How could US drop the a-bomb on Civilians?

Exactly. And if a terrorist can detonate a nuclear bomb in a US city, and stop the deaths worldwide as the result of US action, he is just as justified. That's the problem with facile justifications; both sides can use them.

 

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Agreed. So clearly the equivalency you are trying to draw is fallacious. It is objectively clear which side is on which side of the moral line.

Only if said nuclear bomb is equipped with a time machine!

 

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Who are we killing? Terrorists. That's the problem with moral equivalency, it's dumb. The difference is I don't believe terrorists are morally justified, because I don't think Islam is moral.

 

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The 350,000 people we killed in Japan with those bombs were terrorists? The 100,000 people we killed via the Iraq war were terrorists?

And they don't think the West is moral. You're on the same footing they are in that case.

Personally, I think our one advantage is that we _do_ give all races/religions/sexes equal treatment.

 

Oh, I thought we were talking about WWII.

I don't care. Their "defense" of Muslims is no more legitimate than our defense of Muslims. Note that one reason Al Quida claimed was behind their attacks on the US was our support of Democracy in East Timor. So you cannot claim that terrorists are simply defending the deaths of innocent Muslims, they are defending an ideology that is fundamentally against enlightenment values like Democracy and freedom. If you want to claim that these values are no better than fundamentalist Islam, I've got a middle finger for ya.

Only in that we both think we are moral. But their morality is based on the stories about some ancient guy that heard voices. Ours is based on more immediate concerns. And I will acknowledge that our actions are not always perfect.

 

Estimates were that we would lose about 46,000 soldiers in an invasion of Japan. That's a ratio of 7:1. I would take those odds to save that many Americans.

 

and that's the problem. your using an essentially bigoted moral framework. so when people i like use violence its good when people i don't like use it its bad. funny how your essentially calling for the destruction of an entire religious group because you have decided they don't count. moral equvalency may have its issues but its quit a bit better than your own naked hypcrisy spider so please spare us all your false hysteronics. Islam is no more or less moral than chrstianity or judiasm.

so you don't believe terrorist are morally justified. what about the american colonialists terrorists ventures? or the zionist terrorists who created Israel were they not justified? because you defended both of those as morally upright. again you don't give 2 shits about terrorism. your basing morality on ethnicty and religion not actions.

 

bullshit spider. like most of your arguments on violence its all about defending violence you like and has nothing to with actual morals or facts. many historians are begining to doubt that the second bombing was justified and the theory goes that the second one was to show the USSR we had more than one. for someone who claims to belong to a cultural tradition that states thou shall not kill you do seem to love it when people die and calling for peoples deaths expescially when their not white. if we had a chance at a path that killed less we should have taken it. because spider killing should be a last resort not the first as you seem to think.

 

I don't think terrorism can be morally justified in most cases. Where's the hypocrisy? I pointed out Islam because that's the subject. It hardly needs to be said that I don't believe we are fighting Muslims for being Muslims. We are fighting a particular brand of fundamentalist Islam, and it's not controversial to say they are the mortal enemy of the western world (and now Japan). As a side note, I don't think Christianity or Judaism are moral either.

I doubt the label of terrorist can be applied to the soldiers of the American Revolution, but if they did kill civilians for political reasons, I think that's wrong, even if the entire enterprise wasn't. Same with Israel's fight for independence. What are the Islamic fundamentalists fighting for? A particularly brutal and totalitarian form of theocracy. My concern transcends mere terrorist acts, such a regime is deadly to it's own people, it supports slavery, subjugation of women, gays, and threatens the stability of neighboring countries.

 

I'm not a pacifist. Violence is always tragic, but sometimes necessary. The precedent for attacking cities was already established. We killed over 100,000 people in one attack using napalm and conventional weapons. Many of those killed by nukes were directly involved in the war effort. To say it's OK to attack cities with conventional weapons but not nukes is a silly distinction. I love it that we ended the war, because I hate war.

 

I'm sorry but you can try and defend your bigotry all you want but when you say Islam isn't moral your attacking the faith and thinking in terms of because of their faith. that may be true. but you don't attack those

why single out civilians? your part of the group that label attacks on soldiers as terrorism. and i can't think of a better term for tarring and feathering than terrorism.

