61 years yesterday, and still no apology.

[Whoha]

Re: Re: Re: 61 years yesterday, and still no apology.

Originally posted by Spec


Yes you are, and now I know only 214,000 died. Much better than a land invasion and so on...
Poly is like school for me.

Educate me poeple!!

Spec.

well also consider that every month the Japanese didn't surrender, they held onto their occupied territories where they were butching people. Of course the people involved in the decision to use the atom bomb probably didn't know this.

[Jon Miller]

oh noes, nuclear weapons be the ultimate evil

JM

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Ecthy


I will repeat, compare it to the behaviour of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Corrected. IIUC, the DDR never accepted that the Holocaust was a "german" issue, since it was the bourgeois who did it. Austria maintained the fiction that they were the first victim of Nazism.

[Ecthy]

Nitpicker.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Flip McWho
Why are regimes now responsible for things that happened many regimes ago?

Because the same regimes are in power.

[Flip McWho]

Really? In certain countries granted.

[Daz]

Originally posted by Ming
Did they ever apologize for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor?

I don't see why the US needs to apologize for droping the bomb. It was war. Civilians die in war. While some might disagree, the bombs ended the war.

I see. Now the mass slaughtering of civilians is equal to the attack on ones armed forces. Interesting. But not surprising coming from the ones who would like war criminals to be judged, only not theirs...

for still not apologizing...

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Flip McWho
Oh also, I remember hearing once that the Soviets were on their way to help end the Japanese problem and the US wanted to finish it first to dictate peace.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


The US didn't want Japan turning red.

That theory has been around for a while, but it is basically hindsight speculative bull**** by the militarily uninformed. Stalin certainly had the megalomania to want to pull it off, but in a race to invade Japan, the Soviets had no chance whatsoever of beating, or even competing with the US, had the US been forced to proceed with either stage of Downfall.

The ultimate chokepoint for the Soviets was rail capacity to the east. They could supply an army in Manchuria and Korea (with a long lead time and a big head start), but that doesn't get you close to supporting a land-sea-land logistics chain onto the Japanese home islands.

They had no non-trivial experience in amphibious assaults, amphib war planning, port management, seaborne supply chain, air/land/sea combined ops and support bombardment, coast survey, or any of the other necessary skills or specialties the US had developed over three years of real world practice.

They had inadequate naval presence in the Pacific, inadequate port facilities and capacity, inadequate sea transport, inadequate fuel supplies, non-existent landing craft, etc.

They had no designs for modularizable landing craft that could be part assembled in the industrial heartland and then rail transported, and no seaport manufacturing capacity adequate to produce landing craft and transport them in theater by ship, as we did. If you move the manufacturing capacity, skilled workers (shipbuilders and marine trades were in a bit of a short supply, Tovarich ), and raw materials east, you don't have the rail capacity any more to move men, supplies and equipment. It's all subject to the same rail constraints.

Even if you got all the stuff there, there were inadequate ports - the Soviets would have had to build up port capacity all over South Korea, as Vladivostok was too far and too limited for expansion to support a real landing force.

By the time the US was set to execute the Olympic phase of Downfall, the Soviets might have been able to make a trivial incursion into Hokkaido, against minimal resistance. They might have gotten their act together to pull off their own Olympic (from the other side of Kyushu) by early 1947, and Coronet the following year, (maybe, or the year after), but we'd have already done the job 18-24 months prior.

[chequita guevara]

Course, if we'd waited to drop the bomb a month, Japan still would have surrendered, and we wouldn't have needed to vaporize hundreds of thousands of human beings. According to the Japanese, it was the Soviet invasion that convinced them they had to surrender. Of course, we didn't know that at the time, but we might have suspected it.

I think more than anything though, we dropped the bomb to show Stalin our dick.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Re: Re: Re: 61 years yesterday, and still no apology.

Originally posted by Spec


Yes you are, and now I know only 214,000 died. Much better than a land invasion and so on...
Poly is like school for me.

Educate me poeple!!

Spec.

Probably a significantly higher number of people died from long-term effects, but both the US occupation and later the Japanese government downplayed the longer term effects. An old friend of mine was the daughter of a Japanese doctor from Hiroshima who survived the bombing, and treated acute casualties in the city center, but died of multiple rare cancers some 20 years later, well before his normal lifespan - his wife, also his nurse, became very sick, as well.

In a society that is so conformist and so over conscious of status and family "honor" it is still something in the closet - I lived in Nagasaki in 1985, and finding hard facts about real radiation casualties is hard to do - the US classified data, the occupation authorities criminalized gathering or publication of data on radiation poisoning and treatment, and the US lackey Japanese government cooperated in making sure there was no real information on the extent of radiation injuries and poisoning, or on the efficacy of treatment.

All that considered, I've said it before, and I'll say it again, that even knowing the full extent of the horror unleashed, I would have ordered the bomb dropped, or participated in doing so if that was my job. The second bomb at Nagasaki may have been premature, but the real toll on civilians over the winter of 1945-6 from famine, disease, and lack of basic necessities (clean water, medical treatment, heating, shelter, etc.) would have been far worse had the war been allowed to continue, without even considering the effects of invasion.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Course, if we'd waited to drop the bomb a month, Japan still would have surrendered, and we wouldn't have needed to vaporize hundreds of thousands of human beings.

