Emperor Tojo and the Atomic Bomb

[Rumple Foreskin]

Thought the following news item might prompt some thoughts on the 63-year old debate about whether the US should have used the atomic bomb against Japan. Just for the record, while I wish it hadn't come to that, I've always believed the answer is, yes, both from a moral and military standpoint.

To quote President Harry Truman, "We dropped one bomb and they didn't surrender. We dropped a second bomb and they did."

Check out the article and take your turn.

Rumple Foreskin

eta: Calling Tojo "Emporer" in the title was a mistake, and my fault. He served as Prime Minister from '41 to '44. rf

--

Diary shows Tojo resisted surrender till end

The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 12, 2008

TOKYO: Japanese World War II leader Hideki Tojo wanted to keep fighting even after U.S. atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, accusing surrender proponents of being "frightened," a newly released diary reveals.

Excerpts from the approximately 20 pages written by Tojo in the final days of the war and held by the National Archives of Japan were published for the first time in several newspapers Tuesday.

"The notes show Tojo kept his dyed-in-the-wool militarist mentality until the very end," said Kazufumi Takayama, the archives curator, who confirmed the accuracy of the published excerpts. "They are extremely valuable."

Tojo, executed in 1948 after being convicted of war crimes by the Allies, was prime minister during much of the war. The notes buttress other evidence that Tojo was fiercely opposed to surrender despite the hopelessness of Japan's war effort.

"We now have to see our country surrender to the enemy without demonstrating our power up to 120 percent," Tojo wrote on Aug. 13, 1945, just two days before Japan gave up. "We are now on a course for a humiliating peace, or rather a humiliating surrender."

Tojo also criticized his colleagues, accusing government leaders of "being scared of enemy threats and easily throwing their hands up." Surrender proponents were "frightened by 'the new type of bomb' and terrified by the Soviet Union's entry into the war," he wrote.

The stridency of the writings is remarkable considering they were penned just days after the U.S. atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 200,000 people and posing the threat of the complete destruction of Japan. At the time, Japan had begun arming children, women and the elderly with bamboo spears, in addition to the aircraft and other forces it had marshaled, to defend the homeland against a ground invasion.

The notes first came to the notice of the government when Tojo's defense lawyer, Ichiro Kiyose, gave them to the Justice Ministry. The ministry transferred the papers in 1999 to the National Archives, which made them available to researchers last year.

The papers add to Tojo's well-known writings penned while he was jailed in Sugamo Prison after Japan's surrender until his execution.

The diary shows Tojo remained convinced of the justice and necessity of Japan's brutal march through Asia and its disastrous decision to draw the United States into the war by bombing Pearl Harbor.

On Aug. 10 — the day after the Nagasaki bombing — Tojo wrote that the purpose of the war was to "maintain stability in East Asia and defend our country."

"Many soldiers and the people cannot bring themselves to die until the goal is achieved," he wrote.

Still, Tojo — who apparently wrote the diary for himself rather than as an argument to his contemporaries — said he would accept in silence the decision to surrender, which was made by government leaders in the presence of then-Emperor Hirohito.

"Now that the diplomatic steps have been taken after the emperor's judgment, I have decided to refrain from making any comments about it, though I have a separate view," Tojo wrote.

On Aug. 14, 1945, the day before Japan surrendered, Tojo wrote in a note addressed to a former aide that he took "moral responsibility for causing useless deaths, even though they were meant to be sacrifice for a great cause."

"I am determined to offer an apology with my death," he wrote, presaging his unsuccessful suicide attempt in September 1945 before he was arrested.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I also am one who believes it was necessary. Certainly for my own existance, I believe it. My father was in Troop Transport Command flying C-47's and training the Airborne forces at Ft. Benning. After the drops at D-Day and Market Garden, there weren't any 'spare' pilots left so the plans for the invasion of Japan would have had my father flying the second drop-plane to enter Japanese airspace. My own estimation for his chances of survival range from 'slim' to 'none'. Naturally, I'm prejudiced. However, I have met other men of that generation who would have been in the same or similar situations. 200,000 Japanese died in the explosions. That's horrific. However, that easily that many would have died if we had invaded and tens of thousands of Americans, as well. Neither decision would have been 'good' but The Bomb was 'less bad'.

 

[rgraham666]

I'm not going to argue the morality of dropping The Bomb. It happened, I don't like it.

