"Dumb and Dumber"- Are Americans hostile to knowledge?

[greg]

??

What just happened, here? Did you just call Drogulus a racist, Greg?? If so, you need to stuff a sock in it.

If it was your intention to make a joke it didn't come off at all.

Nothing of what Drog said is even remotely racist.

I, myself, have been a victim of M's false accusations right here on this thread. So your conception of events is in error...


   

wow, sorry if i scared you there, i thought it was obvious I was joking around.

[Hector]

Mostly? Really? Let's see:

WON                                                                                   
Grenada                                                                                 
Panama
The Gulf War, leading to the liberation of Kuwait
Serbia, leading to the independence of Kosovo
Afghanistan, Taliban defeated, leading to the creation of a new Afghan government
The Iraq War, leading to the the creation of a democratic Iraq

LOST
Vietnam*

TIED
Korea**

AS YET UNDECIDED
Iraq insurgency
Afghan insurgency
War on Terror


*There was no political or national will to win at any price (unlike WWII) but there were no "spectacular military failures" in Vietnam either. We won every battle and finally forced North Vietnam to sign the Paris Peace Accords, in which they promised to end hostilities and allow for a peaceful reunification process. The last of the American troops went home with South Vietnam intact and independent. Two years later North Vietnam violated the peace accords and invaded the south with an armored bliztkrieg. The American government did absolutely nothing at that point to help South Vietnam (beyond evacuating a few people)...and it ceased to exist. Not an American military failure...an American political failure.

** Since America fought the Chinese, Russians, and North Koreans to a stalemate that preserved the independence of South Korea and the prewar status quo; and since South Korea has flourished while the North has been reduced to one of the poorest nations on earth, one could say the Korean War actually ended in a victory...certainly a victory for the South Korean people.

Sarge

Grenada! Yeah, right, what a great victory that was. Clint Eastwood won it for you. I know, I saw the film and films, like newspapers, never lie.

Panama?

I think you had a little help from the best army in the World in Serbia and without us they would still be under Commie control instead the current crop of neo-Fascist bastards that run the country (country? - it's falling apart as we speak!).

Also, they have less chance of entering the EU than Uszbekistan and I made the last country up...I think

[Florestan]

I think you had a little help from the best army in the World in Serbia and without us they would still be under Commie control instead the current crop of neo-Fascist bastards that run the country (country? - it's falling apart as we speak!).

Could you be more specific about the bold parts?

[Dancing Divertimentian]

wow, sorry if i scared you there, i thought it was obvious I was joking around.

Ah, okay!

I should have guessed!

Mea culpa!

[MishaK]

You act as if the US decision to drop the bomb sprang from soulless, heartless entities without a care for the consequences. That's not true. You said it yourself: there were those in the top US ranks who forwarded dissenting votes. So it obviously wasn't an easy decision. Obviously.

The fact that some back and forth was going on doesn't change the result that a morally wrong decision was made in the end.

And besides, there are any number of weapons that lack "limited precision" (so I'm not sure what you're driving at). Blanket, high-altitude firebombing among them. And that's what the Japanese were facing in the wake of the capture of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Endless barrages of night and day air raids - aimed at both military and civilian targets alike with bombs being scattered all over the place. I don't see any advantage or lessening of Japan's misery with this tactic. In reality, the casualties would undoubtedly have been much GREATER seeing as the timetable for such an operation would have spanned months if not years. Yet somehow being conventional means it's all right. I simply don't understand this...

You're missing the issue completely. Over centuries, people have tried to figure out morally proper rules of conducting war (for when you absolutely have to). One central tenet is to differentiate between people who are combatants, and therefore proper targets, and people who are outside of combat - hors de combat, to use the technical term - i.e. civilians, medical staff, POWs, etc. A nuclear weapon scorches and poisons a vast area for years to come. Not only is its radius of death so enormous as to make it inevitable that a large number of civilians would die, but the aftereffects are primarily felt by civilians. It cannot ever be used purely against a military target (with the possible theoretical clinical exception of an isolated military base in the desert - but even so, fallout will reach civilians). This is not at all the same as bombing using conventional weapons. With conventional weapons the question is always how accurate is your targeting. That issue is irrelevant with nukes, because of the vast radius of destruction and because of the fallout that follows, which can go anywhere the wind blows.

On top of all this, add the monumentality of a full-scale invasion. Shudderrrrrr.... Bodies piled on bodies on both sides. Gruesome.

False dilemma. As discussed, a number of high ranking military officials disagreed that the only two options were to nuke or face a devastatingly costly invasion.

You simply can't blame any military for not wanting to subject their already weary forces to such a lethal slug-fest. And one that might not even be successful too boot. And that's a reality. It's safe to say the lessons and black eyes of 'Island Hopping' were not lost on the top US commanders. Broaden the scope to include an entire country - one full of the staunchest of defenders - and the outlook isn't very pretty.

It is morally wrong to sacrifice the lives of cilvilians to save the lives of soldiers. You are condemning non-combatants to death who have done nothing to you. You can't say, 'oh I don't want to sacrifice my soldiers in fighting the enemy soldiers, instead let's sacrifice the mothers and children of the enemy soldiers.' That is immoral. The civilians didn't pick a fight with you.

So obviously it was hoped that the two bombs would cause such an outcry amongst the civilian population that the regime would be forced to listen. And it worked. Just as months or years of firebombing and invasion eventually would have done.

One bomb would have done that trick, if one had waited to allow the Japanese some time for assessment and reaction. If Hirohito and others are to be believed, the Russian entry into the Pacific Theater was in any case a more impressive reason to surrender than the nukes themselves, whose impact effects hadn't yet been fully understood.

