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I'm sure in the 28 pages of this forum this has been discussed ad naseum (it's just too long to read the whole thread), as I am sure no amount of evidence, support, common sense, or logic will change your mind. - but "them" was a military dictatorship, not particularly moved by the influence of the people of Japan. What I am saying is they would have been content to let their own people starve. Leadership that uses human bombs is not particularly concerned about the lives of it's people. Besides, obviously, not one person during that time, military or civilian, was promoting a wait out strategy of blockade. That made no strategic sense, the world just can't go on hold for 5 years. It was invasion or atomic weapons, no other option.
Even to get them to surrendor after two atomic bomb drops took almost a coup within the military leadership. Lucky they did, we didn't have a third bomb to drop so it may have very well been invasion at that point.
Another issue is the suffering of those countries that were still under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were not a benevolent occuping power to put things mildly, even cutoff from the mainland.
Not if THEY are starving themselves.
And who cares if they were benevolent or not? We are NOT our brother's keeper.
I have always wondered what would have happened in WW2 if we did not have nukes and there was no bombing of those two Japanese Cities. I suspect that the battle of the Japanese Mainland (including Tokyo) would have killed more people in the long run and the war would have gone on for many years. I understand that even kids as young as 7 were expected to fight against the Americans. Any theories?
That's easy. The Japs had nukes almost ready to use against us.
At the Munich Conference, a meeting between the prime ministers of Britain and France with Hitler, Hitler signed the Munich Agreement, where he declared that he was satisfied with taking Austria and Czechoslovakia, the two German speaking countries in Europe, and he would back down and not invade other countries. This meeting was a response to the German army invading the Sudetland, an area that was taken from Germany, as a punishment for starting and losing World War 1, to create Czechoslovakia. If British and French prime ministers had told Hitler that he needed to back off and leave the Sudetland or else the British and French armies would attack full force on the Germany army, which was quite small at the time, the whole war would have never happened. This is because the Germany army would have either been crushed then and there, or Hitler would have been forced to back down and retreated back into Germany. Basically, if Britain and France had stood up for themselves and the rest of Europe then Hitler's plan to expand Germany would have been depressed and German expansion would have been limited to its control of Austria. If Hitler had been stopped by Britain and France then Germany and Italy would not have allied to conquer Poland, and exterminating Jews. Also, the Japanese would not have followed the example of Germans, claiming that they needed to gain more "Lebensraum", or "living space", and natural resources. If none of this had happened, then Germany would not have, with their eventually gigantic German army, taken control of many crucial countries including Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and most importantly France. That's how World War 2 could have been prevented.
Why would it be moral to blockade the islands for the purpose of allowing the people to starve to death, but immoral to kill them with a bomb?
I'm A Shermanist in that I believe he grasped the true nature and purpose of war, which is to inflict cruelty on the enemy until such time that the enemy will surrender rather than endure more cruelty. I see no obligation for one side to invest their own lives if the means for inflicting sufficient cruelty without losing lives on your own side, is present.
I'm quite confident that the combined death total associated with an invasion of the home islands, or the death toll from slow starvation, would have been far greater than the death toll associated with the atomic bombs.
Finally, if you are killed by a war generated bomb, bullet, disease, famine or fire, it isn't going to make any difference to you how you were killed. That you were killed is what is important.
The moral question was always....do we have a right to kill anyone in the name of our national goals? Once you have answered yes to that, then you have signed aboard for the horrors infliction business. You do not become retroactively moral by designating any particular cruelty as "too horrible."
you kill others in defense of your own territory. When your territory is deemed safe, there is no reason to continue attacking.
Wrong....
You don't unilaterally end a war....
The Japanese had proved themselves to be a threat to the United States, the threat would not be removed until unconditional surrender was accomplished.
Japan was about to surrender before the A-bombs were dropped and Truman knew this. Despite this, the decision was made to go ahead, based on the huge development costs of the A-bomb, which needed to be justified, the desire to show the world what the US could do with this new weapon, and racism. It's highly doubtful that the bombs would have been dropped on any European country under the same circumstances.
Japan was about to surrender before the A-bombs were dropped and Truman knew this. Despite this, the decision was made to go ahead, based on the huge development costs of the A-bomb, which needed to be justified, the desire to show the world what the US could do with this new weapon, and racism. It's highly doubtful that the bombs would have been dropped on any European country under the same circumstances.
That sure doesn't square with the actual record. While there were many in Japan who were ready to give up, that did not include the only people who counted at the time, the army generals who had been the defacto rulers of the nation since the late '30's. I don't see how Truman could have possibly known that they were ready to surrender unconditionally when they themselves did not know. The Japanese remained naive enough right up to the end to trigger some fantasy about using the Russians to negotiate a conditional surrender. The Russians played along, but delivered their actual response in the form of troops coming across the Manchurian border the day after the first bomb was dropped.
While I would agree that there was a large racist element to the Pacific War, I think that had the bombs been ready earlier, the Allies might well have gone ahead and scorched some German city in order to force a surrender before the Soviets had gobbled up any more Eastern European territory. I didn't see where having white skin did a thing for the citizens of Dresden.
The Japanese had proved themselves to be a threat to the United States, the threat would not be removed until unconditional surrender was accomplished.
If you can do so in a one on one fight, you can do it in a war.
Or do you always KILL your opponent?
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