History: Atomic bombs.

[Dune]

Thanks for reminding me BGB.

I want to point out that the quotes I used above were taken from James Bradley's "Flyboys".  I want to make sure I credit my source.

[SunTracker]

Some Japanese didnt even know they were losing the war until the surrender.  The gullible masses would have followed the orders of the fanatic Japanese leaders.

Most of the Japanese would have fought to the death in conventional warfare.  Others would have joined the suicide squads.  After all, the Barbarious Americans (who ate babies) were invading their homeland!

Even after Nagasaki, the military wanted to overthrow the government and continue the fight.  

Heres how I see it:
80% of the reason for dropping the bomb: Ending the War
10%: Scare the Russians off
10%:  Testing new technology

[lasersailor184]

They dropped the bomb because the deaths of everyone would have neared 1 million people.


While Total War is never a great option, at that time, it was the best one.

[NUKE]

Originally posted by miko2d
banana: Of course, all of this would be moot had Pearl Harbor never happened.

 And that would not have happened if FDR did not sign the Smoot-Hawley tariff act which propmpted world-wide curtailment of trade and left Japan unable to trade for resources it critically needed to survive.

 "When goods are not crossing broders, armies do."

 miko

Yeah poor Japan....invading countries for years before Pearl Harbor, invading China just to survive. The nerve of the US to stop selling them needed war supplies.

Poor, poor Japan...all they wanted to do was invade countries and not be bothered. After all, they were just trying to survive.

[miko2d]

[QUOTb]Urchin: So Miko.... where are all your sources from the Army (not Army Air Force) and Marines (not the Navy) who thought dropping the bomb was a bad idea?  Look really hard, you might be able to find a couple.  My guess is it is a lot easier for a pilot to say...[/b]

 None of the people I've cited was a pilot. Each one was a high-level commander or politician who had no prospects of peing pocked with a stick.

 In case you are too stupid to understand what they are saying even after reading them, let me rephrease.
 None of them said that an invasion was preferable to bombing.
 They said that the land invasion was not necessary and neither was the bombing and the blockade would have brought tha same results - or even just accepting Japanese surrender on conditions that US ended up accepting it anyway.


lasersailor184: Btw, Japanese culture at the time was still "Fight until death no matter what." Even after dropping the bombs, there were still japanese fighting us.
 WW2 Needed to be ended with 2 atomic bombs.

 You make no sense here. FIrst you are saying that they were ready to die "no matter what" and continued after the bombings, then you say the bombs were needed.
 
Japan was no where even close to surrendering.

 Yes. Your word against that of Admiral William D. Leahy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral William Halsey, Rear Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, former President Herbert Hoover and MacArthur who claimed that Japan was already trying to surrender.

 I am not saying you are wrong but you will understand if I do not change my opinion all of a sudden.


BGBMAW: lmfao......a Whole city evaporates......and it takes "several days"...to figure that out?
lmfao...

 It took them at least a day to notice the city was off the comms and a couple of days just to re-establish a contact. It took them a few days to come to the conclusion that it was evaporated by a single bomb rather than a regular massive bombing raid. What's so unbelieveble here?


lasersailor184: I say this because I know that many people you quoted had the exact opposite opinion of what you said.

 Well, post their opinon and then we may discuss why they said one thing at one time and a different one at another time. Politicians tend to do that and usually for rational reasons. I believe Eisenhower would have had trouble running for president on a platform of repentance for mass-murder atrocities.


crowMAW: But, I would say that while their deaths were terrible, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have saved all our lives. How many politicians would have been terrified enough of a nuke holocaust to make Mutually Assured Destruction a workable deterrent...

 True. But we have survived so far and the thousands of the nukes are still there and being proliferated while fanatics are looking to obtain one.
 It is very possible that without UT trying to "intimidate" russia we would have had much fewer of them - and maybe no Cold War at all.

 SunTracker: Some Japanese didnt even know they were losing the war until the surrender.

 Good point. That's why an opinon of a US general is more valuable than some lowly japanese pilot.


lasersailor184: They dropped the bomb because the deaths of everyone would have neared 1 million people.

 One would think that by now you would be able to tell reality from hypotetical fantasies.
 The death of 1 million people was as real as the deaths of 10 million americans from Iraqi WMD. Thatw as an excuse - not necessarily a real reason - as the persons I've quotes seem to believe.


 NUKE: Yeah poor Japan...

 Japan is not an individual. It is a country with a lot of people, just like US. In some discussions it is valid to refer to a country as a single entity, in others it mkes no sense - like in this one.