I don't believe it was necessary to drop it or to invade. Japan was to all intents and purposes finished. As an island nation whose merchant marine was at the bottom of the ocean they couldn't do squat except wait for the invasion and use suicidal tactics to take as heavy a price of the invaders as possible before being hammered into the ground.

The Allies could have just waited. It might have taken a while longer but surrender was inevitable.

My $0.02.

 

[Corylea]

Whether the bomb should have been dropped or not, I admire the way in which Harry Truman went about it. No bullshit, no evasions, no spin doctoring, no pretending that previous administrations were really to blame, no pretending that it wasn't a terrible bomb -- he thought it was the best thing to do, and he did it. Period.

I doubt we'll see his like again.

(And if anybody hasn't read David McCullough's Truman, I highly recommend it.)

 

[R. Richard]

Thought the following news item might prompt some thoughts on the 63-year old debate about whether the US should have used the atomic bomb against Japan. Just for the record, while I wish it hadn't come to that, I've always believed the answer is, yes, both from a moral and military standpoint.

To quote President Harry Truman, "We dropped one bomb and they didn't surrender. We dropped a second bomb and they did."

Check out the article and take your turn.

Rumple Foreskin

--

On 6 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On 9 August 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. On 15 August 1945, the Japanese government devised a complete defense against the atomic bomb.

The Japanese would have surrendered without the atomic bomb? It wasn't until the 1980s that they finally lured the last [maybe] of the Japanese soldiers out of the jungles of some of the Pacific islands. The Japanese people in the home islands had been issued bamboo spears to fight the invaders. Do the facts support a Japanes surrender without the atomic bomb?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Not having been alive at the time, despite what my children might think, and hindsight always being twenty-twenty, I believe Truman did the right thing. His goal was to save American lives and the lives of our allies and to win the war. A war which had been on going for six year or more, in which countless lives had been lost already.

As commander in chief it was his duty to end the war as quickly as possible and given the tool he had just been handed not using it would have amounted to almost treason. (Not that I feel that strongly about what he did, but it was the right and moral thing to do.)

 

[3113]

Allow me to roll my eyes a few times regarding this stupid, stupid, STUPID argument:

Sorry. My hyper-focused, Aspergers brain just doesn't have the patience for this. Look. It's war. W-A-R. That means human beings die. Usually on both sides. So. This many Japanese die because of a bomb, or that many Americans die because they invade Japan. Hey. That's war. And that includes women and children in the cities. That's a reality. So you can't cry about the bombed city, because that's war--and you can't cry because a city wasn't bombed and lots of soldiers died in the invasion, because that's war, too! You get into a war, or are forced into a war and people die. They die whether the decision is good/bad, right/wrong.

And arguing the relative morality over killing people in a war is even more ridiculous--and that goes for both sides. So Tojo wouldn't have given up? Hey, Hitler didn't want to give up either, but the rest of the German government did and so, apparently, did the Japanese Government. So, "morally" we're back to square one. Drop or not drop? Would the Japanese have surrendered with out it or not? Could it have been avoided? We can't prove conclusively what would have happened without the bomb dropping because it didn't happen.

My big problem with this mental exercise of "what if?" however, is not that it's pointless (unless you've a time machine and we can change history?); it's that it implies that the A-bomb was just a big bomb, and that dropping it or not is the big question--thus ignoring what that bomb really was and the future it gave us.

I mean, come on, let's say we could prove, no doubt about it, that Japanese surrender would not have happened if not for the dropping of those bombs. Hooray! Saved all those American lives 63 years ago...and created an arms race that could, to this very day, lead to a nuclear winter and destroy the planet! If I'm going to engage in a pointless argument about "What if" we'd done or hadn't done something--"What if" something could have been entirely prevented, I'll go for the BIG question that affects me now. "Would it have been better to have lost all those American lives in an invasion of Japan rather than ever inventing this bomb (presuming that if we didn't invent it, it, and its off-spring, would have never been created by anyone--hey, it's a pointless argument, right?)?"

This question about whether the U.S. should or should not have dropped the A-Bomb, IMHO, ignores, entirely the fact that the invention and dropping of that bomb led to us coming close, scary close, again and again over the last 63 years, to a nuclear war which would have left cities around the globe destroyed and land irradiated--IRRADIATED--for decades. That means no life. Dead. Gone.

And that, gentlemen, is why I've no patience for this argument. Because it never looks beyond that one small point to the larger, and, IMHO, more important point. If you're going to ask what future came out of Hiroshima, don't focus on a the destroyed citizens of the city or the live American soldiers...focus on all the little countries with religious fanatics for leaders who now have said bomb and could drop it on anyone, anywhere. THAT is Hiroshima's real legacy.

