The other discussion was that the "Sonne"/"sun" theme was inspired by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and that the Snow White/Schneewittchen theme was from the band watching a lot of Disney films!!!

For enoch-Uhhh, at the end of the day, who are we to judge, period? My gentle chiding of Sagemind was more was more of an atomic bomb indictment of his take on 'reality' ( a personal construct ), the loaded use of language to parrot a framework for a way of thinking whereby so-called intelligent peeps give power away rather than embracing it, and my own coluratura-filled vitriolic on the overall tone and timbre easily recognized by anyone who doesn't think too hard about how they are being ass-fucked daily by shit-think.

Your own reductio ad absurdum with the dick-sucking options available to hard-working individuals well, I can appreciate your coming to the defense of a wayward soul but....Maybe the smarter and more fastidious folks in the herd should get more creative with such actions suggested later like tax fraud or even homicide if they want to see some tangible changes to digression of systems they so fervently defend.

A great question. Can't vouch for the accuracy on this page, but it presents some interesting facts re: that and other topics related to a Nazi atomic bomb. http://www.unmuseum.org/nbomb.htm

I can't quite figure some of the aspects that outrage people over this. Some objections and concerns seem just very naive or ill informed.

Objecting to the goal of attaining absolute superiority over Japan just makes no sense to me. I mean, it is realized that it was a war being fought, for the presumed purpose of establishing superiority over each other? The difference between Japan being willing to surrender with a host of conditions versus unconditional surrender isn't trivial. Unless you want to fight another war later you want the ending to be decisive and sufficient to prevent it coming up again any time soon.

I also think the humanitarian outrage at, gasp, atomic bombs is terribly ill informed. The allies killed a lot more people in many other bombing campaigns and to much more brutal effect. It strikes me as misguided to be so focused on what is in many, many ways a lesser catastrophe than other attacks the allies made.

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.

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As I recall from studying this is a college class, we had only the two atomic bombs available. Getting material for another was possible, but I think I recall that at the time we could only collect enough for one bomb every several months.

So, a HUGE aspect of this is that we had a pretty good hand of cards in the poker game, but felt that we had to bluff to suggest that it was even more overwhelming.

To me, the interesting part of the debate isn't blockade vs conventional bombing vs invasion vs A-bombs. I think it gets most interesting to consider alternatives that involve dropping one or more of the 2 A-bombs some place where their power would be demonstrated, but where casualties would be as low as possible.

Either option you mentioned would have been GREAT, if they worked (and forced surrender). But both had potential pitfalls also. Drop one on an unpopulated area, and they might have believed we were trying to take credit for some sort of natural event (German V2s blowing up in London were often attributed to sewage gas explosions early on). Staging a demonstration for scientists and leaders to witness might have hardened their resolve and/or made them question ours.

If I had been in Truman's shoes, I feel like I would have preferred to use ONE of the two bombs on something like one of your suggestions; either unpopulated drop or demonstration. Then, use the second on a target of military significance if/when they didn't surrender.

However, in hindsight that would have been a risky move -- they didn't surrender after the Hiroshima bomb, only after both. Would a demonstration and one "we mean business" bomb have been enough to elicit the same response? Who knows. At that point, consider how screwed we could have been if it HADN'T, and it would have taken months to build another bomb (plus keep in mind that we weren't 100% confident in the bombs working reliably, even after trinity and the first two drops). I guess that we could have maintained a blockade and said "we'll give you 3 months to come to your senses" while we made another bomb, but I think that would have legitimately resulted in Japan questioning our resolve quite a lot; we'd be showing our cards too early.

I guess that at the end of the day, I don't envy Truman for having to make that kind of decision. Given the givens, I think that he probably played it as safe as possible and went with the option that was the MOST likely to force surrender. Perhaps some other option would have worked as well but avoided some of the casualties, but Truman took the information available to him and made the decision that he felt was the best -- I think that is pretty much the best we can ask of our leaders.

Why America Dropped the Atomic Bombs has been added as a related post - related requested by Norsuelefantti on that post.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it conflates the crimes of select people in the Japanese military (not everyone was a bloodthirsty or order-following robot) with innocent civilians (although see my comment from 5 years ago about how some have rationalized attacks on Japanese civilian population centers). If you believe that the Japanese people are culpable for the crimes of their military and should pay the ultimate price (i.e. death) for those crimes then you've essentially also rationalized the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., as those that planned them explicitly stated they were retaliation for U.S. political and military interventions in a variety of Muslim countries (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks for more info). Holding the citizens responsible for the actions of their government/military leads to very murky waters indeed.

To be fair to America at the time though, everyone was targeting civilians during World War 2--the Germans were bombing indiscriminately in London, the Brits and U.S. retaliated with the same kind of attacks on the German homeland, the Japanese military was doing medical experiments on random Chinese farmers they rounded up... it was a f'd up war all around and I think by the time the firebombings and atomic bombs were dropped in Japan people were willing to do just about anything to end the war. Victory became more important than humanity.

Well, there is a reason that Japan was ready to sue for peace before we even dropped the first atomic bomb.

If proportionality should be a rule of war, we're almost as in debt there as we are financially.

no one has bombed more than the judeo-christians
atomic bombs
fire bombs
cluster bombs
smart bombs
daisy cutters
and general purpose, gravity guided, high explosive

That's interesting... I wasn't aware of that. It seems Nazi policies and distaste for "Jew Science" greatly slowed their nuclear research down, but they were still making fast progress on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_energy_project

"In the late 1930s, Germany might very well have had a 5-year lead on the West in [atomic weaponry]. ... [But] Manhattan did go forward, first and foremost as a counter to the feared German development [of atomic weaponry]." Google Books: How to lose a War.

The following thread isn't a primary source, but it's enough to make me think more research would probably find similar conclusions to the commenters:

Germany was working on nuclear bombs and reactors. German scientists Hahn, Meitner and Stassmann discovered the nuclear chain reaction in uranium in 1939. One reason Albert Einstein wrote FDR lobbying for an all out effort to make an atomic bomb was he got letter from German friends saying we know how to make atomic explosions for Gods sake hurry up. Einstein got through to FDR and we know were this ended up. In Germany they put their best man in charge a theorist named Werner von Heisenberg...

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Atomic Bomb slowmotion ignition has been added as a related post - related requested by silvercord on that post.

Atomic Bomb slowmotion ignition has been added as a related post - related requested by silvercord on that post.