in ww2, the japanese attacked pearl harbor, a military installation, why the usa, in good moral judgement.....

Question

nuked hiroshima and nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed? lol, i know i will receive a defense of this decision by diehard republicans. republicans can argue the fact that 2 plus 2 is equal to 4. they will find justification that it is equal to 5. by the way, pearl harbor was a military installation, just to remind u all. lets try to be fair and keep an open mind about this question

Answer 1

You really need to read some history before spouting off. both Nagasaki and Hiroshima (you should have capitalized their names after all) were centers of shipping and did have military importance. Unfortunately,the bomb did not hit, those installations. In addition, the Japanese, unlike the US Americans, did a lot of their work in their homes and not in a centralized location, so that makes it harder to pick a single target. The military did have other cities picked out but weather changed their targets. The best estimate I have seen for the number of people killed betweent he two cities of the day of the bombing is app. 150,000. Although, there may never be an exact count. However, many people had been evacuated from the coastal towns because of a fear of invasion. This information was from a journal written by a priest who was in the area at the time of the bombing.

However, I do not hear you ranting and raving about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese that the Japanese killed in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid. There the Chinese aided the downed American pilots and the Japanese killed over 200,000 civilians because of that aid. I also do not hear you ranting and raving about the Japanese POW camps where they conducted medical experiments on Americans soldiers and other captives such as autopsies while the person was still alive, subjecting the person to extreme heat and cold to find out what the effects of those temperatures had on the human body, biological tests, or any of the other atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War. No, all we hear is the Liberal talk of how terrible it was that the US dropped the bomb. Does anyone mention the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo? Where more people died than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined on the day of the bombing? In addition, what about the paper bombs the Japanese sent to the mainland of the US, no one ever mentions those either.

BTW: 2+2=4 regardless of whether you are Republican or Democrat... it only changes when you become a bleeding heart liberal bed-wetter.

Answer 2

The nuking of Hiroshima had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor and had everything to do with the up coming invasion of the Japanese home islands. It should also be noted that Hiroshima and Nagasaki also had large military installations something I think Doesn't get enough attention.Hiroshima was home to a Japanese army base and headquarters,Nagasaki was home to part of the Japanese fleet. If we had invaded the casualties would have been so massive as to make the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem quite insignificant in comparison. This reasoning was backed up by previous engagements with the Japanese at Okinawa and Iwo Jima. So be fair If you were the president what would you have done? You have some choices to play with 1. You could invade Japan a very bloody and costly mess. 2. You could try to starve out the Japanese but the Russians had recently declared war on Japan and you don't want to share Japan with the communist like in Europe. 3.You could use the A-bomb but no matter where in japan you use it you will rack up high civilian casualties. So Truman wanna be which is it? PS I am a Vermont liberal bluest of the blue states.

Answer 3

there are several answers.

1. the war has lasted for a longer period of time and the world was wary of the death toll. japan wasn't willing to surrender so the united states had to find the best strategy to make them surrender in order to end the war.

2. scholars say that perhaps the reason why japan (and the axis powers) fought harder and longer was that the Axis powers wouldn't agree on a truce. they would only accept unconditional surrender from japan, germany and italy. because of this, they were desperate to fight no matter what the cost.

3. albert einstein (a refugee from germany) wrote a letter to pres. roosevelt telling him that the germans were developing a nuclear weapon and he said that it was possible and would be very deadly. this resulted in the United States' crash program to develop a nuclear weapon faster than the germans could. if the americans won't "show the world" what they got, axis powers won't back off.

in a way, the use of the nuclear weapon was, to some extent, good, in a very limited sense of the word. make no mistake here, i abhor the atrocities of the war but if using the weapon was the only means of stopping the ravages of war in the pacific, maybe it's better than letting the japs continue the war, which, theoritically would claim more lives.

the united states government was confronted with the same question. according to history, the top US personnel agreed at the conclusion that dropping the bomb would claim LESSER deaths, casualties, expenses and emotional toll on the international community than continuing the war. it was the lesser evil, so to speak.

i think i agree. prolonging the war was too much for the world to bear.

4. although germany was already defeated at the time the bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki were dropped, history tells us that the germans were actually developing the bomb well ahead than the US. fortunately, there were some slight errors in the mathematical computation of atomic numbers (or something like that, im not sure) so the german bomb wasn't completed. if US didn't make the bomb, germany would have made it first and only heaven knows what could have happened to the world.

it would appear that the bomb was meant to shock the world, to let everyone know that if they didn't stop, more horrible things can happen. fortunately, it worked for japan, the remaining axis power at that time. it also highlighted the military power of the US, something that japan must have underestimated in the first place.

to your question, i think there are no clear answers. i know that the US bombed a civilian area while japan attacked a military installation. that sounded unfair.

but then think again. japan attacked pearl harbor when peace negotiations were going on in washington dc. they deceived the US by pretending to be friendly while their fleet were advancing to pearl harbor.

who's unfair now?

im not saying who's more right or less wrong. im just glad it ended and we exist today.

