Presidential vapor in Hiroshima....

[arkirk]

Has Obama done as I have said or not? You are the one who has read of his actions in my posts and decided on that basis that I think something about Obama. I merely said what he had done and continues to do. I never called him the "embodiment of evil." What you don't seem to understand is that people surrender their morality often when they feel they have "no choice." Their feelings notwithstanding, morality in the matter of murder is in fact immutable in the face of emotion. Those were murders...140,000 of them in a flash...at the bidding of a few American Brass Hats...not all Americans.

Since you put it in ALL CAPS, I took it to mean that you were really ticked off that he did not prostrate himself before the citizens of Hiroshima and apologize profusely for something that happened long before he was born.

Yet - again - they did not seek an apology. They never asked us to apologize for the firebombing of Tokyo, either. Or any of the other things we did in order to gain victory. Had the situations been reversed and Japan were able to attack our homeland, I'm pretty sure they'd have nuked San Francisco without a second thought. As others have pointed out, the Japanese killed millions during the war. Have they apologized?

Forget the fucking apology! That didn't need to be discussed at all. He simply did not say anything that would portend intention to actually do something to lessen the threat. That is what upset and disappointed those survivors of Hiroshima that were there to hear his speech. He made a point of not apologizing...and justifying the dropping of those bombs. If he deemed it okay then...and now has more than 4000 warheads at his disposal and a trillion dollar modernization program for his little stockpile...that won't be very reassuring to those who hear his speech. He just views nukes as one of the tools in his presidential tool kit. The problem with Obama is that he is AMORAL when it comes to causing civilian deaths. An effort is being made to make the nukes smaller so they can be used in "tactical" situations. Wow! I share something with the survivors of these attacks...am the same age as the youngest of them. This happened in my lifetime. I also know that my time is at least in the fourth quarter...like the survivors. I have been opposed to nuclear weapons ALL MY LIFE. Because we have all these weapons, our infrastructure is rotting, our people can no longer go to junior college for just a small amount of payment, our world is getting hotter. The number one carbon footprint could very well be our military. We just keep pouring blood and treasure into this ridiculous structure just like people used to spend in olden times on the church. Mankind has always had parasites and the pathos of war. For the longest time he also had smallpox. We need vaccination against this nuclear religion/disease. Obama has proved he is a total failure at helping eliminate these weapons.

 

[Harry Bosch]

When the Emperor of Japan goes to Nanking and apologizes for what was done to that city, I will ask the President of the United States to apologize for Hiroshima.

The Empire of Japan was utterly evil, worse in many ways than Nazi Germany, who's terrible cruelty and monstrous treatment of their victims well justified using the very worst weapons imaginable to stop them.

I am sick and tired of people pretending Japan was some kind of victim in World War 2. Japan committed the most heinous acts during that war and, unlike Germany, there was virtually NO resistance or dissent from their own population. When you do nothing when your country commits genocide, you are in no position to complain when you get bombed.

The Japanese atrocities committed during WW2 were incredibly underreported in the US. I think that it's because there are more Americans of European descent rather than Asian.

 

[Ford]

Forget the fucking apology!

Again, you insisted that we not do so.

Also, there was NO APOLOGY FOR THE LITTLE MATTER OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK ON A CIVILIAN POPULATION.

 

[whichphilosophy]

When the Emperor of Japan goes to Nanking and apologizes for what was done to that city, I will ask the President of the United States to apologize for Hiroshima.

The Empire of Japan was utterly evil, worse in many ways than Nazi Germany, who's terrible cruelty and monstrous treatment of their victims well justified using the very worst weapons imaginable to stop them.

I am sick and tired of people pretending Japan was some kind of victim in World War 2. Japan committed the most heinous acts during that war and, unlike Germany, there was virtually NO resistance or dissent from their own population. When you do nothing when your country commits genocide, you are in no position to complain when you get bombed.

Obviously the Americans needed excuses for the bombing with was needless.

The allies controlled the air land and sea and carpet bombed Japan on a daily basis. The Japanese had made approaches five months earlier through countries such as Switzerland.
The allies wanted unconditional surrender but in the end the Japanese kept the Emperor and most of its war criminals got off scot free. The Emperor's abdication and apology didn't happen. This is because the alies wanted someone to lead Japan in the aftermath and what better person than the war criminal who led them.

Further the final peace treaty took several years to complete which involved compensation for war victims. In this starting the process months early to save the genocide of civilians (no worse than that committed by the Japanese) would have been a sensible thing to do.

