Hiroshima

[lynx]

Cloudseeder, those figures for Japan include those killed by conventional bombing as well as the 2 atom bombs.

In fact more people died in the Tokyo firestorm than died as a result of the both atom bombs combined, and the firestorm was triggered by a fairly small raid when compared to those on Germany.

If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed in a similar way the death toll would probably been even higher. But the Tokyo firestorm did not convince the Japanese leadership to end the war, so there is no reason to suppose that similar events in these cities would have convinced them either.

Some will ask why it was necessary to drop a second bomb. After the Hiroshima bomb, if the Japanese had been convinced that they could not win the war they would have surrendered. They didn't. The second bomb left them in no doubt.

Edit: see, I told you they would.

[Biggles]

As Stalin said, "a death is a tragedy, a million deaths is merely a statistic".






He was big on statistics too.

[CloudSeeder]

Cloudseeder, those figures for Japan include those killed by conventional bombing as well as the 2 atom bombs.

In fact more people died in the Tokyo firestorm than died as a result of the both atom bombs combined, and the firestorm was triggered by a fairly small raid when compared to those on Germany.

If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed in a similar way the death toll would probably been even higher. But the Tokyo firestorm did not convince the Japanese leadership to end the war, so there is no reason to suppose that similar events in these cities would have convinced them either.

Some will ask why it was necessary to drop a second bomb. After the Hiroshima bomb, if the Japanese had been convinced that they could not win the war they would have surrendered. They didn't. The second bomb left them in no doubt.

Edit: see, I told you they would.

This is my point. There were many less civilian casualties with the 2 atomic bombs than there would have been in using conventional warfare in invading Japan. While I am in no way advocating nuking anything that pisses the U.S. off, I feel it was the right thing to do under the circumstances at that time. In fact I feel that the U.S. bombing Japan is the only thing that actually kept Russia and the U.S. from blowing each other all to hell during the cold war. If both sides had not seen first hand the devistation caused by the nuclear bomb, one side would have pushed the button, and the other side would have retaliated, thus the end of civilization as we know it. I feel that there enough rogue nations out there that the threat of nuclear war is still very much a possibility, I just hope it can be stopped before somebody starts it.

[lynx]

Only the first line was aimed at you, I realised we were arguing the same point.

We should also remember that these were atomic bombs. These are relatively small compared to what is possible with the addition of a deuterium/tritium filled core - which is what current doomsday devices have in them, raising the "yield" by a factor of about 100.

Strange that they call it a yield, that's about the last thing it does in any definition of the word.

[Keikan]

You need to realise that at the time Americans hated 'the Japs' with a passion..

so did the chinese, well some chinese still do (like my family)

[bujub22]

[mogadishu]

more people died in the fire bombings of tokyo than in the atomic bombs... The atomic bomb saved a crapload of people, on both sides. Even if it didnt save japanese lives it was still worth it. In a war you value your own lives more than the enemies. In hindsight its great to think about japanese lives, but at the time, i doubt most americans would have done the same, and after all, those are the lives we are talking about.

[CloudSeeder]

I have read and heard from various sources that the U.S. powers that be were estimating up to 1 million American troops being killed in an invasion of Japan not to mention those wounded.