Hiroshima not Tokyo

[jaywalker]

Thanks to Der Spiegel for getting it right with such great precision. Not "tasteless" as the eurocrat would have it; but right.

Perhaps we should move our children to safer places. But then I thought: usually Hiroshima not Tokyo. And if the conflagration is total then probably doesn't matter (although I note that multi-billionaires are buying up remote parts of New Zealand with some urgency).

[Loz]

Irrelevant who the Der Spiegel cover actually depicted - it's concept was extraordinarily tasteless.

[jaywalker]

Loz Wrote:

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> Irrelevant who the Der Spiegel cover actually

> depicted - it's concept was extraordinarily

> tasteless.

how can what is depicted (here the statue of liberty) be "irrelevant". That is post-truth Loz.

[Loz]

Don't be daft. You have failed to understand what I wrote - read it again.

PS You've started YET ANOTHER trump thread. Was it really necessary?

[jaywalker]

Yes, I often fail to understand what people write - please forgive me.

Yes, satire is tasteless. Isn't that the whole point of effective satire? Would you say to Swift (I do truly recognise that I do not have those skills but one must try): "boiling babies for breakfast" is so tasteless; especially in the 'nappy valley' of ED? Would you say to Bret Easton Ellis (satirist of all this Trump nonsense avant la lettre): that is obscene and so tasteless?

As for new threads, perhaps I will be banned. If so, good bye.

[stringvest]

YOU MAY NOT GET BANNED, BUT JUST HAVE YOUR POSTINGS REMOVED AS IRRELEVANT. I wrote some silly "parodies" for fun that some members found jolly and entertaining. Ah well .... the weird ways of the world web!

[DulwichFox]

I'm losing the will to live trying to decypher WTF some people on here are actually talking about.

I'm Foxed..

[jaywalker]

I had a bad dream, Fox. (I do have some human investments in terms of family and so on). I mean 'bad dream' in the Hamlet sense: "I would could count myself a king of infinite space were it not that ...".

I live in a road where bombs fell during my parent's lifetime. My house was spared: many lives down the road were not.

In the years and months leading up to those bombs there was incredulity about the danger. And also derision of those who said that war was likely.

The war was stopped by nuclear strikes on two Japanese cities by the USA.

After the war there was a further crisis. In the 1950s the USA knew that the USSR did NOT have ICBMs. Many super-intelligent people (the most documented John von Neumann, perhaps the most gifted mathematician of the C20th on a par with Godel and Turing) urged pre-emptive strikes on Russia. The UK knew that the USSR DID have missiles reaching USA airbases in the UK. So any retaliatory strike from such action would annihilate us, not the USA. The origin of the UK's independent so-called 'deterrent' lies here. Its credibility thought to over-ride the 'special relationship'.

We had to establish this AGAINST USA foreign policy as quickly as possible or simply become a pawn-gambit.

At some point later, we decided that the USA was a good supplier of said deterrent (they now build our missiles). Do you really want me to say more?

I wonder if this is echoed in the obvious panic over the Trident misdirection?

[Loz]

jaywalker Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> The origin of the UK's independent so-called 'deterrent' lies here. Its

> credibility thought to over-ride the 'special relationship'.

>

> We had to establish this AGAINST USA foreign policy as quickly as possible or simply become a

> pawn-gambit.

>

> At some point later, we decided that the USA was a good supplier of said deterrent (they now build

> our missiles). Do you really want me to say more?

Since the US supplied the missiles for Polaris and the whole programme was only established after the UK/US Nassau agreement, your writing doesn't seem to me to be historically accurate.

[KidKruger]

Jaywalker:

"The war was stopped by nuclear strikes on two Japanese cities by the USA"

In essence, yes. The Japanese mainly stopped fighting after the big bombs. But the bombs were not necessary to end the war. By dropping the bombs on civilian populations, and with each bomb being of a different type, the Americans got the opportunity to complete the ultimate experiment. Twice. Thereby validating their deadly technology.

They could have attacked a military base, dockyard, remote island, or unpopulated region.

But no, they chose to kill as many civilians as they could, as well as simultaneously kicking-off the cold war (funny how the Russians were somehow automatically the baddies !). All in one fell swoop.