The bomb at Nagasaki also killed hundreds of allied prisoners, plus thousands of Koreans and Chinese conscript workers. There again when the Americans bomb their allied troops it is called friendly fire. Murphy's law says friendly fire isn't friendly.


Had peace talks started some months earlier, a lot of civilian lives could have been saved.

 

[untermensche]

The overall point is that US presidents are nauseatingly hypocritical when they talk about the horrors of nuclear weapons and are really doing nothing to try to get rid of them. When they are actually overseeing the building of more.

To be president of the US is to be an ignorant liar and hypocrite.

It comes with the job.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

I don't think we are building more.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I don't think we are building more.

Depends on how you mean.
We retire old systems, old delivery vehicles, and replace them with newer units, though the overall number being fielded doesn't rise. It actually keeps going down.


The next generation of nuclear missile subs is designed so that entire tube groups can be removed from the sub. Right now, we just install permanent covers over the empty tubes, which has a number of small but nagging problems.

 

[Keith&Co.]

The President just made another of his vaprous bullshit speeches in Hiroshima. It had all the usual bells and whistles of a hypocritical Presidential speech used to re-justify the the gross violence we as a nation had engaged in at that location and then obtusely suggested he was interested in a world without nuclear weapons. He has a trillion dollar nuclear weapons upgrade working at home while he goes abroad with still another distortion of his actual position.

I think you're distorting his actual distortion.
As long as 'the other guys' have nuclear weapons, we want our nuclear weapons to be as scary as possible, so that means as technologically advanced as possible. Or even just as industrially sound as possible. As Industry moves on from some of the stuff that was the new hot-shit tech 30 years ago, factories stop making the parts needed to keep the weapons systems maintained. So we redesign and upgrade and buy Commercial-Of-The-Shelf parts just to keep running in place.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When the Emperor of Japan goes to Nanking and apologizes for what was done to that city, I will ask the President of the United States to apologize for Hiroshima.

The Empire of Japan was utterly evil, worse in many ways than Nazi Germany, who's terrible cruelty and monstrous treatment of their victims well justified using the very worst weapons imaginable to stop them.

I am sick and tired of people pretending Japan was some kind of victim in World War 2. Japan committed the most heinous acts during that war and, unlike Germany, there was virtually NO resistance or dissent from their own population. When you do nothing when your country commits genocide, you are in no position to complain when you get bombed.

"Japan" is not what we are talking about here. The entire country had been firebombed from one end to the other, save a few cities set aside for the nuclear attacks. This is not making an omelette. This is killing 140,000 people, mostly civilians...many of the innocent. We live in an vacuum when it comes to international law. Killing innocent civilians is always wrong...ALWAYS. Japan is not a creature that is apt to learn. It is a collection of human beings with a wide range of opinions, moral codes, economic conditions, etc. etc. etc. Obama's drones are wrong. Pearl Harbor was wrong. Our use of nuclear weapons is wrong...according to the people who made the fucking bombs. All of these things are wrong to a humanist. Countries full of people do not "learn" through punishment with weapons of mass destruction. They only suffer.

Thus showing you have no understanding of war.

Innocent civilians routinely die in war. That's a simple fact of life that we can't prevent with current technology.

Look at the path if the bomb wasn't used--Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have burned under firebombs rather than nukes. The results for the cities would have been similar. The results for Japan as a whole are another matter--it would have been much worse.

The only way we could destroy the Japanese war machine was to burn the cities to the ground. The targets (even when we could identify them) were too small to aim at with WWII-era tech.

Something to keep in mind: The most destructive attack on Japan was on Tokyo, not Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

akirk,
Going with the situation as it stood on August 1, 1945, I want to know how you would have decided what to do if you were Harry Truman.

Some things to remember:

• The Battle of Okinawa ended a few weeks ago. The fighting was extremely fierce (240,000 casualties) and the Japanese drafted schoolchildren as soldiers.
• You have the casualty estimates for the Invasion of Japan scheduled to take place on November 1, 1945 and the forces are beginning to collect.
• The Soviet Union is about to enter the war. The have not passed along any peace feelers. You are suspicious because they will not tell you what they are up to.
• The American People have been locked in a death grip with the Japanese. Both sides hate each other ferociously. This war had been predicted to be coming for decades.
• Japan shows no signs of giving up. Their propaganda is preparing civilians to fight to the death.

Remember we have a lot of historical material that tells us what the likely outcome was from several scenarios. I look forward to hearing your answer.

