jazz74 wrote:TMS wrote:how does someone living in the only country to have ever actually used a nuclear weapon against another have the right to judge the ulterior motives behind another nation developing nuclear arms? i'm having a hard time reconciling that notion. don't u think the US gains political leverage over other nations by having nuclear arms? do u think a country like North Korea would be taken seriously if not for their nuclear capability? Iran is seeking to gain the same kind of political leverage... they're not stupid enough to nuke another nation using the weapons they develop, otherwise they'd be signing their own death warrants... no one is stupid enough to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on anyone in this day & age, not even the United States... there's way too much at stake now & we're no longer the only big kid on the block that has nuclear capability.
well, it was a domino effect with us using such a weapon that, tho horrific, was necessary to end the war. at the time, japan was not going to give up even if germany and italy pulled out because their motives were different from the two. we warned them we had a weapon and to give up which they didnt. fdr had to make good of his promise or we would have been at a vulnerable position with reported japanese submarines off of the coast of california. however, the collateral damage of hiroshima that affects that city today, almost 70 years later, is disheartening to say the least. however, you are right. the reason why countries accumulate these weapons is for legitimacy and to be considered a power. no one will be stupid enough to launch one because then they are enemies of the world. world war 3 would start and it wont be pretty.
ok first of all it was Truman that signed off on dropping the bombs, not FDR, & many of his own military advisors including MacArthur & Eisenhower didn't think the bombings were even necessary to force a Japanese surrender even as our military forces were facing huge losses in recent battles with the Japanese, whose own losses were tenfold in recent bloody battles that occured on Iwo Jima & Okinawa... the bombs were dropped to save thousands of US soldier lives & huge costs in valuable resources that would have been lost if the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland had to take place, so Truman bowed to the increasing pressure he was facing from the homefront to end the war & signed off on wasting hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilian lives by nuking an industrial center & a key seaport that were fueling the Japanese war machine.
in the process the US also showed once & for all they were the big kids on the block & sent a clear message to Stalin & Russia who's got the bigger ****, & staved off a possible Russian invasion of the Japanese mainland to keep them from gaining any of the spoils in a Japanese surrender... the Russians had already invaded Manchuria around the time of the Hiroshima bombing & were on the brink of turning their sights on Japanese occupied China, Korea & Japan themselves... Russia & Japan had been fighting for control of that area of the world for half a century already that culminated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, it was no secret they had a vested interest to gain a foothold of control in that region if Japan surrendered... so we dropped the second nuke on Nagasaki to speed up the process of an unconditional Japanese surrender & contain the spread of communism to replace the fascist & imperialist regimes we just got done eliminating.
look i got no love for the Japanese after all the bad history with Korea, trust me, but playing the hand of God in dropping nukes on another country is just wrong any way you wanna look at it... war is never pretty but when you go to war you do so with the understanding that many soldiers' lives will be lost, but to waste innocent civilian lives like that is IMO nothing short but an act of terror... look at the world outcry when 9/11 happened & 3000 innocent US civilian lives were murdered & multiply that about about a thousand fold & you'll have an inkling of what happened in Hiroshima & Nagasaki... just as bad were the Tokyo firebombing campaigns that murdered even more innocent civilian lives.
& then you had the Japanese-American internment camps that were set up here in the States that pretty much stripped US citizens of Japanese descent of their dignity during WW2... after Pearl Harbor happened, Japanese people were demonized & stripped of their humanity by American propaganda campaigns as being nothing but bucktoothed, glasses wearing sinister Charlie Chan caracatures that sought to kill all Americans... the slogan "Kill all Japs!" was commonly heard & many Americans were so incensed by the attack on US soil that they were out for Japanese blood, & whether you were Japanese, of mixed Japanese heritage or even Asian in general, as long as you looked the part you were a Jap that had to be eliminated... the war hysteria of the time fueled a huge racial prejudice against Asians that still exists to this day in this country... the propaganda fueled demonization of Japanese helped to minimalize the obvious reality that a huge amount of innocent lives were being lost in the Pacific War to the American public.
After 7 years & 40K+ posts, banned by martin for calling Nalod a 'moron'. Awesome.
