New Haven Independent

posted by: 2nd Amendment on August 11, 2008  1:16pm

Too bad we couldn’t have dropped it on New Haven…on the other hand, a waste of a perfectly good bomb. Nuke the whales-lol.

Seriously, imagine the following:

1) How many more Americans and Japanese would have died as a result of the planned invasion?

2) Being that we developed the bomb along with the fact that secrets were passed at the time to the Soviet Union (courtesy of Klaus Fuchs and co.), if we hadn’t used it then with all of the accompanying horrific images, nuclear weapons might have been used in Korea or later with even more devastating results.

posted by: Two2Three on August 13, 2008  12:44pm

The argument that without the atomic bombing of Japan the war would have lasted much longer and taken many more lives has largely eroded. The Japanese offered conditional surrender to Truman in the summer of 1945 - the condition being that the Emperor Hirohito not be deposed. Truman refused. The “unconditional” surrender that Truman accepted after the bombing still retained the emperor, so Truman had other reasons to drop the bombs.

The atomic bomb was not needed to end the war, but rather was used to warn the Soviet Union that the the U.S. was the new global empire and to get out of the way. To this end a quarter million civilians and two large Japanese cities were instantly incinerated.

Atomic weapons are terror weapons. They are aimed at cities. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first terrorist acts of the Cold War. The U.S. threatened to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear countries many times since 1945.

Today we are at war in Iraq because of the false claim that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons that threatened us and face another war with Iran based on the same type of charges. Saudi Arabia is considering acquiring nuclear weapons to counter Israel’s and any that Iran might make just as Pakistan built them to counter India. There are 8 nuclear powers with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, most of them in U.S. and Russian hands and perhaps 5,000 on hair trigger alert, more than enough to destroy all civilization.

Today the Bush administration is proposing building new nuclear weapons, again violating the NonProliferation Treaty and Bush abrogated the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty in 2001, thus increasing the possibility of again using nuclear weapons.

Cities in the U.S. are targeted with bombs that have 10-15 fold the power of the Hiroshima bomb. And our bike ride dramatized what would be lost in our city, and in any city, if nuclear weapons were used. The vigils not only commemorate the bombing of Japanese cities 63 years ago, but importantly for today continue the demand, shared by a vast majority of the world’s people, for the nuclear powers to abide by their treaty obligations to abolish all nuclear weapons.

posted by: 2nd Amendment on August 14, 2008  9:28am

Tell me, Two2Three…

Were YOU on a troop train headed to the west coast during July of 1945 in preparation for an invasion of mainland Japan after having served in the ETO? The bomb must have looked like a pretty good alternative at the time.

posted by: Two2Three on August 14, 2008  3:46pm

If President Harry Truman had accepted the surrender offered by Japan in June and July 1945, the troop trains going to the west coast could have been headed home, a lot of U.S., not to mention Japanese civilian, lives could have been saved, the nuclear standoff of the last 63 years could have been avoided saving trillions of dollars, the 8 nuclear weapons powers would be zero nuclear weapons powers. Saddam Hussein couldn’t have been falsely charged with possessing nuclear weapons, the war on Iraq along with tens of thousands of U.S. and millions of Iraqi casualties would have been as fictional as its premise.  President Bush would not be threatening Iran with nuclear extinction nor could he constantly terrify us that nuclear weapons materials are getting into terrorist hands. The world wouldn’t be a paradise, but it would be hugely safer.