Atomic attacks side-discussion (split from OBL thread)

[Bakustra]

They weren't celebrating the random deaths of civilians- they were celebrating a blow against the empire that causes much of the misery in their daily lives, which bombs them and props up their repressive governments, with unfortunate collateral damage, much like we celebrate fighting terrorists and victory over terrorists despite the unfortunate collateral damage of over 2 million people. Kinda like how Americans also cheerlead the targeted deaths of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as essential to victory over Japan, as well.

I'm calling you out for this analogy. It is a false one.

Collateral damage (NOT deliberate war crimes) during war in Afghanistan: accidental killing of noncombatants in pursuit of a declared military goal.

Destruction of Hiroshima: the city itself had many military targets that were relevant in the total war situation that presented itself at the end of WWII. The deaths in the civilian population may have been the unspoken goal, but the goal of THAT was the military objective of forcing Japan to surrender.

Destruction of the Twin Towers: kill 3000-odd civilians in order to...kill 3000-odd civilians. The point was clearly to kill as many as possible with the method of attack that was chosen and the goal of those deaths was to terrorize the U.S. population. There is no plausible progression or mechanism to get from there to "dismantling the American Empire." I am unconvinced that al-Qaeda has any rational strategic goals.

The point I'm getting at is, saying "Fuck you, America" (which is not any strategic goal except for propaganda) is not a valid justification for mass killing.

NOTE: I do not make this post to defend American methods, tactical, operational, or strategic, in Afghanistan. Nor do I make this post to defend the strategic bombing campaign in World War II. I am merely explaining why I think this analogy is a false one. "But Anguirus," you cry, "what if al-Qaeda had only targeted the White House and the Pentagon?" Then, says I, you would have a much stronger case that al-Qaeda wages war, not terror. The boundaries are blurry, but I have always argued that they exist.

Unfortunately for you, I was talking about the average person in the Middle East, not al-Qaeda. But if the goal was to terrorize, then the killing of civilians is as much collateral for 9/11 as it was for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the greater goal required mass-murder either way. They also didn't actually target for as many casualties as they could, they targeted symbols of American wealth and might, rather than going for killing as many people as possible.

[Terralthra]

Pretty much all of these apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so sad that you've swallowed the lies we tell ourselves for "ego me absolvo". The US targeted them for a psychological blow to Japan, they dropped the bombs knowing full well that civilians would get killed, and indeed targeted civilians by refusing to drop leaflets over the cities, unlike in other bombings of Japanese cities- really, the only difference is that we consider ourselves to be justified and Bin Laden not to be justified. After all, he just wanted to damage an American symbol of power and might, just like we wanted to get Japan to surrender.

If you're going to be flagrantly dishonest about something, try to make it something a little more difficult to trivially disprove.

The leaflets dropped before "other bombings of Japanese cities" included Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the list of targets, and further leaflets specifically citing the atomic bomb were dropped on cities across Japan, including Nagasaki, 3 days before the second bomb was dropped.

Civilians in Hiroshima were warned that their city might be a target. Civilians in Nagasaki were warned it might be a target, and were further warned about the power of the atomic bomb. Are you proposing that the leaflets should have been more specific? We should've dropped leaflets telling the civilians in the (industrialized, military-value-possessing) cities warning them that they were about to be attacked specifically? Is your expectation of all military action so completely unrealistic, that you expect an attack plan to be public to the enemy citizenry days in advance?

[Bakustra]

The better strawman is the inherent presumption in the argument against me that Westphalian nation-states based on linguistic and ethnic characteristics are the appropriate means of organizing humanity and fundamentally moral, rather than basically racist in conception.

Moral or not, damned better than the barbarity that existed beforehand. It is quite easy for you, a pampered first world citizen, to go all feudal, but it is completely sociopathic considering that the wars that existed before that treaty wiped out a third of all Germans. Do you really want to make that argument?

No, I was merely pointing out the fallaciousness of any argument claiming the Westphalian system was good for its own sake. As was said in the argument with Bakustra some weeks ago, the success of systems must be judged by actual statistical outcome, not by some idealized system of morality. You can say the Westphalian system is better and it is doubtless statistically true, but it's not good for it's own sake and there's no way you can say that Arabs not being inclined to it is inherently condemnatory of them or racist. Regardless, it requires the consent of the states in it to play by the rules. Osama did not consent to play by those rules and had the resources to be a de facto state actor--with more power and territory arguably under his control than the joke "government" of Somalia we pretend is a national state has, or even some tiny and stable places accorded nation state status like Liechtenstein. We annihilated him to preserve the system of state organization from an attempt to reassert a millet-based or confessional organization of society. That's truly what the War is about--preserving the world state-order of government.

There are several things wrong with this statement. First of all, you ignore the point that the Muslim world does operate, and even Arabs (you're also confusing Arabs with Muslims, but I guess that's just part of the cycle of authoritarianism you move along) behave as if they are under the idea of states and nation-states. The whole idea of a Kurdistan is that of a nation-state. Pakistan is constructed along the idea of a multinational state. The majority of Arabs, and the majority of Muslims, operate under the state system. Your assumption fails to be descriptive. You also fail to explain how you came to the conclusion that bin Laden operates outside the state system either, nor why this is reasonable. Finally, you pretend that calling Muslims medieval is a neutral statement within Western, and especially American, society.

Secondly, you need to justify Usama ibn Laden as having the resources you claim. Considering that the extent of al-Qaeda or even its existence as an organized group beyond bin Laden's personal circle is still in doubt, this would involve showing that the extent of al-Qaeda and its resources are as great as you say. Good luck!

Thirdly, when you assert that the "War on Terror" is some sort of war on medievalism, you are asserting that this is recognized generally. But if that is the case for the elite, because it is certainly not the case for the general populace, and therefore requires a grand conspiracy to disguise the truth from the public, and the endorsement of such by you. But if this is just your psycho opinions, then you shouldn't use such language as to imply that this is generally agreed upon.

Fourthly, since you assert that system evaluation must be divorced from moral concerns (ps if you are going to do this you shouldn't deny being a sociopath and just embrace your antisocial personality disorder) and suggesting that statistical success be used instead, I am forced to conclude that this refers to the goals of the system. I'll use the goals of the designer as an example. So we should evaluate the Holocaust on how many Jews, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, mentally disabled, physically disabled, Communists, and pacifists it killed? Should we evaluate American policies towards the native populations of the Americas as successful because they managed to reduce the native populations to small, disenfranchised groups in the least valuable parts of the nation?

Oh, but you weren't thinking about that, were you? You were just coming up with a) some way within the currently right-wing viewpoints you hold to insult me, coming up with a roundabout ways of saying "bleeding-heart hippie", and b) some way to respond to Thanas pointing out your phony nostalgia requires glasses so rosy they may well be opaque. Well, congratulations. You have managed to produce a sociopathic approach to society! Your system cannot say whether a system is good or bad, because it cannot evaluate goals. No doubt you will produce some sort of appeal to universalist utilitarianism or something to introduce morality while pretending you're not! Or maybe you'll redefine "system"- I have very little experience with this train ride.

So if your enemy is sinking to a low level, you are absolutely justified to sink to that level as well? What ideals are you defending then?

The land where mountains plunge so beautifully to the sea that it makes me cry to look upon their visage and know I was born there. That is the "ideal" I would defend.

That's not an ideal. That's just a piece of land. Ideals are generally a bit more abstract. This also literally has nothing to do with the War on Terror. Your precious land is not threatened and likely never will be threatened- unless you've adopted paranoid fantasies about "Islamization".

Pretty much all of these apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so sad that you've swallowed the lies we tell ourselves for "ego me absolvo". The US targeted them for a psychological blow to Japan, they dropped the bombs knowing full well that civilians would get killed, and indeed targeted civilians by refusing to drop leaflets over the cities, unlike in other bombings of Japanese cities- really, the only difference is that we consider ourselves to be justified and Bin Laden not to be justified. After all, he just wanted to damage an American symbol of power and might, just like we wanted to get Japan to surrender.

