the console wars could be very different in Japan right now but i don't think gaming today and a war situation is fair to compare lol.

but either way, would you still have voted to nuke the Japanese back then?

i would say no since the war had already ended before they nuked them....once was bad enough, but to do it twice? that's the main reason why japan is so peaceful and anti-nuke today since they're the only country that felt the impact.

the nuke wasn't needed imo. although their gov't is very conservative....conservative people are more likely to start wars but maybe they aren't like american conservatives.

You wouldn't get a vote to choose. The parties that get to "vote" were elected by the people.

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.

yes

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

Likel Munkeh and Snes stated, I would have, and do, support the nuking of Japan in WW2.

It's hard to agree with such a horrible thing, but the alternatives of invading Japan would of been far worse than nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had we invaded, the war would of lasted 3-4 more years, and Japan would almost certainly be a useless country, and not the phoenix that it has been post-war.

This sums up what I think : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=998tSBoa3lo

Nuking wasn't a necessity but a political move, as mainland Japan was easy to take over at that time : their naval fleet had been decimated, most of their elite pilots had been killed in kamikaze attacks, people were starving, 67 big cities had been litteraly destroyed by six months of nightly raids and the drop of millions of incendiary bombs (except for those which were kept untouched by Air Force so accurate assessment of the bombs could be made later on and Kyoto which would have been the first to be nuked but was saved by the fact Henry L. Stimpson, Secretary of war, had fond memories of his honeymoon in this city).

USA had already planed the invasion of Japan but the Russian had a head start, In one day fight they had recovered Manchouria and annexed the Kouril Islands and had plans to invade Hokkaido. Had the Russians entered Japan before the rendition they could have claimed a lot more than what they got. USA took this opportunity to impeed the Soviets to expand any further and at the same time scare them with the bomb and this was the begining of Cold War.

Of course the bombs ended the war quicker but was it really worth it ?

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.

It needed to be done. And so, it would need doing if we were put back there

LOLWAT?

Hiroshima was a city of minor strategic importance, having only a handful of factories and a small number of troops stationed there. The bomb was dropped in the center of the city, where all of the civilian homes and business were while what factories and bases the city had lied on its outskirts. Part of the reason why Hiroshima was chosen was due to its terrain. The city lied in the valley and it was believed that this would channel the explosion, but this theory needed to be tested. Thus Hiroshima became something of an experiment to see how the bomb bast would be effected by land.

The big motivation for dropping the bomb wasnt to end the war with Japan, but to intimidate the USSR. Tensions between the US and Soviet Union were tense throughout the war, but once Truman took office things began to sour. For various reasons President Truman was concerned with the US putting itself in a superior diplomatic position to the USSR, and he saw the bomb as one way to accomplish that. 

One other thing to keep in mind is that the Soviet Union was entering the war against Japan right after the bombs were dropped. Because of this there was a real priority placed on ending the war as soon as possibly to prevent the USSR from acquiring territory in Asia, such as Korea. Oddly enough the USSR entering the war happened to be just as much of a factor in Japanese surrender as the dropping of the Abomb, not just because the Japanese were terrified of the Soviets due to a previous war but also because they were afraid of the Soviets doing the same thing they did in Eastern Europe.

Oh, and one last thing. The US firebombed Dresden in Germany. After we saw the civilian casualty figures and how destructive the bombing was we decided that we would never do the same to Germany. Yet we firebombed Japan on a weekly basis, often times causing far more civilian casualties then dresden.

I don't feel like tackling the last thing you wrote, but its mostly wrong.