| The Ghost of RubangB said: Dropping those bombs is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. I don't understand how anybody can still defend them. Their argument seems to be that it was minimizing potential casualties by stopping the war as quickly as possible. However, they're deciding that murdering countless innocent children and women and even non-Japanese was okay, as long as it minimized the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Japanese soldiers. I disagree. I don't think non-combat troops get to be a part of those equations. Traditional bombs would have been cheaper, cleaner, more successful, and even deadlier. More people died in the traditional bombing of Tokyo (but without mutated babies and decades of radiation poisoning). We were just trying to scare the USSR by showing off our new weapons. We weren't ending WW2 with the nukes; we were starting the Cold War. |
You're missing the point that avoiding conventional invasion also (most likely) minimized the number of civilian causalities. Looking at the civilian casualties faced during the other military campaigns, it is not that outrageous to suggest that Japan could have faced between 500,000 to 2 Million civilian casualties due to a conventional invasion; and preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands/millions of civilian casualties through an act that will kill tens of thousands of them is justifiable.