My God that cold war cost the West a lot of money didn't it ? All those trillions in armaments. Proper earner that one.

So the scary stuff for me is the same major power, with yet more nutters at the helm, is once again in a position to threaten huge populations' future with their disjointed, corrupt and twisted thinking.

[Loz]

KidKruger Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Jaywalker:

> "The war was stopped by nuclear strikes on two

> Japanese cities by the USA"

>

> In essence, yes. The Japanese mainly stopped fighting after the big bombs. But the bombs were

> not necessary to end the war. By dropping the bombs on civilian populations, and with each bomb

> being of a different type, the Americans got the opportunity to complete the ultimate experiment.

> Twice. Thereby validating their deadly technology.

I'd say the bombing of Hiroshima could - at a push - be justified if you really, really try, but in no way can Nagasaki. A mere three days later and, as you say, a different type of bomb.

The most violent and murderous scientific experiment in history.

[jaywalker]

Loz Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> jaywalker Wrote:

> --------------------------------------------------

> -----

> > The origin of the UK's independent so-called

> 'deterrent' lies here. Its

> > credibility thought to over-ride the 'special

> relationship'.

> >

> > We had to establish this AGAINST USA foreign

> policy as quickly as possible or simply become a

> > pawn-gambit.

> >

> > At some point later, we decided that the USA was

> a good supplier of said deterrent (they now build

> > our missiles). Do you really want me to say

> more?

>

> Since the US supplied the missiles for Polaris and

> the whole programme was only established after the

> UK/US Nassau agreement, your writing doesn't seem

> to me to be historically accurate.

Ah, you are too young to remember Vulcan bombers then. A truly terrifying site.

It is true that I'm taking my history from fiction - the post-war reconstructions of Edward Wilson are particularly good.

[jimlad48]

It is very dangerous with the hindsight of history to make value judgements on the final days of WW2. The context of the time was very different - the war against Japan was effectively a total war - the Japanese had mobilised their entire nation to fight, to the extent that bamboo spears were being distributed to the population to fight invaders.

The majority of Japanese industry was located in towns, many of which were destroyed by firebombs, in order to raze the industry to the ground. The reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen was because they hadn't been on the prior target list, meaning it was easier to understand the effects of the device - ironically Nagasaki was unlucky - they were the fallback target, but cloud cover over the primary meant they had to divert Bockscar (the bomber) to the secondary. In those days, when you had assembled an atomic bomb, you had to 'use it or lose it' as the core decayed at such an astonishingly fast rate, you'd have been unable to use it again after that mission. There were only 3 devices in existence, so once assembled, it needed to be used.

The context you need to remember is simple - this was total war, and men,women and children were all legitimate targets for both sides. The US had just razed Tokyo to the ground killing tens of thousands of people (Japanese cities were made of wood, so burned easily) and Nagasaki in particualar arguably demonstrated that the atomic bomb, while spectacular, wasn't a particularly effective means of doing widespread damage - it wiped out some of the city centre, but a lot of the industry was in some form intact. Firebombing was a more effective means of destroying cities then, not atomic bombs.

Set against the firebombing was the reality that the Allies were expecting to invade Japan - there was no 'surrender' culture, and the Japanese people at the time ferverently believed in fighting to the death (huge numbers of suicides in many of the island campaigns ocurred rather than be captured). The incredibly optimistic assumptions I've read on this plan (known as OP OLYMPIC) was that you'd see at least 1 million US / Allied dead during the final campaign to capture the home islands. The Japanese predicted losses were almost incalculable - given the unwillingness to surrender, the low food stores and their desperate situation, I'd have expected the Japanese people to probably be close to being wiped out. Thats because this was a total war of national survival with the gloves off and no willingness on either side to give quarter.

OP OLYMPIC was very real - when the war in Europe ended, many US and British units were being shipped straight to Asia to prepare for the next invasion. The use of the atomic bomb was the last throw of the dice to try and force a surrender (in fact as originally conceived the atomic bombs would have been used in Berlin and Germany, but the war ended there too soon for their use). The use created conditions where the Japanese military and Government finally accepted they were facing capabilities that they could not counter - and set the conditions for surrender.

