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your conciense and your countryman can be free of guilt but many here will not be.
Now don't get me wrong, i'm from Holland and censorship regarding nudity is something we are not custom to, but what the h*ll is wrong when you can show a picture of a charred body without problem but a woman's nipple has to be hidden behind a black dot???
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Bombing of. In the only uses of nuclear weapons in war, and on the order of President Harry S. Truman, the American bomber Enola Gay attacked Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945 and the Bock's Car struck Nagasaki on 9 August. Blast, heat, and radiation from these attacks took over 200,000 lives, mostly civilians. In concert with Soviet entry into the Pacific war, and compounding years of destruction to Japan, the bomb's use forced Japan's capitulation and ended World War II.
American code breakers had been deciphering Japanese military and diplomatic messages since just before the Battle of Midway. By the summer of 1945, "Magic" was deciphering millions of messages. From these messages President Truman and U.S. military leaders concluded that Japan would not agree to an unconditional surrender. The revisionists insist otherwise. They point out that in the summer of 1945 the Japanese were seeking a compromised peace to end the war through their envoy to Russia. But based on intercepted Japanese communications, what Japan was trying to do was make a deal to keep the Soviet Union out of the war. What the Japanese military rulers really wanted was a deal that would allow their brutal military regime that started the war to stay in power, something the U.S. and the Allies would never have accepted. Yet the revisionists persist that the primary obstacle that kept Japan from agreeing to an unconditional surrender was the perception that Emperor Hirohito would not be allowed to continue as emperor. According to the revisionists, the Japanese were so loyal to the Emperor that they would have fought to the death to protect him. While that may have been true for the majority of the Japanese, some of the top military leaders did not hold the Emperor in such high esteem. In fact, when Emperor Hirohito announced his decision to surrender, a group of hard-line Japanese military leaders attempted a coup to overthrow him. The coup failed. Finally, according to the revisionists, the use of the A-bombs were unnecessary because Japan's military was so devastated that the war would have ended in a matter of weeks anyway. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith even asserted that the use of the A-bombs only shortened the war by two or three weeks at most. But Galbraith and other revisionists couldn't have been more wrong. The Japanese had been sheltering their resources in anticipation of an American landing. At the time of the bombings, Japan had over 12,000 aircraft for use against U.S. forces. In terms of land forces, some post war estimates indicate that the Japanese defense forces on Kyushu, the first island targeted for invasion, may have outnumbered U.S. forces by a ratio of 3:2. Typically, an invasion force must outnumber defenders by a ratio of 3:1 to be successful. In addition, the Japanese had been training civilians, including children, for attacks against U.S. troops.
After the replacement of Tojo Hideki as prime minister in July 1944 by General Koiso Kuniaki, the Japanese continued to adhere to their basic strategy as World War II came to an end. That was to fight so hard and inflict such heavy casualties on the Americans that the latter would be willing to settle for a peace in which Japan could retain some of its gains, would not be occupied or disarmed, and would not have its military or civilian leaders tried as war criminals. The Japanese government made an effort to persuade the Soviet Union to either mediate some sort of compromise or, alternatively, reverse alliances and join Japan in fighting the Western powers. A new prime minister, Admiral Suzuki Kantaro, saw these efforts fail; he did not grasp that this was because Stalin had decided to fight Japan, not his current allies.
They wanted to see the "Effects" while rendering aid.
‘The resistance shown by Japanese Soldiers...’ - I agree, they would have died rather than give up. But that’s the soldiers. I do not believe mothers and children would have, given the option.
The existence of such a bomb – we each concluded – would be bad news for humanity. Mankind could not handle such a destructive force. It could not control it, safely, appropriately. The power would be “abused”: used dangerously and destructively, with terrible consequences. Many cities would be destroyed entirely, just as the Allies were doing their best to destroy German cities without atomic bombs at that very time, just as the Germans earlier had attempted to do to Rotterdam and London. Civilization, perhaps our species, would be in danger of destruction.
