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Originally Posted by Coppertop
Didn't answer the question. Because of course we all know the answer.
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I'll go out on a limb and say, it's not. Doubtless that it saved more lives than it killed. One million Japanese lives in my opinion is a conservative estimate, because the psychological makeup of the Japanese people is highly based on honor and I would say that 70% of them would have fought to the death in the event of an invasion from the south by the U.S. and an invasion from the north by the USSR, rather than live under the rule of "gaijin", so we convinced 'em that we're not shittin around and the leaders caved. The conditions of surrender by the Japanese before the bombs were dropped still allowed Tojo to influence the Emperor and would have left the military intact. After the bomb is a different story, because they finally gave in to total surrender, and now Japan is the major tech center of the world. Go figure. Most of the Japanese don't even talk about WWII, because they see it as their ancestors shaming them, even their textbooks have a very passing reference to WWII, and the Japanese Americans that were interred won't accept any sort of "reparations" for their unfortunate and illegal imprisonment, because they see it as blood money resulting from being shamed by their brethren/ancestors. However, we can debate this time and time again, going back and forth about whether it was the right decision, with you bringing up the quote by Ike about the dropping of the bombs being necessary, etc. etc. When in fact, it's totally pointless to do so, because it's history, I really debated even posting the above. We're not gonna change anything by arguing about something that already happened. These are my final words on the topic of the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I will say however that the rhetoric being issued by the Iranian officials is despairingly similar to that of Nationalist Japan and its allies. If Israel goes in and destroys all of their nuclear plants and sends Mossad teams in to destroy nuclear weapons, I will be totally fine with it, because the possesion of nukes by Iran is a dangerous precept in the MidEast, and I would prefer it if Israel handled it like the big boys they are, rather than us babying them all the time.