Was it bloody - absolutely. Did it save the lives of millions of Japanese and Allied personnel and civilians. Yes.

I'm afraid that total wars are terrible terrible things, and the loss of a few tens of thousands of civilians versus the millions predicted is sadly a reasonable trade off.

I've spent many years reading on, studying and trying to understand the final days of WW2 and the early atomic strategy. Its clear that the circumstances of the time, which I feverently hope are never repeated, means that the dropping of the two bombs shortened the war by over a year, and saved an incalculable number of lives, albeit at an awful price.

[jaywalker]

Great post jimlad. A very disturbing period of history to study.

Mind you, I was careful in my OP not to pass judgement on the use of nuclear bombs as I was writing about something else: I would like to see them not used in the future of course. Thanks for filling in the details of how their use stopped the war by changing the framework of understanding.

There are of course ethical positions that would condemn the use of nuclear bombs even if to do so would save millions of lives: but that is a different post.

[KidKruger]

The Japanese had agreed to surrender, but the Americans insisted the emperor had to stand-down as well.

They knew the Japanese would never be agree to their emperor being stood down (him being a god-like figure for the Japanese).

But no, the Americans, had to crush the the Japanese culturally by deposing the emperor and made that an additional condition besides the surrender.

There lay the excuse to experiment on a foreign population with nuclear bombs.

If the bombs had to be used due to unstable cores, they could have been dropped somewhere with a minimal civilian population toll - there's no valid reason for what happened.

[JohnL]

Loz Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Irrelevant who the Der Spiegel cover actually

> depicted - it's concept was extraordinarily

> tasteless.

It's actually taken inspiration from the NY Daily News

2 years ago.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/files/2015/12/nydn-trump.jpg

[jimlad48]

We'll have to agree to disagree. I've looked carefully at this, and I am comfortable that it was the only option. In a total war, where you have specified unconditional surrender, then don't expect negotiations. The allied position had been clear for years - uconditional surrender, which the Japanese were not prepared to accept. If you read the wiki article as a good starting point, its also clear that contrary to rumour, removal of the emperor wasn't a precondition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

Dropping atomic bombs isn't something you just 'do' and you have to be certain of the target, conditions for release and so on. It wasnt an experiment to drop bombs, it was a means to a shortcutting an end to a terrible period of suffering, and saved millions of lives in the process. Gesture bombing for want of a better word only works if it can be seen to work - dropping a bomb on a remote part of the country, in a nation replete with censorship and that has suffered years of firebombing would have no impact. It was only by demonstrating openly the power the allies held so publicly that they were able to send a message.

I never want to see a nuclear weapon employed again, but I do think that sadly their use was 100% justifiable in the context of ending the most terrible war in human history.

[JohnL]

KidKruger Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> Jaywalker:

> "The war was stopped by nuclear strikes on two

> Japanese cities by the USA"

>

> In essence, yes. The Japanese mainly stopped

> fighting after the big bombs. But the bombs were

> not necessary to end the war.

The Soviets were charging towards Japan at a rate

of knots apparently.

They wanted to invade

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/05/stalin_japan_hiroshima_occupation_hokkaido/

[rendelharris]

KidKruger Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> The Japanese had agreed to surrender, but the

> Americans insisted the emperor had to stand-down

> as well.

> They knew the Japanese would never be agree to

> their emperor being stood down (him being a

> god-like figure for the Japanese).

> But no, the Americans, had to crush the the

> Japanese culturally by deposing the emperor and

> made that an additional condition besides the

> surrender.

> There lay the excuse to experiment on a foreign

> population with nuclear bombs.

>

> If the bombs had to be used due to unstable cores,

> they could have been dropped somewhere with a

> minimal civilian population toll - there's no

> valid reason for what happened.

I agree that there were alternatives to the use of the bombs - stopping Russia swooping through Manchuria and demonstrating the power of the bomb to Stalin were huge motivators - but I've never heard that about the Americans insisting on Hirohito stepping down. The Potsdam Declaration was left deliberately vague - it said that those who had misled the Japanese people would have to go, but avoided specifically identifying the Emperor as one of those people - and as we know, post-war the Americans insisted on keeping Hirohito as Emperor and avoided any punitive actions for war crimes against him.