J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Was reading about this earlier and I had never really thought about it much before, it was history, but the more I think about it the more horrific if seems, I appreciate the Japanese were not exactly blameless but I just cant get my head round one nation killing quarter of a million civillians, non combatants of another nation.

Ok, it acheived Japanese surrender and civillians do get killed during wartime but it just seems like such an evil act against women, children and none millitary men, one minute going about their business, next vapourised. Doesnt seem a massive amount different that something Hitler would have done and makes 9/11 seem kind of minor in comparison.

I would like to see what people think, I may be way wide of the mark here and need to read more but at the moment it just seems evil.

Timwinner

iTrader: (3)

History is written by the victor... hence why not a lot of people know very much about it. Back then, and I am not sure about how things are now, but back then it seemed EVERYONE was afraid of the US so they could do what they wanted, plus it was a long way into a long war, I cant help thinking maybe people were numb by then.

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

That did occur to me as well, its almost like Oppenheimer and co developed them this new toy and they just had to use it, I suspect if it hadnt been Japan some other nation would have copped for it in the next few decades.

Mifo

iTrader: (10)

It does seem a drastic measure to take but the Japanese were intent on fighting right to the death.
Dropping such huge bombs demonstrated the hugh power america had and left the japanese no choice.
The war in europe had already ended 3 months before so the yanks probably thought this the quickest solution to ending the war with japan.
It would have also been a chance to show off to the russians.

greenonedave

There have been several explanations as to why the bomb was used, The one that I prefere to believe is that the Japanese had always put up a fantastic fight in defending any land that they had occupied and their fight till the death attitude would have meant the only way to stop the fighting would have been to invade Japan, Given the tenacity of the Japanese army and the well trained home front this conquest would have incurred a very large loss of american troops and was deemed unacceptable to the american army,
In another book I read,The underlying current of the operation to delivering the bomb was that it really was just a big experiment of new technology.
Ether way it changed a lot of things

hodgy0_2

i think the fanatical Japanese defence of Iwo Jima hardened the Americans attitude to using the H Bombs

JackClark

I visited Hiroshima and remember being quite surprised at Britain's involvement in the decision to drop the bomb, I can't remember the details and can't find anything online.

adehook

the main question i what to know is will another be used one day? with all the korea stuff going on. i personally do, i think korea might use a one on the other side of the border. but not to the scale of the ones dropped on the japanese

BOB.T

Some of the radioactive **** (Plutonium?) they used to make the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was captured from a Japanese ship...

On a similar note, I got thinking about the death penalty the other day. Now I'm struggling to understand how that makes the State or the justice system any better than the crim

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

That's what got me thinking, Korean ***** waving, sees to have gone quiet for a while though, was looking like WW3 was imminent last Wednesday.

Prasius

iTrader: (1)

I think many people get a bit thrown by how small the bombs dropped on Japan actually were in comparison to modern strategic nuclear weapons. Modern day atomic weapons make those H bombs look like a cap gun going off.

Also I think people are thrown slightly by the perceived scale of dropping those bombs - compared to what Allied bombing did to Germany it was nothing more than a pinprick. RAF Bomber Command managed to kill more German civilians on single nights of conventional and fire bombing on numerous occasions than the USAAF killed on either of the H bomb attacks against Japan.

That kept in mind, along with the difficulty of mounting a sustained bomber campaign against the Japanese mainland, the use of non-conventional weapons made absolute sense; the failure to end the war in the pacific would have likely resulted in not just further massive military losses, but also numbers of civilian casualties which would make the figures from those two bombs look rather insignificant.

As for if it was right or not... Wars must be fought to be won, anything less than that means you will be defeated by an enemy who is more dedicated than you are (ring any bells??). Given the numerous cases of extreme brutality and barbarism conducted by the Japanese both during WW2 and in the period immediately preceding it (primarily what they did to the Chinese), their attitude of cultural and racial superiority equalled that of the National Socialists of Germany, as did the atrocities they committed in order to further their aims.

I believe not having dropped those two bombs would have resulted in many more tens of thousands dying than did.