 

[R. Richard]

The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon (atomic bomb) during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $2 billion USD ($24 billion in 2008 dollars based on CPI). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.

The wikipedia site is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project

If you read the entire article and some of the historical references, you will discover that the atomic bomb was coming. It was just a matter of time and who first produced a workable atom bomb. [Yes, that's something of a projection, but the soviets produced their own atom bomb not too long after.] The main reason that Hitler didn't have an atom bomb was that he was busy making war on the jews. The jews were at the forefront of atomic research.

What would have happened if we hadn't used the atomic bomb? In all probability someone else would have used the atomic bomb against the US. However, even the soviet dictators realized that no one wins an atomic war where both sides have atom bombs and delivery systems.

Allow me to roll my eyes a few times regarding this stupid, stupid, STUPID argument:

Sorry. My hyper-focused, Aspergers brain just doesn't have the patience for this. Look. It's war. W-A-R. That means human beings die. Usually on both sides. So. This many Japanese die because of a bomb, or that many Americans die because they invade Japan. Hey. That's war. And that includes women and children in the cities. That's a reality. So you can't cry about the bombed city, because that's war--and you can't cry because a city wasn't bombed and lots of soldiers died in the invasion, because that's war, too! You get into a war, or are forced into a war and people die. They die whether the decision is good/bad, right/wrong.

And arguing the relative morality over killing people in a war is even more ridiculous--and that goes for both sides. So Tojo wouldn't have given up? Hey, Hitler didn't want to give up either, but the rest of the German government did and so, apparently, did the Japanese Government. So, "morally" we're back to square one. Drop or not drop? Would the Japanese have surrendered with out it or not? Could it have been avoided? We can't prove conclusively what would have happened without the bomb dropping because it didn't happen.

My big problem with this mental exercise of "what if?" however, is not that it's pointless (unless you've a time machine and we can change history?); it's that it implies that the A-bomb was just a big bomb, and that dropping it or not is the big question--thus ignoring what that bomb really was and the future it gave us.

I mean, come on, let's say we could prove, no doubt about it, that Japanese surrender would not have happened if not for the dropping of those bombs. Hooray! Saved all those American lives 63 years ago...and created an arms race that could, to this very day, lead to a nuclear winter and destroy the planet! If I'm going to engage in a pointless argument about "What if" we'd done or hadn't done something--"What if" something could have been entirely prevented, I'll go for the BIG question that affects me now. "Would it have been better to have lost all those American lives in an invasion of Japan rather than ever inventing this bomb (presuming that if we didn't invent it, it, and its off-spring, would have never been created by anyone--hey, it's a pointless argument, right?)?"

This question about whether the U.S. should or should not have dropped the A-Bomb, IMHO, ignores, entirely the fact that the invention and dropping of that bomb led to us coming close, scary close, again and again over the last 63 years, to a nuclear war which would have left cities around the globe destroyed and land irradiated--IRRADIATED--for decades. That means no life. Dead. Gone.

And that, gentlemen, is why I've no patience for this argument. Because it never looks beyond that one small point to the larger, and, IMHO, more important point. If you're going to ask what future came out of Hiroshima, don't focus on a the destroyed citizens of the city or the live American soldiers...focus on all the little countries with religious fanatics for leaders who now have said bomb and could drop it on anyone, anywhere. THAT is Hiroshima's real legacy.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

I've often wondered if dropping those two bombs on Japan made post-war use of atomic weapons more or less likely.

The threat of total destruction was an everyday feature of life from the late '40's until the end of the Cold War. The accepted doctrine was literally, MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. These days, the chief fear concerning nuclear weapons is their being used by terrorist with no territory to worry about.

Perhaps using the bomb let the "genie out of the bottle" and thus made future use more likely, or perhaps seeing the devestation even small, primitive ones could cause, discouraged any post-war leader so inclined. I don't know. But for whatever reason, "The Bomb" has not been used since August 9, 1945, at Nagasaki.

And for that, to quote William Henley, let us, "...thank whatever gods may be..."

Rumple Foreskin

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

I'm not going to argue the morality of dropping The Bomb. It happened, I don't like it.

I don't believe it was necessary to drop it or to invade. Japan was to all intents and purposes finished. As an island nation whose merchant marine was at the bottom of the ocean they couldn't do squat except wait for the invasion and use suicidal tactics to take as heavy a price of the invaders as possible before being hammered into the ground.

