Unfortunately things aren't so simple.

My understanding is that the land in question is traditional Native land which was never surrendered to Canada.

Rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada and lower courts have established a duty to consult and accommodate aboriginal people when development is considered on their land, even non-reserve traditional lands. This was either not done, or wasn't successful.

There is also some suspicion that one of the individuals who set fire to the police cruisers is an RCMP informant. But I haven't found satisfactory evidence of that yet. If true, it would not be the first instance of police provocateurs infiltrating protests in Canada.

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.

Know what else would have averted the need for a land invasion?

Accepting Japan's single-condition surrender.

Particularly since after Japan gave unconditional surrender, Japan was yielded their one original condition regardless

-scheherazade

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.

I'm not sure the "not wanting to go to war" bit applies when you're already at war. At that point in the war, I suspect all parties still active in WW2 had serious regrets about getting involved in the first place. But that's spilt milk.

This kind of speaks to the time-specific nature of what kinds of judgements it's possible to make. It's easy to say, now, what would have been the best course of action for any player, but we all understand ours is not the perspective Truman or Hirohito had at the time.

Similarly, they would have had different perspectives before the war than in the middle of it. Japan was a willing participant in WW2 at the start, no question about that. The question is, once they were in it, and losing, what would it have taken to get them to surrender, and did anyone have the ability to know?

Another sad thought is that tens of thousands of innocent lives in Nagasaki would have been saved if Japan had surrendered after the first bomb was dropped.

The difference with Cuba was that neither side wanted to go to war, whereas it does seem war was Japan's preference.

The alternative, as far as I am familiar with the counterargument to this viewpoint, would have been to loosen the requirement of "unconditional surrender" of Japan, and possibly to demonstrate the bomb by dropping it on an unpopulated area. Inviting Japanese scientists to a staging ground for a controlled demonstration was also on the books.

Now, assuming the US top brass were convinced Japan was not going to surrender, the argument presented here is quite valid. Bombing a live target certainly had the most shock value, and the bombs were likely in quite limited supply. (I confess, I don't know how many there were at the time.) A continued conventional war would have been horrendous.

But... Were the Japanese really unwilling to surrender, and if so, why? According to what I've read... Well, let me just quote the story, I've seen this in a number of texts:

"At the conclusion of the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill held a press conference. Roosevelt said that he and Churchill…

…were determined to accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy…

Churchill said later that he was surprised by this statement. Churchill adds that he was told by Harry Hopkins that the President said to him:

…then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it; and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/04/jonathan-goodwin/roosevelt-demands-unconditionalsurrender/

It was Jonathan Glover who I first read giving this account of events, but I don't remember what his source was. The argument he and others make, though, is that the Japanese did signal their willingness to surrender, but were not willing to do so unconditionally. This is because they feared the emperor might have been deposed and put to trial, which was simply unthinkable to them. If this is true, then dropping the bombs may have been unnecessary and even before the bombs, the war effort in the Pacific could have been ended through diplomatic means.

All this does leave one with some disconcerting questions. Would Allied leaders really have refused to reconsider their demands of Japan simply due to prestige and the need to show resolve? Was there no diplomatic backchannel? Certainly the fog of war must have played a part in the decisions made. I haven't been able to find a source beyond hearsay for what, exactly, the Japanese diplomatic position on surrender was. Considering this debate still goes on, no such source is likely to surface.

What stands out here, to me, as the saddest thing is: it seems countless lives were lost for lack of solid information and communication between enemies. Had Japan and the Allies been able to negotiate further, had the allies dared show their nuclear hand, had they made it possible for the emperor (while not a nice guy by any means) to be protected, how many lives could have been saved? Unfortunately, no-one has the benefit of hindsight when it's most needed.

I can't help but think of the Cuban missile crisis - what would have happened, had a similar failure to communicate occurred at that time? It was very close...

Well, if you let yourself get hooked on proprietary hard-/software, you willingly surrender control over your devices.

Just wait until TPM 2.0, the most fucked-up hardware development of this young millenium, hits the market in force.

If his story is true, he'd better surrender himself asap. If they can find traces of whatever he was drugged with in his system.. it might cut some time off of his sentence. And if he's lying, he might want to take some ruffies quick!

And yet they didn't sue for peace after we had already dropped the first one. A more concise argument against Japan's willingness to surrender can hardly be made.

1. You are correct that there is not a rights violation, which is why none of these people are seeking damages. However, as soon as they allow themselves to be identified or searched, they are surrendering their rights under the 4th amendment. Furthermore, if the DHS officers state that they are being detained and are not free to go, and use force to make that so, then they are violating their rights for the same reason.

2. Many things have been "legal" in the past and viewed as "constitutional" that have long since been overturned. You don't have to dig too far into the historical grab bag to find some examples. Slavery, internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, poll taxes, spousal abuse, etc. Just because something is legal doesn't make it moral. Likewise, the findings of a particularly conservative and activist Supreme Court does not mean that an issue is actually in keeping with the constitution. Don't forget that our constitution as it was originally written included the proclamation that 'non-free' men only counted as 3/5ths of a person. I mean, you don't get more constitutional than that.

Fatboy Slim's third UK No.1 single 'Praise You' and The Chemical Brothers' 2nd No.1 album, 'Surrender' hit that year.

The last flight of the SR-71

Oh, and this was the year the giant redneck bonfire fell down in College Station at Texas A&M.

Look, here's the real deal-How safe do you want to be and what will you surrender to feeel like you have that, illusion of safety? Will you let assholes make laws that send hind-brained cunts with barely a hundred I.Q.'s in body-armor with M-16's to your door on a hunch??

Answers: WE ALREADY DID!

It does NOT MATTER one bit if guns are regulated or not during a war. This is not about war, this is about trying to protect people from crazy shits and accidents during 'peacetime'. Obviously, if tyranny happened, and there was mass fear in the populace of this or any country, people find a way to stand up and fight back. Guns will be apart of that, and will be a big part. But these regulations that they are trying to put in place have nothing to do with 'surrendering to big brother'.

I completely understand the idea that this can be a 'slippery slope' that will eventually ban all guns and turn us into slaves... somehow. BUT I have a hope in my heart that most of humanity actually is human, and caring of others. We as a species have survived before the gun and after the gun. Unfortunately I can't say that about alot of the other species.