Quote:
Originally Posted by binky9
If by "right thing to do", you mean the saving of thousands of soldiers and civilians from injury or death caused by an invasion of Japan, I agree. Or, we could have continued fire bombing, and killed more innocents than the two atomic bombs did while waiting for the Japanese military to admit defeat.
What were we supposed to do? Just stop fighting, and hope the Japanese generals suddenly had an epiphany and gave up?
binky9
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well, thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers died
anyway, I think that other than the Allied soldiers that were getting ready for an armed invasion, we didn't save anybody's life with the atomic bombs (ironically enough at least one British POW perished in the Nagasaki blast).
Truth is that things could have been handled in a different manner, but as said in the video, 3 billion dollars are no joke, such an investment needed an adequate output..
There have been many efforts and even letters from the scientists behind the Manhattan Project on alternative demonstrations that wouldn't cause the death of so many people (like inviting an international committee to assist the bombing of a desert island with one of the bombs), besides the
two different kinds of atomic bombs were dropped so closely together that Japan had little or no time to understand what happened, let alone surrender. There is evidence that Nagasaki and Hiroshima had been selected for the orography around them, which would have channelled and amplified the blast better, so it was all planned to be the dramatic end scene of a bloody conflict, where it was time to raise the game to another level. Truth is that they needed to show the world (and above all the Russians) who had the stick of command, and the Cold War wouldn't have been the same without this horrible example.
But even if the ghost of Cold War was about to start, things could have been handled differently.
11-28-2011, 02:49 PM
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