Debate Topic

[Trainer Ave]

honestly I do believe that at the time it was necessary However, the US government did not realize the long-lasting effects of using a weapon so deadly. I firmly believe that US should in some way compensate for the additional unintentional damage and harm that Japan had to suffer through.

[BrainyLucario]

The U.S. kind of helped Japan by giving it a Democratic government. The bomb really was justified in my eyes. Think about it, The bomb ended the war, which would have gone on much longer had we not dropped it. A few civilian deaths would be better than millions of soldiers deaths. Someone was going to die either way. We made the best call.

[mikey]

the US actually dropped warning pamphlets over the city multiple times, but the emperor of Japan didn't believe they could make such a destructive weapon

-My dad, the smartest person I've ever met so

[Altissimo]

The U.S. kind of helped Japan by giving it a Democratic government.

elaborate por favor

edit: also for the record i don't believe that one civilian life is directly equal/proportional to one military life so i dont necessarily think "a few" civilians is really worth killing over "millions" of soldiers (debatable numbers)

[Sebastian]

edit: also for the record i don't believe that one civilian life is directly equal/proportional to one military life so i dont necessarily think "a few" civilians is really worth killing over "millions" of soldiers (debatable numbers)

Excellent point.

[Ruto]

The U.S. kind of helped Japan by giving it a Democratic government. The bomb really was justified in my eyes. Think about it, The bomb ended the war, which would have gone on much longer had we not dropped it. A few civilian deaths would be better than millions of soldiers deaths. Someone was going to die either way. We made the best call.

You're looking for the schoolwork help thread.

[mikey]

I think America also didn't quite realize the full destructive power of nuclear bombs, either.  When Einstein first did whatever with nuclear fission, he said he expected the blast to be able to destroy an entire harbor, not an entire city

[Ruto]

^Didn't they test the bomb before they used it?

The full text of Hiroshima is free: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

The U.S. kind of helped Japan by giving it a Democratic government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

I think that if Japan managed to modernize and go to war after a relatively short time, they didn't need any help with ANYTHING.

The bomb really was justified in my eyes. Think about it, The bomb ended the war, which would have gone on much longer had we not dropped it. A few civilian deaths would be better than millions of soldiers deaths. Someone was going to die either way. We made the best call.

What does "a few" mean? Might want to rephrase that because you sound like you think some people's lives are worth more.

If you need to cite me, use the link to this post, my username, and date accessed as 4/12/16.

[Bubbles]

Just wrote a research paper on this lol. Apparently there was a lot of pushing for the "saving lives" of the hundred of thousands of soldiers (both Jap and Am) that would be killed if the war continued and the us had to send additional troops over there. But the SU had agreed to also send in their own troops, and it was estimated that the war would really only last a few weeks after that and not nearly reach the formerly predicted death number. Japan was willing to surrender except for one little thing (allowing power to stay in their gov?? idr) but the us wanted a full and complete surrender so they could prevent their government from starting shit all over again.

Both sides make sense and after doing all the research I'm still neutral lol. The US thought they were mostly just at the time and had no way of predicting the long lasting effects, and it DID end the war. At least it hopefully set an example to stop something like that from happening again in the future

[FireArrow]

We could of just dropped one tbh, or dropped it somewhere unpopulated as a warning. Obviously pamphlets saying "surrender or face utter annihilation" without any details isn't gonna convince any one during war time, it's just flexing.

[Waddle Bro]

#flexxordie

[mikey]

completely irrelevant but my grandpa was in Nagasaki after the bomb dropped
he also wrote a book (I'm not advertising I promise) called Combat Marine at Seventeen.  It's actually pretty interesting
http://www.amazon.com/Combat-Marine-Seventeen-Jardine-Ph-D/dp/0989674509
(I swear I'm still not advertising)

[Bubbles]

We could of just dropped one tbh, or dropped it somewhere unpopulated as a warning. Obviously pamphlets saying "surrender or face utter annihilation" without any details isn't gonna convince any one during war time, it's just flexing.

