Did the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially save the rest of Asia?

Japan was provoked by the West allies to enter in the WW2. The West had great envy of Japan being the empire of the fishing industry.

When the war was in progress, Japan by honor didn't show signs to be humiliated by the West.

Here is where the opinions differ about the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lets see four of them.

1)- Ones say that it was a great opportunity to experiment the consequences of atomic explosions in humans, something that is not out of the table, because Hitler himself used humans for tests of all kind. The west just copied the same tactics, of course, "with the correspondent excuse to justify it".

2)- Another opinion is "to save US troops lives":.

A soldier swears to "die for his country". So, when a soldier is on the field, fighting against the enemy, the soldier "voluntarily" has decided to be there, and expose his life to death.

Civilians do not swear to die for their countries.

When a war is in progress and soldiers fight against soldiers, this is when honor prevails.

When a war is in progress and soldiers fight against civilians, this is when dishonor prevails.

The war between US and Japan was won by the US unfortunately with dishonor

There is no valid argument to justify the murdering of thousands and thousands of civilians in order to save the life of hundreds and hundreds of soldiers.

Only people with sick minds can justify such an act full of dishonor.

If someone justifies the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki murdering civilians, then Saddam Hussein was an amateur, the same than Stalin, and even Hitler can be justified.

3)- Another opinion is that there was no way to stop the Japanese. We must remember that the Japanese pilots started to kill themselves at the same time of damaging the enemy's ships. They decided to die hurting the enemy their best.

There was no way to stop this Japanese strategy. The US army became desperate, it was found out that Japan was to fight until the last consequences.

4)- And finally, "monkey see... monkey do".

Japan's strategy included causing terror, so killing civilians making occupied territories (Asia, shores of Australia, etc.) to change their minds of cooperating with the enemy worked very well. Even the US has used this strategy in Iraq in both recent invasions.

The US used the atomic bombs to terrify Japan and made it stop the war.

Terrorism is the use of terror to change a way of government. The Japanese emperor was replaced by a different kind of government.

If this tactic worked so well in 1945, and today is even "praised" by many, them terrorism is not a bad thing after all... don't you think?

2 Replies

@carloslebaron,

You are assuming that wars do not have collateral damage. I would venture to say that world wars will always impact civilians - whether they approve of what their government decides to do or not.

It's not a "choice." Your conclusion that the US won with dishonor is misplaced. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor without any warning, and killed civilians. Japan occupied many parts of Asia by force and killing many civilians. They were not an innocent party to WWII. They were war mongers.

The reason? Japan as an island country does not have raw materials, and the US implemented a blockade against Japan. They needed raw materials for their war machine. Their military leaders also thought they could beat the US in a war. Only Admiral Yamamoto who was educated at Harvard knew Japan would lose.

Japan was also working on building an atomic bomb in 1943.

0 Replies

@LazarusR,

Quote:

Did the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
essentially save the rest of Asia?

We did not nuke the Japs
to save the rest of Asia. We did it to save American lives
by obviating an infantry invasion of Japan.

David

2 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSig attempts, in his usual sleazy and uninformed fashion, to perpetuate yet another of untold numbers of vicious USA lies.

----------------

The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace. The official myth that “the bombs saved lives” by hurrying Japan’s surrender can no longer be believed except by those who love to be fooled.

The long-standing fiction has been destroyed by the historical record kept in U.S., Soviet, Japanese and British archives — now mostly declassified — and detailed by Ward Wilson in his book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Image: The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.

Greg Mitchell’s Atomic Cover-Up (Sinclair Books, 2011) also helps explain the durability of the “saved lives” ruse. Wartime and occupation censors seized all films and still photos of the two atomic cities, and the U.S. government kept them hidden for decades. Even in 1968, newsreel footage from Hiroshima held in the National Archives was stamped, “SECRET, Not To Be Released Without the Approval of the DOD.” Photos of the atomized cities that did reach the public merely showed burned buildings or mushroom clouds — rarely human victims.

In Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, (Grosset/Putnam, 1995) Robert Lifton and Mitchell note that Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, “left nothing to chance.” Even before Hiroshima, he prohibited U.S. commanders from commenting on the atomic attacks without clearance from the War Department.

“We didn’t want MacArthur and others saying the war could have been won without the bomb,” Groves said.

In fact, MacArthur did not believe the bomb was needed to end the war, but he too established a censorship program as commander of the U.S. occupation of Japan. He banned reporters from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, expelled reporters who defied the ban and later said that those who complained that censorship existed in Japan were engaged in “a maliciously false propaganda campaign.”

That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. … That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.

Read on at,

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-enduring-myth-of-hiroshima/5395102

1 Reply

@carloslebaron,

carloslebaron wrote:

Japan was provoked by the West allies to enter in the WW2.

The US was provoked by Japan to drop A-bombs on them until they surrendered.

carloslebaron wrote:

Here is where the opinions differ about the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lets see four of them.

1)- Ones say that it was a great opportunity to experiment the consequences of atomic explosions in humans, something that is not out of the table, because Hitler himself used humans for tests of all kind. The west just copied the same tactics, of course, "with the correspondent excuse to justify it".

We had no need for such experiments. We already knew about radiation injuries.

And in any case, the A-bombs would have made pretty poor experiments. There was no way to pre-position people to see that they received a certain effect. There was also no control case.

There was, however, a need to make Japan surrender.

carloslebaron wrote:

2)- Another opinion is "to save US troops lives":.

That's not too bad, as explanations go. It is definitely the case that we wanted to save the lives of our soldiers if possible.

But it is ultimately not the reason we dropped the bombs. There was something that was even more important to us. It was so important that we were willing to expend lives (that we would have liked to have saved) in order to achieve it.

