why the americans dropped the bomb on japan??

just something interesting i've spotted whilst browsing.

i had heard about some of the stuff that the japanese had been getting up to in asia and the sorrounds but it was not until i started actually looking properly that i suddenly started putting some pieces of the jigsaw together. (WWII)

may i suggest a quick search on "unit 731", look through wikipedia and the like, it is enlightening.

the outcome and end game on japan and its activities in asia ends in nagasaki and hiroshima and should be a lesson to be learnt for all parties that engage in war crimes. it western thought i'd say it was the goddess of divine retribution - nemesis - that visited.

 

for those of you too lazy to look up unit 731

the brief explanation is that japan was using biological warfare in ww2 against the civillian populace. scanning through the attrocities lit a light bulb up above my head. karmic justice. the indignities/ horrors metered out to the chinese/koreans was nemisis visiting japan bigtime. anyway look this stuff up - it is truely disturbing

 

Japan brought the atomic bomb on themselves when they attacked Pearl Harbor.

 

we could have beat them without dropping it but we had been working on it for a while plus it was a display of power to the rest of the world.

 

my original feelings were that japan was arrogant. it attacked foreign lands,killed, tortured its inhabitants and poisoned them in the name of expansionism. it was arrogant enough not to realise that were bigger bullies in the world with bigger guns and more men. when you've done this kind of shit for so long isn't there payback? i'm not condoning what happened to japan but what i am saying is that there is a karmic price to pay for such activities.

 

my father was getting ready to take part in the invasion of japan (he had already taken part in d-day) when they dropped the bombs .

if you look at the number of expected dead in a invasion of japan thats our and japanese dead those bombs saved lives, I think our expected dead would have been around 3 million.

what japanese dead would have been who knows, but they would have fought to the last man village by village street by street ,and I doubt that the non nuclear option would have been as good as the nuclear if you cared about lost of life or human suffering.

anyway if we had tried to invade very likely my old dad would have been killed and I wouldnt be here so Im not happy about , but feel in the circumstances the bombs were the right thing at the time , and thats not just for us but for the japanese

 

the americans had spent too much money and too much time not to use it.

they wanted to see what the bomb would do
there was no need to invade japan they could have just starved them to submission but by that time world opinion may have shifted to pity for the japanese despite their shennanigans in south asia. by dropping the bomb on them not too many people would shed a tear for them. as the japanese had experimented on civillians the americans experimented on the japanese. you have to remember the japanese were doing silly things like flouting the geneva convention, machine gunning of nurses, beheading of POW's , torture of POW's, charging into cities and killing the inhabitants. no one can do these things without some "blow back" either as an individual or a nation.

 

As a nation?

An eye for an eye just creates a world full of one-eyed people.. Or nations..

I regard the dropping of the atomic bomb an atrocity in itself.. And now the US wants to have control over which countries possess Weapons of Mass Destruction... So that any time they choose to teach a country a lesson, it doesn't get attacked back..

Weren't the US army doing many of the things Japan did in World War II in Vietnam and Cambodia 20 years later?

Hmm..

 

how many people would have died if we had waited to "starve " japan into submission all our prisoners of war would have been killed , are you saying that would have been the better option .

there is no difference with using a nuclear bomb to destroy a city to what we were doing in germany and japan ,we were getting larger numbers of people killed with saturation bombing and creating firestorms than nukes .

if nuclear weapons didnt exist we could have just firestormed all those wood and paper japanese houses then used german nerve agent or gas ,then sent in infantry with flame throwers and killed most or all of the population of japan.

the use of nuclear weapons saved lives .

I know people who flamethrowered villages in burma, people would come out hands up and they would kill them because thats what the japanese would do and then they would detonate a bomb.

thats what real war is like its about staying alive ....and all this we shouldnt have dropped the bomb stuff is a load of nonsense

 

as i said before, i do not condone the actions of america

it is perfectly true japan could have been bombed conventionally by creating firestorms. atomic weapons weren't necessary. what i'm saying is that when it comes to payback, which one is more awesome a nuclear strike or a firestorm?

i'm examining the karmic angle.

 

I was lead to believe that in war, a certain amount of civilian casualties was "acceptable".. Mistakes happen and are totally unavoidable.. Even the odd maniac loose cannon cannot be controlled by years of disciplined training..


But to TARGET civilians as a way of bringing a country to it's knees is as bad an atrocity as you can get.. Certainly as bad sytematically eradicating villages, towns and generations to make an ENEMY unable to wage war against you in future..

 

Well japan had targeted civillians in china, we and the germans had both targeted civilians .

