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Originally Posted by roachboy
jazz--i don't really follow your argument--on the one hand, it's tautological.
then you make some odd jump to talking about the ban on poison gas.
how do you get from a to b and what are you arguing?
as for the last question--you can set up ethical problems that concern the past without launching into the curious world of counterfactuals.
again, i am not sure what you're arguing.
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Sorry, I got distracted by something while writing that and didn't realize how disjointed it is.
Poison gas and nuclear weapons are similar in that they're indiscriminant killers that leave long-term effects on the survivors. Granted that they don't have the same long-term ecological effects, but prior generations showed restraint with tried and true WMD before 1945. My point is that the same actors restrained themselves from using gas prior to WWII as well as afterwards, but only after seeing its effects. No one really knew all of the problems associated with nuclear weaponry until well into the 1950's. Once those became clear, Nagasaki in particular started to be seen in a completely different light, one that wasn't available at the time.
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Originally Posted by Willravel
You're only listing the first of many overtures made by the Japanese. By the end, the only condition was that the Emperor was not killed. And it makes sense, as many of the Japanese believed that the Emperor was still holy.
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Which is exactly what I said. What I left out was that those that made the overture didn't have the power to negotiate or to make a peace at all. It's notable simply because it happened.
In the end, the condition wasn't that the emporer wouldn't be killed, it was that he would remain head of state, even as a puppet. And that what they got. There's a huge difference between the two.
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Japan's navy was essentially gone as was their air force. Maybe they would have swam to China?
As for the civilians, all they needed to do was keep the Emperor as a figurehead, which is actually what the US decided to do.
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The Japanese still had the ability to ferry their troops from China back to the Home Islands.
And the US didn't care any more about the Japanese civilians than the Japanese did. They all cared about the Japanese elite, who made policy.