And I doubt my Grandfather who was, at that point, a POW in Japan having been moved there after working on the notorious Burma railway following the surrender of Singapore, would have thought "poor Japan".

billythekid

It was a PsyOps operation, not really an attack to cause any major damage - because in reality neither attack did that much damage to the actual physical capability of that enemy, I suspect the overall decisions made after Trinity were based on how to bring the white flag rather than how to wipe them off the map and looking at the outcome it worked I would say.

The difference today is the person you shoot your missiles at will have something of their own to shoot back.... this is where the problem comes and TBH I would be shocked if they were ever used again as it would just be too messy for the person pressing the big red button. That said if it ever does you can find me somewhere in 57degN 5degW..

James Neill

iTrader: (1)

JRFRACE

the post about the bombing campaigns is a good one i think, the amount that landed on germany is supposed to have been massive and also incredibly innacurate, and that was a campaign against the populace as well as the military, Hitler went to war and the Allies certainally met him. The nukes, well they haven't been used in anger since have they? whereas every other type of weaponary has, perhaps in part because of what happened and as that picture shows what would likely happen with modern weapons.

I'm sure i read somewhere the russians thought they had a design that was good for 200 megatons


!

astraboy

Admiral Fisher once said "'the essence of war is violence; moderation in war is imbecility!"
personally, I agree with him.
astraboy.

MJW

The main reason the atomic bombs were used when they were was because Germany were already developing their own. Therefore it made sense to show that the allies were capable of using these weapons first. They also had access to some great scientists who were subsequently spirited away to the US after the war.

mrtheedge2u2

Whilst the A-bomb is catastrophic in its nature....... I would be amazed if more and more nations are not developing N-bombs.

dome

I can thoroughly recomend this book, one of the most eye opening I have ever read.

The Bomb: A Life: Gerard DeGroot: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Goes through the history of the nuclear bomb from the splitting of the atom, WW2 and the crazy days of the earl 50's where nuclear tets in the desert were a tourist attraction. Anyone want to buy some sand crystalised by a nuclear blast? You could then!!

Also some of the scientists on the Manhattan project apparently had a bet on that the first nuclear bomb detonated would ignite the entire earts atmosphere. Soldiers near the tests were told to wear sun tan lotion and sunglasses to protesct themsleves. The truth is the knew very little about what exactly would happen, apart from a big explosion!

Brian

Skoobie Dhu

iTrader: (3)

Although the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Nuclear bombings are infamous for their impact and death toll, the most destructive bombing raid ever with the highest loss of life used normal explosives, see wiki link..

Bombing of Tokyo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LG John

Wow, that's quite sobering!!! So what sort of area could the Hiroshima and that Tzar bomb devastate respectively. Going simply on the scaling in that diagram I have visions in my head of that Tzar bomb being able to level everything within the M25 or the entire Central Belt of Scotland...is that realistic? More/less?

New_scooby_04

iTrader: (4)

Wikipedia have this to say

Tsar Bomba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Some footage here.

YouTube - Tsar Bomba - The King of Bombs

LG John

Holly ******** Tuesay!!!!!!!!!!

JRFRACE

there used to be a declassified document on the net that had a picture drawn up by the mod of the uk (i think from the 60's or 70's) with all the targets and the related weapon yields in kilotons or megatons that were expected to be deployed by the russians in a nuclear exchange. I can't find it right now, sure its out there somewhere, safe to say we'd be completely obliterated, i think a bit of NW scotland would be left floating but you'd have at least 5 heads

Still, be able to keep yourself company

edit to add: still can't find it, but the independant ran a story on it when it came out with the detail:

Military top brass thought the Soviets had identified 104 potential targets, including all Britain's main cities, air bases and naval bases. They estimated more than 360 nuclear weapons would be launched by the Soviets with a total yield of 389 megatons - equivalent to 389 million tons of TNT explosive. The bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War, by comparison, had yields of just 20,000 tons of TNT.

really need to see the map for it to sink in, nothing like seeing your house being covered by 7 different blast zones!

p1mark

I have been to Hiroshima and visited the memorial / museum. It is a very sobering experience and i defy anyone to not have a tear in the eye when they leave.

