Was Hiroshima an act of terrorism?

Penderyn said:
No - they were prepared for discussions, and the threat would almost certainly have done.
Click to expand...
Penderyn said:
There is plenty of evidence of Japanese readiness to negotiate, so I understand.
Click to expand...
Japan was free to surrender at any time. We'd have been happy to accept their surrender.


Penderyn said:
There seem to have been an awful lot of people on these military bases! The purpose, looking back, is pretty obvious.
Click to expand...
The purpose was to shock the Japanese government into surrendering, and to pave the way for invasion if they didn't surrender.
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
Japan was free to surrender at any time. We'd have been happy to accept their surrender.



The purpose was to shock the Japanese government into surrendering, and to pave the way for invasion if they didn't surrender.
Click to expand...

Everyone was free to surrender to Hitler at any time too. Don't be bloody silly: while you are losing but can still fight you negotiate. Unconditional surrender means you're buggered. You do it when great masses of your civilians are being massacred.
 
Penderyn said:
Everyone was free to surrender to Hitler at any time too. Don't be bloody silly: while you are losing but can still fight you negotiate. Unconditional surrender means you're buggered. You do it when great masses of your civilians are being massacred.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure what there was to negotiate, but that's neither here nor there.

The fact remains: When we dropped both A-bombs, we had not received any surrender offers from Japan. Japan was also not in any negotiations with us.
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
Hiroshima was a huge military port with tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers awaiting deployment to resist our invasion of Kyushu.

Hiroshima was also the military headquarters in charge of repelling our invasion of Kyushu.

The second A-bomb was intended for Kokura Arsenal, a massive (4100 feet by 2000 feet) arms production complex. Things went wrong with that raid, but the A-bomb still took out the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works.



That's unlikely. Which law of war would be violated?

Someone doing such a thing would have committed an act of nuclear war against the United States military however.

The response would be swift and not to their liking. And it probably wouldn't involve war crimes tribunals.
Click to expand...

I believe there is something about proportionality. If the target is a large building a hydro bomb is overkill, like by a million civilians.
 
Micawber said:
I believe there is something about proportionality. If the target is a large building a hydro bomb is overkill, like by a million civilians.
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that hydrogen bombs come in varying sizes from 40 kilotons to 1 gigaton.

If an enemy were waging war against the US, how would they destroy the Pentagon without the use of nuclear weapons?
 
Micawber said:
I believe there is something about proportionality. If the target is a large building a hydro bomb is overkill, like by a million civilians.
Click to expand...
Proportionality in war just keeps the war going. An overwhelming response shows the enemy that further resistance is futile.
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
Keep in mind that hydrogen bombs come in varying sizes from 40 kilotons to 1 gigaton.

If an enemy were waging war against the US, how would they destroy the Pentagon without the use of nuclear weapons?
Click to expand...

Kinetic. You could target that. It's sort of isolated. It's on the VA side of the potomac I recall. Between Crystal shitty, Roselyn (sp?), key bridge
and the beltway.
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
Yes, but the city was too long and thin to effectively demonstrate the power of the A-bombs. Some of the bomb's power was wasted on empty countryside. Plus the city is divided by a ridge that helps shield one part of the city from an explosion over the other part. The Targeting Committee protested the late orders to include Nagasaki on the target list, but they were overruled. Flattening Kokura Arsenal would have been a much more dramatic example of the power of the A-bombs.

Unfortunately we conducted a large conventional raid at Yawata just a few miles upwind of Kokura Arsenal the day before the second A-bomb mission, and the smoke from this raid prevented our bomber from getting a visual fix on Kokura Arsenal.

Additionally, Bockscar had a bad fuel pump that prevented the plane from using a lot of its fuel (but it still had to carry the weight of this fuel). Instead of taking the time to fix the pump or change to a different plane, we decided to launch the mission with a crippled plane. This gave the crew very little time to linger over Japan before running out of fuel.

Had we not made these two errors, it is likely that Kokura Arsenal would have been flattened, and the results of the second A-bomb would have been much more dramatic and shocking to the Japanese government.

Another error was not reserving Yokohama for the A-bombs. In addition to its industrial area being much more geometrically suited for a circular blast area, as it is a suburb of Tokyo the mushroom cloud would have been visible from the Imperial Palace. Yokohama should have been the alternate and not Nagasaki.
Click to expand...
I agree that Nagasaki wasn't the best target but it was good enough to get the job done.
 
Micawber said:
Kinetic. You could target that. It's sort of isolated. It's on the VA side of the potomac I recall. Between Crystal shitty, Roselyn (sp?), key bridge
and the beltway.
Click to expand...
It's a very large and very durable building. Some years back a fully-fueled passenger jet crashed into it at high speed. The damage was contained and then repaired.
 
I venture that the time will come when America apologizes to the Japanese for the terrorist attacks upon two major civilian population centers and pays reparations for the damage and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered by the devil's bombs. Those responsible should be stricken from any honorable references to American bravery, gallantry or indeed humanity. Cowards all. Hell-bound from the point of decision- and good riddance.
 
moon said:
I venture that the time will come when America apologizes to the Japanese for the terrorist attacks upon two major civilian population centers and pays reparations for the damage and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered by the devil's bombs. Those responsible should be stricken from any honorable references to American bravery, gallantry or indeed humanity. Cowards all. Hell-bound from the point of decision- and good riddance.
Click to expand...
You are wrong. America will never apologize. Nor will we ever pay reparations. We never did anything wrong. The A-bombs were dropped on military targets so were neither terrorism nor murder.

But I'm curious if you think Japan will ever apologize or pay reparations to the US and all the rest of their victims?
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
It's a very large and very durable building. Some years back a fully-fueled passenger jet crashed into it at high speed. The damage was contained and then repaired.
Click to expand...

This is turning into a digression. But if jets were ideal weapons suffice it to say we'd be using those instead on bombs.
 
Anvil Kasseri said:
You are wrong. America will never apologize. Nor will we ever pay reparations.
Click to expand...

Ah- your pseudo-patriotism is all about the Benjamins. There had to be a motive- ' cause truth and reason haven't figured in your degenerate trollshit, you Nazi tool.


Dr+Strangelove+2.jpg
 
moon said:
I venture that the time will come when America apologizes to the Japanese for the terrorist attacks upon two major civilian population centers and pays reparations for the damage and the hundreds of thousands of innocent people murdered by the devil's bombs. Those responsible should be stricken from any honorable references to American bravery, gallantry or indeed humanity. Cowards all. Hell-bound from the point of decision- and good riddance.
Click to expand...
Right after they apologized for Peal Harbor and pay us for forcing into a very expensive war with them. And while they are at it they could pay the families reparations for the downed pilots the executed then canalized their livers.
 
Micawber said:
This is turning into a digression. But if jets were ideal weapons suffice it to say we'd be using those instead on bombs.
Click to expand...
Destroying the Pentagon with conventional bombs would be quite an undertaking. No war crimes tribunal would consider nuking the Pentagon to be disproportionate in the course of a nuclear war.

The US military would nuke the aggressor back of course. But there would be no war crimes prosecutions for such an obvious act of war.

You should zoom in on Moscow and Leningrad on this map of our 1956 nuclear war plan:
https://futureoflife.org/background/us-nuclear-targets/
 
ExpressLane said:
Proportionality in war just keeps the war going. An overwhelming response shows the enemy that further resistance is futile.
Click to expand...

Agreed here. If we go to war, go to win and we win with overwhelming force. It saves lives all around, but most importantly it saves American lives.

War should always be a last resort, but that resort is used, immediately go for the win.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top