Nuclear shadow, NagasakiLDarrell t1_j96l3ia wrote
Reply to comment by RemRose in Nuclear shadow, Nagasaki by allez05
No the answer to stop the war. Would it have been better to invade the island of Japan and kill maybe a million more military on both sides and main land Japanese civilians?
TinKicker t1_j99vvme wrote
The ongoing conventional bombing of Japan was FAR more destructive (and lethal) than the atomic bombing. People always seem to forget that.
By mid-1945, the US was running out of targets to destroy. Yet the Japanese were showing absolutely zero indication of entering into surrender negotiations. (We were reading their encoded messages. We knew their plans!)
The civilian populations were being trained in the manufacturing and use of homemade weapons to defend the home islands. The Japanese Imperial Army informed the Emperor that it would only require 20 million civilian deaths to repulse an American land invasion, which they felt they could easily absorb and recover from, while the Americans would surely lose their stomach for the war afterwards. (Just as they assumed the Americans would lose their stomachs for war after the attack on Pearl Harbor)
The cities targeted for nuclear weapons were chosen solely because they were ones of only a few cities that had not already been utterly destroyed by conventional bombing, or recognized as having historical/religious significance.
(Yep, that’s right. The US spared some Japanese cities specifically because they had historical or religious importance to the Japanese. I cannot think of another nation in history that has spared an enemy’s cities, in a time of total war, specifically because those cities were precious to the enemy.)
LDarrell t1_j99x2ou wrote
You are not addressing the death and destruction that an invasion of the Japanese main island would have caused. The estimate is that a million death would have occurred had there been an invasion and most of those deaths would have been Japanese civilians caught in the middle of all the fighting.
After the Hiroshima bomb the Japanese military was not interested in surrendering. After the Nagasaki bomb, they were still not interested in surrendering and it was only the intervention of the Emperor that caused the Japanese Military to lay down their arms. An invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been a blood bath on all sides.
Again, please do not dismiss the millions of people (military and especially civilians) killed either directly or indirectly by the war started by Japan and its allies.
TinKicker t1_j99xng0 wrote
Ummm….I think you have me confused with someone who disagrees with you.
(And the one million casualties is what the US calculated it would cost the American military in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. The Japanese estimated it would cost 20 million of its own civilian population in defending against such an invasion…a cost they were actively preparing to absorb.)
LDarrell t1_j99y1yj wrote
I apologize if I have misunderstood you
RemRose t1_j96m2q0 wrote
No but stopping the war has to be agreed upon by both parties and while the majority of the civilians of japan no longer supported the war effort their government would not sign any form of treaty to end this. Nuking them was a gross extension of power not just once but twice. The proper answer would have been to sanction the fuck out of a island that had burned most bridges to its surrounding neighbors but our answer to the problem was unfortunately to try to cause the most death we could to a bunch of people not involved in a way shape or form because we wanted to see a big boom. So the idea that oh well they deserved it because they killed people too is a very harmful thought process in general.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments