CenterBHSFan;643599 wrote:Can you imagine being the President at the time to make that terrifying decision? I cannot imagine...

Nether can I...Truman must have had many sleepless nights. Ironically enough he was a Dem...ha ha! Of course he was a Dem from a different time and a different mindset...one I'm sure you wish they'd return to.

believer;643756 wrote:Nether can I...Truman must have had many sleepless nights. Ironically enough he was a Dem...ha ha! Of course he was a Dem from a different time and a different mindset...one I'm sure you wish they'd return to.

- No doubt about it! I would just be sick with it, myself.

- Amen!

CenterBHSFan;643599 wrote:Can you imagine being the President at the time to make that terrifying decision? I cannot imagine...

Considering the concept of the type of destruction at the time was still very limited to nearly everyone, expect those who saw the test explosion, it apparently wasn't that big a decision to Truman. His diary is pretty bland on the decision. Apparently to him it was just another weapon.

It was after the detonations and images that the full impact of the bombs hit people.
Actually shortly after the war, until the early 1950s, the weapons were usually thought of as any other type of weapon. It was only after further tests on the effects on Japan and other U.S. nuclear tests that the horror stepped in and created the taboo.

However, back to Ike. Oddly enough, even though Ike knew of the horrors, he knew the U.S. could not win a conventional war in Europe, and it was too costly. So, he and his SECDEF created the Massive Retaliation doctrine. Pretty much saying, any Soviet Union movement on Europe would involve the full strike of the U.S. onto the Soviet cities. A scary prospects that really limited the U.S. on options in a crisis.

Kennedy and McNamarra changed the policy to flexible response or what became MAD.
A great read on the early history of the Cold War is McGeorge Bundy book:
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
http://www.amazon.com/Danger-Survival-Mcgeorge-Bundy/dp/0679725687

ptown_trojans_1;644419 wrote:Kennedy and McNamarra changed the policy to flexible response or what became MAD.

While the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction for our younger OC posters who spent more time in condom application class than history class) may seem insane, I'm convinced this extreme policy helped avert WWIII.

believer;643756 wrote:Nether can I...Truman must have had many sleepless nights. Ironically enough he was a Dem...ha ha! Of course he was a Dem from a different time and a different mindset...one I'm sure you wish they'd return to.

Actually, Truman was interviewed many times about possible regrets...and he said that he never lost a night's sleerp over it.

believer;645042 wrote:While the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction for our younger OC posters who spent more time in condom application class than history class) may seem insane, I'm convinced this extreme policy helped avert WWIII.

I agree, though it had its moments of brinkmanship. But, once the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred and more common crisis management and cooperation occurred, things sort of leveled out. (1983 being the exception, but still.)

ptown_trojans_1;643107 wrote:Ugh, I'm not a fan of this debate really.
I have my own view, above, but is Japan was going to surrender, Truman didn't know about it. In Truman's diary and briefings, there is no mention of Japanese surrender. Plus, different time period on the death scale.

footwedge, the GW archive has the documents, and Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb provide some great info.

In the end, it is irrelevant and to me misses the point.
The most important aspect of the decision was it created what Thomas Schelling called, "The Nuclear Taboo." The effects were so great that other leaders did not want to cross that line. From Truman, to Ike, to Kennedy and Johnson onward, no President wanted to cross that line because they knew of the effects.

If there were no dropping of the bombs, that taboo may not have been established.

majorspark;643543 wrote:I agree. I mentioned this in a previous post above. A side effect of the dropping of the bombs revealed to the world their horror.

As an unenlightened civilian, that has always been my thought as well. If not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, somebody somewhere surely would've dropped a bomb, possibly on a major metropolitan area with far greater loss of life, and there may have been a retaliatory dropping of another bomb(s) by a nation not facing defeat like Japan was.

