From paragraph 1:whiterock said:Major reading comprehension error, counselor.Sam Lowry said:Of course there was.whiterock said:How many straw man can you pack into a single post? Thereo was no indication that Japan was prepared to negotiate a surrender.Sam Lowry said:
The Hiroshima/Nagasaki scenario is the kind of false dilemma that often presents itself when you try to apply the trolley hypothetical to real life. A negotiated surrender would have avoided both tragic outcomes. However, it would not have secured our post-war hegemony in the way we desired.
Things get even messier when you consider that elections aren't surprises or one-time events. We all gather to watch this absurd scenario every four years. At some point, reasonable people have to ask who's tying all these people to the tracks and why. Who is this Whiterock, and why is he telling us we have no choice? For that matter, why is his company busy laying tracks and recruiting "volunteers" in countries all over the world? What's his angle? As repulsive as "virtue posturing" may be, there is something worse. Exploiting the misery of others while accusing them of hypocrisy is doubly hypocritical.Quote:
The top American military leaders who fought World War II, much to the surprise of many who are not aware of the record, were quite clear that the atomic bomb was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender, andfor manythat the destruction of large numbers of civilians was immoral. Most were also conservatives, not liberals. Adm. William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.… In being the first to use it, we…adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
The commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, Henry "Hap" Arnold, gave a strong indication of his views in a public statement 11 days after Hiroshima was attacked. Asked on August 17 by a New York Times reporter whether the atomic bomb caused Japan to surrender, Arnold said that "the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air."
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that "the atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan." Adm. William "Bull" Halsey Jr., the commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…. It was a mistake to ever drop it…. [The scientists] had this toy, and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it…"
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that when notified by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the decision to use atomic weapons, he "voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." He later publicly declared, "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." Even the famous hawk Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command, went public the month after the bombing, telling the press that "the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all."
The record is quite clear: From the perspective of an overwhelming number of key contemporary leaders in the US military, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a matter of military necessity. American intelligence had broken the Japanese codes, knew the Japanese government was trying to negotiate surrender through Moscow, and had long advised that the expected early August Russian declaration of war, along with assurances that Japan's emperor would be allowed to stay as a figurehead, would bring surrender long before the first step in a November US invasion could begin.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/tnamp/
Each one of those statements was an assessment by an American military commander that the use of nuclear weapons was unnecessary because Japan was already defeated. Pointedly NOT one of those statements by any of those commanders indicated they were aware that Japanese political or military leaders were prepared to surrender.
"William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir I Was There that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
