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From: ins_apmj@jhunix.UUCP (Patrick M Juola)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.misc,net.rumor
Subject: Re: Lives saved by nuking Japan?!? (was Re: The Presidents...)
Message-ID: <2928@jhunix.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-May-86 10:13:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: jhunix.2928
Posted: Thu May 29 10:13:48 1986
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References: <133@petrus.UUCP> <513@mit-trillian.MIT.EDU> <709@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> <2784@pixar.pixar> <735@sigma.UUCP>
Reply-To: ins_apmj@jhunix.ARPA (Patrick M Juola)
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In article <735@sigma.UUCP> roman@sigma.UUCP (Bill Roman) writes:
about the "Myth" of millions of lives saved by the Hiro/Nag A-bombs.
>I recommend an article "A postwar myth: 500,000 U.S. lives saved" in
>the June/July 1986 issue of _Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scientists_
>to anyone who believes this.  Briefly summarized, it states that the
>"half a million boys on our side" that Truman is quoted as believing
>he saved with the atomic bombs was an after-the-fact rationalization.
>The military plans for the invasion estimated casualties on our side
>at roughly an order of magnitude less.
>
>The couple of hundred thousand who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
>were civilians; I don't think the bombings were particularly significant
>militarily.  They served more as a frightful demonstration.  I
>personally find the morality of such action totally abhorrent.
>-- 
>Bill Roman

All right, so you only saved 50,000 US lives.  How many Japanese lives were
saved as well?  
	The defense of the Japanese islands was/would have been the defense
equivalent of a jihad, a holy war.  The Japanese were training themselves with
bamboo spears since they couldn't get enough rifles.  Remember bushido, the
"way of the samurai"?  "There is no failure, only death or success."  I can
visualize a force of thousands of Japanese farmers charging an infantry
platoon with their spears and getting MOWED DOWN by machinegun fire.   The loss
of a hundred man platoon is peanuts compared to the four thousand Japanese it 
took to kill them.  (Or 40,000, or 400,000, depending on how good you think
the Marines were.)
						Pat Juola
						Hopkins Maths