BTW, great reading through this thread. Thanks for the history lesson, majorspark & ptown.

jhay78;645342 wrote:As an unenlightened civilian, that has always been my thought as well. If not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, somebody somewhere surely would've dropped a bomb, possibly on a major metropolitan area with far greater loss of life, and there may have been a retaliatory dropping of another bomb(s) by a nation not facing defeat like Japan was.

BTW, great reading through this thread. Thanks for the history lesson, majorspark & ptown.

Just so that I understand you, PTowne, and Sparky here. We drop 2 atomic bombs on civilian cities with no military and no armaments....killing 200,000 people that had nothing to do with starting or fighting a war....and it's justified because the horror of it all will prevent future atomic or nuclear exchanges?

You people cannot be serious.

I don't know that anyone thought the bomb was capable of killing that many people. Just my thoughts, I can't say that with certainty.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't one of the high-ranking officials in the Pacific war propose an invasion of the Japanese mainland immediately after we had dropped multiple bombs (like more than 3)? I don't think he or many others at the time knew exactly what it would do and what the after-effects would be.

But they did know what the effects of a mainland invasion would be, and it would've been many more civilian deaths along with untold military casualties. And the 200,000 innocent civlians were victims of a brutal war started by nutjobs in Europe and their own nutjobs in their government, as well as victims of a brutally oppressive government (ask the innocent civilians of China in the 1930's) who provoked the US to war in the first place and refused to surrender after Hiroshima.

Footwedge;645661 wrote:Just so that I understand you, PTowne, and Sparky here. We drop 2 atomic bombs on civilian cities with no military and no armaments....killing 200,000 people that had nothing to do with starting or fighting a war....and it's justified because the horror of it all will prevent future atomic or nuclear exchanges?

You people cannot be serious.

It was justified because it saved the lives of hundreds of thousands more American and Japanese that would have been killed in the coming invasion. Possible preventing its future exchanges was just a positive side affect.

I would also not say that the citizens of these two cites were innocents that had nothing to do with fighting or starting a war. Did they support their government? Did they work in the factories that where supplying equipment and arms to the Japanese war machine?

The "Fat Man" weapon, containing a core of ~6.4 kg (14.1 lbs.) of plutonium-239, was dropped over the city's industrial valley. It exploded 43 seconds later at 469 meters (1,540 ft) above the ground exactly halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north.

Citizens that allow, enable, and directly participate by manufaturing the tools of the war machine, bare some responsibility for the actions of their government. The atrocious immoral acts of the Japanese and German governments during WWII don't leave their civilian masses with out much excuse. At least the Italians rose up. But the damage had been done and their nation paid a price.

majorspark;645742 wrote:Citizens that allow, enable, and directly participate by manufaturing the tools of the war machine, bare some responsibility for the actions of their government. The atrocious immoral acts of the Japanese and German governments during WWII don't leave their civilian masses with much excuse.

Right on target. Oh hey I'm sorry...I said target. Is this considered right-wing inflammatory rhetoric? If so, I apologize profusely for using an insensitive figure of speech in my response and it in no way should it be considered marching orders for any raving loner lunatic to shoot Democratic Congresswomen in the forehead.

Footwedge;645661 wrote:Just so that I understand you, PTowne, and Sparky here. We drop 2 atomic bombs on civilian cities with no military and no armaments....killing 200,000 people that had nothing to do with starting or fighting a war....and it's justified because the horror of it all will prevent future atomic or nuclear exchanges?

You people cannot be serious.

Yep.
Thomas Schelling: http://web.mit.edu/mitir/2007/spring/taboo.html
and http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/17374.html

and there were no such things as "civilians" during World War II. If you want to criticize the locations of the bombs, then you have to criticize the whole doctrine of the Army Air Corp and massive bombing.

believer;645770 wrote:Right on target. Oh hey I'm sorry...I said target. Is this considered right-wing inflammatory rhetoric? If so, I apologize profusely for using an insensitive figure of speech in my response and it in no way should it be considered marching orders for any raving loner lunatic to shoot Democratic Congresswomen in the forehead.

Awww shoot, believer, I thought you were serious at first!