If you could go back to the WW2 era, would you still vote to Bomb Japan?

[Bursche]

Munkeh111 said:

Snesboy said:
Yes I would. The war ended in the European Theater only. It still raged on in the Pacific Theater. Japan refused to surrender since they were a very Imperialistic nation during WWII. Not too mention that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. We weren't targeting civilians.

Your argument is very weak because of the reason I mentioned earlier, the war was only over in Europe, and the United States was planning an invasion of the Japanese mainland beforehand. Truman decided to not risk the lives of more than 1 and a half million soldiers that would've been sent to their death if such an invasion occurred. Dropping an atomic bomb was a better solution since it wouldn't cost as many lives, even if it did kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese. If the United States Army did indeed invade Japan, it would have cost far more lives in the long run and make the war last well into the latter half of the 1940's.

Lastly, conservatives are more likely to start wars that have been provoked by other nations. Look throughout history. Hitler, he was a threat, he starts invading countries, he has to be stopped. Korean War, stop the spread of dangerous government idea's (communism). Vietnam War, same thing. War on Terror, prevent psychological maniacs from executing their crazy ideals. On top of that, al Qaeda made a deliberate attack on the United States first (9/11). They were asking for it.

Damn that was a long post.

Well with Japan thier government was not in control at all during the war. when the league of nations requested the Japanese withdraw from Manchuria after their invasion, the government accepted, but the army had taken control and so they invaded even more of China.

May I also point out that the US had already destroyed Tokyo, so they certainly had been targeting civilians even if those two were military places (they were still cities with huge numbers of civilians). I issue was that the US did not really understand the effects that the bomb would have had, and in their invasion plans that had intended to use nukes to clear the beaches to land troops after waiting a day or two for the radiation to clear.

Anyway, the US actually saved lives, as there were several million Japanese soldiers willing to fight to the death, and tons of US soldiers would have died as well, so I would have voted for it, but there was no vote, the US bombed without any warning

They barely bombed Tokyo. That bombing was more of a political morale booster than effective war strategy.

But they did it for a variety of reasons. The issued public reason was to save "1.5 million lives". Would it have taken that many casualties? Probably not. But using the atomic bomb not only saved time, military lives, but also as someone said, kept Russia out of Japan. That is the biggest and most important reason. Japan wouldn't be the democratic, industrialized nation of today if it was invaded by both the US and USSR. I could see Japan being split much like Germany was.