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"I say war by its very nature is immoral. If you are going to prolong a war by using a lesser weapon, that is an immorality. But I do not see any special immora

• MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
  Very much so. I found there wasn't a single sentence of that old man that I disagree with.
  • cyphax 11y ago
    I also found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said, but at the same time, I can't imagine coming to the conclusion that the only way out is to drop not one but two atomic bombs on cities. It's easy to say "but if we hadn't done that we would've ended up killing many more on the ground" but that's speculation, even if it's well-founded. There's no alternative timeline that we can point at and say: look, this is what happened if we hadn't dropped the bombs so we had no choice. There was always a choice and I don't think I could ever make the choice they made.
    • MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
      Hmm, I guess thats true. The second bomb probably wasn't necessary. One must not forget though that the conventional firebombing of the vulnerable wood and paper housings had already claimed much more lives up to that point, so it wasn't exactly a difference in the scale of human lives lost. Maybe the emperor was scared they'd drop one on him? I know the US military discussed that option.
    • sethammons 11y ago
      If I recall, America first said, "surrender, or we will unleash an unimaginable weapon upon you." Japan says, "go pound sand." America drops the bomb and says, "if you don't surrender, we will do it again." Japan says, "there is no way you have more than one of those. Pound sand." America drops the next one. Japan surrenders.
      • hga 11y ago
        There's also the "Would you prefer to surrender to us, or the Soviets who are currently grinding your Army into sand in Manchuria?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria)? It would have taken some time for them to have arranged to invade more than Sakhalin Island on down to the Kurils, but it's very possible they might have grabbed some of the home islands, in which case Japan would have a lot more to be upset about than the four of the Kurils off Hokkaido it still wants back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
• skrebbel 11y ago
  Seriously? He basically says that it's better that many innocent civilians die than that even more soldiers (but fewer civilians) die, over a longer span of time. It's a pretty sane opinion to hold: basically, it boils down to "in war times, value(civilian) == value(soldier)". But I wouldn't call it "unassailable", and I'm sure many will disagree with it.
  • 67726e 11y ago
    Part of the job description? How about conscription, how does that play into the equation? The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. The question you need to be concerned over is, "What would we do in this day and age faced with a similar situation?"
    • skrebbel 11y ago
      Yeah, you're right, I edited that "part of the job description" stuff out again. Sorry for making you respond to something that was only in my comment for 3 minutes. All that said, I'm not judging any actions, I'm not sure where you got that from. The GP said that the remarks made by the pilot were "unassailable". I just pointed out that that's nonsense because while it's a sane argument, there's also a sane argument against it. It's been many years and there's been no US bashing in this thread up until now, but absolute statements on the morality of what happened, in either direction, just don't seem to make sense anymore.
    • scottjad 11y ago
      > The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. Plenty of people in the day opposed it as well. Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc: http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
  • veidr 11y ago
• prof_hobart 11y ago
  I'm not sure it is unassailable. More quickly doesn't always equal less casualties, for instance. And even where more quickly does equal less casualties for your side, it could mean vastly more for the other side, or less military deaths but more civilian one. Or how about the potential for ongoing damage to both environment and survivors health. This isn't to say that a nuclear attack, or any other weapon that could bring a war to a swift close, is automatically worse - just that's not automatically and unassailably better either.
  • veidr 11y ago
    I think his argument is based on the premise that the atomic bomb meant the war could be ended without protracted ground invasion and thousands of additional conventional bombing runs. You can still dispute that premise -- and while I don't, many people do. But if you accept that premise, then yeah, it's a war. End (win) it as soon as you possibly can. I also think that in a war, unless you think you are on the wrong side or perpetrating immoral aggression towards an underserving enemy, you should optimize for more deaths on the opposing side than on yours. Also, I live in Tokyo (though I am American) -- and the sustained, conventional firebombing of Tokyo produced more devastation and casualties (though perhaps not horror) than Hiroshima or Nagasaki[1]. Of course dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations is a terrible thing to do, but to me the key point of Beser's lecture is that he reminds you that it was done in the context of a completely fucking horrific world war. Which really does radically change the equation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
  • merpnderp 11y ago
    Given an average of 100,000 [EDIT 100,000 per month since 1937] civilian deaths at the hands of the imperial army just in China alone (there were civilians being slaughtered in Indo-china and the Korean peninsula also), if the bombs ended the war just two months earlier than it would have ended (incredibly unlikely to the point of absurdity), it was a net gain in civilians saved. And it can be well argued that the Japanese civilian deaths should be blamed on the imperial army for not capitulating when it was obvious the war was lost.
