(urth) (no subject)

[James Wynn]

On 1/18/2011 11:13 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> All were awful, but the atomic weapon makes it so much easier and 
> convenient to be awful. The overkill bombardment of Berlin and the 
> Okinawan slaughter required a huge human cost in sustaining the 
> terrible resolve to kill and keep killing for as long as it took, so 
> that few of the victors could look forward to repeating it. Robert E. 
> Lee would weep. 

On 1/19/2011 9:48 AM, António Pedro Marques wrote:
> The reason people abhor nuclear bombing in a way that they dnt 
> conventional bombing, is that in conventional bombing a reasonable 
> proportion of the potential victims is able to fight for their lives, 
> even if the odds are low. With nuclear bombing, the idea people have 
> is that it just kills everyone in a given radius instantaneously. That 
> sounds inhuman (yes, inhuman, not simply inhumane). 

Allow me to take the Devil's side for a bit. The Imperial Japanese 
culture in the early 1940s glorified nihilistic fanaticism. Long after 
it was clear that they would not win the war, the Emperor and the J 
government had decided that if they were beaten there should be a 
genocide of the Japanese people. This, incidentally, was the ultimate 
decision of Hitler's inner circle and cultic followers for Germany as 
well. The Japanese soldier's who bought in to that culture did all they 
could to make themselves detestable (inhuman) to American Marines and 
sailors. You would go to lend medical aid to a wounded Japanese soldier 
and likely as not he would have a grenade in his hand waiting to take 
you out. They used the White Flag the same way. And they were famously 
callous in the their own treatment of captives. Obviously, this 
undermined US forces willingness to not Overkill. The use of the bombs 
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan's leadership to truly face what 
their imagined genocide would be like. They presented them with an 
example of that genocide, stripped of all it's potential glory, and thus 
brought them back to rationality. It only barely worked. Hiroshima alone 
wasn't enough and there was _actually_ a serious attempt at a coup.

Obviously, after WWII, atomic/nuclear weapons became increasingly 
problematic as the technology became less and less exotic. But, if you 
weigh the horrors of ALL the uses of atomic weapons over the last 65 
years AGAINST the almost certain toll without them , Pres Harry Truman's 
decision to use the bomb looks quite humane. So God bless the Bomb.

u+16b9