do u guys think the 2 bombs dropped on japan during WW2 were really needed?
i say no because they just killed innoc3nt people in those 2 citys and it left a perment mental damage on my grandma (im japanese)
so what do u guys think

Why is it acceptable for the Japanese to murder several hundred thousand people and not for the United States?

Death is an invitable outcome of every war. The destructive power of a nuclear weapon far exceeds any losses that can be sustained in a conventional battle. The long-term effects of nuclear weaponry contaminate the land and resources and create genetic mutations in offspring of people and animals exposed to the fallout for generations.

If your eye-for-an-eye justification is the precedent for the use of nuclear weaponry in the future, we will render this planet uninhabitable over time. I was trained as an NBC NCO at Ft. Dix, NJ, while in the Army. My knowledge of the use of nuclear weaponry makes me aware that a knee-jerk reaction like that will lead us into a conflict from which we will not recover in our lifetime. I'm not creating an armageddon-like scenario of annhilation. The effects of the Chernobyl disaster are a more honest reflection of the effect of radiation after the blast. If it is acceptable to lay waste to the earth in such a fashion, where will the line of "humane" battlefield tactics be drawn?

If the US ever sustains any losses from the deployment of nuclear weapons, we will be the unfortunate victims of devestation unlike anything this country can imagine. Our justification for the previous use of the atomic bomb will render any "complaints" rather unjustifiable since we introduced it to the modern battlefield.

At the end of any war, we remain inhabitants of the same planet. The use nuclear weapons in order to "win" a war achieves a victory a cost that is too great. Total and complete destruction of the planet should not be an acceptable outcome of war.

Click this link and read some of the facts related to the use of the atomic bomb. Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page.

http://www.brook.edu/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCOST/50.HTM

Here are several that review the long-term effects of the atomic bomb w/ pictures.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l...ine/bombing.htm

http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/titles/radtoc.htm

^

the atomic bomb's equivalant TNT tonnage was dropped in the dolittle raid. The amount of death in the hiroshima bombing is equivalent to carpet bombing the city- it's not exessive.

^ You have to be incredibly ignorant to not see this wreckage. Would you see the excessiveness if this was dropped upon your home?

then, japanese rather die than surrender, they lose a fight to americans on an island, and all of them, around 100+ jumped off the cliff together, but never did they surrender.



that is just hideous. when my sister was doing a project/essay on the rape on nanjing(nanking), two japanese soilders had a contest on killing the most ppl in one day, the winner killed 147 people. my grandma was hiding away from them (she was consider rich then), and they were the only family with food: potatoes. everyone in the village had potatoes, thats all they haf.

my grandma even said she saw them using a curvy knife with a handle and choped this pregnant woman, and the baby fell out of her stomach. they even punch womans vagina and use spoons to cup their eyeballs out. i still get nightmares over this. how evil japanese can be.

the scariest things about japanese soilders are, they dont mind dying. in the invasion of pearl harbor, they just flew into ships and people in the airplane. dying in the war is dying for the country, it is "HONOR".

It was bad, but it's not like it was unprecedented. I think that's what he meant.



That is an image after the firebombing of Tokyo. I think it's safe to say the damage is equally as horriffic.

IIRC, firebombs killed more people than the atomic bombs did.

Your comments reflect absloutely no understanding of the nature of radioactive contamination and its ability to kill. Death from radioactive poisoning can take months and years. It creates suffrage that can last for generations.

Additionally, it is the nature of every nation who sends armies into battle to use tactics that torture, maime, brutalize and ultimately kill the "enemy." If you are trying to point out the inhumanity of war, your position would be better established by opposing war/conflicts of the nature that create such carnage. Your view of "justification" invariably leads to the continued validation of war and its devastating consequences.

Oh, I get it. So the Japanese people were alright because they killed people quickly and brutally.

Right on. [/sarcasm]

That's not the point at all. My response to your post was based on your eye-for-an-eye justification of the use of the atomic bomb. Killing is the nature of war. If you can't accept it, adopt a more peaceful way of resolving conflict.

killing is the nature of war.


japan and the US were at war at the time of both bombings.

