Earl (08-10-2020)
Earl (08-10-2020)
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Why do idiots say the US were out of bombs? They had another ready to go after Nagasaki and another six, in the pipeline, to be used in September and October!
I still think that the primary motivation in using nuclear weapons, especially the plutonium bomb, was to stop Stalin from invading Hokkaido. The Russians never gave anything back unless forced to, witness Kaliningrad and Eastern Karelia. I don't think the Allies could have allowed that to happen and they'd either confront the Russians or used nuclear weapons on them as well. Of course Truman wasn't to know that Klaus Fuchs had given the Russians the know how on making nuclear bombs anyway as they amply demonstrated in 1947.
Last edited by cancel2 2022; 08-09-2020 at 09:06 PM.
Nomad (08-10-2020)
Yes, I think the bombing was immoral and inhumane, but plausibly also strategically warranted. It is possible to believe both things at the same time.
Few Americans realize that the Soviet Army, fresh off their destruction of the Japanese Kwangtung Army in Manchuria, had battle plans to invade and occupy the northern Japanese home island of Hokkaido. That is one reason Truman was keen to coerce Japan into immediate surrender and compel them to submit to American military occupation.
There is no question in my mind that the Soviets would have set up a communist client state in a "People's Republic of Hokkaido", and giving the USSR a key strategic foothold in the north Pacific.
Anvil Kasseri (08-09-2020)
There were already implosion assemblies waiting on Tinian. All they needed were fissile cores to put in them.
The next fissile core was on its way out the door at Los Alamos on August 11 (for a planned bombing date of August 17-18) when they held back the shipment to give Japan some breathing room since they had finally started talking surrender. It made it as far as the Los Alamos parking lot before being recalled.
Doc Dutch (08-09-2020)
Hiroshima and Kokura Arsenal were deliberately spared from conventional bombing so that the A-bombs would have targets large enough to convey to the Japanese government how powerful they were.
It was a big mistake not to spare Yokohama from conventional bombing as well. It would have been a much better alternate than Nagasaki.
Nagasaki was spared from conventional bombing because it was hard to pinpoint using the radar guidance that was used by the large incendiary raids.
They would have kept trying until Kokura Arsenal was destroyed, but then they would have started saving the A-bombs to use all at once to clear away concentrations of Japanese troops in front of our invasion.
Actually the US government was considering offering the Soviets all of Hokkaido and a portion of Honshu as an enticement for convincing the Soviets to invade Hokkaido at the same time that we invaded Kyushu.
There were also a lot of nervous feelings about how bad an invasion would be even with a bunch of A-bombs clearing the way in front of our troops.
We didn't target civilians. The A-bombs were dropped on military targets.
We didn't. We won't.
Yes. Hiroshima was Japan's primary military port. There were tens of thousands of soldiers there awaiting deployment to resist our invasion.
Hiroshima was also the military headquarters in charge of repelling our invasion.
Earl (08-10-2020)
That is incorrect. The point was to make Japan surrender.
They were saved as targets.
Hiroshima was not so much a manufacturing center as it was a gigantic military base.
It is true that it was saved as a target, as was Kokura Arsenal. This allowed us to shock Japan's government with the power of the A-bombs and potentially intimidate them into surrender.
We should have saved Yokohama for the A-bombs as well. It would have made a much better alternate than Nagasaki did.
Earl (08-10-2020)
Earl (08-10-2020)
The Russians took the low hanging fruit by capturing Sakhalin island and the Kurils...which they still possess.
While the Soviets were thought to be a problem, if they were that big of a problem perhaps Truman should have nuke them while he had the chance. As it was, he passed. There's more to this story than most people here are discussing.
"Hatred is a failure of imagination" - Graham Greene, "The Power and the Glory"
Nomad (08-10-2020)
Nuking Russia in 1945 would have been stupid, and would forever have tarnished the image of the United States as a reliable ally.
Whatever crimes Stalin perpetrated on his people, the USSR lived up to its obligations as our ally against the Axis powers. They promised to join us in attacking Japan as soon as Nazi Germany was defeated, and they not only lived up to their end of the bargain, but they destroyed the largest remaining Japanese Army formation, the Kwangtung Army.
I do not think a Soviet occupation of Hokkaido would have been a good outcome. And for that reason we have to admire the vision of FDR and Truman for a military occupation of Japan and the dismantling of their military dictatorship and warrior ethos.
Nomad (08-10-2020)
Nope. The behind the scenes deal was already nearly finished. Japan was done, as Ike and Leahy said. But what do they know compared to you? We could have leveled those cities like we did the others and not used nukes. We owned the skies. We firebombed many. many cities and in some cities, killed more than the Abomb could have. It was a show of strength and a scientific experiment. They spent over a trillion dollars making those 2 bombs and were not going to skip seeing what they could do.
I know you want to believe that stuff, but it just isn't true. It is what the victor says when it is over. They write the history. That is why we say we did not torture, but we did. We say we did not gun down unarmed citizens and children, but we did.
Earl (08-10-2020)
cancel2 2022 (08-10-2020)
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