24h after Hiroshima got nuked

will watch that thing later,

i am half german/half austrian, and just imagine if the nazis dropped an atomic bomb on the UK or the US to decide the war in favor of them

would you also think that its deserved? would you americans not just deserve the bomb for not surrendering a week earlier?

imo, the first bomb was already waaay over the top , it was more an experiment in real-life circumstances. but the second bomb on nagasaki is just plain and straight one of the biggest and most merciless massacres ever to happen.

and people, please leave this "my grandma here", "my grandpa there" shit out. my family also fought in this war, every family lost members in this war, so please shut up, seriously. we cannot carry the hate on forever. at some point, it shouldnt matter what happened to our grandfathers or even fathers but we should ask ourself what hate really is and who profits of it?

people need to learn history, not hate. in germany, people had to clean everything up and work on their history. austria (officially "freed", not "conquered") not so much. countries from the winning side also not at all.

end: if you think that killing hundreds of thousands of civilians because your grandfather lost a leg or was even killed is legit, then i cant really help you.
 
The Japanese War machine was a horrible thing. The general public were led to believe a complete and utter falacy as to what was taking place in the war. On the main islands of Japan people were told of constant victories, basically just that everything was going way better that it was.

People literally didn't know they were losing till the enemy was on their doorstep.

Also, if you want to watch a movie about Japanese civilians during the war, watch the anime "Grave of the Fireflies". It's easily the most moving film I've ever seen, so unbelievably heart breaking.
 
"Grave of the Fireflies" is such an amzing anime, one of the best imo. But it needs to be watched in Japanese.
 
I've written a few papers on it in the past, and each time, I think it's justified.

The problem most people face with analyzing history is that we are of course, doing it retrospectively. Naturally we're all going to think that killing such a number of people (not as many as were killed in some nightlong firebomb raids, fyi) was a terrible, awful thing.

But what you have to keep in the front of your mind is that we were at war, and not at "war" like we are now. We were coming off the largest combat operations the world had ever seen, and after nearly 5 years of fighting, we were about...oh, halfway through. One enemy who was more prone to surrendering/retreating had taken a huge coalition more than a year, and countless lives to push back.

With that thought, weigh the options.

Send 3 planes to drop 1 bomb, a total of roughly 30 crew members, and try to end the war by destroying 1 city. (Though it ended up being 2)

or

Relocate the forces who have been away for years, fighting in europe to japan, join up with the marines and Russians, and launch another massive amphibious assault, then fight your way, inch by inch through japan, most likely needing to destroy every person you encounter because they won't give in, losing an estimated million lives.

This was a war, folks. The idea was to win while keeping as many of your people alive as possible. The ethical argument of bombing civilians is interesting, but in the end, somewhat irrelevant. Germans bombed london, allies bombed berlin, americans bombed japans, and the japanese hacked hundreds of thousands of chinese civilians to death. Only difference is that the americans did it faster, wiped out cities, and ended the war. No one is more innocent or guilty than the next.
 
TheRapeOfNanking_1edCover.jpg


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_%28book%29

I was on the fence about the use of atomic weapons on civilians until I read this book. Japan got off easy.
 
threads for the video

but the whole thing is too complex to label with a simple "justified" or "not justified." i take a middle of the road approach--i think that given the jap gov's absurd inability to admit defeat (proven when they didnt even surrender after the first bomb) and their plan to arm civilians to fight to the death/the huge toll a ground invasion wouldve taken, dropping the bomb was perhaps justified..what wasnt, in my opinion, was dropping it on a city with waay more civilians than military units. IMO dropping the bomb on a civilian filled city had more to do with racism, the mental effect of war (granted, the japs did some of the most atrocious things in recent history during ww2, but so did most everyone else), flexing muscles for the upcoming cold war, and we also probably had a big interest in ending the war before russia could chip in in japan so we didnt have to split it up with them like we had to with germany

another thing i'll add is i feel like a lot of these discussions leave out the firebombing raids we were pulling all the time on japan.. those killed a lot more people than the bomb, and they were HORRIFIC

one thing we hopefully can agree on is that war sucks all around and we should do everything in our power to stop it from happening unnecessarily. of course, that's not the case at all, and people call me a hippy for saying that sometimes. people are fucking crazy..