Answer 4

The aim of the Pearl Harbor attack was a strategic military one. It's goal was to keep the Pacific Fleet from responding to the Japanese invasion on the Philippines. The terrorism aspect of the attack was a secondary thought, if any. If anything it might play a role in the US suing for peace as to avoid further confrontation with Japan. I think Japan would have been overjoyed if that happened. All they really wanted was to have direct access to natural resources so the US could not twist their arm in Japan's occupation of China. Up to that time, Japan had few natural resources and relied heavily on the US for oil and scrap iron. The US created an embargo, demanding Japan withdraw from China before it would be lifted. A terrorist attack is where the goal is to instill a desirable response from the enemy solely through the terror of the attack itself. You can have terrorism without war. I don't know how you can have war without terror.

Answer 5

You have to appreciate the Japanese Army wasn't interested in such things as the Geneva convention. They bombed, raped, murdered, slaughtered, gassed, did medical experiments, etc etc etc to anyone they didn't like.
For example, many Allied POW's died when the Japanese Army put them into ships and sailed them into areas patrolled by allied submarines.
I could go on quite a bit, but there isn't much point, suffice to say they slaughtered millions in China and the rest of Asia.
Now compare the millions to they killed to the 200,000 killed in two nuke attacks. Do you notice the scale of the numbers? Yes, one is measure in millions, and is one fifth of a million.
The reason for the attacks was simple: The Allies demanded unconditional surrender. They had no other option. They didn't want to be trying to bargain with the Japanese when they were threatening to kill POW's and people in concentration camps. True, they had issued orders for camp commanders to prepare to kill all prisoners.
In the case of Hiroshima, many of the people were killed because the houses were all made of flammable material and had fire type stoves, and the blast had knocked the houses down and the fire stoves had set them alight.

Answer 6

I am Democrat and I can safely say the japanese were not good to civilians. Tell this to hundreds of thousands of chinese who were gassed, tortured, raped etc by the misconduct of the Japanese army. Besides, Japan was not surrendering, the battle of okinawa alone cost the lives of over 100,000 people. We needed the war to end, and the use of nuclear weapons saved more civilian lives and our own valued military personnel. The Japanese had stores of military toxins and weapons and would not have hesitated to use it on their own soil if it meant stopping a home invasion. 10,000 planes and millions of soldiers would have to be destroyed and killed for us to officially beat japan. Would you have preffered a drawn out house to house fighting for the war to end, or perhaps dropping a few hundred tons of napalm on the citizens of japan in order to route out defense cooridons.

Answer 7

I'm guessing you are one of the people who would have liked to see US Marines and Army landing on the beaches of Japan. House to house fighting on the Japanese mainland. A country that would mobilize its entire civilian population to defend itself. The civilian losses would have been in the millions if not 10's of millions. Plus the loss to both militaries. You need to think about the end results more than the actual bomb.

Answer 8

These two cities were not peaceful or innocent. Major weapons manufacturing, military personnell, and non-military collaborators were heavily concentrated in either city. Japan was an empire filled with people ready to die to expand the borders and wealth and power of Japan. Much like every major city in Germany was filled with Nazis and Nazi collaborators, weapons manufacturing, and military recruitment and training centers, every major city in Japan was in full war mode.

Had these been innocent peasants, and had there been no viable targets in either city, I would tend to agree with your assessment. But you do not have the facts, sir.

I also object to your blatant partisanship and overall ignorance of the subject. Calm down, read a few books, and stop attacking things you do not understand.

If it can be proven that I am incorrect, then prove it. Otherwise, don't bother attacking me.

Answer 9

Nanking was not a military installation.

Iwo Jima showed just how costly a landing invasion would have been.

Nukes saved lifes. If it meant the deaths of some Japanese people for it to happen then so be it.

Answer 10

well i guess that the simplest answer, while it will not make everyone happy is as follows. to begin with, understand that both nazi germany and japan were looking to develop nuclear power, if it were not for a combination of good intelligence,military strikes and alot of luck, they would probably had it before us. furthermore, i believe that our military and political leaders believed that if the germans and japanese would get this power, that they would not hesitate to use it on america and or it's allies.
also, after seeing the fanactical defenses that the japanese military used in the pacific, our leaders realized that it would be far too costly in civillian and japanese military casualties as well as the projected staggering losses to american lives. all things being equal, it was better to devastate two major cities, rather than trying to militarily invade the entire nation of japan and deal with their fight to the death mentality and attempt to occupy that nation at the risk of hundreds of thousands of american casualties. lets not be to sympathetic to japan, they attacked us first while negotiating a peace treaty with us, performed untold attrocities on their military pows and civillians of defeated nations, used germ warfare experiments on pows, gave us the forced deathmarch of bataan, and used kamikazee pilots to attack our navy.
i believe that we had the moral high ground in this subject. we also dropped leaflets warning of the attacks on their cities,in the end those bombs forced japan to surrender very quickly after they were dropped.
for the record, i am a democrat.