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The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian pop
by stavros 2mo ago
The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population. "Terrorists have hidden a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan" is one of the unthinkable nightmare scenarios routinely portrayed in US films, and yet that's exactly what the US did to Hiroshima.
- defrost 2mo agoI'm looking back several hours here and not seeing where this is laid out. I'm also curious as to why what the US did to Hiroshima is an unthinkable nightmare scenarios whereas what the US did to Tokyo is not (and nor is what the US did to 71 other cities in Japan also not that).
- stavros 2mo agoDo you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs over months?
- account42 2mo agoThe human suffering in both cases is the same but one ended the war while the other did not.
- stavros 2mo agoIf your goal is to end a war, there are much easier ways. If your goal is to win the war, well...
- defrost 2mo agoThe specific goal at the time was to test two prototype weapons of differing design.
- wredcoll 2mo agoWow yes the USA and friends could have just surrendered. Brilliant insight. Very clever. I'm sure everyone being tortured to death by the various Japanese military units would super appreciate that.
- forestrywat 2mo agoI think you need to educate yourself a bit here. Japan's surrender was inevitable, largely due to Russia pressing them. The war was ending whether those bombs dropped or not.
- defrost 2mo agoThe other awkward detail was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked from a conventional HE & incendiary bombing targeting list; had they not been destroyed with the first atomic weapons then they would have been destroyed to the same degree by a wave of heavy bombers overnight, just as Tokyo and 71 other cities were.
- jambalaya8 2mo agosure but they were picked because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. but who knows maybe that was Germany bombing us or them and we just were ignorant.
- wredcoll 2mo agoThis is the point I keep trying to make, like, I don't want to downplay, you know, literally being nuked, but I also don't want to downplay the results of 1000+ heavy bombers dropping thousands and thousands of tons of "regular bombs" on a city during a single night. Dead is dead.
- wredcoll 2mo agoThat's a famous myth. Among other things, russia didn't have a navy, or a strategic bombing force, so they essentially posed no threat to the actual island of japan. You are correct in the sense that Japan was going to surrender at some point, whether that was due to conventional bombings, starvation from naval blockades or an actual invasion by the USA, there's no scenario where they don't sign an unconditional surrender. Most of those scenarios would have killed more people than the two nuclear weapons being dropped.
- jambalaya8 2mo agowell, glad someone finally figured out how to measure human suffering.
- wredcoll 2mo agoIf you can't measure human suffering then what's the argument for claiming the nukes are worse than anything else? You can't have it both ways.
- defrost 2mo ago> with thousands of bombs over months? Say what now? Tokyo was bombed by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) .. The strikes conducted by the USAAF on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, constitute the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history.[1] Sixteen square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo > Do you see a difference in razing a city with one bomb in an instant or with thousands of bombs Tokyo vs. Hiroshima - https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ Do you? (Aside from thousands of conventional bombs being significantly cheaper and lower tech than a nuclear bomb).
- jambalaya8 2mo agoto be fair a link from september 2014 (almost twelve years ago) about things that occurred in 1945 (almost (relatively) a century ago), in the brains of people that were not even alive yet, and even if they were, unable to process the events through anything like a remotely similar scope or in a contextually contemporaneous way, or even relatively approaching the neurological pathways that someone from that time would have used, is...
- wredcoll 2mo agoAre you a markov chain?
- wredcoll 2mo agoOne bomber is considerably harder to defend against, otherwise, I don't think the people who died really cared.
- wredcoll 2mo ago> The argument is that nuclear bombs made destroying entire cities dirt cheap, and it's one of the big atrocities of history that they were used on a civilian population The cost of causing death isn't the atrocity. The atrocity is the death happening. If "terrorists" somehow managed to create 1000+ b52s and drop 10,000 tons of "regular bombs" on manhattan, it would be just as atrocious as a nuclear weapon going off. Obviously the single nuke is a slightly more realistic threat, but that's not the point. If you want to argue that anybody dying ever is an atrocity, that is one thing. If you want to argue any civilian dying during a war is an atrocity, that is a different thing and, among other things, would require you to define civilian in a useful way.