 
Yeah, Nanking was a horrible war crime in its own right but does it grant a person a reason to wish such harsh vengeance on 2 entire cities? The whole Nanking warcrime is hardly documented and based mostly off of chinese testimonials of people who survived the attacks. While I do believe Nanking did happen and was some serious warcrimes, you have no way of knowing exactly what happened and how many people were actually murdered and what for.

There is never any justification for dropping atomic bombs on cities.
 
I am going to disagree.

There is plenty of evidence for that massacre of Nanking. From the bones of the mass graves to articles that ran in Japanese news papers describing killing contests.

Don't forget Japan attacked the US more or less unprovoked.

Japanese culture also would not allow for a surrender under normal war time circumstances. They were completely brainwashed by not only the emperor but by centuries of Bushido code.

I think this is more than evident based on the fact that even after the first atomic attack there was no surrender.

In addition, in the end it almost certainly saved lives. More people were killed in fire bombing raids in Tokyo then both atomic blasts combined. Another example is Dresden Germany where thousands were killed by conventional bombing. This would have been the case in Japan, not to mention the military death toll from island hopping fighting all the way to the Japanese main land where armed civilians would have fought to the last person standing.

There is no one that will argue that dropping the atomic bomb was not a horrible thing, and caused unspeakable death, however when you consider the circumstances it was the only option and indeed saved more lives than it extinguished.

It also changed the face of war, up until that point causalities were exponentially increasing. Since WWII causality numbers have been on a decline and smaller isolated conflicts.
 
IMO the worthy debate is whether the US couldve/shouldve demonstrated the bomb's power by dropping it in the ocean or in a more rural area, or at least on a mostly military site. dropping it instead on a city full of civilians is pretty questionable... though japan's refusal to surrender even after that does put a good portion of the blame on their shoulders..
 
I don't think there is any doubt they technically could have demonstrated the bombs power but that leaves a lot of what if's.

What if the bomb didn't detonate (which was a major concern).

What if they questioned the test, or the existence of a second bomb as a bluff.

What if they would have increased air patrols to prevent the bombing.

There was really no other option. Either drop the bomb, or fight all the way to Tokyo.

Even the existence of nuclear weapons stabilized the world. If we would have not dropped the bomb on a civilian area we would have been at war with Russia within 5 years. That is a pretty big leap but I think totally reasonable given post war tensions.
 
yeah i think we mostly agree. i just dont think dropping that shit on those cities eliminates any of those what ifs that dropping it on a more rural or military oriented site would. ocean was just an example. there are plenty of places to drop a nuke that will devastate the opponent and display your new power that doesnt take out a city full of civilians
 
half a million dead U.S. soldiers and anywhere from 5 million civilian deaths to 10 million civilian casualties. God, it would have been terrible. Simply tragic.

 
You left out one teeeeny part about the US wanting to flex their military prowess to intimidate the ever growing threat of communism out of Russia. The cold war had already more or less begun before the bomb was dropped. It was a huge "don't fuck with us, look at our new toy" to the Kremlin.
Just a minor detail.
 
That's funny. You are saying we need to not hate, and yet you are hating on people who made decisions in 1945, that they thought would end the war faster, with ultimately fewer dead Americans and Japanese.

66 years later and the American Navy was the first responder on scene after the tsunami. If something catastrophic happened in Berlin or Vienna, we would be there and most likely contribute more than any other country. America did not pick the fight against Japan, but we helped them rebuild after the war. How many Germans went over and helped rebuild London?

I don't blame the German people of today for the holocaust. It sounds an awful lot like you are still blaming today's Americans for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It takes some big blue veiny ones, and some serious historical amnesia to go there.
 
honestly, they need to understand why what happened did.

the japanese were right there with germany, id say what they did was just as bad as what hitler did, and they had no intentions of stopping.

they shouldnt even be asking that question, the thing is, they wouldnt nuke us under similar circumstances because we havent gone off pillaging neighboring nations in recent history.
 
"Don't forget Japan attacked the US more or less unprovoked."

I assume you're talking pearl harbor there. That was a military base, that's what you do in wars. We hear all the great things on the news when ever america goes and bombs someones bases. I hope you're not saying that justified the atomic bombs.

Then the coolness on our part to put a shit ton of japanese into internment camps. That was super sweet of us.

