Were they really ready to surrender? And sitting and parsing one bomb o.k. the second not ok., as a layman permit me to disagree with you and even Gen. Eisenhower. The whole debate strikes me as 20/20 hindsight. Tolkiens thoughts are much more complex, but I don't think you could run a country on them.
The assumption that the Japanese were ready to surrender is just that l, a theory. It was far more complicated and many parties were ok with ceasing hostilities but wanted no occupation and even retention of other territory.
JRR was right. This got them to cave. We talk about American and Japanese lives saved but never talk about China , Indonesia and Malaysia that were still being brutally oppressed until August 9.
I am basically certain that other arms, perhaps even more insidious still than atom bombs, are already in existence: biological, chemical; plus, possibly, geophysical weapons, which I believe to be more likely reality than fiction.
It would also possibly benefit some of the commenters and readers here to read Unz's accounts on the Japan side of World War II, and learn how that part of the conflict started, and whose will by it did.
What I heard in "The World At War" series was that the Americans didn't drop it so much for the Japanese as the Soviets. The Japanese were beaten and just to blockade the island would have eventually finished the war. But the Soviets were fighting them in Manchuria and the Japanese had hopes of signing a better deal with them.
In 1960, shortly before his death, Leo Szilard, physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project, wrote: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.” [5]
U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public. Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe: “what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
> If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.
If the Germans had developed the atomic bombs first, nobody would have been in a position to put them on trial.
Were they really ready to surrender? And sitting and parsing one bomb o.k. the second not ok., as a layman permit me to disagree with you and even Gen. Eisenhower. The whole debate strikes me as 20/20 hindsight. Tolkiens thoughts are much more complex, but I don't think you could run a country on them.
I was on Austin Peterson's show talking about this today. I believe the answer is yes: Japan was absolutely preparing to surrender.
The assumption that the Japanese were ready to surrender is just that l, a theory. It was far more complicated and many parties were ok with ceasing hostilities but wanted no occupation and even retention of other territory.
JRR was right. This got them to cave. We talk about American and Japanese lives saved but never talk about China , Indonesia and Malaysia that were still being brutally oppressed until August 9.
I am basically certain that other arms, perhaps even more insidious still than atom bombs, are already in existence: biological, chemical; plus, possibly, geophysical weapons, which I believe to be more likely reality than fiction.
It would also possibly benefit some of the commenters and readers here to read Unz's accounts on the Japan side of World War II, and learn how that part of the conflict started, and whose will by it did.
Interesting. I have always supported the use of the two (different) atomic bombs on Imperial Japan. I think this is good, from Ann Coulter: https://anncoulter.substack.com/p/thank-god-for-the-atom-bomb
What I heard in "The World At War" series was that the Americans didn't drop it so much for the Japanese as the Soviets. The Japanese were beaten and just to blockade the island would have eventually finished the war. But the Soviets were fighting them in Manchuria and the Japanese had hopes of signing a better deal with them.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/nagasaki-80-years
In 1960, shortly before his death, Leo Szilard, physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project, wrote: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.” [5]
U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public. Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.
Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe: “what is the difference between the U.S. government massacring civilians from the air and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of some Czech or Polish village?
> If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.
If the Germans had developed the atomic bombs first, nobody would have been in a position to put them on trial.