@ Meso re the treatment of Japanese-Americans. Have you seen Bad Day at Black Rock? If not then I am sure you will enjoy it.

On the issue of history belongs to the victor, I only partially agree with you. It isn't so far a step from this position to one of, for example, Holocaust denial. In my view we need to judge actions on the basis of their own intrinsic morality. I maintain that the Atomic bombing was an immoral/wrong act. Incidently, I also feel that the employment of Von Braun by the U.S. after the war was too.

At the time, several people in the military were displeased with Truman's decision.

For instance:

"I was against (use of the atomic bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

It's a little reported part of the story that really, it's not hindsight that affects our view of it. Plenty of significant people of the era opposed it.

I never said those quotes are from you, and I'm sorry if it appeared that I was quoting you..
Those quotes are conglomerations of responses I've gotten to those questions over the years as I talk with people about logical conlcusions behind their beliefs about war, civilian casualties, and atomic weapons.

Sorry, I definitely didn't make that clear.

I'm just frustrated everytime I hear people complaining about civilian casualties from the atom bombs.

Now I am quoting you "it was not necessary to drop the bomb to end the war"

I'll refer you now to my previous post, specifically the section about the objective of a war. Is not the point to end the war as quickly as possible with the fewest casualties to your side, and minimal civilian casualties?

And again quoting you:
"Lot of people seem incredibly desperate to justify the pointless murder of 200k+ people"

How it was it pointless?
I will grant that war is essentially legalized murder, and to say otherwise glorifies an ugly necessity, but war is necessary and killing is necessary in war.

+96 SacredDigits

fiedler - I would not say it is a 'desperate' attempt to justify murder. It is a war. War is defined as one side attempting to kill the other side to enforce some political will, territorial gain or some other defined goal. War in of itself is murder be it a the point of a bayonette or at the business end of an atomic weapon. I do not encourage war. It is a waste of lives, resources, time and energy. I look forward to the day where wars belong to the past and future humans can sit here and argue the points that we are discussing today as a pure exercise.

And oddly enough, we are discussing this in a forum devoted to the playing of a war game! :-)

so uh.

can we *not* say "japs"?

it's a tiny bit offensive... lol. more than a tiny bit. kind of an ugly legacy from all the shit we're talking about.

if you didn't realize it was offensive i'm sure you'll stop now.. if you continue... i can't stop you... but you have no excuse not knowing you're being insensitive from here on out

and @octavious...

for better or worse i strongly agree with you.

i think the fact that we saw such destruction in japan prevented many a crisis from happening.

you can always test a nuke but its body counts that really get your attention.

@Leif - thanks for clarifying your post.

"Is not the point to end the war as quickly as possible with the fewest casualties to your side, and minimal civilian casualties?"
- yes absolutely, which is why they could have chosen any of the 4 alternatives I posted above. WW2 was highly unusual in the history of warfare in that the victors insisted on unconditional surrender. Conditional peace is far more common and decent. Both Japan and Germany were seeking a conditional peace upto 3 years(!) before the war ended. Now I can't say that the allies should have accepted conditional peace, it would depend on the specific agreements, but you could certainly argue that the insistance on unconditional surrender cost maybe more than 1 million lives. Pretty ruthless huh?

"How it was it pointless?
I will grant that war is essentially legalized murder, and to say otherwise glorifies an ugly necessity, but war is necessary and killing is necessary in war."
- yes I agree with you. As I previously posted, the bombing of civilians was motivated by a theory that it would cause a moral collapse in the enemy nation. This theory turned out to be flat-out wrong. The people who died in London, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Guernica, Rotterdam etc etc died for no purpose - it was just a huge waste, and a waste of the lives of the flight crews who dropped the bombs as well. There was no positive military value to the effort. Therefore: pointless.

sorry thucy, don't agree that japs is offensive at all. Unless you think yanks, or brits, or huns, or frogs, or russkies, or ivan are also offensive? ;P

"you can always test a nuke but its body counts that really get your attention."
- here be offensiveness! :O

The horrible part of the demand for unconditional surrender causing extreme escalations in World War II is that in the end, Japan's surrender was not unconditional.

Is it a macho thing for you clowns to act as racist as possible? I mean "Japs"? Are you serious, here? Grow up.

How many times must the pro-mass murder people recite the "minimize casualties" defense before it becomes stale and stupid? If America was interested in minimizing casualties they would never have demanded unconditional surrender. Come up with a new argument.

"It seems that it's a matter of contention as to which had more of an effect. "Another piece of evidence on which Asada’s and Frank’s argument is constructed is Prime Minister Suzuki’s statement. According to Asada, on the night of August 8, Suzuki told Sakomizu"

That whole paper is dedicated to refuting Asada's argument.

I have to admit that I've never considered the word "Japs" to be racist in the slightest. I do find it slightly offensive, however, that for the sake of appeasing the somewhat bizarre pc views of a vocal minority the world would be forced to abandon national nicknames.

If you read down the page.