The Allies could have just waited. It might have taken a while longer but surrender was inevitable.

My $0.02.

I don't disagree with this. The firebombing, the submarine campaign and dropping mines from B-29s in key waterways had converted the home islands into a starving pre-industrial wasteland. That said, one must consider the context - a triumphant but still Pearl-Harbor-enraged American public would not have accepted anything less than unambiguous surrender at that point, and wasn't in any mood to wait. That's just reality.

Here's another consideration: As an alternative to waiting and postponing the rebuilding of the devastated world economy, the bombs probably did save lives, even if there had not been an invasion. The US had the only functioning economy in 1945, and the longer the delay until we stopped fighting and started providing humanitarian relief the more people were going to die all over the war-torn world, including (or especially) in Japan. How many Japanese civillians would have expired of starvation and disease had the blocade lasted another three or six months, even if not another shot had been fired? I'll bet it would have exceeded Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

 

[rgraham666]

I re-read a favorite story of mine not long ago, No Shoulder To Cry On.

It was written in the late '60s and set in the late '80s. At that time Cuba had just joined the nuclear armed nations. It was number 27. Things were getting tense.

Then aliens arrived from a 'Federation' of nearby planets, one ship from each member. And they did come in peace.

Of course, humans were ecstatic. Here were people that had managed to not blow themselves up. Maybe they could show us how.

The aliens said they could help us, but not right away. They didn't know enough about humanity to know for sure. So they said they'd take some humans back to teach them about humanity and then they'd see what they could do. Each ship of the 'Federation' took a social scientist, because these scientists knew most about humanity.

Well, it turned out the aliens lied to us. It wasn't that they had kept from blowing themselves up. It was that they hadn't succeeded yet.

In the forty years after creating atomic weaponry, we'd only used them twice. The aliens in that time had used hundreds.

They had fission bombs, fusion bombs, antimatter bombs and gravity bombs. They had the technology to turn a sunspot into a laser and fry the sunlit side of a planet.

The 'Federation' once had nearly four hundred planets. The sixty odd ships that had gone to Earth were from those planets still surviving. The rest were lifeless balls.

I can remember the last line from memory. "This job of keeping the peace that you humans think you have done so badly? Teach us how to do a job that bad. Please."

Maybe we humans aren't doing that bad a job.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Allow me to roll my eyes a few times regarding this stupid, stupid, STUPID argument:

Sorry. My hyper-focused, Aspergers brain just doesn't have the patience for this. Look. It's war. W-A-R. That means human beings die. Usually on both sides. So. This many Japanese die because of a bomb, or that many Americans die because they invade Japan. Hey. That's war. And that includes women and children in the cities. That's a reality . . .

That's reality and war 20th Century style, and while such bloodyhandedness is certainly not unusual in the history of war, it's not inevitable. Niall Ferguson has an interesting series on PBS, "The War of the World." I saw a bit of that without casting blame characterizes the victory as tainted, just because of the nature of the war. We (the allies) didn't start it, but we sure did finish it by perfecting the barbarism the axis pioneered.

 

[cantdog]

I've read Hogg, I've read Truman's Memoirs, I've read all six volumes of Churchill's The Second World War, and all his History of the English-Speaking Peoples for that matter. Dozens more works by dozens more witnesses.

The people who were there have few regrets. Oppenheimer and many others regretted that there had ever been any such weapons, and even Truman mentions it. But there were. And in the circs, they made, especially Truman, the decision they did. This was not the mad Curtis LeMay foamings, but a carefully considered decision in the context of an ongoing conflict already responsible for tens of millions of deaths. By 1945, so many millions had been shot, burned or blown to pieces. Those people knew what each new death signified, knew what was being lost each day the war continued.

I began, in my twenties, believing that it had been a criminal act of epic proportions, but after a study of the history, especially the lengthy and detailed histories which bring home the years and years of fearful slaughter and desperate measures taken by all sides, I have come to a place where i can give Truman the benefit of the doubt.

The man was right, I now suppose. And God help us.

The militaristic clique which ran Japan in those years was worse even than the nazi scourge, with the exception, possibly, of the death camps. The callous and offhand slaughter in China, Sumatra, and so many other places under the Co-Prosperity Sphere amounted to a more casual and disorganized racist extirpation that was very close in total deaths to the scientific death mechanisms of the Holocaust.

Then there's the horrors known as Unrestricted Submarine Warfare, and Indiscriminate Round-the-clock Bombing.

