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Japan was building their own nuke too

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Sulaco said:
I notice you completely ignored my previous post, directly in answer to yours. I think we all know the reason why.

Let's be honest here, Welsh. You're ignorant. You know little of the war, the context, the the on-the-ground tactical situation of the Pacific war at that time. You're arguing this from a moral absolutist position, without any regard for boring old history, or facts, or context. You're ignorant, borderline trollish, to the point of being not only disingenuous but cartoonish in your idiocy.

As has been stated, the Japanese were nowhere NEAR capitulation. This is not guesswork. This can be academically proved via the MAGIC intercepts from their ambassador to the foreign minister.
Operation Ketsugo was the Japanese plan for all of Japan to fight the invaders, down to the women and children with bamboo spears and rocks. The practical hope was that they would inflict such massive casualties on the Allies to make the cost so overwhelming at home to force and armistice. The actual implementation called for the entire destruction of the Japanese people before surrender, like the "heroic" citizens throwing themselves from Cliffs on Okinawa.

This is not guesswork. This is not supposition. Anything approaching a conventional invasion and air campaign, with or without the soviets, would have cost MANY TIMES THE CIVILIAN, JAPANESE LIVES as the twin Atomic bombs cost. This is inarguable.
Saying nothing of the cost of TENS OF THOUSANDS of Allied deaths, and hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Again, I understand you're ignorant. But you're on the internet. Take some of the time you devote to your inane, baseless supposition and devote to actual research and scholarship.
Sure, you won't be able to post as much nonsense, but you'll always gain a glimmer of understanding and perhaps not look the perpetual fool as well.
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Evisceration quoted for posterity.
 
WelshBloke said:
And you're justifying an unjustifiable act because, deep down, you know that the murder of 70,000 civilians is indefensible.
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Don't be thick headed, Welsh. You're smarter than that. The decision to drop the atomic bomb was both a political and a military one.

For one, as the others stated, the civilian cost would have been many times higher if we hadn't dropped the bomb. We're talking hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. Displacement has a ghastly effect on civilian populations.

The second reason is a political one. We needed the Japanese to surrender, and fast, because we knew that in time the Red Army would have likely invaded Hokkaido. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union was not our friends.

So, yep, we dropped the bomb. We didn't like it, but we did it, and we did it for good reason. We tried to get the Japanese to surrender much earlier, but they refused. And for their stubbornness, they paid the price, but it was better than the alternative.
 
Ventanni said:
Don't be thick headed, Welsh. You're smarter than that. The decision to drop the atomic bomb was both a political and a military one.

For one, as the others stated, the civilian cost would have been many times higher if we hadn't dropped the bomb. We're talking hundreds of thousands to potentially millions. Displacement has a ghastly effect on civilian populations.

The second reason is a political one. We needed the Japanese to surrender, and fast, because we knew that in time the Red Army would have likely invaded Hokkaido. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union was not our friends.

So, yep, we dropped the bomb. We didn't like it, but we did it, and we did it for good reason. We tried to get the Japanese to surrender much earlier, but they refused. And for their stubbornness, they paid the price, but it was better than the alternative.
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I lose zero sleep over the fact that the Japs got nuked.

Good points.
 
Remobz said:
I lose zero sleep over the fact that the Japs got nuked.

Good points.
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You lose me with the racist "Japs" bit. There was nothing to applaud about dropping the bomb other than it ended the war earlier than otherwise. The fact that doing so saved many lives in the long run will never matter to the Japanese -- or to folks like WelshBloke...


Brian
 
Japan having the nuke doesn't change much unless it's early in the war, Pearl Harbor early. US could strike anywhere which made it a strategic weapon, Japan would have it as a tactical weapon to use on it's shores, delivering a nuke strike to US soil would have been proven very difficult to pull off in later stages of the war, attempting to reach range for a coastal city attack. How many foreign military projectiles have even hit US ground (excluding embassies abroad) over the course of past 100 years?

If Germany had won Kursk and kept going, they could have dragged deeper into Russia in summer of 1944 only to inevitably get crushed on the western front but hopefully not before taking Stalin out and installing a puppet that the US would eventually inherit. That would have had most significant impact on the past 70 years, communism crashing like myspace. Cold war would have been a cool breeze, imagine 30% of military/intelligence spending over the past 70 years diverted into something more useful.
 
Rick James Astley said:
If Germany had won Kursk and kept going, they could have dragged deeper into Russia in summer of 1944 only to inevitably get crushed on the western front but hopefully not before taking Stalin out and installing a puppet that the US would eventually inherit. That would have had most significant impact on the past 70 years, communism crashing like myspace. Cold war would have been a cool breeze, imagine 30% of military/intelligence spending over the past 70 years diverted into something more useful.
Click to expand...

Hypothetical WW2 scenarios are always fun, but given that the atomic bomb was originally intended to be dropped in Europe, your scenario would have resulted in an irradiated Germany more than anything.

...and many many many more internet forum conversations on the moral ethics of dropping atomic bombs in general lol.
 
Morals in war? How do you think the civilians of captured cities were treated during the war?

I actually think it's funny how people who live in a little bubble think it would be so easy to avoid doing horrible things during a war.

You do realize that these 'soldiers' are just civilians forced to go to war. I doubt every single person in the army wanted to be a killer.
 
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