We had already been guilty of massive fire bombing of their cities and surrender was imminent. This idea that the acts of a few can be used to justify the destruction of innocent people is WRONG to a humanist. I will never buy that. I understand how you feel. It is trained into us to feel that way. But it makes it no less wrong.

Once again you show you have no understanding of war.

Surrender was not imminent. Until the bombs Japan was still operating under a strategy of trying to make final victory so bloody and expensive that we would give up and leave them alone. That's what the "peace" offers were about.

You're still committing the fundamental liberal fallacy of thinking there is a good answer. Those who subscribe to this are very likely to make incredibly bad decisions when faced with a situation where there is no good answer.

In the real world you're often forced to choose the lesser evil.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Actually Japan surrendered unconditionally, it was MacArthur that kept the Emperor in power.

After three days of these imperial assholes dithering we kill another number of thousands of people with an experimental plutonium bomb in Nagasaki. It was the Emperor's dithering combined with the American Military want to drop the damned thing. It is clear there was more than just the war going on here. There were U.S. military leaders wanting to test the plutonium bomb. They were clearly on their way to surrender before the first bomb. Truman and Lemay both ushered in a new era of civilian murder...possibly an extension of what they learned from Hitler's blitzkrieg.

I am sure there were many Japanese war criminals. That is not the issue. We really need some actual movement away from nuclear holocaust. That will only come when those addicted to nuclear war powers finally are made to put down their weapons. I share some of Chomsky's skepticism that we may not be able to overcome this without another release of nuclear weapons. We seem to be married to nuclear pathos.

We had to drop the second bomb soon after the first. The bomb was really a great big bluff, if we made it look like our supply was limited it wouldn't have worked.

 

[Bronzeage]

When the Emperor of Japan goes to Nanking and apologizes for what was done to that city, I will ask the President of the United States to apologize for Hiroshima.

The Empire of Japan was utterly evil, worse in many ways than Nazi Germany, who's terrible cruelty and monstrous treatment of their victims well justified using the very worst weapons imaginable to stop them.

I am sick and tired of people pretending Japan was some kind of victim in World War 2. Japan committed the most heinous acts during that war and, unlike Germany, there was virtually NO resistance or dissent from their own population. When you do nothing when your country commits genocide, you are in no position to complain when you get bombed.

"Japan" is not what we are talking about here. The entire country had been firebombed from one end to the other, save a few cities set aside for the nuclear attacks. This is not making an omelette. This is killing 140,000 people, mostly civilians...many of the innocent. We live in an vacuum when it comes to international law. Killing innocent civilians is always wrong...ALWAYS. Japan is not a creature that is apt to learn. It is a collection of human beings with a wide range of opinions, moral codes, economic conditions, etc. etc. etc. Obama's drones are wrong. Pearl Harbor was wrong. Our use of nuclear weapons is wrong...according to the people who made the fucking bombs. All of these things are wrong to a humanist. Countries full of people do not "learn" through punishment with weapons of mass destruction. They only suffer.

The object of any military action is to convince the enemy that it is a bad idea to continue fighting. This make war very similar to a bar fight.

In addition to inflicting pain on the enemy, one has to reduce one's own pain as much as possible. There is validity to the claim that two atom bombs saved the lives of countless US soldiers and Japanese civilians.

It's easy to judge in 21st century hindsight and declare things to be wrong. That does not make them any less necessary. Sorry.

 

[Tristan Scott]

"Japan" is not what we are talking about here. The entire country had been firebombed from one end to the other, save a few cities set aside for the nuclear attacks. This is not making an omelette. This is killing 140,000 people, mostly civilians...many of the innocent. We live in an vacuum when it comes to international law. Killing innocent civilians is always wrong...ALWAYS. Japan is not a creature that is apt to learn. It is a collection of human beings with a wide range of opinions, moral codes, economic conditions, etc. etc. etc. Obama's drones are wrong. Pearl Harbor was wrong. Our use of nuclear weapons is wrong...according to the people who made the fucking bombs. All of these things are wrong to a humanist. Countries full of people do not "learn" through punishment with weapons of mass destruction. They only suffer.

The object of any military action is to convince the enemy that it is a bad idea to continue fighting. This make war very similar to a bar fight.

In addition to inflicting pain on the enemy, one has to reduce one's own pain as much as possible. There is validity to the claim that two atom bombs saved the lives of countless US soldiers and Japanese civilians.

It's easy to judge in 21st century hindsight and declare things to be wrong. That does not make them any less necessary. Sorry.