Stalin himself killed nearly 20 millions in his Ukraine genocide and the purges.

And the death continued.

Murder. Those of us who follow the phenomenon of war have watched while a handful of small conflicts in the early 1960's escalated to over 50 around the world today (1997); all of them being fought concurrently; many of them major wars. The generally agreed statistics are that some 1000 soldiers, and 5000 civilians die, per day, every day, for a total of over two million deaths per year, for a total of 75 million deaths over the past 35 years (in 1997, this would be since 1962). The conservative English military historian John Keegan states that more than 50 million people have been killed by war since the peace began in 1945.

Either way these are record numbers. They make World War One into a sideshow. They make the Black Death into a small joke. In general, these deaths are not so much dismissed as eased off any serious agendas with the qualification that the wars in question take place mainly in the Third World. Whatever you may think about that marginalizing qualifier, this has been less and less true since the end of the Cold War.

It is true that MAD and the very existence of the Bomb probably prevented a Third World War at many different times during the Cold War era. It set a limit to how all-out either side was willing to go to destroy the other.

I think I have also come around to an understanding of what is needed to set the world onto a better path. But I suppose that's another thread.

 

[R. Richard]

One thing that has been overlooked in all of the posts I read is this. Soldiers fight in the front. Generals observe from the rear. Politicians cluster among the women and children away from the battle. With atomic bombs, there is no front, no rear and no away from the battle, there's just a wide zone of destruction. Thus, atomic bombs directly attack the politicians. Is that a consideration?

There has been only one wartime use of atomic bombs.

 

[cantdog]

One thing that has been overlooked in all of the posts I read is this. Soldiers fight in the front. Generals observe from the rear. Politicians cluster among the women and children away from the battle. With atomic bombs, there is no front, no rear and no away from the battle, there's just a wide zone of destruction. Thus, atomic bombs directly attack the politicians. Is that a consideration?

There has been only one wartime use of atomic bombs.

No, it isn't a consideration. We have bombed civilian populations and caused many millions to die thereby. Shock and Awe and the Fallujah campaign, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon not so long ago, and many, many other examples. Atomics have no such exclusivity as you suggest. Conventional arms kill anyone in a zone, too. Thus, as so often, your arguments are vapid and jejune and your conclusions false and tendentious. You have nothing to say, and you say it poorly.

 

[cantdog]

Politicians!

One thing that has been overlooked in all of the posts I read is this. Soldiers fight in the front. Generals observe from the rear. Politicians cluster among the women and children away from the battle. With atomic bombs, there is no front, no rear and no away from the battle, there's just a wide zone of destruction. Thus, atomic bombs directly attack the politicians. Is that a consideration?

There has been only one wartime use of atomic bombs.

My dear Ass, it is you yourself who are intended to be a politician, in your capacity as a citizen in a democratic state. If you refuse the responsibility, you cannot blame power hungry interest groups for occupying abandoned territory.

 

[R. Richard]

No, it isn't a consideration. We have bombed civilian populations and caused many millions to die thereby. Shock and Awe and the Fallujah campaign, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon not so long ago, and many, many other examples. Atomics have no such exclusivity as you suggest. Conventional arms kill anyone in a zone, too. Thus, as so often, your arguments are vapid and jejune and your conclusions false and tendentious. You have nothing to say, and you say it poorly.

I am in awe of your self proclaimed brilliance. You say, "Conventional arms kill anyone in a zone, too." Of course, your statement isn't true. Unprotected people mostly die in a carpet bombed zone. Protected people, such as those in bunkers may well survive. Really protected people, such as those in hardened bunkers will almost always survive conventional arms. Survival after an atomic attack is much more difficult. Even those who survive the blast, say in a hardened bunker, may later die of radiation poisoning. Survivors don't die of radiation after a conventional bombing attack.

You say, "We have bombed civilian populations and caused many millions to die thereby." No kidding? You have then read the history of World War II? You know of things like the fire bombing of Dresdend by the British? The destruction bombing of Lübeck, Cologne, Hamburg and several other cities by the British? The fire bombing of Toyko by the US? The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US?

You also read the newspapers and know of more modern bombings. The bombing of Baghdad by President Clinton's order [as many as 150,000 dead?] The bombing of Kosovo by President Clinton's order?

One thing does puzzle me. You cite the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis responded to cross border attacks from Lebanon,as is the right of a sovereign country. Their purpose was to try to rescue two Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped by Hizbollah guerrillas. AFAIK, The US wasn't involved in the matter. The UN had troops in the area, but they sat and did nothing.