If you're going to be flagrantly dishonest about something, try to make it something a little more difficult to trivially disprove.

The leaflets dropped before "other bombings of Japanese cities" included Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the list of targets, and further leaflets specifically citing the atomic bomb were dropped on cities across Japan, including Nagasaki, 3 days before the second bomb was dropped.

Civilians in Hiroshima were warned that their city might be a target. Civilians in Nagasaki were warned it might be a target, and were further warned about the power of the atomic bomb. Are you proposing that the leaflets should have been more specific? We should've dropped leaflets telling the civilians in the (industrialized, military-value-possessing) cities warning them that they were about to be attacked specifically? Is your expectation of all military action so completely unrealistic, that you expect an attack plan to be public to the enemy citizenry days in advance?

Yes, we should have, if we wanted to avoid the charge that we were unconcerned about civilian casualties! Or we could admit that we, or at least the American leadership, don't give a fuck how many people we kill when we bomb things unless somebody complains. We had a list of targets, and we could have distributed this list if we wanted people to really evacuate, but we didn't. We wanted to kill people and terrorize Japan into surrender. Oh no! Looks like we might have to cede some moral high ground!!

Normally, I'd thank you for correcting me, but since it's clear from your hostility that you're personally offended by the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be considered terrorizing (or God forbid, terrorist) actions, or indeed apparently anything other than sweetness and light from the USAAF, I have a suggestion for you. Go to Hiroshima, to the memorial, and preach about how it was totally justified until the police drag you away and you get to experience the Japanese justice system. See how many people you can convince. Maybe distribute copies of the leaflets as evidence. Burn copies of Grave of the Fireflies. Put your money where your mouth is.

But if you're just this much of an asshole all of the time, there's no punishment greater than being you and going through life as you, so I feel sorry for you.

So it seems that the problem is how do you define an organization that has no effective 'country' or 'people', yet has openly, as a military organization, and to a man, declared war on a group of people that do have a country and uses non traditional methods to carry out it's attacks?

You mean like the Symbionese Liberation Army?

[Terralthra]

Pretty much all of these apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so sad that you've swallowed the lies we tell ourselves for "ego me absolvo". The US targeted them for a psychological blow to Japan, they dropped the bombs knowing full well that civilians would get killed, and indeed targeted civilians by refusing to drop leaflets over the cities, unlike in other bombings of Japanese cities- really, the only difference is that we consider ourselves to be justified and Bin Laden not to be justified. After all, he just wanted to damage an American symbol of power and might, just like we wanted to get Japan to surrender.

If you're going to be flagrantly dishonest about something, try to make it something a little more difficult to trivially disprove.

The leaflets dropped before "other bombings of Japanese cities" included Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the list of targets, and further leaflets specifically citing the atomic bomb were dropped on cities across Japan, including Nagasaki, 3 days before the second bomb was dropped.

Civilians in Hiroshima were warned that their city might be a target. Civilians in Nagasaki were warned it might be a target, and were further warned about the power of the atomic bomb. Are you proposing that the leaflets should have been more specific? We should've dropped leaflets telling the civilians in the (industrialized, military-value-possessing) cities warning them that they were about to be attacked specifically? Is your expectation of all military action so completely unrealistic, that you expect an attack plan to be public to the enemy citizenry days in advance?

Yes, we should have, if we wanted to avoid the charge that we were unconcerned about civilian casualties! Or we could admit that we, or at least the American leadership, don't give a fuck how many people we kill when we bomb things unless somebody complains. We had a list of targets, and we could have distributed this list if we wanted people to really evacuate, but we didn't. We wanted to kill people and terrorize Japan into surrender. Oh no! Looks like we might have to cede some moral high ground!!

Did you even read the link? We did distribute a list of targets. Leaflets dropped had a list of cities, including both cities targeted by nuclear weapons.

Normally, I'd thank you for correcting me, but since it's clear from your hostility that you're personally offended by the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be considered terrorizing (or God forbid, terrorist) actions, or indeed apparently anything other than sweetness and light from the USAAF, I have a suggestion for you. Go to Hiroshima, to the memorial, and preach about how it was totally justified until the police drag you away and you get to experience the Japanese justice system. See how many people you can convince. Maybe distribute copies of the leaflets as evidence. Burn copies of Grave of the Fireflies. Put your money where your mouth is.

I count at least two fallacies here, both appeal to intent and strawman. Is this normally the level of discourse you display? Lie, ignore evidence when presented, bluster, and write entire paragraphs devoid of rational argument?

[Bakustra]

Did you even read the link? We did distribute a list of targets. Leaflets dropped had a list of cities, including both cities targeted by nuclear weapons.

Did it say "Hiroshima, followed by x, followed by y, etc. are the targets, ranked in order of the chance we will destroy them?" It did not. Neither did the second set of leaflets provide a ranked list of targets. Instead, they provided a broad sample of targets when the US government had a ranked list of targets by that point, watering down any sort of humanitarian intent, since if heeded they would have created mass evacuations rather than evacuations of the actual targets. I guess at that point we're still at trading the lives of hundreds of thousands for expediency. I guess you haven't really contradicted this, have you? Nor have you addressed anything else I've said.

Normally, I'd thank you for correcting me, but since it's clear from your hostility that you're personally offended by the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be considered terrorizing (or God forbid, terrorist) actions, or indeed apparently anything other than sweetness and light from the USAAF, I have a suggestion for you. Go to Hiroshima, to the memorial, and preach about how it was totally justified until the police drag you away and you get to experience the Japanese justice system. See how many people you can convince. Maybe distribute copies of the leaflets as evidence. Burn copies of Grave of the Fireflies. Put your money where your mouth is.

I count at least two fallacies here, both appeal to intent and strawman. Is this normally the level of discourse you display? Lie, ignore evidence when presented, bluster, and write entire paragraphs devoid of rational argument?

Oh, I see that you're just pedantic. See, when people start masturbating to the nuclear destruction of two entire cities, which they do, by insisting that it was justified, and in hordes, they are often personally offended by any contrary or hints of any contrary sentiments. So I leapt to the conclusion that by immediately jumping in with hostile responses, you were personally offended like so many people are by this sort of suggestion. So I cut loose a little. I'd apologize for this, but I frankly doubt that you have the social graces to accept it- you seem very much like a robot programmed for hostility. So let me ask you, is this how you talk to people ordinarily? Oh, whoops, that's a fallacy right there.

[Anguirus]

Unfortunately for you, I was talking about the average person in the Middle East, not al-Qaeda.

How is that relevant? A man who cheers in the street because of a blow struck against American civilians implicitly supports al-Qaeda, who struck that blow.

But if the goal was to terrorize,

This is a PROPAGANDA goal, insomuch as it is defensible AT ALL.

Note that you evaded my point, that no human being with an ounce of brains or rationality would predict that 9/11 would demoralize the American population to such an extent as to cause a ceding of our Middle Eastern interests.

then the killing of civilians is as much collateral for 9/11 as it was for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the greater goal required mass-murder either way.

It's not collateral, it is the point of the exercise. Strategic bombing blurs the line, but a sneak attack on an entirely civilian target cheerfully walks over it. Then releasing a gloating video pisses on it.

The point of Hiroshima was not to terrify Japanese citizens into fearing for their lives ad infinitum. It was to end a war that was itself a vortex of human suffering, and to end it in weeks, perhaps months. (Of course, it turned out ot be more like days.)

They also didn't actually target for as many casualties as they could, they targeted symbols of American wealth and might, rather than going for killing as many people as possible.

I'm curious what better targets present themselves as far as civilian casualties, considering the choice of weapon and the major details of the operation. You also present them as orthogonal goals, rather than considering that the attack may have been planned to get a good number of casualties, if not the theoretical maximum, while also hitting that symbol.

Not that it's relevant, as destroying a given big building, whether or not there are people in it, is still a propaganda goal. You have yet to explain to me why saying "Fuck you, America" justifies killing 3000 people.

Oh, wait, but it's even worse for you. The attack was timed to maximize casualties. Even assuming that their pilots couldn't fly at night, I find it hard to believe there weren't suitable flights for attacking the towers at, say, dinner time.

I also can't help but notice Terralthra fucking destroying you about the leaflets. Note the following passage from his well-chosen link: "An American-controlled radio station on Saipan was broadcasting a similar message to the Japanese people every 15 minutes." Also note that the Americans had a much more delicate series of objectives to balance during the strategic bombing campaign (which I am again not defending except to note that it was somewhat more an exercise of war than it was of terror...small comfort to the dead, but that's not the argument) than al-Qaeda did on 9/11. Once the courses were locked in and it was too late for an interception by American fighter jets, a radio broadcast (say, 15 minutes before?) would have saved many lives at relatively minimal effort and risk (compared to informing the Japanese government where to position their antiaircraft units). And they still would have brought the buildings down, as you foolishly assume was the objective. It is very telling how even at the absolute height of ferocity and barbarism of World War II, elements of the US war machine were trying to save Japanese lives as their full-time job. And once the war ended, it became everybody's full-time job as they plunged into rebuilding the country.

[Alyeska]

Bakustra, you're a fucking moron if you think a conventional campaign was justified. As horrible as the nuclear bombs were in Japan, they saved lives. Japan was prepared to go down fighting to the very last man. Civilians were encouraged to die. They gave fucking icepicks to school children to use to stab US soldiers.

Do you even understand how many people would have died in a conventional war with Japan having such a mind set?

[Havok]

The Japanese would have Casinos in the US if you get my drift.

[Shroom Man 777]

On a related note, what is the legality of Von Stauffenberg's attempted attack on Adolf Hitler in the 20 July plot?

[K. A. Pital]

The WTC is an "entirely civilian target"? Sorry, but if factories are industrial targets that can be bombed during strategic bombing campaings, office critter skyscrapers with company headquarters are likewise acceptable targets for such campaigns. Especially if your means are limited.

After all, hitting a stock exchange building would cause economic chaos, which is one of the objectives in strategic warfare. It is perfectly acceptable when we are talking about total war and saying that strategic bombing is perfectly justified. Maximizing casualties is also acceptable in attacks against economic targets because when you do so, you destroy qualified workforce which is not easily replenished.

Sure, the attack on the WTC is less obvious as a military target compared to, say, the Pentagon, which was also attacked, but a case can be made if you were arguing from total war. After all, the WTC is not a kindergarten, right?

The attack was timed to maximize casualties.

Common in strategic bombing as well. You'd want to hit the factory when people are still there, that way you kill qualified workers. Well, or something like that.

Do you even understand how many people would have died in a conventional war with Japan having such a mind set?

Alternatively, the US could have just avoided invading Japan, leaving it in a blockade to collapse on itself. Sure, it would turn the remains of Imperial Japan into a crippled nation. Perhaps you could argue that this or that would be a better outcome in the long run and try and weigh it against the lives lost.

To me this discussion seems a pointless waste of time. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak. If Al-Quaeda controlled a superpower, it would obviously use more conventional weapons if it decided to go to war with America. Cruise missiles, tanks, ICBMs. They would attack industrial targets to cripple America and then use conventional forces to occupy the nation. They don't have these resources, so terrorism remains the only option.

Considering how quickly any small nation that would openly declare war against the Western powers (or at least do something they don't like, see Nasser) will get invaded and kicked the shit out, resorting to terrorism is more than natural. Much like other types of nationalist and separatist movements (IRA, Chechen terrorists, etc.) Al-Quaeda resorts to terrorist attacks out of weakness.

One can argue that these attacks are entirely illegitimate because they break the laws of war, but the reality is such that weak groups that have no chance in a formal war can be more than successful with terrorism; simply calling it "illegitimate" will not make terrorism vanish, because terrorism is produced by fundamental factors, and those factors can't be changed by killing people and capturing "masterminds" somewhere in remote regions. These factors are backwardness, lack of education, poverty and suffering around people, religious indocrination. Osama bin Laden did not produce these factors, he was merely a product of his surrounding. The existence defines the mind, and that is a final judgement.

Osama's assassination achieved much-needed revenge for his terrorist act, but outside of that, it is just another meaningless step in a never-ending "war" without any clear goals in sight.

[NecronLord]

On a related note, what is the legality of Von Stauffenberg's attempted attack on Adolf Hitler in the 20 July plot?

A domestic matter, and subject to the domestic law of the Hitler-Fascist regime.

Which is why people should not confuse International Law with morality.

[Broomstick]

Did you even read the link? We did distribute a list of targets. Leaflets dropped had a list of cities, including both cities targeted by nuclear weapons.

Did it say "Hiroshima, followed by x, followed by y, etc. are the targets, ranked in order of the chance we will destroy them?" It did not. Neither did the second set of leaflets provide a ranked list of targets. Instead, they provided a broad sample of targets when the US government had a ranked list of targets by that point, watering down any sort of humanitarian intent, since if heeded they would have created mass evacuations rather than evacuations of the actual targets. I guess at that point we're still at trading the lives of hundreds of thousands for expediency. I guess you haven't really contradicted this, have you? Nor have you addressed anything else I've said.

Hey, fuckhead – stop moving the goalposts. First, you say we didn't distribute leaflets warning the public, when actually we did. Then you bitch that oh, no – it has to be a ranked list of cities.

Fact is, even with a “ranked system” of targets, until the day of an attack even the military wasn't sure which city would actually be hit because weather was a factor. Nagasaki actually was NOT the preferred target on August 9, Kokura was. It was not until they actually over Kokura, which had gone from clear to 70% cloud cover, that they abandoned that target and flew on to Nagasaki. So, dropping leaflets saying “we're targeting Kokura first” would, in fact, have been misleading. The cities listed were targets, and it is entirely plausible that the “target order” in effect at the time of printing would have been significantly altered by the day of the attack. Hell, the target order on August 9 changed while the bomber was in flight!

All this focus on the atomic bombs, when in fact ordinary, conventional incendiaries killed more people on just the night of March 9-10 in Tokyo than the Nagasaki bomb killed in total, and perhaps more than the Hiroshima bomb did (casualty figures for all of the above are not exact and usually given in ranges of numbers). But somehow the atomic bombings are inherently more horrific or something, I guess. The atomic bombs were used, most certainly, to try to force Japan to surrender. Was that something inherently bad? The US was assembling a million-man invasion force to storm the islands of Japan. The Japanese government was organizing the civilians to resist, in some cases planning to meet the US Marines charging the beaches with bamboo spears because more advanced weapons could not be provided. What do YOU think the outcome of that would have been? We can't rewind history and run the alternative course, which means people will be arguing over the decision for eternity, but to me it looks like by August 1945 a fuckton of people, a lot of them civilians, were going to die either way. I'm just glad I don't have to make those kinds of decisions.

By the way – if people surge out of a village brandishing bamboo spears, charging towards the guys on the beaches armed with guns and grenades, are those villagers still civilians or have they moved to combatant status? If they aren't in uniforms but do happen to have guns, and are firing on the invasion force, are they civilians or combatants? One of the many problems of wars is that they are messy, and sometimes the distinctions that seem so sharp in peace time because very fuzzy. Just one more reason why wars are bad things.

[Bakustra]

Unfortunately for you, I was talking about the average person in the Middle East, not al-Qaeda.

How is that relevant? A man who cheers in the street because of a blow struck against American civilians implicitly supports al-Qaeda, who struck that blow.

They may have different reasons for doing so, unless you're going to suggest that al-Qaeda only gets followers through mass, incredibly effective brainwashing.

But if the goal was to terrorize,

This is a PROPAGANDA goal, insomuch as it is defensible AT ALL.

Note that you evaded my point, that no human being with an ounce of brains or rationality would predict that 9/11 would demoralize the American population to such an extent as to cause a ceding of our Middle Eastern interests.

That's not what their goal was, you know, or rather don't. Their goal was to convince the US to invade a "Middle Eastern Nation" in response, expand the war by encouraging groups in neighboring countries to attack the US occupational forces, and then simply wait until the US is forced to withdraw like the Soviet Union. At that point, and at that point alone, does it become crazy by suggesting that a Wahabbi Caliphate will be practical at that point.

I'm also not really sure that you can apply non-overlapping magisteria to propaganda and war, even with the power of capitalization.

then the killing of civilians is as much collateral for 9/11 as it was for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the greater goal required mass-murder either way.

It's not collateral, it is the point of the exercise. Strategic bombing blurs the line, but a sneak attack on an entirely civilian target cheerfully walks over it. Then releasing a gloating video pisses on it.

The point of Hiroshima was not to terrify Japanese citizens into fearing for their lives ad infinitum. It was to end a war that was itself a vortex of human suffering, and to end it in weeks, perhaps months. (Of course, it turned out ot be more like days

So how did it end the war, idiot? By frightening the Japanese government into surrender. In other words, inducing terror. If only English had a word to describe that method of activity!

They also didn't actually target for as many casualties as they could, they targeted symbols of American wealth and might, rather than going for killing as many people as possible.

I'm curious what better targets present themselves as far as civilian casualties, considering the choice of weapon and the major details of the operation. You also present them as orthogonal goals, rather than considering that the attack may have been planned to get a good number of casualties, if not the theoretical maximum, while also hitting that symbol.

Not that it's relevant, as destroying a given big building, whether or not there are people in it, is still a propaganda goal. You have yet to explain to me why saying "Fuck you, America" justifies killing 3000 people.

Oh, wait, but it's even worse for you. The attack was timed to maximize casualties. Even assuming that their pilots couldn't fly at night, I find it hard to believe there weren't suitable flights for attacking the towers at, say, dinner time.

I also can't help but notice Terralthra fucking destroying you about the leaflets. Note the following passage from his well-chosen link: "An American-controlled radio station on Saipan was broadcasting a similar message to the Japanese people every 15 minutes." Also note that the Americans had a much more delicate series of objectives to balance during the strategic bombing campaign (which I am again not defending except to note that it was somewhat more an exercise of war than it was of terror...small comfort to the dead, but that's not the argument) than al-Qaeda did on 9/11. Once the courses were locked in and it was too late for an interception by American fighter jets, a radio broadcast (say, 15 minutes before?) would have saved many lives at relatively minimal effort and risk (compared to informing the Japanese government where to position their antiaircraft units). And they still would have brought the buildings down, as you foolishly assume was the objective. It is very telling how even at the absolute height of ferocity and barbarism of World War II, elements of the US war machine were trying to save Japanese lives as their full-time job. And once the war ended, it became everybody's full-time job as they plunged into rebuilding the country.

See, what they could have done is rammed the plane into a residential area packed with townhouses and started fires. Or they could have targeted a sports event with tens of thousands of people. Those would probably have killed as many or more people. But they chose specific targets. The Pentagon was clearly chosen for its symbolism, why do you think that they didn't choose one of the tallest buildings in the world for the same reason? Because you're uncomfortable with mass murderers possibly having reasons beyond slaughtering people? Because you think that I'm calling the 9/11 attacks a good thing?

It is very telling how the US war machine broadcast "one of these thirty cities will be destroyed! we can't be more specific!" Clearly this was a propaganda effort designed to induce panic in the Japanese population and further induce them to surrendering- or maybe it was both. Maybe it wasn't a pure-and-simple effort to save Japanese lives. Maybe they decided to make a token effort, or maybe it was part of a cynical propaganda strategy, but pretending that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were purely military targets and not terrorism, while 9/11 was purely civilian and clearly terrorism, when both targeted military and economic apparatus and both sought to terrorize the population... Maybe Americans just can't come to terms with our history after all.

[Bakustra]

Bakustra, you're a fucking moron if you think a conventional campaign was justified. As horrible as the nuclear bombs were in Japan, they saved lives. Japan was prepared to go down fighting to the very last man. Civilians were encouraged to die. They gave fucking icepicks to school children to use to stab US soldiers.

Do you even understand how many people would have died in a conventional war with Japan having such a mind set?

You do know that 1) nobody has ever re-evaluated the chances of that actually happening, 2) there were more options than just invasion or nukes, 3) the use of nuclear weapons being the best option does not mean that it suddenly stops being mass murder or arguably terrorism, and 4) with hindsight, we can realize that most members of the Hitler Youth did not obey orders to commit suicide or form Werwolf units either, so expecting hordes of starving, emaciated children to brandish ice picks is not really all that reasonable when we look back with the benefit of data.

Did you even read the link? We did distribute a list of targets. Leaflets dropped had a list of cities, including both cities targeted by nuclear weapons.

Did it say "Hiroshima, followed by x, followed by y, etc. are the targets, ranked in order of the chance we will destroy them?" It did not. Neither did the second set of leaflets provide a ranked list of targets. Instead, they provided a broad sample of targets when the US government had a ranked list of targets by that point, watering down any sort of humanitarian intent, since if heeded they would have created mass evacuations rather than evacuations of the actual targets. I guess at that point we're still at trading the lives of hundreds of thousands for expediency. I guess you haven't really contradicted this, have you? Nor have you addressed anything else I've said.

Hey, fuckhead – stop moving the goalposts. First, you say we didn't distribute leaflets warning the public, when actually we did. Then you bitch that oh, no – it has to be a ranked list of cities.

Fact is, even with a “ranked system” of targets, until the day of an attack even the military wasn't sure which city would actually be hit because weather was a factor. Nagasaki actually was NOT the preferred target on August 9, Kokura was. It was not until they actually over Kokura, which had gone from clear to 70% cloud cover, that they abandoned that target and flew on to Nagasaki. So, dropping leaflets saying “we're targeting Kokura first” would, in fact, have been misleading. The cities listed were targets, and it is entirely plausible that the “target order” in effect at the time of printing would have been significantly altered by the day of the attack. Hell, the target order on August 9 changed while the bomber was in flight!

So? If we did so, then they would have known how to prioritize evacuations, rather than the method of "we'll keep you guessing and terrified to the last second" that we did implement. Saying, "the mostly likely target is Kokura, followed by Nagasaki" might have saved more lives, had it been heeded, then if the leaflets and broadcasts we used had been heeded, since the Japanese government would have been able to focus instead of tying up what transport and medical supplies it had left with 33 or so different cities. They would also have been able to focus their anti-aircraft guns, but that speaks to the inherent inhumanity of strategic bombing, that it forces people to choose between expediency and mercy.

All this focus on the atomic bombs, when in fact ordinary, conventional incendiaries killed more people on just the night of March 9-10 in Tokyo than the Nagasaki bomb killed in total, and perhaps more than the Hiroshima bomb did (casualty figures for all of the above are not exact and usually given in ranges of numbers). But somehow the atomic bombings are inherently more horrific or something, I guess. The atomic bombs were used, most certainly, to try to force Japan to surrender. Was that something inherently bad? The US was assembling a million-man invasion force to storm the islands of Japan. The Japanese government was organizing the civilians to resist, in some cases planning to meet the US Marines charging the beaches with bamboo spears because more advanced weapons could not be provided. What do YOU think the outcome of that would have been? We can't rewind history and run the alternative course, which means people will be arguing over the decision for eternity, but to me it looks like by August 1945 a fuckton of people, a lot of them civilians, were going to die either way. I'm just glad I don't have to make those kinds of decisions.

See above as to bamboo spears. Now, the thing is, I was arguing that they counted as terrorism, since they were designed to frighten the Japanese government into surrendering through the use of force, and everybody knows about them, unlike the Tokyo firebombing. I'm not arguing that that was inherently bad, oddly enough.

By the way – if people surge out of a village brandishing bamboo spears, charging towards the guys on the beaches armed with guns and grenades, are those villagers still civilians or have they moved to combatant status? If they aren't in uniforms but do happen to have guns, and are firing on the invasion force, are they civilians or combatants? One of the many problems of wars is that they are messy, and sometimes the distinctions that seem so sharp in peace time because very fuzzy. Just one more reason why wars are bad things.

You are aware that the Geneva Convention covers this, right? The First Protocol states that people bearing arms are combatants, even if they do not have a formal uniform, and that impersonating a civilian during a military operation is a breach of the Convention and criminal. That's one of those things that is very clear. It was specifically designed to address partisans and guerrillas.

[Broomstick]

there were more options than just invasion or nukes

Please enlighten us to these alternatives, then. Stas already mentioned blockade, which I pointed out wasn't likely to work due to third parties. Not to mention the death and suffering such blockades would impose. What else? Keep dropping napalm? I deal with that later in the post. Any other suggestions?

3) the use of nuclear weapons being the best option does not mean that it suddenly stops being mass murder or arguably terrorism,

In other words... the BEST alternative may have been mass murder? Well, yes, we all know WWII was horribly grimdark...

I prefer "least evil", because I don't want to use "good" or "best" in the same sentence as "drop an atomic bomb on a city". There were no good choices.

and 4) with hindsight, we can realize that most members of the Hitler Youth did not obey orders to commit suicide or form Werwolf units either, so expecting hordes of starving, emaciated children to brandish ice picks is not really all that reasonable when we look back with the benefit of data.

The problem with that comparison is that the Japanese weren't Germans.

In Europe, medics openly wore red crosses on a white background because it reduced (though it did not eliminate) the chances of them being fired upon, as both US and German culture regarded shooting medics as a no-no. In the Pacific the medics stopped wearing such devices because the Japanese regarded them as targets. They didn't have the cultural qualms against killing medical people.

When German soldiers were captured or surrendered then tended to stay that way. Japanese either wouldn't surrender, would surrender and then blow themselves and their captors up with a concealed grenade, or would just plain suicide. There were some exceptions, of course, but the disparity in numbers of POW's between the two theaters was due to Japanese actions, not US.

Then there was the business in Okinawa - over 100,000 Japanese casualties, 50,000 US, and tends of thousands of dead civilians. That was one battle for one island out of all the many islands of Japan. Over 1400 suicide attacks. Episodes of mass suicide by captured Japanese, and also by Okinawan civilians. Okinawa maintains that over 100,000 civilians died.

In other words, about 1/4 to 1/3 of a million people dead to take Okinawa. That is a fact. And that on an island where the civilian Okinawans did not have the same loyalty to the Japanese Emperor as in Japan proper and some of them even sided with and helped the US troops. You couldn't expect that to happen on, say, Honshu. Now, extrapolate that to all of Japan. Tell me with a straight face that fewer would have died in an invasion, or that there would have been less suffering.

The notion of a million dead in an invasion of Japan was not simply pulled out of someone's ass. It's not a figure made of pixie dust and the masturbatory fantasies of adolescents. It was arrived at by military people who actually had an education in these matters, based on how things had gone over several years of fighting a particular enemy. Unless you can justify a smaller figure you can't handwave it away.

Yes, in the case of Japan there actually was reason to fear Marines facing off against "hordes of starving, emaciated children to brandish ice picks". School girls were being instructed to tie their ankles and knees together before killing themselves so their body wouldn't fall into an indecent pose. I don't know why the idea of child soldiers is somehow inconceivable to you - African has plenty of them in today's world. Are you less dead if it is a child that stabs you?

Did it say "Hiroshima, followed by x, followed by y, etc. are the targets, ranked in order of the chance we will destroy them?" It did not. Neither did the second set of leaflets provide a ranked list of targets. Instead, they provided a broad sample of targets when the US government had a ranked list of targets by that point, watering down any sort of humanitarian intent, since if heeded they would have created mass evacuations rather than evacuations of the actual targets. I guess at that point we're still at trading the lives of hundreds of thousands for expediency. I guess you haven't really contradicted this, have you? Nor have you addressed anything else I've said.

Hey, fuckhead – stop moving the goalposts. First, you say we didn't distribute leaflets warning the public, when actually we did. Then you bitch that oh, no – it has to be a ranked list of cities.

Fact is, even with a “ranked system” of targets, until the day of an attack even the military wasn't sure which city would actually be hit because weather was a factor. Nagasaki actually was NOT the preferred target on August 9, Kokura was. It was not until they actually over Kokura, which had gone from clear to 70% cloud cover, that they abandoned that target and flew on to Nagasaki. So, dropping leaflets saying “we're targeting Kokura first” would, in fact, have been misleading. The cities listed were targets, and it is entirely plausible that the “target order” in effect at the time of printing would have been significantly altered by the day of the attack. Hell, the target order on August 9 changed while the bomber was in flight!

So? If we did so, then they would have known how to prioritize evacuations, rather than the method of "we'll keep you guessing and terrified to the last second" that we did implement. Saying, "the mostly likely target is Kokura, followed by Nagasaki" might have saved more lives, had it been heeded, then if the leaflets and broadcasts we used had been heeded, since the Japanese government would have been able to focus instead of tying up what transport and medical supplies it had left with 33 or so different cities. They would also have been able to focus their anti-aircraft guns, but that speaks to the inherent inhumanity of strategic bombing, that it forces people to choose between expediency and mercy.

You are SUCH a fucking idiot on this. What part of "weather is a factor so even the US wasn't sure which cities would be hit" are you having a problem with?

Or do you fail to understand that in WWII they didn't have desktop printers, it took longer to produce printed materials than it does today?

It was not "Kokura first, Nagasaki second", it was "Kokura preferred, if not, go to one of these

• where the weather is better". On August 9 that happened to be Nagasaki. It didn't have to be. If Nagasaki had been clouded over it would have been somewhere else. Or perhaps an aborted mission.
  
  You are asking that the US military have perfect precognition. They didn't and they don't. Again, you are moving the goalposts. First is was "they need leaflets!", then when you were informed there were such leaflets it was "they need to list specific cities!". Now it's "they must rank them in order of attack!". Stop fucking moving the goalposts, you know that's against the rules. Unlike actual war, we do have rules here.
  
  We DID warn the civilians. Unfortunately, on a realistic level, there wasn't a fuck of a lot the civilians could do. A lot of them just wouldn't evacuate, any more than the English evacuated London during the Blitz.
  

  Now, the thing is, I was arguing that they counted as terrorism, since they were designed to frighten the Japanese government into surrendering through the use of force, and everybody knows about them, unlike the Tokyo firebombing.

  What? Are you implying that the Tokyo firebombing was secret? OF COURSE people knew about it! How the fuck do you think 1/4 of the largest city in Japan can burn to the ground and people not notice? GRAPHIC LINK WARNING: Really, the evidence was hard to miss the next morning. Good lord, man, you think the Japanese High Command somehow missed the fact that they city they lived in was under attack? The Imperial General Headquarters was damaged even though it wasn't specifically targeted, I think the Japanese noticed! It wasn't even the first firebombing of Tokyo, that had been in February.
  
  The US had plans to burn to the ground EVERY Japanese city over some ridiculously small population figure. The time the US was engaged in systematic firebombing of Japanese cities. Which, by the way, didn't seem to be working as far as encouraging surrender was concerned. Apparently, the Japanese were not to be intimidated by wave after wave of bombers raining death upon them, they thought somehow they'd survive, if not as individuals then as a nation. (And remember that last, it's important)
  
  It wasn't until the US demonstrated that it only needed ONE airplane with ONE bomb to destroy a city, when the US clearly had thousands of airplanes, that Japan surrendered. They didn't surrender out of fear, it was because they finally figured out they could NOT win. The US intention was not to "terrorize" the civilians, it was to make it clear to the rulers that either Japan would surrender or it would be utterly destroyed. Forget bamboo spears and icepicks, the Americans won't get close enough for you to use them - in one night they can set every single one of your cities on fire. (Well, actually we couldn't, we didn't have a ready supply of atomic bombs, but no way were we going to tell the Japanese that, hang on, it'll be a couple weeks before we can get even another one to your islands). It was not fear for their lives that prompted the surrender, after all, the Japanese had demonstrated over and over a willingness to die for their cause, it was the notion that Japan would cease to exist. At all. Just ash heaps and bones on a scorched landscape.
  
  Because, rest assured, if they had not surrendered after Nagasaki the US would have firebombed, invaded, nuked, and otherwise rolled over Japan until they did surrender. Or died. All the guys who had been fighting the Nazis in Europe were now available for the Pacific, our industry back home was intact, and we weren't just able to feed ourselves, we'd wind up fending off starvation in Europe as well. No question the US could have continued the fight.
  
  Once I figured that out, what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while horrible and hellish, was clearly NOT the worst of all possible outcomes. Not by a long shot.
  
  And I'd prefer that be the last I need to say on the topic of Japan, as that is getting seriously off topic.
  
  Back to bin Laden - the US fully intended to hunt him down, one way or another. I can't see some of the alternatives - bombing his suspected location, for example - to be either morally or legally superior to a "surgical strike". The US had tried to limit their reaction to treating the agents of Al Qaeda as criminals since at least 1993, but the damn organization and bin Laden kept sending more of them, culminating in the attacks of 2001. Of course the US was going to do something about that, one of the government's fundamental responsibilities is to defend the people. There were certainly a lot of mistakes made along the way. However, a small team going to the home of a (pick one) criminal/enemy combatant/swore enemy/declared enemy/terrorist/whatever to is a pretty "clean" way to remove the threat. The pity is it couldn't have been done that way in, oh, 2002.
  
  I realize some thought it all melodramatic when Bush said "dead or alive" but Americans actually mean that shit sometimes. It's not just a line from a movie. When you hear something like surrender or die or dead or alive from American authorities it does often mean exactly that. As a general rule, if you DO surrender we usually don't treat you too horribly (usually) but if you don't we will do our best to enforce the "dead" part. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I suppose it depends on context, and whose side you're on or who you think it right.
  
  If the reports are correct that bin Laden was given a chance to surrender and he chose to keep fighting I, like many here, don't have a problem with that. Killing people isn't a moral good, but this can be argued as a case where more people would have died if he had remained alive than by him being dead, in which case it's a moral lesser of two evils. If he's given two options and he chooses death well, I'm all for free choice, you know? Him being dead does eliminate some problems, but it also gives rise to others. Capturing him alive and putting him on trial might have allowed the US to regain some moral high ground lost in recent years, but it also could have turned into an even greater mess.

[Enigma]

We DID warn the civilians. Unfortunately, on a realistic level, there wasn't a fuck of a lot the civilians could do. A lot of them just wouldn't evacuate, any more than the English evacuated London during the Blitz.

Unfortunately, even some of those that evacuated after Hiroshima was nuked, got nuked in Nagasaki. Double survivors, I think they were called for those that survived the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[K. A. Pital]

To be fair, the US analysts differed on estimates of how many casualties the actual invasion would cost. Some argued for a far smaller number than a total million casualties and even less than half a million, in which case the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki become the utilitarian equivalent of the invasion (i.e. the invasion is as deadly as the attacks). Why this is relevant is because Honshu, for example, suffered from a lack of ammunition because the Japanese moved a huge fraction of their entire ammunition reserves to Kyushu (almost a half!). And with a lack of ammunition, huge hordes of unarmed combatants wouldn't be able to accomplish much. By contrast, in Okinawa the Japanese forces relatively well-armed and so were the civilian "helpers".

Why I mentioned blockade is because it was a more realistic alternative than the crazy attacks on Kyushu which was chock-full of Japanese troops. Also, I disagree with the notion that the USSR would invade mainland Japan easily. It lacked naval power to pull this off; the invasion of Manchuria and taking over Sakhalin was far easier given the sparsely placed forces. Invading Honshu or Kyushu was absolutely out of the question for the USSR's logistic capabilities in the Pacific, or so it seems to me. Maybe invading Hokkaido was an option, but that operation would not entail even a fraction of the casualties expected from OLYMPIC or CORONET, and thus not relevant to the question whether atomic bombings were justified.

Hmm. Not much to add here, except that I think atomic bombings are a huge tangent in this thread and if it continues we'll have to split it. Maybe it is better to discuss, uh... OBL's assassination?

[Bakustra]

there were more options than just invasion or nukes

Please enlighten us to these alternatives, then. Stas already mentioned blockade, which I pointed out wasn't likely to work due to third parties. Not to mention the death and suffering such blockades would impose. What else? Keep dropping napalm? I deal with that later in the post. Any other suggestions?

First of all, the planned ground invasion would have seen the USSR invade Hokkaido two months before Olympic, which was set to begin on November 1. The Soviet invasion was planned for late August. So that objection applies to the ground invasion as well. In addition, the proponents of the blockade felt that Japan would surrender quickly, by the end of the year. They could have launched Operation Coronet first, targeting Tokyo, since the Japanese concentrated their forces in Kyushu in order to delay the American invasion. They could have offered the terms that were eventually offered accepted and which Japan proposed to the US in January 1945- that the Emperor would not be forced to abdicate, which could precipitate the final showdown that occurred historically between the Emperor and the army officials planning to resist indefinitely. They could have combined these or others. There are more than two options. That they were not seen as practical or desirable at the time does not mean that they were not practical in fact.

3) the use of nuclear weapons being the best option does not mean that it suddenly stops being mass murder or arguably terrorism,

In other words... the BEST alternative may have been mass murder? Well, yes, we all know WWII was horribly grimdark...

I prefer "least evil", because I don't want to use "good" or "best" in the same sentence as "drop an atomic bomb on a city". There were no good choices.

That's fine. I prefer that formulation as well.

and 4) with hindsight, we can realize that most members of the Hitler Youth did not obey orders to commit suicide or form Werwolf units either, so expecting hordes of starving, emaciated children to brandish ice picks is not really all that reasonable when we look back with the benefit of data.

The problem with that comparison is that the Japanese weren't Germans.

In Europe, medics openly wore red crosses on a white background because it reduced (though it did not eliminate) the chances of them being fired upon, as both US and German culture regarded shooting medics as a no-no. In the Pacific the medics stopped wearing such devices because the Japanese regarded them as targets. They didn't have the cultural qualms against killing medical people.

When German soldiers were captured or surrendered then tended to stay that way. Japanese either wouldn't surrender, would surrender and then blow themselves and their captors up with a concealed grenade, or would just plain suicide. There were some exceptions, of course, but the disparity in numbers of POW's between the two theaters was due to Japanese actions, not US.

Then there was the business in Okinawa - over 100,000 Japanese casualties, 50,000 US, and tends of thousands of dead civilians. That was one battle for one island out of all the many islands of Japan. Over 1400 suicide attacks. Episodes of mass suicide by captured Japanese, and also by Okinawan civilians. Okinawa maintains that over 100,000 civilians died.

In other words, about 1/4 to 1/3 of a million people dead to take Okinawa. That is a fact. And that on an island where the civilian Okinawans did not have the same loyalty to the Japanese Emperor as in Japan proper and some of them even sided with and helped the US troops. You couldn't expect that to happen on, say, Honshu. Now, extrapolate that to all of Japan. Tell me with a straight face that fewer would have died in an invasion, or that there would have been less suffering.