• RankingMember 11y ago
  Unassailable? That short-sited philosophy essentially legitimizes the use of any weapon if the goal in using it is to finish a war faster. The goal of each side in a war is to dominate and win as fast as possible, but there are degrees of immorality, and to stoop to deplorable means (gas, nukes, biological) to bring about a quicker end is to lose the high ground and very likely inspire surrounding nations to unite against you. Thankfully, our leaders have realized this, otherwise we'd have kept on using nukes when in conflicts since dropping them on Japan.
  • mc32 11y ago
    Sometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc. One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused.
    • hga 11y ago
      Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity. Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question.
      • RankingMember 11y ago
        "Sometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc. One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused." "Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity. Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question." What I'm getting from these two comments is that it's good we dropped two bombs on civilians because it taught us that we shouldn't do that and that, also, there was some scary science fiction about worse ways for nuclear weapons to be introduced to humanity so our way wasn't that bad. Is that what you're intending, because I can't really read it any other way. "Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point" It's hard to argue hypotheticals, but really, you wouldn't change anything about history up to that point? Perhaps not strangling Germany quite as hard as we did after WWI? You wouldn't change that even if it'd completely erase the climate where the Nazis could rise to power?
• euroclydon 11y ago
  It makes sense in the context of WWII, where conventional bombing campaigns killed people at a slower rate that atomic. Also, it just took a localized atomic campaign to cause that war to cease everywhere, whereas increased conventional bombing in all theaters would have not ended the war so quickly. There might be a modern analogy to be drawn: "It's more moral to torturously murder a few enemies on internet video, such that the rest of your enemies are sufficiently scared to engage, than it is to try to engage them all in battle."
  • veidr 11y ago
    Wow!! Did you do like, debate club in school? Because even though I stand by my statements made in this thread so far, I am pretty sure you win. (Although I do think there is still a point in there somewhere to be made about the underlying reasons the conflict is occurring in the first place. If you started it to implement your vision of a religious caliphate, revive the slave trade, etc... how does that change the morality of it?)
• rz2k 11y ago
  The major premise of the statement, that war was a given, is effectively 'unassailable' in this case, but it isn't difficult to imagine such a calculus being abused. I think it was especially a danger when one compares the apparent flight of talent from the public sector when you compare the people working for the federal government in the 30s and early 40s to the personality types and intellectual capacity of people behind the red scare in the 50s. Furthermore there are even worse imaginable scenarios than occasional use of nuclear weapons, namely, complete compliance from everyone else without nuclear weapons. In my opinion, many of the people in government in the 50s and 60s really were motivated by an anger toward people who they thought were their inferiors displaying insufficient deference, and I think tools to demand greater compliance can have a self-reinforcing effect—"these animals don't respond to x level of force, so we use y level, which is much softer than z level" et cetera. And yet with hindsight we see that after ending the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons were a significant factor in keeping the Cold War "cold" long enough for the relative strengths of the two systems to matter as much as how the balance of military power happened to lay at the end of WWII. So my point isn't that I think the end didn't justify the means in this case, but that it is because of the specifics rather than the value of the rule. As a general rule, it is a horrible one. Just as sometimes fighting a war is better than not, the opposite can also be true, and whether or not its important to insist on supremacy, even when there is little cost, is a discussion that should come long before the analysis of different weapons' impact. The danger is the implied generality of the rule. It is tempting to shift the conversation to quantifiable metrics like lives lost, because it is easier than the very difficult, soft discussions about whether pursuing various policies do anything to create the world we want to live in.