"The Uranium carried by U-234 was enough to make two atomic bombs, to blow up two American cities -- 1,235 pounds of 77 percent pure uranium oxide -- unusable by the destroyed Nazi hopes, it was destined for the Japanese atomic bomb program. The U-234 executive officer supervised the opening of the containers in Washington, DC, and reports he was told that one of the Americans was Oppenheimer. It is generally believed the the uranium was taken over by the Manhattan project, but its ultimate use, if any, is lost in secrecy. It was most certainly sent to Oak Ridge, but there was probably not enough time for it to have been processed and used in the two WW2 weapons."
-www.ww2pacific.com...
Originally posted by mblahnikluver
This is why I am 100% behind a ban against nukes or any weapon of mass destruction.
The question ultimately boiled down to this: Would the US try to defeat Japan the hard way, endlessly bombing and eventually invading, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers along the way? Or would they spare those soldiers by using nuclear weapons? It was an easy call. No one in their right mind (at least, no American) would have hesitated to use the bomb on Japan. This one was a no-brainer.
The war against Japan was still going on. I made the decision that the atomic bomb had to be used to end it. I made that decision in the conviction it would save hundreds of thousands of lives--Japanese as well as American. Japan surrendered, and we were faced with the huge problems of bringing the troops home and reconverting the economy from war to peace.
Of course, by any humanitarian standards, dropping the atomic bomb on two virtually defenseless cities was an atrocity by any humanitarian standards. And the terrible acts have been amplified as historians and revisionists who've agonized over it for the past 65 years. But, if you were Harry Truman, a plain Midwest politician newly thrust into a job he never dreamed he would have, what would you have done in the same circumstance? Use the only weapon you have at hand to end the bloodshed quickly by killing 200,000 of the enemy? Or would you allow the conventional war to go on indefinitely, resulting in the deaths of a million and a half or more?
Truman and the US Military began planning for the invasion of Japan called “Operation Downfall.” The Americans knew casualties would be high – Truman stated after the war they had anticipated anywhere from 250,000 to one million US soldiers, as well as millions of Japanese civilians. The Japanese military also threatened to kill all Allied POWs if the country was invaded. The justification for using the bomb evolved into ending the war quickly, with fewer deaths than an extended diplomacy and invasion would bring. Truman ultimately made the decision to drop the bomb to stop the war by inflicting destruction “sufficient enough to cause Japan to surrender.” Truman also said “we have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans” (from the public papers of Presidents, Harry S. Truman).
The Germans could have used all of the excuses that you just gave to justify the use of Chemical weapons against England to "end the war fast, to save lives".
France in the 1920s was the first nation to embark on an antipersonnel biological program. Its suspicion was that German rearmament would include airborne germ weapons attacks. In the interwar years, the German military did achieve superior air power but, due to Adolf Hitler’s aversion to biological weapons, it shunned their development. The French program ended with the German invasion in 1940. In 1924, the Soviet military started a fledgling biological program that was abandoned with the 1937 Stalinist purge of physicians, including those in the military. The dominant programs began in the war years, with the UK and Canada starting theirs in 1940 and the United States joining them in 1942. The US program, the largest in its time, involved dozens of universities and medical centers, as well as joint projects with its allies, and it lasted 25 years.
While continuing the battle may seem pointless to you, The Japanese forces that left the Shuri Line numbered some 45,000 troops(5,000 were left to perform a rear-guard action against the American troops). During the retreat, some 10,000 Japanese troops and 15,000 Okinawa civilians were killed by American bombing and shelling. Still, no final attack would have left some 30,000 combat-effective troops on the island of Okinawa. How many troops would the Americans had to leave on Okinawa to keep the island secure? However many it would be, it would be too many. These troops would most certainly be better used in the upcoming battle on mainland Japan rather than defending Okinawa. IIRC the Americans were planning to use 250,000 troops to invade Japan. Guarding Okinawa on a man to man basis would be roughly 10% of the troops slated to invade Japan.
Okinawa was a prefecture of Japan, the first part of Japan proper to be invaded. The battle for Okinawa was widely regarded as a dress rehearsal for what could be expected in an invasion of the home islands, where the role of kamikazes was to be paramount. There is no doubt that stubborn Japanese resistance on Okinawa plus the massive American casualty figures played a role in the decision of President Harry S. Truman two months later to employ atomic weapons against Japan.