"I think this is more than evident based on the fact that even after the first atomic attack there was no surrender."

So the end justifies the means? If throwing 20 baby girls off a building would prevent 50 thousand military deaths, should we do it? Is that right? Also if somebody nuked that many civilians, you have a proud culture, you think that might piss people off enough to continue fighting.

Dropping those bombs on civilians was one of the most fucked things we've done as a country. It's really sad that it's so easy for people to see it as a deserving action. They bombed pearl harbor, they wouldn't surrender, it had to happen. If this was the other way would we have surrendered? Would we see it as something we deserved and the best course of action to save lives?

Look how fucking crazy people got about 9/11 where a few thousand people died. Yes it was tragic, but doesn't even come close to scaling up to the a bombs. People look at things so one sided. America can't do any wrong, we're always right.
 
Actually if you read more into the actual accounts from scientists working on the manhattan project they had a petition in circulation to stop it from usage, and contrary to propaganda Japan was wavering in strength. Point is, that the US had dumped over $2Billion and employed over 100,000 people on the project. They more or less had to justify the costs by putting the bomb into use. Can you imagine trying to explain the use of $2B in the 1940's for something that didn't serve a purpose? They wanted to test out both models of A-bombs, the shot gun style "little boy" and the larger "fat man" circular plutonium core bomb.
It took Japan 3 weeks to surrender after dropping both bombs, you can sure as hell bet if they had enough material for a 3rd bomb they would have dropped it too. In fact they had the processing plants working overtime to produce more bombs, they had like 6+ more lined up for the next two months.
The US felt extremely threatened by Russia and it is not just some minor secondary footnote. It has a lot to do with the use of two bombs, and on a civilian target.
Do more non biased reading.
 
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."- Dwight Eisenhower"It is my opinion that the use of this 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.-Admiral William D. Leahy(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)"I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted." He continued, "In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn't have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb."-Ralph Bard (Under secretary of the Navy)(The military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors)"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."Brigadier General Carter Clarke.
 
Just watched the whole thing learned alot and it was very interested with the shadows that got left on every thing. People should post more of these I would like to see. Thank you +K!
 
In a way you are right, but you don't have to be such an asshole. Yes taking action against japan was necessary because of their attack on pearl harbor and killing innocent people that were not even involved in the war. To Americas credit the bombs turned out to be a hell of alot more catastrophic than anyone hoped. All respect to japan and all the innocent people and families brutally murdered and killed during one of the most pointless, yet ruthless wars in history.
 
I can also back fujarome up on this one as well. So many different factors you have to take into account when analyzing this situation
 
That's sad, but I'm guessing he was in the military involved in a war. That's what happens in wars. For the next part, fucked up shit happens on all sides during wars. I'm sorry that happened but that's still not a good reason for nuking civilians.

"

I firmly believed that the bomb being dropped on japan was absolutely warranted, and i am frankly tired of people thinking america was, and is a monster for doing it. Its a tradgedy that it had to to be dropped, but there was a damn good reason for it being dropped."

We killed a shit ton of civilians intentionally. Sorry it's been spun in a way that that doesn't even bother you. What is this "damn good reason" you have have for it being dropped.

 
That was chilling...so crazy to think that we have created something capable of vaporizing thousands of years of history and citizens in a flash.
 
That's not even the worst part... the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only .0018 megatons and .0023 megatons yield.
The Russians had a Tsar Bomba that was 57 megatons that they detonated in Sibera. The US detonated a bomb at 25 megatons as well. That's right, the Russians detonated a bomb with 31,000x more yield than Hiroshima.

 
Fucking shit. I really wish I could watch this. Internet at my BF's house is slow as shit (dont hang out at my house much) and the video file won't download either.

Anyone else know where I can watch/get it?
 
if i had the decision to save 10 of my countrymen by killing 100 of the enemies civilians who were 100% supporting the enemy, i would do it in a heartbeat. I think like the mob does. If you fuck me me, im gonna fuck you up so bad that you will never be able to fuck with me again.

Please, what other options did the USA have at that point? We all know how costly a ground campaign would have been. The japanese wouldnt even sit down to talk to the US about terms.

If the bomb saved even 1 american life, then i believe that it was worth it. The japanese started the war, and they can suffer the consequences.

 
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