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The human suffering in both cases is the same but one ended the war while the other did not.
by account42 2mo ago
The 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.