They did extrapolate, and came up with about 268,000 US dead, missing and wounded for a 90-day equivalent of Okinawa in Kyushu for Olympic. The one million figure is an estimate of total dead, missing and wounded for Olympic + Coronet, both lasting 90 days, both at the same levels of intensity. That is not a particularly reasonable estimate, given the invasion of Hokkaido would draw troops from Kyushu, and Coronet would have been much less opposed. The highest estimates for casualties (1.7-4 million) were developed by the Department of War and assumed that the majority of Japanese civilians would engage in the fighting. This seems unlikely, given that only one battle in the Okinawa campaign, for Ie Jima, saw civilians fighting alongside Japanese soldiers or even aiding them significantly.

One million fatalities comes from civilian proposals from Herbert Hoover and the LA Times. The Army thought them far too large.

Okinawa killed 12,000 American troops directly, not 50,000. In total less than 20,000 American troops died as a result of the Okinawan campaign, being incredibly generous with the number of troops that died later of wounds sustained on Okinawa. Your other figures ignore that the majority of mass suicides among civilians were ordered and forced by Japanese soldiers.

Meanwhile, estimates for the casualties (dead, missing, and wounded) within the first 30 days ranged from 23,000 to 49,000 among Army and Navy staff. At the low end, MacArthur estimated 125,000 casualties for the first 120 days of the invasion, which he revised to 105,000 after removing wounded who could be treated in-theater and returned to duty. At the high end, we have tens of millions of Japanese dead, over a million Allied dead, and millions of Allied wounded, if we mash together the highest estimates. Which is closer to reality? We will never know for sure, but the higher estimates relied on the idea that significant fractions of Japanese civilians would fight, and that the invasion would last at least six months, and were unaware of the pending invasion of Hokkaido by the USSR or the full disposition of troops in Japan or the lack of ammunition or equipment among the Japanese forces.

Looking at these factors, it is quite likely Japan would have surrendered in September, before any US invasion could begin, with the invasion of Hokkaido in August. It is also likely that if they didn't do so then, they would have collapsed as an effective fighting force once the USSR invaded Honshu (they would have been facing underequipped forces with barely any ammunition in Hokkaido and northern Honshu) and Olympic finally began. It is also possible that Japan would have surrendered once the USSR took Manchuria in a matter of days. It is possible that civil unrest would have forced a surrender in August or September as well. In other words, it is quite possible that the nukes shortened the war only by a matter of weeks rather than the half-year that was thought to be necessary.

The notion of a million dead in an invasion of Japan was not simply pulled out of someone's ass. It's not a figure made of pixie dust and the masturbatory fantasies of adolescents. It was arrived at by military people who actually had an education in these matters, based on how things had gone over several years of fighting a particular enemy. Unless you can justify a smaller figure you can't handwave it away.

Yes, in the case of Japan there actually was reason to fear Marines facing off against "hordes of starving, emaciated children to brandish ice picks". School girls were being instructed to tie their ankles and knees together before killing themselves so their body wouldn't fall into an indecent pose. I don't know why the idea of child soldiers is somehow inconceivable to you - African has plenty of them in today's world. Are you less dead if it is a child that stabs you?

No it wasn't. I went over this. First of all, you haven't justified that this would have happened in serious numbers, especially given that again, the assumption that this would happen was based on a single island, while other experience, and the opinion of the emperor's staff, suggests that civil opposition to the military was mounting, and that it was unlikely that civilians would of their own volition fight in significant numbers. Again, the Hitler Youth, Volkssturm, and Werwolf units did not act like this, so why would we assume that Japanese civilians in similar situations would have continued to fight?

Hey, fuckhead – stop moving the goalposts. First, you say we didn't distribute leaflets warning the public, when actually we did. Then you bitch that oh, no – it has to be a ranked list of cities.

Fact is, even with a “ranked system” of targets, until the day of an attack even the military wasn't sure which city would actually be hit because weather was a factor. Nagasaki actually was NOT the preferred target on August 9, Kokura was. It was not until they actually over Kokura, which had gone from clear to 70% cloud cover, that they abandoned that target and flew on to Nagasaki. So, dropping leaflets saying “we're targeting Kokura first” would, in fact, have been misleading. The cities listed were targets, and it is entirely plausible that the “target order” in effect at the time of printing would have been significantly altered by the day of the attack. Hell, the target order on August 9 changed while the bomber was in flight!

So? If we did so, then they would have known how to prioritize evacuations, rather than the method of "we'll keep you guessing and terrified to the last second" that we did implement. Saying, "the mostly likely target is Kokura, followed by Nagasaki" might have saved more lives, had it been heeded, then if the leaflets and broadcasts we used had been heeded, since the Japanese government would have been able to focus instead of tying up what transport and medical supplies it had left with 33 or so different cities. They would also have been able to focus their anti-aircraft guns, but that speaks to the inherent inhumanity of strategic bombing, that it forces people to choose between expediency and mercy.

You are SUCH a fucking idiot on this. What part of "weather is a factor so even the US wasn't sure which cities would be hit" are you having a problem with?

Or do you fail to understand that in WWII they didn't have desktop printers, it took longer to produce printed materials than it does today?

It was not "Kokura first, Nagasaki second", it was "Kokura preferred, if not, go to one of these

• where the weather is better". On August 9 that happened to be Nagasaki. It didn't have to be. If Nagasaki had been clouded over it would have been somewhere else. Or perhaps an aborted mission.
  
  You are asking that the US military have perfect precognition. They didn't and they don't. Again, you are moving the goalposts. First is was "they need leaflets!", then when you were informed there were such leaflets it was "they need to list specific cities!". Now it's "they must rank them in order of attack!". Stop fucking moving the goalposts, you know that's against the rules. Unlike actual war, we do have rules here.
  
  We DID warn the civilians. Unfortunately, on a realistic level, there wasn't a fuck of a lot the civilians could do. A lot of them just wouldn't evacuate, any more than the English evacuated London during the Blitz.

They ranked the cities, you idiot. They specifically ranked them as targets, so that it was Kokura as the first priority, then Nagasaki, then x, then y. If they had wanted to spare the civilians, they could have told them this to make evacuations more effective, had they been heeded. Because they didn't, heeding the warnings would have resulted in a splintered and ineffectual distribution of evacuations and medical supplies, possibly doing more damage because supplies would have to be rushed to Hiroshima from where they had been brought across Japan. Maybe you shouldn't act so superior.

PS: The English did evacuate a number of people from London during the Blitz, particularly children considered non-essential to industry, and a number of people left on their own.

Now, the thing is, I was arguing that they counted as terrorism, since they were designed to frighten the Japanese government into surrendering through the use of force, and everybody knows about them, unlike the Tokyo firebombing.

*snip hilarious ranting*

And I'd prefer that be the last I need to say on the topic of Japan, as that is getting seriously off topic.

No, that's not what I said. What I said was that the average person today- today, is more aware of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than the Tokyo firebombing. How you got that from what I was saying I don't know. I would suspect a hallucinogenic of some sort, or some need to distort what people are saying to make it dumber. Well, we all have our neuroses.

[Thanas]

Just a note - as Stas said, any further discussion of Okinawa and the atomic bombs might be off topic and will be handled as such. Unless there is a direct relevance to the topic though.

[SCRawl]

Split from this thread.

[Sea Skimmer]

To be fair, the US analysts differed on estimates of how many casualties the actual invasion would cost. Some argued for a far smaller number than a total million casualties and even less than half a million, in which case the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki become the utilitarian equivalent of the invasion (i.e. the invasion is as deadly as the attacks).