Your apparent aim is to conduct a political attack on me and on the current administration in Washington. If you don't mind, I was trying to address the topic of this thread.

 

[Corylea]

I re-read a favorite story of mine not long ago, No Shoulder To Cry On.

I can remember the last line from memory. "This job of keeping the peace that you humans think you have done so badly? Teach us how to do a job that bad. Please."

Maybe we humans aren't doing that bad a job.

Thanks for sharing that. I'd love to read it -- who's the author?

 

[DesertPirate]

I am glad President Truman gave the order. When my Dad was in occupation force Japan Sep. 45 - Aug. 46, he looked at the beaches we would have invaded and their defences. He said he would not have survived Japan and he was scheduled for the fourth wave. He was a radioman in the 8th Naval Beach Battalion (beachmasters for invasions) in Europe and was in the first wave at North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Southern France. After that the Navy broke up the 8Ball and sent everyone to the Pacific. He was in the radio room on the command ship at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and lost every friend who had survived Europe that went in in the first 3 waves at those.

 

[cantdog]

I am in awe of your self proclaimed brilliance. You say, "Conventional arms kill anyone in a zone, too." Of course, your statement isn't true. Unprotected people mostly die in a carpet bombed zone. Protected people, such as those in bunkers may well survive. Really protected people, such as those in hardened bunkers will almost always survive conventional arms. Survival after an atomic attack is much more difficult. Even those who survive the blast, say in a hardened bunker, may later die of radiation poisoning. Survivors don't die of radiation after a conventional bombing attack.

You say, "We have bombed civilian populations and caused many millions to die thereby." No kidding? You have then read the history of World War II? You know of things like the fire bombing of Dresdend by the British? The destruction bombing of Lübeck, Cologne, Hamburg and several other cities by the British? The fire bombing of Toyko by the US? The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US?

You also read the newspapers and know of more modern bombings. The bombing of Baghdad by President Clinton's order [as many as 150,000 dead?] The bombing of Kosovo by President Clinton's order?

One thing does puzzle me. You cite the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The Israelis responded to cross border attacks from Lebanon,as is the right of a sovereign country. Their purpose was to try to rescue two Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped by Hizbollah guerrillas. AFAIK, The US wasn't involved in the matter. The UN had troops in the area, but they sat and did nothing.

Your apparent aim is to conduct a political attack on me and on the current administration in Washington. If you don't mind, I was trying to address the topic of this thread.

The topic being politicians in a bomb zone?

 

[oggbashan]

One thing that has been overlooked in all of the posts I read is this. Soldiers fight in the front. Generals observe from the rear. Politicians cluster among the women and children away from the battle. With atomic bombs, there is no front, no rear and no away from the battle, there's just a wide zone of destruction. Thus, atomic bombs directly attack the politicians. Is that a consideration?

There has been only one wartime use of atomic bombs.

I wasn't a consideration in the UK. Our citizens and politicians had been bombed in our own country in World Wars 1 and 2. My family was bombed out of their homes by a Zeppelin in World War 1. Another part of my family lost their home to bombing in World War 2. The Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace were bombed in World War 2. Conventional bombs were capable of piercing the shelter used by the UK's wartime cabinet of ministers.

The bombing of Japan prior to the A-bombs had been ferociously destructive but had the Allies had to invade the Japanese homeland the casualties on both sides would have been enormous. Given the circumstances of the time I think that the decision to use the A-bombs was correct. They ended the war.

Whether I could have made that decision? I don't know.

The Germans were close to producing an A-bomb. The destruction of the heavy water plant in Norway delayed their research long enough for the war in Europe to end before they could make a functioning A-weapon. Just think what an A-bomb would have done to the D-Day beaches...

Og

 

[rgraham666]

Thanks for sharing that. I'd love to read it -- who's the author?

The author's name is Hank Davis.

 

[R. Richard]

The Germans were close to producing an A-bomb. The destruction of the heavy water plant in Norway delayed their research long enough for the war in Europe to end before they could make a functioning A-weapon. Just think what an A-bomb would have done to the D-Day beaches...

Og

I am aware of the German efforts, but I didn't have time to do a thorough search. The thing that is ironic, as I stated before, is that Hitler probably could have had an atomic bomb if he hadn't chosen to make war against jewish civilians.

 

[bronzeage]

Just a technical point, but Tojo was not the Emperor of Japan.

 

[rgraham666]

As I recall he wasn't even the head of the government anymore and hadn't been for a couple of years.