Are you saying its worse to kill a hundred thousand civilians with nuclear bombs, than killing millions of people including millions of civilians in a full scale invasion of japan

 

in my opinion, sometimes the only way to protect man is to destroy man. Dont blame america for a nucleur bomb when the other country provokes it. Its happened once and I garuntee it will happen again sometime soon. Other countrys seem to get this idea that America is such a bad country and so evil, theyr protecting thier own people jus like any other country would. I beleive the cause of war today is sheer jelousy. People attack this country because the people in it have a better life than them. but why attack and attempt to destroy it. I mean, nobody ever thought the Soviet union would fall, they thought it would be the global empire for another 50 years. yet 5 years after it fell, every country gets a turn to be an empire. Without War america will surely one day fall and not be the richest country anymore.

 

Well Here It Goes = Save Lifes By Shortning The War Or Scaring The Hell Out Of The Russian Who Now Were Stronger Than The Germans In 1939. And You Can Bet The Russians Wanted The Whole European Continent.

 

problem was, was the russians had infiltrated the american sercret services and were probably following the making of the bomb closely, they also had sympathisers feeding them material. this is why they were able to duplicate the bomb so quickly and successfully. the chances are they already had the bomb at the same time as the usa, they just gave the americans the impression that they didn't have it. obviously the americans suspected that they did have the bomb, this is why they didn't take russia on after the war. if the americans were the only ones with the bomb they would have invaded russia, russia would have retaliated in kind and a heap of eggs would have been on the american governments face.

as an aside , the russians have the tendency to be aware of things but not show their hand. the russians in their time also had infiltrated the british secret service with various sympathisers, the americans complained about this. "spycatcher" a book banned by margaret thatcher suggested that the british spy chief (or one of them) was a russian spy. the russians infiltrated mainly through universities and gentlemens clubs like the masons.

 

guy, just were did you get the insane idea that america would have invaded russia after WWII if it didn't have the atomic bomb? Russia didn't have the atomic bomb at the end of WWII, they didn't develop it until later on. They did have spies and sympathisers in various countries, including in the manhatan project, but that just got them data. It took them time to compile it and make sense of it. After WWII, NO country was lookin for a war. The cold war was simple posturing between nations of comparable strength with differing views. The same sort of thing can be seen throughout history when you have 2 strong nations, you can go as far back as greece and persia or rome and crap, cant think of the name at the moment. But just because there is posturing doesn't mean that america wanted to invade russia, or vise versa, the posturing was to try and show that one was stonger than the other, and hence have more influence with other nations.

 

the americans and soviet russia were natural enemies. the cold war was an extension of ww2


even before the end of ww2 hitler was trying to play the two sides off each other, to secure his position. hitler had a potent weapon in his armoury , nerve agent, something the allies had no protection against, he could have won the war if he used it. he chose not to. why? simply because he thought the british had their own stockpile and the risks taken using it outweighed the perceived gains.

as for the atomic bomb i'm sure you will find that making one is an extemely difficult process. russias history of its nuclear weapons programme is one that has been given to us by them.

given america's enthusiasm for war thoughout its history and its hate for soviet russia, why did they not invade and take the russians on, unless they suspected the russians had their own bomb. since its inception america has rarely shown any restraint, the anamoly is where they choose not to wage war. they only pick fights (military confrontation) with people that they think they can defeat. the cold war was one where america was unsure of the outcome, hence no direct military confrontation. the russians? well they were interested in the revolution but that failed miserably on the back of self interest.

with the demise of the soviets came the american empire.

but getting back to main theme...

 

guy, you have a serious case of America hate, and need to read your history.

But back to the point, if you wonder about restraint, look at the calculations put into the decition to drop the bombs, the loss of life from the bombs isn't even a fifth of the projected casualties that would come from a direct invasion of the japanise home islands. And that's not even counting the calcualted loss on the American side. By droping the bombs, America insured that there would be a Japan after the war. Because if left to conventional wepons, every city in Japan would have been destroyed, all of their infrastrucure as well.

 

ok tell me about the american indians

 

hold that thought

lets get back to the original thought otherwise we'll get bogged down in the righteousness of american foreign policy.

my original ponderings were about japan and divine retribution? the original thread was more about the japanese, their actions in asia, the destruction they created. in this philosophy america would have simply been the tool of nemesis. can any individual or nation do so much and expect to get away without "blow back" aka divine retribution. being a site dominated by americans it is natural that the american angle will be fixated upon. if you have a quick squizzz at unit 731 you'll know what i'm going on about.