"What is important, moreover, is the evidence that Asada chooses to ignore. According to Suzuki’s biography, the prime minister came to the clear conclusion after the Hiroshima bomb that there was no other alternative but to end the war. Nevertheless, it was not until he learned of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that he “was finally convinced that the moment had at last arrived to end the war, since what we had been afraid of and tried to avoid at any cost had finally come about [kitarubekimono ga kita].” He thought that “now is the time to realize the emperor’s wish,” and “in view of the urgency of the situation, I finally made up my mind to be in charge of the termination of the war, taking all the responsibility upon myself.”[26] This biography makes it clear that Suzuki did not make up his mind about terminating the war until the Soviet entry into the war.[27]"

I'm so tired of people who bitch and moan about how their unrestricted ability to use racist terms is being curtailed.

Nobody cares if YOU don't find the term racist.

http://www.modelminority.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=322:in-florida-japanese-americans-endure-slurs-echoes-&catid=47:society&Itemid=56

"How many times must the pro-mass murder people recite the "minimize casualties" defense before it becomes stale and stupid? If America was interested in minimizing casualties they would never have demanded unconditional surrender. Come up with a new argument."

I don't see why, an Unconditional surrender was the allied (Not at all purely American) War aim on both sides of the Atlantic, Stalin in fact incessantly criticized the Allies for perceived unwillingness to follow through with the unconditional surrender.

Still missing from this analysis would be American knowledge of Japanese peace overtures, there were many overt signs that the Japanese were not going to surrender willingly. Were the peace overtures communicated?

Japs btw, derives its racist effect from its use in WWII, it is dehuminaizing, and brings back images of the portrayals of Japanese as beasts during the war. It is definitely racist

Lol. I do find you amusing at times, Putin. Should people care if you find the word Jap racist then? It's just not a racist word and has never been used in such a context in the full extend of my experience. To try and keep up with what some do and don't consider racist is an impossible task so we must carry on the way we feel is right and have a bit of tolerance for others.

Apparently laziness is the excuse du jour of sticking it to minority communities and being as "unPC" as possible. You aren't target of the term "Jap", so your views are irrelevant on the matter. I'm sure you don't find "chink" or "wog" offensive either, another sign of your masculinity I'm sure. You're so tuff, Octavious.

Where is anyone a target of the term, Jap? This may be a problem term over in the States, but where I am it's just not an issue. I have only ever heard it used by non-Japanese people as shorthand for the Japanese. If I wanted to be racist against the Japanese for some reason (...if wanted a racist character for a book I was writing, say), using the word Jap wouldn't occur to me.

The demand for unconditional surrender was made without Soviet participation at the Casablanca Conference. It was a demand put forward by Roosevelt and the policy announcement was made as a unilateral announcement. Churchill and Stalin were reluctant about this policy, because they believed it would intensify German resistance in particular. Stalin expressed as much at the Tehran conference.

http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943CairoTehran&isize=L&submit=Go+to+page&page=513

And then Stalin spent the rest of the war accusing the west of plotting to make a conditional surrender with Germany

I'm not going to read four pages of this, so if i'm repeating anything somebody let me know.

Whether they were justified or not is complicated. As far as overall casualties as a direct result, neither bomb was as effective or cost efficient as a convential firebombing would have been. However for general shock value they were certainly unparalleled. And in their goal of convincing the Japanese to surrender they were an unmitigated success. It is possible that just carpet bombing or firebombing the two cities would have been enough to convince the Japanese to surrender, but this is unlikely as no previous conventional bombing had that effect. So far, then, they were justified.

If we take into account though the long term effects of the radiation, and the psychological effects of the total annihalation of two cities, the bombs do seem to be over powered and extravagant. The total obliteration of two cities and their populaces would still have more or less happened by fire bombing, so that is really just semantics. As for the radiation, it seems clear that the American government and military would not have known or considered the full effects of irradiating a population center and the surrounding farmland, despite what studies were done. but ignorance is no excuse, as the information would have been available to them regardless. Taking this information into account, were the bombs were jusitified? Maybe.

Taking a closer look at the goal of forcing Japanese surrender, some things need to be examined. the cost of human life in an invasion of the mainland would have numbered in the many millions, and primarily been japanese people, with as much as a 1:10 ratio of Allied to Japanese casualties estimated by American Military sources. Surely the bombings were prefferable to that. Yet after the first bomb was dropped the Japanese made overtures that indicate they were going to surrender. They were however not absolute in the manner of conveyance, and instead of waiting for what would have surely been a decision to surrender, the American military dropped the second bomb. Thus the second bomb was certainly unjustified under these paramiters, but the first was.

I don't suppose you have documents to support this claim?

and I read your link, Stalin's problem with unconditional surrender wasn't with the harsh nature of it, it was the absence of terms, and in fact he wanted the harshest terms conceivable. In other words he was not concerned with the harshness of an unconditional surrender, but the uncertainty of it, and the fear that the uncertainty would spur future resistance.

Here's some other estimates from the American military,

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.

Here's a good page in general.

http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm