History Forum / General / General Topics / July 2004

Bill, I apologize!
It was Roger who said the bombing was right.
Yet I wonder where you get that number.
For all time?

I've seen estimates of one million, 400% of the 250K
figure above. Perhaps that included Japanese casualties?

--
Les Cargill

One of the benefits of age is changing history in our minds to make it
fit the way we wanted it to.  The US spent more than 1% of the Gross
National Product on building a bomb.  There was no way that we were not
going to use it. As I stated previously, the decision was made in
February 1943 to not drop the bomb on Germany for fear that it would not
work and they would reverse engineer it and to drop it on Hiroshima
because Hiroshima was deemed to be a communication center and the word
of what had happened would get out fast ( it didn't happen that way. A
scout plane was sent from Tokyo to see why no one was responding in
Hiroshima). When Truman took over he was briefed on the bomb for the
very first time. That was around June14th, 1945. He had wanted to
reverse the decision to drop it, he would have been removed. It had
so much momentum that no one could stop it. Truman talked about how
he agonized over the decision in his memoir's but it didn't happen
that way.

Angela if you would venture up to Ft Meade every other year and join in
the history seminar you too could learn all these things without having
to read the lousy reference books that you have.

Angela, I hate to disagree with you over mere definitions, because I really
think your heart is the right place. But checks and balances are the very
definition of ~inefficiency~.

First point:
Checks and balances mean that the same decision is made more than once by
different groups of people, then compared, usually before being implemented.

The definition of efficiency it that the same job is done with fewer
resources than before, or that a larger job is done with the same amount of
resources. Since checks and balances means that you are setting one group to
check the work of another, you are using more resources to accomplish the
same job, clearly a form of inefficiency.

It is, however, also a method of control. Things done by government are
often things in which control is a lot more worthwhile than efficiency, so
we sometimes use checks and balances. The cost of greater control in such a
case is a reduction of efficiency.

Second point:
If you are merely arguing that the bombing was out of balance, then I think
I may have misread your post. It appeared to me that you were arguing that
any use of nukes, ever, was an absolute wrong.

My argument is that the use of nukes in Japan was quite in line with the
history of that war, particularly the war in the Pacific, that the number of
deaths caused was fewer than would have been true of the alternative
(invasion) and that the weapons used then were not that much more powerful
than were the firebombings which had been previously used in the total war
that was being fought. I consider that, historically, to have been in
balance. I gather that you don't.

If in October 1973 the Egyptians or Syrians had successfully kept attacking
so that Israel's existence were threatened, I think that for the Israelis to
take out Damascus or Cairo with nukes would be a balanced response. The
armed planes were on the runway, and every nation in the world today knows
that. It is my opinion that is the reason why there has not been another
major war in the middle east between the Israelis and anyone else since
then.

[So now we have terrorism instead. Frankly, that so far is not a bad
trade-off, but the game changes if terrorists get nukes. They can attack
without placing their own nation at risk because there are terrorist groups
like al Qaeda who have no nation-state. But that is another story.]

I also think that the fact that both India and Pakistan had nuclear weapons
prevented a major conventional war a few years ago. MAD seems irrational,
but as long as we are looking at it in conflicts between nation-states, it
seems to be working among those nations who have them.

Bush probably did not attack North Korea at least partly because of the fear
than they have nukes and would use them. The residents of Seoul especially
should appreciate that. Conventional weapons would have unavoidably
destroyed the city.

Nukes, as truly horrible as they are, are also a substitute for large
military forces. Also, unlike chemical weapons and any bacteriological
weapons currently known, they can be made militarily effective. The only
reason why people inherently recoil from nukes to any greater extent than
conventional military forces is that nukes are historically new and seem to
be something we could never (as societies) recover from. Essentially, we are
used to conventional military forces, so we find them an acceptable form of
defense. So as long as either exists, both will. The genie didn't come out
of the bottle when fat man and thin man were dropped. It came out of the
bottle prior to the armies of Sargon. They are inextricably a dark part of
what humanity is all about.

They are part of the dark portions of the yin-yang symbol. Without the dark
parts, the yin-yang symbol does not exist, just as without the dark sides,
humanity does not exist. Nukes and war are part of the dark parts.

No, John.  My question is whether he knew who would survive the war!  A lot
of Japanese didn't, and aren't they part of we?  Now and then.
www.star.net/silence