I’ve always thought it was a horrific decision, but not at all because of the immediate effects or massive death and destruction they caused in Japan….they fucked around and found out and deserved everything they got (and I was unaware the Russian Manchurian offensive timing, but it’s even more reason to not drop a second bomb or even a first if we knew it was coming).

I think it was horrific because we had no idea what the long term effects of even minimal fallout might be, and in fall/winter the jet stream runs from Japan directly to the highly populated West coast (which we knew well thanks to balloon bombs), so some portion of the fallout was guaranteed to fall on millions of US citizens. We lucked out that it wasn’t deadly a year later, and didn’t cause horrible birth defects with near zero exposure…we had no concrete idea at the time though just guesses, and still don’t have a clear idea of how much it contributed to higher cancer rates in the US.

Keep in mind, we had no idea what discussions the Japanese were having amongst themselves , so no idea how effective our bombs nor the Manchurian offensive were at persuading them to surrender. Hindsight is 2020, but at the time we were flying blind.

The uncertain risk there of possibly killing millions of ourselves or gimping or sterilizing or even Cronenberging entire future generations for the comparatively minimal convenience of not using conventional bombs, to me, is no where near worth it. There were just too many unanswered questions about too many factors. I’m sure the soldiers fighting at the time would feel differently.

*promote the history lesson, learned some new stuff!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'fifty, nee ner, alan davies, rich hall, clive anderson, wwII, japan' to 'fifty, nee ner, alan davies, rich hall, clive anderson, wwII, japan, fugo, balloon bombs' - edited by calvados

Now where did I hear the story of those Japanese balloons before? That's right, VideoSift.

Balloon bombs? Really? REALLY? Let me know when 6000 balloon bombs equal the force of one Little Boy or Fat Man.

>> ^2pornot2p:
>> ^thinker247:
"When the girls walked outside, they found a vision of hell."
I still can't comprehend why it was necessary to destroy 100,000 civilians.

They would have done it to us first had they been able to.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=11
Read it, it's an amazing piece.

As I understand it, the decision to switch to fire-bombing came about because of the complete and utter ineffectiveness of high altitude bombing. They started out trying to bomb legitimate military targets like munitions factories and realized that the high altitude bombs simply weren't precise enough to hit the targets due to severe cross-winds. The decision then came to fly lower and drop a napalm payload that, even if it missed the intended target, would start a fire that would likely consume the target anyway. Unfortunately the fires, once started, continued to burn indiscriminately.

The argument has also been made that since the Japanese civilians basically supplied the manpower for the Japanese armies and the workforce for the War Machine itself that technically they were valid military targets.

It should also be noted that the Japanese tried to firebomb the U.S. by using high altitude balloons filled with napalm that floated on the jet stream to the West Coast (do a google search for FUGO balloon bombs). Fortunately, only a few of the balloons released actually landed on U.S. shores. At the time, the government covered it up because the idea that the U.S. mainland was vulnerable to attack was simply to terrifying a prospect to consider.