Oh no definitely we should have kept it at one or away from actual innocents lol. I think it was illegal for citizens to pick up those pamphlets too, and even if they did who would believe it?? The final decision was prob just taking the easy way out/wanting to use the bombs they spent billions on because they couldn't bomb Germany anymore

[MaestroUGC]

The second bomb was dropped because the Emperor just didn't want to surrender the first time, and initially exasperated by early reports of the bombing being interpreted as rumor. It really just boiled down to becoming the first case of "nuclear chicken", and Japan lost. They had time to examine the destruction for themselves, and during the three-day period between bombings they gave four conditions of their surrender, but the Allies wanted them to surrender on their terms. It basically boiled down to the first example of "nuclear chicken", which Japan ultimately lost. Should Truman have waited a few extra days? Maybe, but it's likely Japan would've still resisted a full surrender. If they hadn't surrendered after the second bombing then the USSR would engage them directly, they formally declared war on Japan the same day of the Nagasaki bombing, which Japan was in no condition to face. They were already losing ground on the Pacific and could not afford taking on another front, nor the risk of future bombings by the U.S., which may have likely done irreparable damage to the global environment in the long-term, and likely completely obliterate the nation of Japan.

Whether or not we should've dropped any atomic bombs in the first place is a different debate. We had no way of knowing the actual long-term effects of doing so at the time; while we could create reasonable estimates of lasting damage and fallout, at the time we couldn't predict the long-term health hazards such a device would cause. The effects of radiation exposure were only just recently becoming understood by the scientific community at the time; the earliest known case of any sort of radiation poisoning was attributed to Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, who at the time misattributed his symptoms to ozone. The first well known case would've been the Radium Girls in 1917, from their exposure through the paints they used on radios. It normally takes decades of active study to understand long-term medical effects of anything, and nothing to the scale of the atomic bombing was even possible at the time; so the scientists at the time had a very limited understanding of the results outside of their pure destructive power.

Another factor to consider is that Truman had no idea the bombs were even being tested while serving as Vice President. When he became President after Roosevelt died, Truman was told two weeks after taking office that the bombs even existed, and were ready to use. Even Stalin knew about them before he did, thanks to his network of spies within the U.S. government. His first priority after taking office was overseeing the final surrender of Germany, and his advisors estimated about another year of fighting with Japan still lay ahead. Given the monumental costs another year of the war would cost; financially, spiritually, and the ever rising mortality rate, he had to weigh the potential loses on both sides of the war. You also need to realize that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were purely civilian cities; they were major military targets for either logistics or supplies of the Japanese military. While they both had relatively sizable populations at the time, they weren't regarded as dense metropolitan zones, nor any sort of center of Japanese infrastructure; Nagasaki itself was even bombed a few times during the war, as were other similar cities on both sides of the war. While the immense destruction they suffered from the bombings is seemingly high due to how concentrated it was, it was ultimately less than choosing other appealing targets like Tokyo, the capital, where the casualties of such an attack would've been eight times the total of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, or by continuing the war, which would've seen casualty rates increase due to the USSR joining the fight.

The argument about "lost cost" from making the bombs in the first place is also a frivolous one. Everybody spent unfathomable amounts of money on the war, developing new weapons to use on each other; and the U.S. itself spent billions on various projects that either never saw action or were just outright unfinished or abandoned by the end of WWII. In fact, dropping the bombs (or more specifically, the second one) saved the Allies billions they would've spent on the continuing war effort had Japan not have surrendered. Sure, the U.S. really wanted to use it on Germany first, but it was mostly because it was a race between the two to get a working bomb first. The decision to drop the second bomb wasn't an attempt to recoup investment costs, because they more or less did that once Germany surrendered, both in terms of actually money and the moral victory that resulted. The tactical decision behind using the atomic bombs was sound, the moral decision is less cut-and-dry. However, it was also a war, so nothing that was decided was ever going to be a perfect solution, so Truman banked on having less casualties overall when making the final choice.

[Altissimo]

[citation needed]