re: Do you think the US was "evil" to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

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Obama apparently thinks the US is evil for doing so. He didn't apologize for it but for him to say that it was "evil" may just be worse. quote: “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil,” the president said. “We come to ponder the terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead.” LINK frick that guy.

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This thread is pathetic and comical at once. Nowhere does Obama say the US was evil for dropping the bomb but yet 5 pages to date have been written about it.

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People put so much effort into hating Obama and it doesn't matter what he really says or means. Obama didn't say that anyone was "evil to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" but that's what the haters want to believe so they just believe it and feel duty bound to call it out as the apology or anti-American sentiment that it wasn't.

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You can't really blame people for being jaded and possibly interjecting their views of Obama into this speech. He's not a huge fan of traditional US/Western ideals and his foreign policy has been a quaternary concern from jump street.

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TJGator1215

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Kill yourself

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General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Western Europe, reacted to the news in a way that contradicts politicians’ narratives:

“During his [Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan wasalready defeated and that dropping the bomb wascompletely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives ,” he said.[emphasis added]

General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, was not even consulted about the use of the bomb. He was only notified two days before the first bomb was dropped. When he was informed he thought “‘…it was completely unnecessary from a military point of view.’ MacArthur said that the war might ‘end sooner than some think.’ The Japanese were ‘already beaten.’”

Tough, cigar-smoking “hawk,” General Curtis LeMay—who was responsible for the firebombing of Japanese cities—was also disappointed with the decision to drop the bomb. In an exchange with reportershe said,

“The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. [emphasis added]”

“You mean that, sir? Without the Russians and the atomic bomb?”one journalist asked.

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,”LeMay replied.

Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, sent out the following public statement: “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan [emphasis added].”

While Eisenhower, MacArthur, LeMay, and Nimitz believed the dropping of the bombs to be unnecessary, Chief of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy went even further, insisting that even the contemplated invasion of Japan was unnecessary to end the war. He said,

“I was unable to see any justification…for an invasion of an already thoroughly defeated Japan. My conclusion, with which the naval representatives agreed, was that America’s least expensive course of action was to continue to intensify the air and sea blockade…I believe that a completely blockaded Japan would then fall by its own weight. [emphasis added]”

At the conclusion of the war in the Pacific, President Truman appointed a panel of 1000 experts to study the conflict. One third of the experts were civilians and two-thirds were military. The panel issued its report, entitled “United States Strategic Bombing Survey”—a 108 volume publication on the Pacific front. The survey makes the following damning conclusion about the necessity of dropping the the atomic bombs and invading Japan:

“Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring aboutunconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945,…Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. [emphasis added]”

Even the Japanese leaders knew they were defeated. They were even secretly willing to negotiate an unconditional surrender. According to thesurvey, there was

“…a plan to send Prince Konoye to Moscow as a special emissary with instructions from the cabinet to negotiate for peace on terms less than unconditional surrender, but with private instructions from the Emperor tosecure peace at any price.”

If dropping the bombs was not necessary, and if Japan was even willing to contemplate an unconditional surrender, then why were the bombs dropped at all? One reason referenced by several historians was to project American power against the future enemy in the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. As theChristian Science Monitor noted in 1992,

“Gregg Herken…observes…that ‘responsible traditional as well as revisionist accounts of the decision to drop the bomb now recognize that the act had behind…’a possible diplomatic advantage concerning Russia.’ Yale Prof. Gaddis Smith writes: ‘It has been demonstrated that thedecision to bomb Japan was centrally connected to Truman’s confrontational approach to the Soviet Union.’”[emphasis added]

Secondly, there was a rather large incentive to use the bomb—to test its effectiveness. On that subject, the most succinct quote comes from Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., Commander U.S. Third Fleet. Hesaid, “[The scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. . . . It killed a lot of Japs, but the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia long before.”

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I think Nuclear Weapons are evil just like I think cancer is evil.

Yes, technically they are non sentient but assigning them the evil label makes me happy.

I don't think he meant it as the US was evil.

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If any country in history deserved to have their citizen's eyeballs melted out of their sockets, then it's Japan. Unspeakably evil atrocities were committed by the average Japanese guy during the war.

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Exactly.

Dropping those two bombs was much more humane than any other option. A land invasion would have been horrific for both sides. By the time these weapons were used we were finished with Germany. People today do not realize the amount of material that American factories were pumping out at this time. We could have easily not done a land invasion and just firebombed the crap out of them. This would have caused MUCH more devastation on the average citizen.

People also forget, we did not start them war with them. The Japanese also were extremely brutal to our prisoners and to all the indigenous people around them. They killed between 10-14 MILLION people in Korea, China, and Russia.

frick them, they got what they deserved.

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However, none of this cold calculation detracts from the fact that the bombings were indisputably heinous acts of state terrorism, fitting the standard definition almost perfectly: the use or threat of violence against civilians, to instil fear and achieve a political goal. Indeed, the Secret Target Committee in Los Alamos proposed that the large population centres of Kyoto or Hiroshima should be deliberately targeted for the "greatest psychological effect," and to ensure the bombs’ “initial use was sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognised".

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The decision to use the bombs was also predicated on racist and dehumanising attitudes towards the Japanese. The Japanese were frequently depicted as "yellow vermin", "living snarling rats" or "monkeys". Indeed, the dehumanisation was such that the mutilation of Japanese soldiers became widespread. US servicemen frequently removed ears, teeth and skulls as grisly war trophies. Even President Roosevelt was infamously sent a letter opener carved from a Japanese bone by a US congressman. It was easier to drop inhumane weapons on those who were not really human to begin with.

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There is little disagreement that the atomic bombings constituted war crimes, even amongst its architects. As the US Secretary of Defence, Robert S. McNamara, famously reflected: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

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In theory.. Dropping a bomb and that whipped out what? 120k+ people.. And that was just the first bomb.. It does seem to be somewhat "evil". Do you consider 9/11 evil? So yeah.. I can see where Japan would see it as evil. That doesn't mean I am against the fact it was dropped, but it did help us win one big pissing contest.