From: Ronald Gillen (gillen@NCONNECT.NET)
Date: Sun Apr 11 1999 - 09:33:15 PDT
A Cassel wrote: > > Hi All, > > Any discussion of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki > tends to avoid one glaring issue. The time frame. > =================snip======================================= > > Yes, the bomb is a horrible weapon, but is the loss of lives in the two > cities better than the cost of the invasion that would have occurred? > While the weapons were powerful, the physical damage would have been far > less in European cities due to concrete, steel and brick construction, > and the effects of radiation were not even a consideration at the time. =================snip============================================ As horrible as the A bomb was and the civilian casualties that it caused at the time it probably saved many more lives on the Allied side than it took. It has been estimated that an invasion of Allied forces onto the Japanese Islands homeland would have resulted in one to two million casualties and have prolonged the war up to two and a half years. Japanese housewives were prepared to tie kitchen knives to broom handles and use them as spears to defend their villages from the invaders. If the Emperor had not ordered the Japanese to surrender they would have fought on indefinitely. I regret that the planners did not have the vision to drop a demonstration A-bomb in a place on Japanese soil that would have gotten their instant attention, like Yokohama Harbor and at a cost of fewer civilian casualties. Those Allied advisors that understood the Japanese cultural mentality in many instances had difficulty in restraining the military planners from performing acts that would have only enraged the Japanese population and caused insurmountable problems. One American Admiral, 'Bull' Halsey, wanted to ride the Emperors white horse in the Tokyo victory parade, it took an order from General McArthur to stop him. Others wanted to hang the Emperor, had this happened we would probably still be fighting in Japan. >Air Force planes > dropped leaflets on the targeted cities warning the civilian population > to leave or face destruction. They chose not too. Neither event shows > great thought of human values, but isn't war the ultimate failure of > diplomacy? I have been told by more than one resident of Hiroshima that there were never any warning leaflets , that if such leaflets were dropped they would have been taken very seriously indeed. This story may have been for home news consumption to offset the horror of having a whole city destroyed and has since become an urban legend. Any comments ??? Regards ..... Ron Gillen