Atomic bomb survivors want an apology from Obama.

[Nuvendil]

Lefil said:

Nuvendil said:

If you think the North Korean government is by any standard a good government then...wow I don't even know what to say.

And nukes don't make you safe. For one, they make you a larger target.  Second, it's not like anyone can use one right now, not attacking or defending.  So they can't use them to protect themselves.  All they can do is shield you from other nukes but that's not much since there are plenty of other destructive weapons out there.  

As for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I've given the facts on this numerous times so here's the short short short version:  they were military targets, one a massive command center and the other a weapons and munitions manufacturing center as well as containing an armory.  They were not pure soft targets, they would have been bombed to oblivion in the event of an invasion anyway.  Please see the rest of the freaking thread for details.

How can America justify having NOT dropped an atomic bomb on North Korean instead of engaging in the Korean War and NOT dropping a bomb on Hanoi prior to engaging in the Vietnam War? Wouldn't the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., with all the names of those young men etched into the stone in small font, be much shorter had America nuked Hanoi much earlier instead of engaging in a protracted conflict? 

A number of things changed between WWII and that war.

For one, the US didn't *want* NK or NV to surrender, they just wanted their attempts to invade their southern counterparts to stop. 

Second, there's the MAD concept to consider.  The fear was always that the use of a nuke by either the first world or second world used a nuke, there would be an escalation of retaliation that would cause immense if not total destruction. 

Also, while terrible, those wars never reached anything even remotely approaching the devestation of WWII. 

And lastly, we had a far better understanding of radiation.  We couldn't nuke with tactical or heavy nuclear ordinance North Korea or North Vietnam, they were too close to our allies and the attacks would adversely effect them as well. 

In short, entirely different situations.  To just boil it all down to nuke=better than a prolonged conflict is to take a highly complex decision and reduce it down to a non-representative simplistic argument.