What i did find very upsetting was the yanks (and us) made a conscious decision not to conventionally bomb Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto and one other city that i cant remember in the preceding weeks and months to actually dropping the A bomb. This is because they wanted to see the devastation the bomb would cause to a fully built city. Hiroshima was chosen because of the fact its surrounded by hills and the weather was good on the drop date.

It was much an 'experiment' to see how many people it would kill and how much of an area it would flatten as it was an attempt to end the war.

tanyatriangles

iTrader: (2)

For those who either don't know of their existence, or have never seen either, I can heartily recommend the films "Threads" and "The Day After".

They document imaginary nuclear attacks on Sheffield , and on the American midwest. To say that both are sobering is an understatement. I have seen teenaged girls cry after seeing "The Day After".

The films are interesting in that they even show the effects of the EMP, the weapon which would be airburst just before the main ones arrived, in order to knock out all electronics. It has been postulated that a single EMP over, say, the USA, would effectively render them back to the stone age: nothing would work, and all their money would disappear in an instant...........since 90% of it is held electronically.

Both films were made in order to educate the public as to the effects of nuclear conflict, since governments on both sides of the Atlantic were making noises about a nuclear war being "winnable, provided we can get in a pre-emptive strike"

spider

iTrader: (1)

With regard to public attitudes at the time of Hiroshima and soon after, I'd expect that there were a lot of grateful people on the Allied side.

Certainly the old boys who I've spoken to who were either in the Burma campaign or part of the Tiger Force ready to bomb Japan, to a man breathed a huge sigh of relief that the two A-bombs made the Japanese surrender.

They'd all fought the Japs and knew what they were like for defending - the thought of having to assault mainland Japan filled them with dread as they knew how many of them would be killed.

As one of the Burma Star veterans told me "Those A-bombs saved our lives - pure & simple".

StickyMicky

The wifeys grandad had something to do with testing the nukes, out at sea or something if i remember rightly ?


he was also one of them crazy lodge masters from the masons, a mysterious man!

tanyatriangles

iTrader: (2)

My dad was RAF, 83 Pathfinder Squadron, Lancasters. He was waiting to be posted overseas, and he DID breathe a sigh of relief, it was EXACTLY what he said later when I asked about the morality of the nuclear weapons.

JackClark

Geezer

Maybe, but that is slightly misrepresenting the situation. Modern weapons have never been used, it's a moot point. The explosions were still very powerful and destructive, the relevance of even bigger explosions by modern weapons is irrelevant. It's like saying that an ant would have been even more squashed by being stood on by an elephant as opposed to me.

This simply isn't true. The fire bombings carried out against Germany in 1945 killed nowhere near the numbers that we killed in the nuclear attacks. An estimated 25,000 people lost their lives, half of the number lost at Nagasaki alone.

Admittedly, 100,000 people died in the conventional attack on Tokyo in February of 1945, but does that somehow justify what happened a few months later?


Whilst this is certainly true to an extent, the effort to run the Manhattan project was truly enormous too. You could argue that the resources would have been better spent on conventional technologies. As for the deaths, we will never know. Japan had made approaches for peace prior to the dropping of the bombs, and whilst they had vehemently defended certain islands, surrender was becoming more common place.

On an individual basis, I would agree, you should do whatever is necessary to win. However, on a strategic and national scale, war still needs to be conducted in a certain way. We are no better than them if we slaughter countless thousands of people who need not have died to make a point. The power of the bomb could easily have been demonstrated without dropping it on a civilian centre.

As for a determined enemy, that simply doesn't stand up. The Japanese could not have defeated the US from 1941-1945 no matter how determined they were. They simply did not have the army or the material or techology to withstand them.


The war could have been won without dropping it at all, the only question is how many more would have died? That is something we cannot answer now, but does it make it right to kill so many innocents in the blink of an eye? That was what was so abhorrent about the ***** and the Japanese, their utter disregard for anyone but themselves. To be honest, dropping the nuclear bombs makes the US pretty much the same.

Geezer