Canoerebel
Posts: 21100
Joined: 12/14/2002
From: Northwestern Georgia, USA
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The criticism of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is well-intentioned, heartfelt, and naive.
It took years to develop the bombs. It took months to plan and conceive the missions to deliver the bombs to Tinian and the missions to drop the bombs. Throughout that time, Japan was putting up fanatical resistance and showed little if any inclination to surrender unconditionally. The United States was understandably anxious to end the war as efficiently and quickly as possible. It is difficult to make last-minute changes to complex plans months or years in the making based upon conjecture or possibilities. There might have been other ways to end the war at less cost to Japan - and possibly to the United States - but those were uncertain and debatable while a clear path to victory seemed obvious.
In hindsight, the use of a weapon of mass destruction fills us with horror. From a position of foresight, this was not the case. These bombs did not differ in kind from what the Allies were already doing - wholesale attacks against both the Japanese military and the civilian population's will to endure and to support the military. Fire bombings were already killing tens of thousands of civilians in individual raids and all but wiping out cities. The bombs would do the same, the only difference being the raids vs. Nagasaki and Hiroshima wre more efficient and less hazardous to the Allies.
The two bombs inflicted less casualties on the Japanese than did a number of conventional bombing raids. So if you wish to oppose death in war, oppose it across the board, but not on the basis that these weapons were "worse" than others. The only difference was that these two missions exposed fewer American troops to danger (only a handful of aircraft involved as opposed to hundreds on conventional raids). These missions were simply more efficient, callous as that may seem.
We all depore war and death today. Most of us also recognize that, unfortuantely, war is inevitable or the best option under certain circumstances. In war, civilians will be killed. The Allies killed thousands of neutral or friendly French and Dutch and Belgians in conventional bombing raids. They didn't want to, of course. But there was no reasonable alternative that they could see. We can try to minimize civilian casualties, but sometimes even that can be counterproductive by extending an nation's or people's will to fight. William Sherman (and Abraham Lincoln) knew that in 1864.
As others have noted in this thread, the awful potential of atomic power became apparent in August 1945. Those two days transformed the world from "willingness to use atomic power in warfare" foresight to "awareness that we must never go down that path again" hindsight. We agree that war is awful and to be waged only when there is no other option. Since August 1945, the planet has never again endured a world war. Atomic weapons are one reason. Let's hope and struggle to see that it never happens again.
Between 100,000 and 200,000 unfortunate souls perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Far more than that perished in Tokyo and other cities during a few raids that summer, not to mention the millions of others that perished in the Pacific War and globally. Ending the war as efficiently and quickly as possible was a reasonable decision under the known conditions of that time. Every civilian and military death, whether at Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, Dresden, London, Manila, Tokyo or Hiroshima, is a lamentable. But to those who died it didn't really matter whehter it was by bayonet, grenade, fire bomb or atomic bomb. The latter was not any more or less "evil" than any other method.
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RE: We're the atomic bombs necessary - 
Even less so when I consider the enormous losses that USSR suffered during the war.
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