Every Purple Heart that has been given out since WW2 all come from a surplus we made in preparation for a land invasion of Japan. Think about that. Had the bombs not worked, our own estimates put the casualties at hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Just US soldiers. Not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian lives. I don’t think the Soviets would have had a magical method to invade without similar casualties.
Were the bombs the right move? I don’t know. It was almost 80 years ago in a complicated time that none of us discussing it now can fully understand. I think it’s telling that Japan surrendered shortly after. I also think it’s telling that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since then. Based solely on our estimates of what a land invasion, either by the US or the Soviets, would cost in terms of lives lost, I do think it’s a fair argument to say the bombs wound up costing less.
sheepy@lemm.ee 7 months ago
While I’m not defending the use of the bombs as bargaining chips, Japan would have suffered the same fate as Germany under Soviet rule. North Japan and South Japan, alongside a Tokyo Wall, would have not been just a “threat to capitalism”.
june@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
So it’s better to melt the faces off of hundreds of thousands of innocent people than to risk a two state solution?
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 7 months ago
They weren’t innocent, they were willing and eager subjects of a fascist state that had killed over 20 million Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos amongst others, and there was never a chance of it being two state solution.
If there’s a reason Truman dropped the bomb as an anti-communist measure it was to just to irredeemably prove we had them and it wasn’t propaganda.
In the real world, however, Imperial Japan was an irrational state that was trying to force a conditional surrender in a war the leaders never thought they could win in the first place.
The USA waited three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a surrender. It didn’t happen. That alone proves there wasn’t one coming from other circumstances.
Sunforged@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
Are you a willing and eager subject to the current genocide being funded with your taxpayer dollars?
livus@kbin.social 7 months ago
Just no. Tens of thousands of those killed were children and babies.
Massacring civillians using the excuse that they "all" are collectively responsible for their leadership is a war crime. You're in very bad company. Osama Bin Laden explicitly used that same excuse for 9/11. Israel is using it now for Gaza.
In the documentary Fog of War McNamara admits that him and Curtis May were essentially behaving as war criminals.
There's absolutely no reason to try to carve out this weird moral exception for the US in its slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civillians at Hiroshima and Nagisaki.
There is no shame in learning from the mistakes of the past.
june@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
“They” were civilians. You may have had a point if they nuked strictly military targets, but they didn’t, they nuked two major civilian centers and they placed the epicenter of the blast in such a position so as to cause maximum carnage.
Any argument that it was anti Soviet (and that that makes it acceptable somehow) or that it was necessary is just atrocity apologia.