 When we are talking about social dynamics inside a country that brought certain groups to power because of foreign influence, you cannot consider a country as an undivided whole - by definition.
 It makes as much sense to talk of Japan in that context as it makes to talk of US when we are discussing the internal political power struggles.
 Osama Bin Laden may have hurt US in general but he surely have benefitted a lot of interest groups here.

 Yes, by certain time Japan was agressive and had to be confronted. It became aggressive as a direct result of British tariffs on japanese goods.
 Those tariffs were legitimate and british war on Japan was also legitimate but since the goal of the tariffs was to somehow increase weafare of the british people, it does not seem like a rational choice.
 Even if tariffs did benefit economy - which they do not, it would seem to me that continuing free trade with Japan since 1930 and not having to fight it would be more profitable than have tariffs and than a war. War cost much more than any revanue a tariff can allegedely bring.

 The inavitability of the war with Japan - and Germany - was predicted since 20s and early 30s before either became aggressive by the economists and politicians and the general case of trade restrictions triggering wars ws made in 17th century.

 If you pretend that history started in 1941 or that the politicians of 1930s were not supposed to know what trade restrictions would treaten, that just shows your level of education.

 miko

[NUKE]

Nice try miko, but it was YOU who said Pearl Harbor would not have happened if

"And that would not have happened if FDR did not sign the Smoot-Hawley tariff act which propmpted world-wide curtailment of trade and left Japan unable to trade for resources it critically needed to survive.

I mearly pointed out how ignorant semed to be in making a stupid comment like that when we all know Japan had been invading countries for years before that happened. Japan was not denied the means to survive.


So please, Miko, don't go all "windbag" on us trying to divert the argument.

[AKIron]

Originally posted by miko2d
It took them at least a day to notice the city was off the comms and a couple of days just to re-establish a contact. It took them a few days to come to the conclusion that it was evaporated by a single bomb rather than a regular massive bombing raid. What's so unbelieveble here?

 miko

That just doesn't hold water. I'm willing to bet that the top military commanders and the emperor knew they had been hit by an unknown weapon of mass destruction within hours of the event. Lemme see what I can dig up.

[miko2d]

NUKE: I mearly pointed out how ignorant semed to be in making a stupid comment like that when we all know Japan had been invading countries for years before that happened.

 Let's see the dates.
 I say Smoot-Hawley Act- The Tariff Act of 1930 preceeds the Japan invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937.

 Starting with 1918 - when Japan was US ally in WWI, you name any Japanese agression that would be even comparable with US and european invasions and colonial wars of that period.

 The trade makes reasons for war disappear - even a country that was aggressive could be made less agressive as a result of a trade.
 The major conditions of all peace treaties were trade concessions. Even if Japan was aggressive, signing a free-trade peace treaty before the war would have been infinitely more productive than signing the same treaty after the war.

 According to the american political doctrine and commonly accepted political philosophy, foreign conquests by imperial powers do not make regimes stronger but weaker. Most empires that tried to keep together disparate hostile populatioins deteriorated and crumbled on their own accord - Spanish, Roman, Soviet, etc.
 Japan trading with China would have grown much stronger than Japan occupying and exploiting China - as we see now.

 US had nothing to fear from Japanese aggressions. In fact, if Japan took the european colonies and associated troubles off european hands, europeans would have been better off, japanese colonialism would have crumbled as assuredely as european and american one (Vietnam war, anyone?), the expence would have been Japanese and not american/european and the former colonial people would have hated japanese and not europeans/americans.

 If Japan was bad as a country and we cannot consider it at a lower level and deal with it, then how come we did not have to completely eliminate it?

 If all that was necessary was just to remove a militaristic power group from influence and give influence to merchant-industrial complex, there were ways to do so without war - like increasing the power and influence of merchants/industrialists by trading with them and letting the military discredit itself in stupoid wastefull colonial adventures.


 Some of you guys seem to have trouble keeeping more than one though in your head at the same time. First you say that you believe the oppressive, imperialist and socialist regimes are unstable and bound to fall and then you claim that they would be stable, eternal and outlive american republic unless some superhero like Ronald Reagan or nuclear bomb puts an end to it.

 Sure, it makes it easier for you to argue since your agruments can be contradictory all the time but you do not make any sense.

 miko

[AKIron]

As has been mentioned here and I'm sure you know miko. the Japanese were warned many times prior to the bombing of a severe weapon. That they didn't surrender immediately after Hiroshima had nothing to do with their lack of knowledge regarding the devastation of that city but rather as so many have suggested the internal struggle among their leaders.

