Re:Declassified photos from Tinian Island as the B-29 “Enola...
by lmm on Wednesday October 01, 2014 @10:37AM
(#8394665)
> How do we really know this? The Japanese were ready for a long drawn out decades conflict. The US forces were war-weary and war was draining the economy. This could have gone on with quite some time, or ended in a frozen conflict that would reignite periodically. Who knows, but a quick non-nuclear win was certainly not in the cards.
A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.
> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.
A quick non-nuclear win was very much on the cards. The soviet union had just entered the war. The navy knew that it couldn't protect the homeland and didn't have any planes. There was, at the very least, a substantial faction in the cabinet that wanted to surrender, and had the support of the emperor in this. Can we be sure the war would have ended quickly? No. Can we be sure that the human cost would have been less than the ~200,000 civilian deaths caused by the bombs? Definitely not - conventional firebombing could have inflicted those kind of casualties if the war had continued for as little as another week or two. But a decade-long conflict or frozen ceasefire is really implausible; the balance of conventional forces was really overwhelming at that point.
> Arguably, if the US used nukes on Chinese soldiers during the Korean conflict, as some generals advised, there would be no North Korea. We'd have a cowed China and built a single free and democratic Korea, essentially one large South Korea. Instead we have one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen as a client state of China, who uses China's political influence and muscle to threaten the West with nuclear war every day. So, progress?
You could equally argue that if the US had given up and pulled out of Korea entirely, instead of North and South Korea we'd have a country like Vietnam, which is doing pretty well. Or that if the Soviet Union had used nukes to conquer the world we'd have peace everywhere. Everyone thinks they're the "good guy"; any moral principle that would allow the US to use nukes would seem to allow other countries to do so too.