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From: andree@uokvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: addendum to my flame - (nf)
Message-ID: <5114@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Jan-84 22:58:38 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.5114
Posted: Mon Jan 23 22:58:38 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Jan-84 09:38:16 EST
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#R:watdaisy:-642000:uokvax:5000063:000:2103
uokvax!andree    Jan 22 05:14:00 1984

You want justification for Nagasaki? I'll give it to you.

In case you don't remember/haven't discovered, the japanese near the
end of WWII (more properly, the Second Thirty Years War, Phase II)
had sworn not to surrender until they were all dead. This was considered
an unlikely occurence. We dropped one bomb on the japanese (after
warning them that something awful would happen if they didn't surrender).
This just told them we were ahead of the rest of the world in building
a-bombs. They weren't going to surrender yet, as nobody could have
the raw nuclear material to build more than one.

We then drop a second a-bomb on them. All bets are off. Since we
shouldn't have been able to produce that one, it's no longer
clear how many we have. We *MAY* actually be able to kill all the
japanese with minimal effort on our part. NOW, they surrender.
Of course, we had to use two different flavors of bomb, and couldn't
have turned out another one for a while, but they didn't know that.
America has just saved several million lifes, both american and
japanese, by nuking two cities. Not optimal, but even if we did ask
for the war, we didn't ask the japanese to be fanatical about it.

As for feeling guilty about it, I don't. Nor do I see any reason to.
At the time, bombing cities was accepted behavior (I think the germans
started it). Most such bombings were actually against militarily
important targets (the nukes hit a troop staging area and a naval
dry dock, if I remember correctly). Nukes are big enough that they
tend to splatter badly, and conventional weapons (at the time) had
such lousy delivery systems that you could miss by most of a mile.
So civilians got hit.

There are things america did during the this period that I am ashamed of.
Firestorming german and japanese cities, mostly. This was stategically
useless, and provided a painfull death to far to many people - larger
than the any death toll even you would consider reasonable for hiroshima
and nagasaki. This I'm ashamed of. Hiroshima or Nagasaki? No, I'm not
ashamed of that.

	"With wobbly to fill in the chinks."
	<mike