Your opinions on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[CodeRedR51]

Not in the mood to read the whole thread right now, but:

Not to mention the last post before it was revived was almost 4 years ago.

 

[Rage Racer]

We have come close though.

Not once though. There were four incidents of false nuclear alert. Two in USA (1979 and 1980) and two in USSR/Russia (1983 and 1995).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nuclear-false-alarms.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAD#False_alarms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

Of course, these systems are meant to be operated by professionals, who ought to use their heads in case of emergency. Somebody in Pentagon had to see that the satellites don't detect any missiles, and the number of missiles keeps changing. Petrov knew that only 5-missile attack is weird (as he said later, he didn't have a "red button" on his table - he had two phones, one to call the authorities, and second to give an order to his subordinates), and the observers in Murmansk spotted the Norwegian rocket's trajectory heading away. Everyone was doing their job properly. Idiots don't serve in strategic missile troops (or so we hope ).

Russian doctrine, I believe, relies heavily on literally thousands of "battlefield" nukes which are deployed by commanders at the field level. These can be mishandled, stolen, used by rogue commanders, or deliberately used in a last-ditch attempt to avoid defeat. The US has battlefield nukes, too, though not as many.

Tactical nukes, you mean?
I'm not sure if "relies heavily", but yes, Russia has the world's biggest amount of TNW's - short-range ballistic missiles, aerial bombs, SAM's, artillery shells and even landmines. And they are meant to be used on the home territory to annihilate massive numbers of invading enemy troops with minimal risk to the civilians.

 

[TenEightyOne]

@RageRacer, whatever your hobby is it gives you a worrying overview of Russian ballistic ground forces and their weaponry... good man!

 

[a6m5]

Way I understand it, U.S. & Soviet did compete over Japan's surrender. And while this is just a conspiracy theory, I've also read that Japan did use that fact as the leverage in negotiating the surrender. I believe it.

As for the atomic bombs, it was one ugly mother of a war(realest of wars IMO), and everybody got their hands dirty. Were the bombs justified? While I think it's healthy to question the decision, I personally don't blame Truman one bit(and I'm Japanese). Had we completed our nuclear program before the Americans, I have very little doubt that Tojo would have hesitated to burn down American cities with his bombs.

Well, my opinion is...

Japan went over to Pearl Harbour and was all,

PEW PEW PEW!

That's the American version. It was a very complicated power struggle in Asia between Japan & the West!

 

[Danoff]

If I were in league with a powerful alien race, I would suggest to them that humanity would be better off if you (aliens) stole all the technology, then altered human DNA so that IQ would be permanently capped at 60 or so.

 

[ledhed]

Impartial historical look at the cause of Japans declaration of war on the USA and UK can only be understood if you consider WWII just the end of WWI .
You must consider Japan felt they had joined the ranks of other great nations and had proven in WWI and against the Russians that they were a player on the world stage and just emulated the other Imperialist like the UK and US and others and were unfairly punished .
Also they where treated badly in treaty negotiations and no one can say if this was a direct cause of militarist rise to power.
This is a very complicated issue if your interested in truth and fairness.

 

[Keef]

It's also possible to think that the entire nuclear bomb and power industry, with hundreds of open air tests, accidents and rivers of pollution has lead directly to the explosion of cancer rates from ~1950, and indirectly to the explosion of autism rates beginning about a generation later.

In my opinion, the world would be a better, safer place if wars were fought by knights on horseback, armed with lance and sword, and led by the King who started the war. I wish that machine guns and atomic bombs were never developed.

You may be amused to know that my father played a role in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. He drew the navigation and bombing run maps. A geologist before the war, he worked as a cartographer for the USAAF on Guam.
Ironically, he died young of brain cancer.

I don't think it's possible, I think it's an absolute fact, and the evidence for it is overwhelming. There are many localized events which support it, including this one which is an ongoing phenomenon in St. Louis. Basically, don't raise kids in Florissant, Missouri unless you want them to die from brain cancer at 40. I estimate that after further investigations, testing, and current residents die off, this entire swath of St. Louis will eventually become a ghost town due to fear over radiation poisoning. That'd make at least two places near St. Louis which have been rendered uninhabitable.

This video is a collection of local news reports, including snippets of the original report interviewing a couple local women who began researching the phenomenon. I can't find the original video but this one includes later updates.



And just for kicks, here's the list of EPA Superfund sites in Missouri which have made it to the National Priorities List. Most of them are industrial hazardous waste, not nuclear waste, but they're interesting nonetheless.

I'm spend hours at a time reading about these sites. There's about 10 of them (non-nuclear) in my area near Dayton, OH. I live about 3 miles away from 4 of them. My dad used to play in the worst one when he was young. He died when he was 63 and I'm convinced the exposure didn't help his case. Being a historically industrial city, Dayton didn't escape all sorts of lazy practices which seem to mostly have occurred between the 50s and 70s. Most of the later discoveries and cleanup efforts occurred in the late 80s and the program is ongoing. Give it a read and take note of all the places in your area where you shouldn't buy a house.