This^^^

In the first place Truman as C in C would have been derelict in his duty to the soldiers, sailors and airmen if he didn't use the bombs and instead went on with the invasion. Military planners estimated a million US casualties and up to 100,000 deaths on our side and well over a million more Japanese deaths. What our planners did not realize was that the Japanese had been husbanding their aircraft and aviation fuel and had over 100,000 aircraft that were to be used as kamikazes against our invasion fleet. They were also training their civilians in combat using spears made of sticks.

To blame the US for it's tactics to end the war is asinine, almost as asinine as the Japanese decision to start a war against two major world powers when she was struggling in her war with a weak nation (China). People forget that the Japanese started the war and they started it for imperial purposes.

 

[whichphilosophy]

We had already been guilty of massive fire bombing of their cities and surrender was imminent. This idea that the acts of a few can be used to justify the destruction of innocent people is WRONG to a humanist. I will never buy that. I understand how you feel. It is trained into us to feel that way. But it makes it no less wrong.

Once again you show you have no understanding of war.

Surrender was not imminent. Until the bombs Japan was still operating under a strategy of trying to make final victory so bloody and expensive that we would give up and leave them alone. That's what the "peace" offers were about.

You're still committing the fundamental liberal fallacy of thinking there is a good answer. Those who subscribe to this are very likely to make incredibly bad decisions when faced with a situation where there is no good answer.

In the real world you're often forced to choose the lesser evil.

The Japanese did want to surrender some months earlier as history shows. As you mentioned the Cities were being constantly bombed for the allies had control over land sea and air. A ceasefire was possible so that peace talks could begin. As clearly mentioned earlier, even with the unconditional surrender of Japan the allies soon backed down on removing Hirohito and ceased the pursuit of Japanese war criminals.

Therefore the ceasefire for peace talks was more a common sense action than a lesser evil.

Sun Tzu also stated: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

 

[whichphilosophy]

The object of any military action is to convince the enemy that it is a bad idea to continue fighting. This make war very similar to a bar fight.

In addition to inflicting pain on the enemy, one has to reduce one's own pain as much as possible. There is validity to the claim that two atom bombs saved the lives of countless US soldiers and Japanese civilians.

It's easy to judge in 21st century hindsight and declare things to be wrong. That does not make them any less necessary. Sorry.

This^^^

In the first place Truman as C in C would have been derelict in his duty to the soldiers, sailors and airmen if he didn't use the bombs and instead went on with the invasion. Military planners estimated a million US casualties and up to 100,000 deaths on our side and well over a million more Japanese deaths. What our planners did not realize was that the Japanese had been husbanding their aircraft and aviation fuel and had over 100,000 aircraft that were to be used as kamikazes against our invasion fleet. They were also training their civilians in combat using spears made of sticks.

To blame the US for it's tactics to end the war is asinine, almost as asinine as the Japanese decision to start a war against two major world powers when she was struggling in her war with a weak nation (China). People forget that the Japanese started the war and they started it for imperial purposes.

America has continued its involvement of its asininities into the 21st Century while sending troops to die in Vietnam and Iraq while also getting involved in Libya and Syria to name a few. At the same time it has racked up debts exceeding a trillion dollars.

If peace talks had occurred a few months earlier as the Japanese requested, then even more lives would have been saved. The Japanese had no place to go. The US wanted unconditional surrender but actually did not achieve this in the end. Hirohito and most war criminals were not prosecuted.

If there was a ceasefire earlier with Japan in response to its request for peace, then not only would the deaths have been avoided but the thousands of Koreans, Chinese and allied prisoners who were in Nagasaki would not have been killed. There again the US is known for killing its own troops or those of its allies through friendly fire.

Of course the Japanese were training its population for defence of the Islands. This is what Britain did when threatened by Germany and is known as common practice in war.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Sun Tzu also stated: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

Yes, but he was talking about wars that his employer started, to expand his own nation. Not wars waged in self defense. For that, I'm sure he'd be far more in favor of using any available weapon which kept HIS army intact. That's why he was fond of using spies to assassinate and spread disease, to hamper the enemy so when his troops showed up, they didn't have to fight.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Sun Tzu also stated: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

Yes, but he was talking about wars that his employer started, to expand his own nation. Not wars waged in self defense. For that, I'm sure he'd be far more in favor of using any available weapon which kept HIS army intact. That's why he was fond of using spies to assassinate and spread disease, to hamper the enemy so when his troops showed up, they didn't have to fight.

It applies to any war but the circumstances are always weighed up to also try and achieve this. If you occupy a country without an army intact to maintain order internally it has security problems (Iraq).