Thank you for proving my point. Ie their goal conquest was morally justified. so you gloss over their violence and terrorism and defend it. with and i quote they felt they could do better and had the power to enforce their will. those were the criteria you gave to justify the terror created by colonialism and the zionst war of conquest. now here are some muslims who under that same criteria you should be defending their crimes but because their brown your attacking them. your using a different standard to judge them that is hypocrisy at its finest.

funny Israel's victims would label it the same way.

bullshit. you judge based ion how you view the perpatraters. your concern is only for those you decided have the right to be violent.

 

your full of it. if you hated war you wouldn't be calling for it like you have been. your nothing more than a warmonger and hate monger. violence is always wrong spider. it may be necessary at times but you've forgotten that doesn't make it right. your missing the point spider. its not that we nuked them. its we did so when other viable options that would kill less were available.

 

Are you calling Truman a bloodthirsty hatemonger? They looked at other options, but none of them were thought of as viable. We saved Japan with these bombs.

 

For the twentieth time: that was not the choice. There was never going to be an invasion of Japan, once the US had a working atomic bomb - May of 1945. From that moment invasion was off the table. That was not an option. It might not have been an option before - siege and starvation were probably better choices for America - and it certainly wasn't one afterwards.

Every mention of the possible death toll from massive invasion is reality denial. There was no such choice. It justifies nothing. It is irrelevant.

Why do the apologists keep returning to that bogus and irrelevant comparison?

By whom, and why, were these other options dismissed? We know that several people of the time thought other options were better, and we know that these other options were available and could have been tried, physically, months before Hiroshima. We have only reasoning from evidence to guess at why what appears in hindsight to have been a horrible mistake was made.

We also know in addition to keeping the Hiroshima bomb a secret unnecessarily, and allowing the Japanese to underestimate our future production capabilities of similar bombs without correction after the drop,

and delaying its drop (and the possible end of the war) to allow development and construction of the Nagasaki bomb, which needed testing,

that the Nagasaki bomb drop was rushed, dropped on a lesser target hurriedly while the Japanese were still reacting to Hiroshima. There was no apparent military necessity for that rejection of simple delay and better target choice - the cities weren't going anywhere. So that is evidence of the thinking behind the decision.

 

That was when the scientists informed Truman that we had developed the Bomb. We could have informed the Japanese high command as well.

You do when the knowledge ends the war in your favor, avoids months of siege, and forestalls the incineration of schoolchildren at your hands.

They had no ability to build a bomb, or deliver one, or conceal the attempt, and we knew that. Their knowledge of physics, meanwhile, worked in our favor - their physicists would have had no trouble understanding what that weapon meant.

So? We already had it. They were done, defeated. The war was over - why did we keep that a secret for months?

So my point is made: it was knowledge of America's possession of nukes that brought surrender. We didn't need to burn a single schoolgirl alive - all we had to do was credibly inform the Japanese of our ability and willingness to make and drop enough atomic bombs to destroy Japanese civilization completely, wipe Japan off the face of the earth.

We could have tried that in May of 1945, with almost no risk or cost to ourselves. And that is not hindsight - that was known and suggested at the time. It might not have worked, but as you have so insistently posted the hindsight evidence is that it would have - and if it didn't, Hiroshima would have been there anyway, waiting,

And not on our conscience, warping and corrupting our national psyche for generations.

 

The Japanese command didn't believe we had a working nuclear bomb until they sent experts to ground zero to investigate its effects. One aspect of such a weapon isn't just it's existence, it's our willingness to use it.

 

Too bad they hadn't heard about it earlier. The effects might not have needed to include burned children. Or Nagasaki.

So? Do you think the Japanese would have thought us unwilling to use such a weapon, rather than invade in the face of their preparations? We had just burned Tokyo.

 

Our secret weapon, a postcard.

Dear Hirohito,

You fill in the rest.

 

Put a picture of a schoolchild on it. Unburned.

Tape it to a reel of movie footage from Los Alamos, and a set of equations determining the expected yield of the gun design we have built and ready. Include a diagram of the gun design.

Hand it to the diplomatic envoys the US has been refusing to talk to, in May of 1945, and give them escorted safe passage wherever they want to land.

Maybe shorten the war by three months, and save the US from having Hiroshima and Nagasaki on its hands for all history to come.

Why the hell not?

 

Movies can be faked, equations of expected yield don't prove it will work in reality. Extreme distrust reigned at the time. You can't be serious.