Were the Atomic Bombings of Japan Necessary?

The dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have traditionally been held to be the cause of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific, with the justification that the surrender of Japan saved more lives in the long term than the bombs themselves cost. In this video we take a look at the academic debate for and against the use of the bomb, and whether it was in fact the deciding factor in the Japanese surrender.
newtboysays...

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!

siftbotsays...

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, July 21st, 2023 2:38pm PDT - promote requested by newtboy.

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