Ban Atomic Bombs...

Tango, big boy?

Perhaps a Squaredance, or maybe a lively Polka. I find Latin a bit intimate. In any event, wear your steel-toed dancin' slippers ... no tellin' where my big feet might land once I get drunk enough to dance in the first place.



timber.

Go ahead, call me a tease, but I don't think I can take this any further.

I too think it best we let it die here in peace. Thanks, though, for playing!



timber

(curtsey)

Well, I leave for a couple of days and the party is already over. Here I am all dressed up and no place to go. I'm even wearing my high heeled sneakers. Sigh.

Yeah, we had a pretty good time on this thread for a while, but I think we're all danced out now.

Nothing like a discussion on A bombs to get everyone's feet tapping.

It's not the civilized part of the planet that we need to worry about but rather the uncivilized parts. It would be a much sadder state of affairs were we to throw away the weapons we need to keep the barbarians at bay.

Tantor

h.l. menchen:
As for the atomic bomb itself, I believe it is the greatest of all American inventions, and one of the imperishable glories of Christianity. It surpasses the burning of heretics on all counts, but especially on the count that it has given the world an entirely new disease, to wit, galloping carcinoma. I have been reading with great edification in the medical journals of the clinical pictures presented at Hiroshima. Large numbers of the victims, I was proud to note, were women and children. They were slowly fried or roasted to death... In many cases their agonies were prolonged, and they suffered worse than any bishop will ever suffer in hell.

I take it then that you are wearing a burqa that the evil Republicans have forced you into? That you have lost your job due to current administration and are forced to live in seclusion at your family's home? Is there any fear that the Republicans will take you out to the local stadium and shoot you at halftime because you had extramarital relations?

Your position is preposterous.

Tantor

Read up Tantor, Diane has already been attacked and retracted and explained her comment.

Nope. It depends upon who is holding the nukes. Certainly, evil flaky nations like Iraq and North Korea should never hold nukes. Generally, it is good for responsible nations like America, Britain, maybe even France, to hold a substantial arsenal of nukes. There is a point of diminishing returns where you have more nukes than targets. However, the smaller your arsenal of nukes, the greater the threat of nuclear war becomes because a nuclear opponent has a greater chance of wiping out your arsenal in a first strike. It also reduces the reliability of a successful counter attack. If you have ten thousand nukes, your counterattack can be counted on to be successful. If you have only a hundred nukes, your counterattack may meet with limited success.

The worst and most dangerous situation of all is to ban nukes. If all the civilized countries rigorously upheld their agreement to reject nukes it would give too much advantage to the evil nations to acquire them. Of course, the bad guys would develop nukes. They always will. That's why we need a substantial nuclear arsenal to suppress their evil ways.



False. I don't see where the UN has been particularly effective in projecting military force, largely because it's military deployments are run by committee. You need unity of command to effectively wage war. In the UN, you have dozens of hands on the wheel, steering it in crazy and self-defeating directions.



Yes, you have it quite right that we don't want the UN to run our military. We don't want Third World majorities to spill our boys blood pursuing bad or stupid agendas. We want our military to remain ours and responsible only to the people of the US. We certainly do not want the UN disciplining or court-martialing our troops if they are part of a military campaign of which the European bureaucrats reject. That mindset, that a democracy should not give up its defense to others, should never change.



True. Nukes don't deter terrorism. Nukes deter coarser threats, not fine threats like terrorism, just as nukes don't deter commando raids. However, our nuclear arsenal and conventional military superiority is what drives armed opposition of our evil adversaries to terrorism. They can never win a conventional war against us. Terrorism is all they have left. It is a strategy of weakness.

However, nukes are not irrelevant to terrorism. Bin Laden desperately wants a nuke. He had his minions working hard on the problem of buying or developing one. The radical fundamentalist Islamic strategy includes taking over Pakistan in order to acquire its nuclear weapons so as to use them on the infidels. That means us.

Tantor

You can not put the Genie back in the bottle. They will eventually be as common as the gunpowder. If man can not curb it's warlike instincts in the not too distant future this old world may become a burned out cinder.

I can't imagine that the agonies of the people of Hiroshima were worse than the agony of hundreds of sailors in Pearl Harbor who were scalded by the steam of exploding boilers on their ships. Their skin sloughed off along with their flesh. It took most of them about three days to die. I'm not sure if being blasted to death by an atom bomb is not better than being decapitated by a Japanese sword in front of a cheering mob of drunken Japanese soldiers.

I might also note that you promote the myth that Hiroshima was a city full of innocent women and children. It's completely false. Hiroshima was a military city and had been for a century. It was proud of its samurai tradition, though it doesn't ever seemed to be mentioned now, certainly not by those seeking to avoid the painful truth. It was a major base for the Japanese army. Half its population were soldiers in uniform. The majority of the civilian population were employed in war industries to support the military. Hiroshima was the staging area for the military defense of Japan. Once the Americans invaded, the Japanese would have deployed their reserve from Hiroshima to the beaches to fight them.

I might also note that the Japanese technically had no civilians. They had militarized the entire population, giving them weapons and telling them that were expected to kill one American before they committed suicide. Even kindergarteners were given bayonet drill with bamboo spears. The slogan went "One Hundred Million Lives For The Emperor." The Japanese were all enlisted to fight to the death in defense of Hirohito. It is the height of hypocricy to make all your citizens soldiers and tell them to kill the enemy while claiming them to be exempt from attack.

I might also note that the Japanese brutal war of conquest was wildly popular with the Japanese. One paper carried a running story about two lieutenants who were in a contest to see who could cut off a hundred Chinese heads first. The papers carried the current score like a baseball game. Japanese civilians thought that that was pretty funny. Do you?

The Japanese killed about ten million Chinese during their occupation. That's about the population of Hiroshima every two weeks. Thank God we had an atom bomb to drop on them before they could kill more. It almost wasn't enough.

Tantor

i would think omniscence would be a heavy burden.

'Twould.

Less than 150,000 people were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but as far as suffering, the radioactivity maimed many of them and it took up to three years to die. That's suffering. Not that it wasn't the right thing to do. I still believe it was -- and a Democratic President made the decision. The evidence that we would have lost many more soldiers in an invasion is overwhelming.

Still, here's a link to explore the tragic events (any event where many lives are lost is a tragedy despite the reasons for it):

http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/

The Nagasaki bomb was a test of the plutonium device on a live city, and an excercise in scaring the Russians.

It had, in my opinion, nothing to do with winning the war or saving lives.

In August 1945, the problem was keeping Japan from surrendering long enough to test the fat man gadget on a live enemy, not using it to bring an end to the war per se.