Hiroshima? The right or wrong thing to do -- and why?

Question

Your opinions please.

Answer 1

Wrong thing. Certainly Nagasaki was.
Japan was already beaten. No allies, No navy, no merchant marine, no natural resources to sustain modern war fare.
The Japanese were already beaten. They were already making peace feelers and all the Allies had to do was blockade and cordon off the islands. - Hiroshima would have certainly convinced them by then - and Germany was already surrendered. I think maybe the first might have been necessary...but then even then I have mixed feelings. I think eventually Japan would have surrendered anyway.

Answer 2

I don't think the world is mature enough to answer that.

I'm very glad it wasn't me who had to make the decision to do it. I'm not certain I could live with myself. I very definitely think that it would have happened sooner or later though.

Part of me wants to be a smart@$$ and tell you to ask one of the thousands of innocents that were incinerated or died from radiation or were born with birth defects afterwards if it was right. Surely even after it's happened and we know the results we aren't mature enough for such a capability and surely we've bitten off more than we can chew. The chilling thing is that a lot of folks have already forgotten or don't care.

I could argue, though, that for the same reasons in the long run we are better off knowing the reality how awful it is and that it is a part of history that should never ever be revisited by anyone.

Maybe your question should have been, "What have we learned from bombing the snot out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"

My answer would be that humanity is capable of justifying any sort of insanity just so it can sleep at night, and that we should never ever, ever, ever do it again.

Qualifier: I am nowhere close to being a liberal, just so you know, and quite frankly, have no issues with the concept of war as a reality of our existance. But this is just too much.

Answer 3

Since it did occur, it is a bit rhetorical to debat the rightness or wrongness of the bombing of Hiroshima. It was a use of a weapon of mass destruction, and it cause the deaths of a large number of civilains. In this aspect, it was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. It did bring about a rapid surrender by Japan, but there is no way to truely know that the surrender would not have been accomplished anyway.

Answer 4

Unfortuneately it was probably right on many levels. The war to take over Japan would have been vicious, long, millions of Japanese would have died and Japan would have been utterly decimated. A frightening look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended all of that. Probably well less than one tenth the death and destruction than without it. Walter you are an outright liar, please stop gracing us with your utter nonsense.

Answer 5

Well we pretty much had to . We would have eventually won with out doing it but Japan wanted to fight to the death which would have meant a horrible loss of lives on both sides. Liberals try to use this for there spin of loss of lives in a unnecessary war of today but like always they are incredibly wrong! They think let's just take are troops out of there and it will be over. I'm beginning to think this is shear stupidity because even Liberals can't be that naive!

Answer 6

Absolutely the right thing to do. My grandfather was on a ship headed for the rally point for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Most likely, he and hundreds of thousands of others would have died.
BTW, everyone questions the use of the atomic bomb, but no one questions the firebombing of Tokyo that killed around a hundred thousand. I guess it's the method, not the madness that's wrong.

Answer 7

I guess so. It was total war.

It certainly does not sit well tho.

Still, in total war, both sides target tons of innocent people.

I'm sure doing that saved many many american lives. Unsure whether or not it saved Japanese lives in the long run.

You should remember that Japanese were being fire bombed all the time during the war and more people did from that. (If you ask a Chinese, they did quite alot of fireboming and the like too.)

So in a nutshelll, in the context of war, it was probably justified. War is a bad thing.

Answer 8

Planksheer is the only person who has answered the question accurately. Japan had already notified the US that they were about to surrender before either bomb was dropped. The bombs were dropped purely as experiments upon innocent civilian targets (Nagazaki is/was a Catholic civilian city) while Hiroshima did have a Naval port, was lacking any Japanese military vessels at the time..
I felt that Rostov attitudes were also good. He felt that probably it was acceptable, but it did not sit well with his attitudes and feelings.

Answer 9

Right thing. It saved lives on both sides.

It is remarkable that even after this A-Bomb was dropped and the devastation realized that the Japanese military were still willing to go forward with a glorious suicidal defense of the Japanese homeland. It took another A-Bomb and intervention by saner minds to finally come to the realization that Japan was facing total destruction.

Answer 10

Right.

The enormity of the bomb's power is what persuaded the emperor that surrender would save the lives of countless Japanese that would have died if more bombs of increasing magnitude were dropped.

If we didn't have the atomic bomb, an invasion of the Japanese home island would have resulted in the genocide of the Japanese people due to their training to never surrender.

The "way of the warrior" would have resulted in the death of every Japanese man of fighting age. It would have been a bloodbath.

The best way to win a war is to not go to war.

In case anyone forgot the facts, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We were the defenders, they were the attackers.

Same with Nazi Germany. Popular opinion stateside was to remain isolationist in the face of the "European war".

It was Germany that declared war on us after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Same with the twin towers. Islam declared war on us! We're the defender, and our guys are kicking their butt in the middle eastern theater.

Bush had a lot of balls to send our boys in there, I would have dropped bombs on Mecca and called it a day, but he's cleaning out the hornet's nest.

It's an unpopular war, and it's unknown (to me) what Bush's true intentions are. Handing over their economy to the federal reserve board is a bad indicator, but history will be his judge.

It's a little to early for history to judge Bush 43.
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