We wanted to force Japan to surrender.

carloslebaron wrote:

A soldier swears to "die for his country". So, when a soldier is on the field, fighting against the enemy, the soldier "voluntarily" has decided to be there, and expose his life to death.

Civilians do not swear to die for their countries.

Apparently you've never heard of the draft.

carloslebaron wrote:

When a war is in progress and soldiers fight against soldiers, this is when honor prevails.

When a war is in progress and soldiers fight against civilians, this is when dishonor prevails.

There was much Japanese dishonor then, with the way they horribly massacred so many innocent civilians for fun.

carloslebaron wrote:

The war between US and Japan was won by the US unfortunately with dishonor

Japan was the one who was massacring civilians for fun.

The US, unlike Japan, was not trying to massacre civilians.

carloslebaron wrote:

There is no valid argument to justify the murdering of thousands and thousands of civilians in order to save the life of hundreds and hundreds of soldiers.

No civilians were murdered by the US. The A-bombs were dropped on valid military targets.

Any civilians who happened to be killed by the A-bombs were mere collateral damage.

Further, the argument regarding the saving of lives presumes that a million US deaths were prevented.

This number does not include several million maimings and serious injuries prevented in US soldiers.

It does not count the ten million Japanese civilians who would have starved to death had the war continued.

And it does not count the non-Japanese Asian civilians who were dying by the millions at the hands of dishonorable Japanese soldiers.

carloslebaron wrote:

Only people with sick minds can justify such an act full of dishonor.

There is no dishonor in the wartime bombing of a military target.

carloslebaron wrote:

If someone justifies the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki murdering civilians, then Saddam Hussein was an amateur, the same than Stalin, and even Hitler can be justified.

No murders occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, if we count the number of civilians that Japanese troops murdered, Japan was very much in the same league as Hitler and Stalin.

carloslebaron wrote:

3)- Another opinion is that there was no way to stop the Japanese. We must remember that the Japanese pilots started to kill themselves at the same time of damaging the enemy's ships. They decided to die hurting the enemy their best.

There was no way to stop this Japanese strategy. The US army became desperate, it was found out that Japan was to fight until the last consequences.

If Japan had chosen to fight to the very end, it still would have resulted in US victory.

Japan fought to the end in Okinawa, and the US still overcame them.

Had Japan decided to do the same on the main islands, the result would have been one giant "Okinawa battle" from one end of Honshu to the other.

carloslebaron wrote:

4)- And finally, "monkey see... monkey do".

Japan's strategy included causing terror, so killing civilians making occupied territories (Asia, shores of Australia, etc.) to change their minds of cooperating with the enemy worked very well.

Yes. I noted Japan's vast massacres of civilians up where you were noting that such actions were dishonorable.

However, the US did not copy Japan and begin targeting civilians ourselves.

carloslebaron wrote:

Even the US has used this strategy in Iraq in both recent invasions.

The US has not targeted civilians in the past hundred years. This includes all of our wars in Iraq.

carloslebaron wrote:

The US used the atomic bombs to terrify Japan and made it stop the war.

The US did not target civilians. Both A-bombs were dropped on military targets.

carloslebaron wrote:

If this tactic worked so well in 1945, and today is even "praised" by many, them terrorism is not a bad thing after all... don't you think?

Terrorism involves targeting civilians. That is very much a bad thing.

2 Replies

@oralloy,

Uncle Sam's smegma pouring from Oralboy's gob.

0 Replies

@oralloy,

U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study #23, 1948:

Our real task... is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [U.S. military- economic supremacy]... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming... We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization... we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning. U.S. State Department. 1948

0 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

Quote:
Did the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially save the rest of Asia?

We did not nuke the Japs to save the rest of Asia.

True, but the end of the war did spare the lives of many millions of Asian civilians who otherwise would have died at Japan's hands.

OmSigDAVID wrote:

We did it to save American lives
by obviating an infantry invasion of Japan.

There is a bit of hindsight in this popular viewpoint. At the time the bombs were dropped, no one knew what it would take to make Japan surrender.

It might have been a nice hope that the bombs would provoke immediate surrender, but all anyone really knew when the bombs fell was that this was one more blow that was being struck towards an eventual surrender that still might require a large invasion to accomplish.

1 Reply

@oralloy,

More smegma.

You can't just mouth USA propaganda and expect it to be accepted as source material, Oralboy. That it works/has worked on brain dead folks like you and OmSig, and millions of other brain dead Americans means nothing.

0 Replies

@JTT,

JTT wrote:

OmSig attempts, in his usual sleazy and uninformed fashion, to perpetuate yet another of untold numbers of vicious USA lies.

I note your failure to point out any factual inaccuracies on the part of either OmSigDAVID or the United States.

JTT wrote:

The U.S. atomic destruction of 140,000 people at Hiroshima and 70,000 at Nagasaki was never “necessary” because Japan was already smashed, no land invasion was needed and Japan was suing for peace.

Wrong. Japan did not sue for peace until the day after Nagasaki.

JTT wrote:

That most people in the United States still believe the “saved lives” rationale to be true is because of decades of this censorship and myth-making, begun by President Harry Truman, who said Aug. 6, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. … That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

In fact, the city of 350,000 had practically no military value at all

Hiroshima was a huge military center and was Japan's primary military port. Most of Japan's invasions of their neighbors were launched from Hiroshima.

There were tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima; most of them were awaiting deployment to the beaches to stand in the way of our coming invasion. Hiroshima was also the military headquarters in charge of repelling any invasion of the southern half of Japan.

JTT wrote:

and the target was the city, not the base three kilometers away.

The city was riddled with military bases. Half of the Japanese soldiers therein were killed.

Did the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially save the rest of Asia?

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