It's easy to look back and say it wasn't necessary, and no one wants to condone the large scale slaughter of civilians, especially military leaders. Consider this though, Saddam Hussein got off relatively light and surrendered unconditionally. Yet he fought us for 12 years after and eventually rejected every condition he agreed to. If we had gone on in to Baghdad in '91 things likely would have turned out differently. Of course then there would be those saying now that it wasn't then necessary.


Here's an interesting link:
http://history1900s.about.com/library/prm/blbombthatended1.htm

[miko2d]

AKIron: That just doesn't hold water. I'm willing to bet that the top military commanders and the emperor knew they had been hit by an unknown weapon of mass destruction within hours of the event. Lemme see what I can dig up.

 I understand your doubt but I am sure once you find and read the related documents - and get a clearer picture of what japanese conditions were like, it will be much easier for you to imagine.

 There was one emperor, one general staff and a huge desperate war going on and a whole bunch of cities of no particular importance being bombed every day. Do you think every morning they all woke up thinking "how is it going in Hiroshima?"

 Imagine that something strikes US right now - in peacetime, will all our comms and satellites and measuring equipmant (how many radiation counters did japan have at the time and people who knew what to measure?). How long would it take to determine if that was a some kind of a weapon or an (possibly unusual meteorite) or some kind of other phenomena? It would take at least a few days for a president to come up with a decision to base his policy on. Just hearing all the scientists will take a day or two of meetings.

 Something - a some kind of a terrible explosion - happened in Central Siberia  in 1908 that leveled thousands of square miles of forest.
 I believe people still do not know what the heck happened there - some kind of a comet bouncing off the athmosphere, an anti-matter meteorite. There is a huge devastation but no crater.
There were planty of stories of a secret weapon experiment at the time.
 It took 50 years just to come up with some plausible hypothesis.

 miko

[miko2d]

AKIron: As has been mentioned here and I'm sure you know miko. the Japanese were warned many times prior to the bombing of a severe weapon. That they didn't surrender immediately...

 I do not argue with that. The point is that the immediate surrender of japanese was not necessary. They could have been blockaded into submission for months or even years.
 Once one zeroes in only on the surrender in August, sure, the bombs were the only way for it. But it is not a valid limitation. Overal victory with minimum expence - material, human and political - is.


Consider this though, Saddam Hussein got off relatively light and surrendered unconditionally. Yet he fought us for 12 years after and eventually rejected every condition he agreed to. If we had gone on in to Baghdad in '91 things likely would have turned out differently.

 I do not want to derail this discussion even further. There are planty of knowlegeeable americans who believe that he did not fight us for 12 years and that he did not regect conditions and complied with all of them because he wanted nothing better than to be left alone and get back on our good side. He was interested in holding his power, not losing it in a futile struggle with US for no apparent reason. He was a pragmatic secular SOB, not a religious fanatic, whatever he told for internal consumption propaganda.

 Same is true about Libya which was offering US all kinds of a deals ever since it lost its Soviet Sponosors.

 As Gary Hart, a Senate Democrat from Colorado who won the New Hampshire presidential primary in 1984 wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in "My Secret Talks With Libya, and Why They Went Nowhere.", e was approached by
Libyans in 1992 when he was a private citizen, they asking him to serve as intermediary with the US State Department to work out a diplomatic resolution to the estrangement.
 Hart worked at it for several months, but no matter how open-ended the offers from Tripoli, the State Department was not interested. Hart said that he has always assumed the administration preferred to have Libya remain "a villain."

 Of course now the whole story is presented as the result of last year's Bush policy, not 12-year libyan efforts.

 Governments need villains and excuses and politicians love to play soldiers and make history.

 miko

[AKIron]

Originally posted by miko2d
I do not want to derail this discussion even further. There are planty of knowlegeeable americans who believe that he did not fight us for 12 years and that he did not regect conditions and complied with all of them because he wanted nothing better than to be left alone and get back on our good side.  miko

Back on our good side? Is that why he took frequent pot shots at our planes? The US has military planes flying over many countries and very few of them shoot at us. The ones that do aren't trying to befriend us. Tell me you don't really believe that.

Saddam had a lot of ambition and likely had plans to conquer all of the middle east. Of course I'm only speculating on that last part but Iraq reminds me a lot of pre WWII Japan.

[miko2d]

AKIron: Back on our good side? Is that why he took frequent pot shots at our planes?

 Some of the "pot-shots" were just a radar pings. If there were any actual launches, no single plane was shot, so it is much more likely that the shots were undertaken purely for the internal propaganda consumption, not to cause us any harm.

 If you are a dictator barely holding to power against plotters and population after a disasterous war, a bunch of foreign planes flying around without permision or UN sanction and bombing at will are not good for popularity - amond the people or military which was his support.