There's never been any real evidence to support that. It was far closer to reality (a real conspiracy existed) to assassinate or kidnap the emperor and those of his staff who advocated any discussion of peace, to further a movement to fight to the death of the Japanese nation. This isn't modern Japan - this is the Japan of Ni-Ni-Roku, Nanjing, and the glorification of Hagakure.

According to the Japanese, it was the Soviet invasion that convinced them they had to surrender.

According to some Japanese, and disregarding the shame of admitting to a (nominally former) enemy that the enemy's act forced surrender. Better to place the reason with a third party, than futher humiliate oneself with one's enemy. Ishida Mitsunari all over again?

Of course, we didn't know that at the time, but we might have suspected it.

Having kicked their asses from Guadalcanal to the home islands over three bloody years, and having sent their navy to the bottom of the sea, why would we expect them to be more afraid of a phantom invasion a couple of years away than of what we had in store for them next - LeMay was running out of targets to flatten, the government had shut down schools to have schoolkids train as militia (my ex-brother-in-law was one of these kids, as a 10 year old, in training to be a 20th century Ashigaru with a bamboo spear), the country was falling apart at the seams - the leadership knew that 1947 or 48 wasn't an issue.

I think more than anything though, we dropped the bomb to show Stalin our dick.

Probably premature on that - LeMay and MacArthur were red haters, but we hadn't gotten far enough into the occupation phase in Europe by the time the bombing was authorized to have had a real shift in policy towards Stalin. Not that it was a bad idea, I just don't think Truman was all the way there at the end of May, when the target selection was made, or by July, when the bombs were transported.

[Ecthy]

How can there be long term effects if radioactive half life is so low? Wasn't it just a mere 30 days or something? I mean obviously exposure to radioactivity for several weeks or months would increase your overall cancer risk, but how does it result in a significant number of casualties in a population? Your doctor friend is a single case which has no weight statistically. I may have a misconception of how long term cancer risk works.

[Mr. Harley]

You don't need a physicist, you need a biologist. The current theory is that all ionizing radiation damages cells, and that the effects are cumulative. Being exposed to the blast of an A-bomb (and surviving) or to fallout both increase your lifetime risk of cancer.

Half-life becomes a factor due to the fact that most short half-life isotopes formed by a nuclear explosion are actually more radioactive. They are emitting charged particles at a very fast rate. However, their effects linger for a shorter time. The long half-life substances will have a longer duration during which they produce radioactive emissions. If also makes a difference as to the form of radioactive emission, but that evens outs when we are talking about a nuclear explosion, which is very messy and produces all sorts of highly radioactive particles - though it is usually the heat/blast wave that kills you.

The last problem with fallout is radioactive particulates. When you inhale them, they tend to be stuck in your lung. This is NOT A GOOD THING, and depending on the substance, i.e. plutonium, and the size of the particle, a guaranteed recipe for developing lung cancer. Lung cancer has one of the poorer survival rates.

[Mr. Harley]

I researched the info on the US submarine campaign against Japan several years ago. Just like the US bombing campaign against Nazi fuel supplioes, the problem was that the US military did not know how effective their campaign was. US analysts did not realize the degree to which Japan relied on coastal shipping to distribute food. The US could have starved Japan into eventual submission, they just didn't realize it.

Even worse, the US Army policy of engaging and destroying enemy military forces made this an even more difficult strategy to have been adapted, even if they had realized they could starve Japan out. Trying to get a military to actually embrace an entirely new strategy, especially those leaders who fought "the last war" is astoundingly difficult. Most of the US casualties on Okinawa were caused by this "search and destroy" policy rather than simply taking the necessary airfields and setting up a defensive perimeter accross the island, keeping all the Japanese light artillery out of range of the airfields. Literally, the generals could not conceive of this idea.

The posters comments about the results of a embargo/starvation policy against Japan. After another one to two years the islands would have been depopulated. On the basis of casualties, the A-bombs were the more ethical choice. There is abundant evidence that the conventional invade - search and destroy strategy was going to produce horrendous US casualties, and that many in the US Army were terrified of that possibility. Again, on that basis dropping the A-bomb, if you thought that it MIGHT cause Japanese capitulation, is an ethical decision.

Ned and I had a major argument over this several years ago - Ned arguing that the bombings were unethical! With further research, most of the individuals involved made the reason for genuinely sound military reasons. A couple of individuals DID push for the bombings for real politik - cold war reasons. This produces the fascinating, but very real world effect, that most of the individuals were for the A-bomb decision for sound military and ethical reasons - i.e. saving more lives than it cost, early end to hostility, etc. while a couple of individuals may well have contributed to the decision for utterly amoral reasons that without the military excuse would be considered war crimes.

[Datajack Franit]

Apologizing for dropping a bomb against a country that slaughtered 20 millions of people in China and Korea