The lower end of US estimates are unrealistic in the basis of the calculation. They were optimistic estimates to start with, and all US estimates were based on a considerable underestimating of the size of Japanese forces. What the true toll will be, no one will know, but it was bound to be very heavy. Many factors just can’t be estimated so we are stuck with speculation. At Okinawa for example the US offensive was delayed for weeks at great costs, because not one but three different ammunition ships for the landing force were sunk in close proximity. Something like 30% of the ammo sent to the battle went down with them. Problems like that could become far more critical in a battle against massive Japanese forces better able to counter attack… or they might never exist. Japan’s 9000 planes including 5000 Kamikazes are just scary. Japan lost about 4,000 planes at Okinawa without any decisive results, but that was fighting far out over the open water.

Why this is relevant is because Honshu, for example, suffered from a lack of ammunition because the Japanese moved a huge fraction of their entire ammunition reserves to Kyushu (almost a half!). And with a lack of ammunition, huge hordes of unarmed combatants wouldn't be able to accomplish much. By contrast, in Okinawa the Japanese forces relatively well-armed and so were the civilian "helpers".

Well, they had a relative lack of ammunition on Honshu consider the vast mobilized size of the force, but the total quantity available was still very large and endless banzai charges don’t require that the troops have more then a basic load of ammo. How much the improvements in American tactics and equipment would have made, such as deploying far more corps and army level heavy artillery would have made is anyone’s guess.

The Japanese on Okinawa were well armed compared to any other force US forces faced, but about half the force they had was barely trained militia with nothing heavier then machine guns. They did not have a particularly large stock of ammunition, no gun had more then about a thousand shells and many had less. Shortages of ammunition were a serious factor in the eventual collapse of the Shuri Line.

Why I mentioned blockade is because it was a more realistic alternative than the crazy attacks on Kyushu which was chock-full of Japanese troops.

Yeah, it was certainly a much superior military strategy. But estimates of Japanese deaths by blockade were 17 to 40 million dead if it took about a year for Japan to surrender. Much depended on how bad the winter would actually be and if disease outbreaks became widespread prior to or just after capitulation. Even if these estimates are much too high, a figure a third as great would easily run higher then any other option for resolving the war, and the death and suffering would fall disproportionately on civilian vs military personal just as the atomic bombs did.

[K. A. Pital]

The lower end of US estimates are unrealistic in the basis of the calculation. ... Well, they had a relative lack of ammunition on Honshu consider the vast mobilized size of the force, but the total quantity available was still very large and endless banzai charges don’t require that the troops have more then a basic load of ammo.

To be fair, the USSR's smash march through Manchuria was likewise facing a serious Japanese force on paper, who could technically deal lots of damage by running in endless banzai charges. However, post-facto their Kwantung troops collapsed like a house of cards with extremely small losses relative to the size of army and the scale of operations. Perhaps it is a bit unfair to extrapolate this to Japan's home islands, but so is the extrapolation of Okinawa hardly a true representation of what would happen.

Yeah, it was certainly a much superior military strategy. But estimates of Japanese deaths by blockade were 17 to 40 million dead if it took about a year for Japan to surrender. Much depended on how bad the winter would actually be and if disease outbreaks became widespread prior to or just after capitulation. Even if these estimates are much too high, a figure a third as great would easily run higher then any other option for resolving the war, and the death and suffering would fall disproportionately on civilian vs military personal just as the atomic bombs did.

Which is why I didn't say it was a superior strategy in a utilitarian sense. It would only be superior if Japan capitulates rapidly. That is unlikely, unless the US changed the terms of said capitulation.

[Samuel]

They did extrapolate, and

Can you provide links to your sources or a way to check them? I tend to trust Sea Skimmer's reading of the situation more. Can you show something he is missing or a reason he is wrong?

That they were not seen as practical or desirable at the time does not mean that they were not practical in fact.

We could have asked for a white peace after Midway for Japan. It would have saved a ton of lives. War is about achieving objectives that your opponent does not want you to achieve and is willing to kill in order to prevent you from getting what you want.

I'm not sure how this is an indictment of the atomic bombings over war in general.

If they had wanted to spare the civilians, they could have told them this to make evacuations more effective, had they been heeded.

However, if we mentioned it, the Japanese would know which city were attacking next and could have defended it better.

Of course, since it was illegal to read the leaflets in the first place, it is unknown how effective they would be. The people most likely to read them are the people most likely to already be planning to leave.

Because they didn't, heeding the warnings would have resulted in a splintered and ineffectual distribution of evacuations and medical supplies, possibly doing more damage because supplies would have to be rushed to Hiroshima from where they had been brought across Japan.

We were firebombing the whole country. I think no matter where they were, the medical supplies would have been needed.

PS: The English did evacuate a number of people from London during the Blitz, particularly children considered non-essential to industry, and a number of people left on their own.

People left cities in Japan as well. The difference was there were no other cities to hide in- you could go to the countryside, but everything else was a target.

Edit- on the 9/11 tangent, the atomic bombings are not comparable. Nuking the cities destroyed military targets that were in them. By contrast, destroying the World Trade Center did not destroy military targets. In fact, from a military point of view it was counter productive- it would have been more intelligent to have those two planes back up to hit the White House or Congress and the Pentagon. As it is, the didn't get the former and did slight damage to the latter.

If you can hit actual political and military leadership and you pass it up to hit office workers, you are just aiming to cause as much carnage as possible.

[Sea Skimmer]

To be fair, the USSR's smash march through Manchuria was likewise facing a serious Japanese force on paper, who could technically deal lots of damage by running in endless banzai charges. However, post-facto their Kwantung troops collapsed like a house of cards with extremely small losses relative to the size of army and the scale of operations. Perhaps it is a bit unfair to extrapolate this to Japan's home islands, but so is the extrapolation of Okinawa hardly a true representation of what would happen.

Okinawa is pretty similar to a large portion of Japan, with its mix of open spaces and rugged steep hills. Actually a fair bit of Kyushu is worse terrain then Okinawa, though Japanese defenses could not be as dense even with 700,000 people on the island. But still it would be a very hard fight, and for the first time in the Pacific campaign other then the siege of Manila urban warfare would be a serious factor. Japanese cities would get burned down and obliterated by artillery fire if they don’t get nuked. Nagasaki was one of the US objectives for Olympic after all.

Now Manchuria is mostly a flat open plain next to a desert and the Soviet invasion included entire tank armies. These units could attack in mass with supply dumps to feed them. Once the US gets forces that size and firepower unloaded then sure, the battle would become easy. But that’s going to take weeks and months of battle to accomplish. Establishing US air power on land bases in Japan was going to be a hell of a pain in its own right. That’s also why leaping from Okinawa to Honshu would be absurdly risky; such an operation would have only limited land based air support.

Manchuria held major Japanese forces, but many of them were skeletal units, tank battalions missing whole companies and artillery regiments with only a few guns left. The troops had been taken away, sent to New Guinea and the Philippines, Formosa and then the home islands. I believe most of the Japanese armor, not that it would last long against T-34/85s anyway, was actually south-central fighting the Chinese and never engaged. By this stage of the war Japan actually finally was pulling back in China some… the solution that could have avoided everything in the first place.

[PeZook]

I have noticed there is still a conspicous lack of concession from Bakustra, on his original point, that being:

The US targeted them for a psychological blow to Japan, they dropped the bombs knowing full well that civilians would get killed, and indeed targeted civilians by refusing to drop leaflets over the cities, unlike in other bombings of Japanese cities- really, the only difference is that we consider ourselves to be justified and Bin Laden not to be justified. After all, he just wanted to damage an American symbol of power and might, just like we wanted to get Japan to surrender.

(bolding mine)

Your claim was disproven immediately, the fact that the information on the leaflets did not conform to your exacting standards is moving the goalposts and thus irrelevant. You also used an appeal to emotion by pointlessly calling for Terralthra to go to Hiroshima to incite mob violence against himself. Stop that.

Consider yourself warned.