Years ago, I posted a thread named: "I met a man today.." When I was doing contract work on the road, I met a man who was chosen to crew the back up plane to the Enola Gay at a gas station somewhere in Kentucky. What he told me about it just gave me shivers as this man lived thru perhaps the most dangerous time in this planet's history. What he said was, he was damned glad he didn't have to fly that mission because he didn't want to have to live with having killed over 100K people. I have read that the actual crew members really didn't have nightmares as they looked at as a job to do. War does strange things to people. I ask the group this question: Could any of you press a button and kill millions of people? Could you live with yourself if you did? Please, no John Wayne/Chuck Norris answers ok. Give it some thought first then answer.
Type of thing you can never answer until you're in the situation. Today, unemotionally and completely withdrawn from the situation, no. But if we're in the midst of a giant world war against some evil powers who attacked us on our own shores? I think I might do it, especially if I saw it as an end game.
It was a war crime under the accepted definition of war crimes that were in use at the time the bombs were dropped. It was no different than the Nazi's shooting entire villages in the Balkans to try to force partisans to stop fighting them. The argument that winning the war was a strong enough goal to justify the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens and the maiming and ruination of the lives of hundreds of thousand more is clearly not morally justified. If winning is everything then no price can be too high and by extension the victors in WWII should have been willing to sacrifice everybody but their own citizens to achieve that result. Killing hundreds of thousands of non-combatants in a calculated act in which their deaths were a certainty can be seen as nothing but a massive war crime no matter what type of fig leaf you try to put over it. If anybody but the Allies had done that in WWII they'd have been in Nuremburg on trial. If we had lost we'd have been in Nuremburg on trial. A war crime is a war crime. It isn't "justified" by any potential gain.
It was justified because WE won. If it was Japan that did it to us and they won, for us it wouldn't have been justified. But there would be a whole bunch of Japanese sumo wrestling fans on TheGangYellow.com posting that what THEY did was justified because they won. Oh boo frickety hoo big bad America. Stop. We didn't start the fire, we ended it. You don't want to get incinerated? Don't murder our sailors and pilots and infantrymen while they lay asleep on a Sunday morning. _
Nuking people doesn't translate to tough guy talk. But no war crime. Because they started it and killed a lot of our soldiers. And they were brutal just like their allies the Nazis. The question is was there another legit solution other than the A bomb. I can't answer this, I don't know. For me: if I had to make that decision. I would have taken more losses if necessary rather than use the A bomb. I think. And who says you had to invade Japan. Just cut the head of that monster if that was feasible. Not sure.
If NYC was nuked in any war as a demonstration of power with the full knowledge of the people who nuked us that hundreds of thousands of non-combatants would be killed it would be a war crime. Intentionally killing non-combatants is a war crime. The fig leaf that we have pulled over our war crime is that it somehow saved lives or was necessary in other ways. That is not true. It is objectively not true because you can't shoot a non-combatant in a calculated act and justify the shooting except in immediate self defense and even then the moral justifications are hazy. America was not threatened by a Japan in full retreat. The was was already won, it was just a question of closing it out at that point. Japan's industrial production was in ruins and the vast majority of their armed forces were cut off from effective resupply. We chose to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima as either an act of political expediency "the war has to end as soon as possible whatever the cost" or as a reprisal for Japanese crimes committed earlier in the war or to demonstrate our newly found power and try to intimidate the Soviets in the process. None of those reasons was morally justifiable. We had other options in each case. We chose to take the most brutal path, the intentional killing of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, and in so doing we committed a war crime. However the victors get to decide who goes on trial. The US will not allow the International War Crimes Tribunal to have control over or to try US military personnel for war crimes. This is because we can't sweep our war crimes under the rug once we get into a truly international tribunal. The powerful don't get to decide what is and is not a war crime in an open tribunal, even one that is largely populated by their peers.
You're making a point about bombing civilian areas. Not sure about military capabilities in terms of pin point bombing back then-it wasn't well developed- and how they could or should have avoided killing civilians. But was it necessary to conquer Japan to stop the war. Could we have just disabled them. Did it have to go that far. Using A bombs is going over the line. Because of destruction and killing and also long term effects. As for some of the replies you've gotten. These are individuals who look at atomic bombs as cool weapons. And think of battles and warfare like they're a football game.
This wasn't bombing in civilian areas with the possibility of civilian casualties. This was a premeditated strike to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants. It was mass murder, premeditated. Nothing justifies that. Ground Zero in Nagasaki was St Mary's Urakami Cathedral. It was the landmark that was given the the crew, all Christians, to find and drop Fat Man on. Nagaski was home to 12,000 Christians at the time, most of whom perished in the bombing.
For such an intellectual dude, you seem to have overlooked Lot's wife (and the rest) in your biblical response. A perusal of Genesis 19 is in order. Cuba would love another Amerika hater. I understand travel restrictions have been relaxed, and aren't you one of the favored classes for such treatment?
Are you really that historically ignorant? The use and efficacy of Atomic weapons, narrowed the list of potentially militaristic powers, to exactly one. The one that wouldn't use it casually. And once it became two, it still kept the rest 0f the rejects from getting to bellicose, unlike the actions of the 150 years prior to that date, It's all good fun to put todays perspective on yesterday's events, but colonialism ( British and French fuckups we are still paying the price for) and bellicosity were the rule of the day, in recent history, circa 1945.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had so little military value that they weren't bombed during the war. They were saved as a select group of cities to make an example of. This shows clear intent on the part of the Allied war effort to commit an atrocity at the end of the war to make a point. Nagasaki was a secondary target on the day of the bombing run but the primary target had heavy cloud cover and so Nagasaki became the massacre instead. Civilized powers do not commit atrocities at the level of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. What the US did was equivalent to what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs when he used poison gas and nerve agents to force them to capitulate. It's equivalent to what Hafez Al-Assad did to the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 when his forces besieged the city for 27 days and killed up to 40,000 people the vast majority of them civilians in the line of fire. It's equivalent to every war-related atrocity committed against civilian populations by the Nazi's, the Soviets and the Japanese during WWII, of which there were many. What makes our accountability any different than theirs? Brutal suppression is brutal suppression.
Wow. So if you're doing a Mount Rushmore of War Criminals, you're going Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and...Harry Truman? _