Touche...after I posted that I realized that I left myself open. Umm...I knew what I meant to say. Oops!

That does not excuse the effect of the attack. Why should as much as 100,000 civilians be innocently killed when the target of war should be at armed forces? The whole concept of war revolves around power and control. Leaving the lasting effect of illnesses and radiation poisoning is hardly a courageous victory to be proud of.

wait...

so you're saying the mountain villages in costal china were military targets?
that's interesting...

the way to win a war is to deprive your enemy of one or more of three things:

1. soldiers
2. supplies
3. morale

killing soldiers is a wonderful way to kill off all males in your enemy's country.

supplies are often manufactured in cities, and bombing supply manufacture plants is a sure way of killing women and children.

to discourage your enemy, tactics like raping evey female and hacking off thier breasts can be used when encoutering enemy settlements. In addition, the open tourture of prisoners can be effective.

If you read my post properly, I was NOT implying what goes on during the war or in other countries but the effects it took as a result of using "weapons of mass destruction". Please read before you make assumptions and talk about something else completely irrelevant to the bombings in JAPAN.

^

hiroshima and nagasaki were both legitimate military targets.

please note that the term "weapon of mass destruction" refers to any conventional, nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon designed to kill more than one person at a time.

a gernade is a weapon of mass destruction.

anyways, the bombings were sapping morale, and supplies.

two in one, it's a pretty justified bombing.

and might i remind you the alternate was to gas the entire island

No; a weapon of mass destruction is a weapon designed to kill a large amount of people and/or cause a large amount of physical damage. The US Army defines a weapon of mass destruction as a weapon "that [is] capable of a high order of destruction and/or of being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people. Weapons of mass destruction can be high explosives or nuclear, biological, chemical, and radiological weapons" [1]. The FBI says that "a weapon crosses the WMD threshold when the consequences of its release overwhelm local responders". International convention limits the application of the term to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons [2], although that is not agreed to by any treaty, only common protocol.

Some groups consider a grenade with a propellant to be a WMD, but that is an RPG, not a traditional grenade, and at any rate, such use of the term is not common. Others have even gone so far as to apply the term to small arms, but both these uses are purely rhetoric, and not representations of the term in common usage.

^ in WWI they were WMDs, as were machine guns.

i guess these weapons start to loose thier WMD status after a while tho.

but any conventional bomb over 100 pounds is a WMD, i say.

As I said many times, I'm not historian but... Japan bombed us first. We had no choice. Pearl Harbor was a big deal, although 2 wrongs don't make a right. Maybe it was karma?

umm polls dont really go too great in debate but ok yeah i thought it was necessary cuz they needed to test it and they were at war so they put 2 and 2 together and boom and it left us with alot of awesome video footage

Actually, we were pretty much carpet bombing the heck out of Japan after Pearl Harbor. I personally think the US A-Bombed Japan because the citizens of the US would be angry if their tax dollars weren't going into a fundable source.

^

that's interesing...

and which bomber had the range, and which US air base was in range, for this constant carpet bombing of japan?

Im not sure which base it was, but the development of the B-29 gave the United States a bomber with sufficient range to reach the Japanese main islands.

We weren't carpet bombing the crap out of Japan right after Pearl Harbor. I think you're talking about the Doolittle raid. It was a great boost for morale, but militarily speaking, it was a complete failure. These were B-25s that were launched from an aircraft carrier, something they weren't meant to do.

The only time we could deploy land based bombers like the B-29 were when we had already taken islands closer to Japan.

Well yea, I agree, but what I was mainly focusing on was that we were bombing japan before the A-bomb.

the atomic bomb was held up by two things:
1- development of the bomb.

2- airstrip within range.

there was not constant bombing throughout the war.

anyways; i watched something on TV (discovery channel or something), that said the japanese military commanders were not impressed by the atomic bomb, and said it was liked any other bombing where lives were lost and they were going to continue to fight.