Perhaps US politicians still watch too many John Wayne movies.

 

[whichphilosophy]

"Japan" is not what we are talking about here. The entire country had been firebombed from one end to the other, save a few cities set aside for the nuclear attacks. This is not making an omelette. This is killing 140,000 people, mostly civilians...many of the innocent. We live in an vacuum when it comes to international law. Killing innocent civilians is always wrong...ALWAYS. Japan is not a creature that is apt to learn. It is a collection of human beings with a wide range of opinions, moral codes, economic conditions, etc. etc. etc. Obama's drones are wrong. Pearl Harbor was wrong. Our use of nuclear weapons is wrong...according to the people who made the fucking bombs. All of these things are wrong to a humanist. Countries full of people do not "learn" through punishment with weapons of mass destruction. They only suffer.

The object of any military action is to convince the enemy that it is a bad idea to continue fighting. This make war very similar to a bar fight.

In addition to inflicting pain on the enemy, one has to reduce one's own pain as much as possible. There is validity to the claim that two atom bombs saved the lives of countless US soldiers and Japanese civilians.

It's easy to judge in 21st century hindsight and declare things to be wrong. That does not make them any less necessary. Sorry.

There again to simply agree to a ceasefire and peace talks with the Japanese when these were requested a few months earlier would have saved more American and allied lives including its own citizens it killed in Nagasaki. Then of course the politicians needed some plausible sounding drivel to feed its masses to show how nuclear warfare as a means to test new weapons saves lives.

 

[Tristan Scott]

If peace talks had occurred a few months earlier as the Japanese requested, then even more lives would have been saved. The Japanese had no place to go. The US wanted unconditional surrender but actually did not achieve this in the end. Hirohito and most war criminals were not prosecuted.

If there was a ceasefire earlier with Japan in response to its request for peace, then not only would the deaths have been avoided but the thousands of Koreans, Chinese and allied prisoners who were in Nagasaki would not have been killed. There again the US is known for killing its own troops or those of its allies through friendly fire.

This is completely inaccurate. Japan made no peace overtures to the allies. Where are you getting this shit? Japan put feelers out through it's embassy in Moscow, but the Russians refused to give them an audience. We of course knew it at the time because we had broken their diplomatic codes before the war even started. Their terms were not going to be acceptable even had they been able to make them. They did not want to be disarmed, they wanted no war crimes trials and they even wanted to keep most of the territory they had gained.

There is a lot of revisionism going on regarding this subject, has been since 1946, starting with Norman Cousins and Thomas K. Finletter who accused Truman of using the nuclear raids as a tool to keep the Russians in line, to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, published in 2005. Hasegawa uses the favorite tactic of revisionist where he cherry-pick history for support of his revisionism. His work, like most revisionists has been discredited as most of his sources do not support his conclusions.

Don't get me wrong, as new information comes to light, history should be revised. After the death of Hirohito a lot of archived information in Japan was released causing a lot of revisionism in regards to not only Hirohito but as to what was going on in Japan during the final days before the surrender. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this history read Sadao Asada's The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender––A Reconsideration.

 

[Bronzeage]

The object of any military action is to convince the enemy that it is a bad idea to continue fighting. This make war very similar to a bar fight.

In addition to inflicting pain on the enemy, one has to reduce one's own pain as much as possible. There is validity to the claim that two atom bombs saved the lives of countless US soldiers and Japanese civilians.

It's easy to judge in 21st century hindsight and declare things to be wrong. That does not make them any less necessary. Sorry.

There again to simply agree to a ceasefire and peace talks with the Japanese when these were requested a few months earlier would have saved more American and allied lives including its own citizens it killed in Nagasaki. Then of course the politicians needed some plausible sounding drivel to feed its masses to show how nuclear warfare as a means to test new weapons saves lives.

I don't believe I have ever read anything about a plausible attempt by the Japanese government to request a ceasefire or peace talks. Given the convoluted structure of the Japanese government and its military command, I don't think such a thing would have been possible, even if the Emperor himself wanted it. Hirohito had enough resistance to a surrender, after the second bomb. Why would it have been easier before?

The real worry, after exhausting our nuclear arsenal was that the Japanese would not surrender and truly fight to the last man. This would have left the Allies with no choice but to continue conventional warfare, while building more bombs. It was bad enough to kill so many civilians, but to kill the to no effect, would have left the Allies no choice but to continue with the invasion plans. This would have meant placating Stalin, which would have inevitably led to a partitioned Japan, just as was done with Germany.