be able to contain the fallout to the target area.
and then proceeded to back your claim with, and this is the kicker here: non-sequitr examples of abuse of nuclear devices by government, an inherently aggressive institution that current holds monopoly powers over the development and deployment of the devices. That you would only find aggressive examples of the use of nuclear device in that case was almost painfully obvious,
I cited the history of testing and use to show that the radiation cannot be contained without making an extremely small explosion. I also gave a possible defense for a private defense firm to at least threaten states with nukes.
The fact remains that there are no safe nukes, and their use is guaranteed to harm innocent people. Their possession cannot be seen as justified for any reason beside dismantling them in a free society.
and despite your denial of such things this very specific set of rules in the form of
- Possessing an object is not inconsistent with NAP
- While also objects, nukes are an exception because they have only ever be used to indiscriminately destroy
- Therefore, nukes are not consistent with NAP
Is very much a case of special pleading because have does not necessarily imply can.
It is still not special pleading. Read the thread again. Your logic here is flawed and not even an example of special pleading. A gun, grenade, or SCUD differs from a nuke in that the former can be targeted without harming innocent people. They are different things, thus open to a different interpretation. What you need to do is prove the existence of a nuke that can be exploded without harming innocent people, and I will say, “OK, we’ll call those “safe nukes” and their possession is legitimate as long as they are used defensively just like a pistol.”