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I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my

I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties. If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.

mpyne 13y ago
> I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver. They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP. To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.