 I wonder how long a US presudent would have stayed in power if foreign warplanes were illegally overflying New York and Los Angeles and he did not at least make a show of resistance.


The US has military planes flying over many countries and very few of them shoot at us. The ones that do aren't trying to befriend us. Tell me you don't really believe that.

 In any othe country our planes ask permission before entering the souvereign space. The US military planes over Iraq were totally illegal, not sanctioned by UN and intended only to interfere into the internal matters of the iraqis - preventing him from using his military aviation against internal insurgents.

Saddam had a lot of ambition and likely had plans to conquer all of the middle east.

 You are serious? Have you seen the stats on Iraq? Population, economy, industry? Have you ever heard about the war between Iraq and Iran where Iraq got soundly trashed and would have been overrun if not for US help?

Of course I'm only speculating on that last part but Iraq reminds me a lot of pre WWII Japan.

 The only thing that is really common bewteen Iraq and Japan is that by 1990 Iraq was as much exhausted after 8-year Iraq-Iran war as the japan was in 1945. And that was even before US kicked them in 1991.

 Even assuming the incredible hypothetical worst, that he did somehow conquered anything, do you think hw qould have easier time to hold together few dozen militaristic hostile factions (including Al-Qaeda) that he did half a dozen Iraqi factions? Sovied Union was bigger and more powerfull and crumbled all by itself.
 How long would have Hussein's regime lasted? He could not conquer Kurds in the mountainous areas, would never have secured the borders and imagine the can of whoppass the world muslim community would have unleashed on him if the secular socialist tyrant occupied the holy lands of Saudi Arabia? Even if US and Europe did nothing, it would have been a spectacle to behold.

 You guys are strange. Somehow in every word of yours I see conviction that oppresive socialist regimes are viable and will strengthen and grow unless opposed by overwhelming force. That's not what your schools should have taught you.
 Nobody defeated British Empire militarily, nobody defeated soviets, Rome was done by the time some internal barbarian factions (Alaric was a roman general) took control, Charlemaignes's empire split few years after his deqath, so did Alexander's, China is turning around by itself, Iran is changing drastically, etc, etc.

 Stop being scared of big bad (or rather small) tyrants. Free society is really stronger and faster-developing and inherently  viable while tyranies are boud to fall.

 It is our own governments that use imaginary foreign threats to grab more power that we should be worried about.

 miko

[AKIron]

I guess you're just gonna believe what you want miko. I find your view very ostrichesque. Here's a link to at least one incident of Iraq "firing" more than their tracking radar, there were many more. How you can deny this is beyond me. http://www.sptimes.com/2002/11/16/Worldandnation/Iraq_fires_on_allied_.shtml

[miko2d]

AKIron: I guess you're just gonna believe what you want miko.

Here's a link to at least one incident of Iraq "firing" more than their tracking radar, there were many more. How you can deny this is beyond me.

  I never denied that Iraq fired a missle - as you can see if you re-read my post. Here is what I said:

If there were any actual launches, no single plane was shot, so it is much more likely that the shots were undertaken purely for the internal propaganda consumption

 I am saying that shots were taken for propaganda purposes and did not hit any planes and you claim that I am denying that Iraq shot missles and AA cannon at all. What the hell I was talking about that were taken for propaganda purposes and did not hit american planes? Imaginary missles?

  the real issue which is no plane was ever hit by iraqi fire and was most likely never intended to be hit, I do not see what the heck we will achieve by that discussion.

 We know that US planes killed a bunch of canadians in afghanistan for "trying to shoot them down". What, do we have to drop everything now and go invade Canada because of a lie concocted by some trigger-happy fame-seeking pilot?

 Sure it's much better for a career to report that a shell or a missle was fired at your plane than to admit it was fired nowhere close to being able to hit it. Syrians had no problem making an AA ambush and shooting down US planes and neither did vietnamese or serbians.

  Care to remember how many US aricraft were shot down or damaged since US defeated Iraq and Hussein has been out of power?

 You really believe that Iraq could not have ambushed at least a single plane flying predicable course with a textbook setup of a few dozen AA missiles and shot it down?

 I will even throw you a bone here. Let's say I believe your hare-brained assumption that Hussein did not manage to shoot down a single US plane after realy trying for 12 years.

 You tell me, how many iraqi air-defence officers were executed by Hussein for failure to shoot down a US plane on his orders? How many deserted to Kuwait or SA in fear of being executed for that?

 Who do you think Saddam Hussein was, a gentle grandfather or a tyrant ready to torture a man and rape his family for any perceived failure?

 miko