 

[Blitz24]

Was that an indirect reference to Times Beach, the town that was razed due to the road paved with carcinogens?

 

[Keef]

Was that an indirect reference to Times Beach, the town that was razed due to the road paved with carcinogens?

Indeed it was.

I like to play a game of "find the contaminated landfill" by searching Google Maps for bare land dotted with monitoring wells. Once you find them, maybe with help from the Superfund listings which don't often have precise locations, it's obvious as hell what they are. There might be a little building housing equipment, monitoring wells dotted all around the side, a fence around it, etc. Then you go drive up to the gate and see a sign which says "Danger, keep out" and labels it an EPA Superfund cleanup site.

Look up Love Canal. It's a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, a part of which was abandoned after toxic wastes seeped out of the ground.

 

[Danoff]

The more centrally planned an economy is, the more difficult it is to distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Undoubtedly there were many civilians killed in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What's a "war crime" and what's not comes down to a lot of specifics about the actual situation. I will say that it's easy to distinguish Hiroshima and Nagasaki from some other kinds of instances where civilians are harmed or brutalized, and that is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not selected to intentionally harm civilians or to maximize civilian casualties. The civilians killed in those bombings were "collateral damage", rather than the target. Those cities were military targets, even though collateral damage was high (even extreme). This is not the same as some of the Russian strikes in Ukraine, where civilians, in some cases, are the literal target - the intent being to demoralize the population rather than to actually harm the military strength of the opposition. And I don't mean just any kind of demoralization (like convincing an enemy that they cannot win militarily), I mean demoralizing them because of the pain and suffering you're inflicting on the civilian population.

If you want to make the case, and I haven't tried, you'd be looking for evidence that civilians were the intended target, or that civilian casualties was positive contributing factor in the selection of those targets (there is some evidence for this). And you'd want to make that case based on what your father actually thought.


Hopefully from the above you'll see that it's more complicated than that. I know you like to think this sort of thing, but it's really a misguided notion in an era of information.

Maybe it's time for a thread revival.

 

[Imari]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. They were ultimately only nuked at all to demonstrate a powerful weapon in order to convince the Japanese to surrender and avoid further casualties, both military and civilian, if the war were to drag on. Other considerations were simply telling the Japanese about the weapons or demonstrating it on an uninhabited target, which for various reasons were considered likely to be ineffective.

The nukes weren't particularly more deadly than more conventional (at the time) attacks like the firebombing of Tokyo, and so I don't think the use of them was considered as outrageous as using a modern thermonuclear weapon would be.

While a lot of people were killed, there was a lot of people killed in the war overall and there's a reasonable argument to be made that the bombing was undertaken with the ultimate intention of creating the least loss of life possible. That sucks and feels profoundly disrespectful to all the people that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as all those that survived, but it's probably true.

I've visited ground zero in Hiroshima, and it's not a nice feeling to be standing near where a nuclear bomb once went off and flattened a city. It's what I imagine visiting a concentration camp would feel like, an unavoidable awareness that something terrible happened there. One would hope that the world is smart enough not to get itself into a position again where nuking a city is somehow a net positive, but recent events would seem to suggest that at least some nations/governments/leaders aren't really that fussed.

 

[Rich S]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. They were ultimately only nuked at all to demonstrate a powerful weapon in order to convince the Japanese to surrender and avoid further casualties, both military and civilian, if the war were to drag on. Other considerations were simply telling the Japanese about the weapons or demonstrating it on an uninhabited target, which for various reasons were considered likely to be ineffective.

The nukes weren't particularly more deadly than more conventional (at the time) attacks like the firebombing of Tokyo, and so I don't think the use of them was considered as outrageous as using a modern thermonuclear weapon would be.

While a lot of people were killed, there was a lot of people killed in the war overall and there's a reasonable argument to be made that the bombing was undertaken with the ultimate intention of creating the least loss of life possible. That sucks and feels profoundly disrespectful to all the people that died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as all those that survived, but it's probably true.

I've visited ground zero in Hiroshima, and it's not a nice feeling to be standing near where a nuclear bomb once went off and flattened a city. It's what I imagine visiting a concentration camp would feel like, an unavoidable awareness that something terrible happened there. One would hope that the world is smart enough not to get itself into a position again where nuking a city is somehow a net positive, but recent events would seem to suggest that at least some nations/governments/leaders aren't really that fussed.

And just think... Those first few nukes were thousands of time weaker than what's out there on our missiles now.... I live about 3km from a major university, if fat man went off at the center of the campus my house is still standing.... But if a modern warhead, just one, goes off in a city 15 miles away I'm toast...