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From: berman@psuvax1.UUCP (Piotr Berman)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: America-bashing (use of atomic bomb)
Message-ID: <1679@psuvax1.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Aug-85 01:39:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: psuvax1.1679
Posted: Sun Aug  4 01:39:23 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Aug-85 00:39:30 EDT
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Organization: Pennsylvania State Univ.
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> Tony Wuersch
> {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw

> > William Swan
> > <301@persci.UUCP> bill@persci.UUCP

> > [The 'bomb' on Japan brought ...] the instigators of that war to an 
> > early surrender, thereby avoiding tremendous bloodshed (on both sides) 
> > and total destruction of their nation and people.  
  
> The "instigators"?  Do I detect a hint of revenge here?  
> ........................................................
> But revenge is not a sufficient excuse for the cold-blooded murder of
> civilians.  The US knew it was on the verge of victory.  It could
> have considered the tradeoffs in lives from one strategy or another,
> especially civilian lives.  The historical record shows no such niceties
> in the decision(s) to drop the bombs.
 
  Tony ignores three facts.  
  1. Pearl Harbor was not a Japanese port bombed by Americans.
  2. World War was a TOTAL war, which means (for sure in Japanese case)
     that the ENTIRE countries were at war, not just an easy to isolate
     groups of soldiers.  Bombing cities was a method to diminish the
     supply of enemy's war material.  The noncombat population was
     predominantly working for the war machine.
  3. Japanese leaders were promising to figth to the bitter (possibly
     very bitter) end.  The suicidal tactics of Japanese made this
     promise credible.  Now, change scale of the human destruction
     from Iwo Jima and Okinawa to main islands of Japan.
  Moreover, I do not by the argument which in practice says: "Instead 
  of killing 100,000 innocent civilians we could kill 300,000 soldiers."
  As I pointed out, in a total war the civilians are not any more 
  innocent than the combatting conscripts.  All of them are part of the
  war machine, not of their making perhaps, but 
> I read somewhere that the second bomb was dropped to see if it would work,
> since it was more experimental (used plutonium instead of uranium) than
> the first bomb.  Dropping it on a civilian population served two purposes
> at once, I guess.  It was dropped on Nagasaki.  The second bomb was not
> dropped because the Japanese had decided to continue fighting.
> 
> Most arguments about the morality of the "bomb" focus only on the first
> one.
> 

This is an ahistorical thinking.  Now we know that the nuclear bomb is
more nasty than the conventional one: radiation, cancer etc.  Still,
what makes nukes really scary because of rockets which can spread them
everywhere in half an hour.  
In 1945 thet looked just more efficient: lots of cities were leveled 
with the ground with the use of conventional bombs or even artilery.  
Many times more Japanese were killed in conventional bombings than in 
nuclear ones.

> > It was most unfortunate that it [atomic bomb] was used, but consider 
> > ALL the circumstances before you start getting judgemental. This 
> > particular circumstance will never arise again.
> > William Swan  {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!persci!bill
> 
> War is war, and it's hell, and so are atrocities.  The dropping of the
> atomic bomb was just more effective than the concentration camps, since
> we still have it around today.
> 
> It's amusing how the US tries to show a crazed skull's face to its enemies and
> a caring, fatherly "we are the world -- I did it for the best of reasons" face
> to the rest of us.  All governments do this to some degree, but I think the
> US believes it can persuade people that it acts as a moral actor and
> conquers the contradictions of "circumstances" with a lot more sureness
> and certainty than do most other governments.
> 
> If state religion is what states believe about themselves and their
> relation to the deity, then the US is probably the most religious and
> pious state in the whole world.
> Tony Wuersch

A better example of worshiping the state one can find in USSR.  If you
know Russian, you would see that Pravda contains a. hossannas to the
wisdom of the Party, b. diatribes agains imperialism (their Satan), 
c. description of cases were people don't sufficiently follow wisdom of 
the Party.
More serious, Tony again ignores the realities of war.  Americans didn't
know for example how many attrocities Japanese would commit in an extra
week of the war (once they killed 200,000 in Nankin in three days). This
were not conditions to invite the enemy to the test site and then chat,
whether it wouldn't be better to surrender.

Piotr Berman