And as I said, it was a very unfortunate oversight that no one knew about the long-term consequences of nuclear fallout. No one could have guessed it. The bomb had never been deployed on humans before. And dropping it in an open, vacant expanse would have netted zero. There had to be something for the Japanese high-ups to look at. Sad as it is to say...

Lots of flawed information and logic here. The devastating capabilities of the first nuclear weapon detonated at Alamogordo was not at all lost on those who were present and watching. There is *zero* reason why Japanese military leaders should have been immune to seeing the self-evident, had a demonstration been made over a non-human target. In fact, it could have made an even bigger impression than Hiroshima, since nobody from the Japanese military leadership was present to witness the blast. They didn't fully understand what happened there until weeks after. As to no one being able to guess the fallout consequences, that isn't correct either. There were serious concerns, but the military leadership brushed them under the table and didn't allow sufficient testing.

[Wanderer]

... Serbia ... (country? - it's falling apart as we speak!).

This seems to happen quite a lot lately in the places the US of A choose to invade, bomb or otherwise disrupt around the world.

[MishaK]

Mostly? Really? Let's see:

WON                                                                                   
Grenada                                                                                 
Panama
The Gulf War, leading to the liberation of Kuwait
Serbia, leading to the independence of Kosovo
Afghanistan, Taliban defeated, leading to the creation of a new Afghan government
The Iraq War, leading to the the creation of a democratic Iraq

LOST
Vietnam*

TIED
Korea**

AS YET UNDECIDED
Iraq insurgency
Afghan insurgency
War on Terror

Sarge, you can't be serious! Grenada so doesn't count. That was Reagan wanking off. A busload of tourists could have taken over the place without a single shot fired. The whole thing was a pretext for showing off. There wasn't even a real reason to do anything in Grenada. Counting that as a war should be embarrassing, not a matter of pride, and certainly not a victory. That's like Hillary counting Florida and Michigan as victories. It was no contest. Panama is likewise debatable. Do you count it as a victory if you in the first place trained and created the regime you're removing?

You can't count Iraq in two columns at the same time. The ojective in Iraq was regime change and creating a stable country. Remember that regime change involves not just removing the existing one but also setting one up that has control over its country. The latter hasn't happened. There is no control over the country and therefore the war isn't over. It was fought with inadequate means, with a boneheaded strategy and no plan for the occupation. Whatever it turns out to be in the end, it is no victory. Eisenhower and Patton must be turning in their graves looking at that mess. The war on terror doesn't count as a war. Fighting terrorism is an intelligence and law enforcement operation, not a military one. That is a completely wrongheaded approach to the problem. The "Global War on Terror" is nothing more than a label used by neoconservatives to conflate fears of terrorism with regional wars they would like to fight (Iraq - Syria and Iran next), which have nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11. That isn't an actual war, and certainly not if you are counting Afghanistan and Iraq as three wars separate from the GWOT.

Whether the independence of Kosovo is a victory or a whole new can of worms remains to be seen. Militarily, certainly it was reasonably well executed (if you ignore some of the larger booboos like the bombings of refugee convoys and the Chinese embassy in Belgrade).

*There was no political or national will to win at any price (unlike WWII) but there were no "spectacular military failures" in Vietnam either. We won every battle and finally forced North Vietnam to sign the Paris Peace Accords, in which they promised to end hostilities and allow for a peaceful reunification process. The last of the American troops went home with South Vietnam intact and independent. Two years later North Vietnam violated the peace accords and invaded the south with an armored bliztkrieg. The American government did absolutely nothing at that point to help South Vietnam (beyond evacuating a few people)...and it ceased to exist. Not an American military failure...an American political failure.

You've fallen prey to a sort of reverse mission creep for the purpose of saving face. The objective was to kick out the Commies completely. That failed, even if you stop counting at the Paris accords, for North Vietnam continued to exist as an independent political unit. The ultimate failure here was twofold. Firstly, failure to understand that the primary struggle was anti-colonial and that the population didn't so much care about communism as it cared not to be occupied by anyone, not the Chinese, not the French, not the Americans, and that they were going to fight tooth and nail toward that end. Secondly, the mistaken belief that in such a situation anything could be accomplished militarily in the first place. You can look at lots of battles "won", except that none of them mattered. Every battle "won" set the US cause back by increasing the antagonism among the population. This goes back to the Hiroshima question. In all its East Asian conflicts, the US military showed a remarkable racism in how it treated the Asian civilian population, very different from how WWII was fought in Europe. From dropping nukes on Japan, to bombing civilian dams and dropping Napalm on towns in Korea, to napalm, agent orange and My Lai in Vietnam.

** Since America fought the Chinese, Russians, and North Koreans to a stalemate that preserved the independence of South Korea and the prewar status quo; and since South Korea has flourished while the North has been reduced to one of the poorest nations on earth, one could say the Korean War actually ended in a victory...certainly a victory for the South Korean people.

But remember that that victory was not at all a given and that it came very late. Syngman Rhee's regime was a cruel right-wing military dictatorship populated by cronies and former collaborators with the Japanese occupiers (that's why, by way of contrast, Kim Il-Sung's resistance fighter credentials carried considerable weight for quite some time). The South committed numerous atrocities with the US either giving its explicit OK or closing both eyes (notably the Cheju massacre). What the South did do, what the North didn't, was that it left the handful of very wealthy families and their holdings intact. They became the owners of the chaebols, the huge Korean corporate conglomerates that fueled the postwar growth of Korea, albeit at the great expense of significant political corruption. But remember: South Korea didn't become a democracy until 1988. Even after the military regime was in disarray after the assassination of Park Chung-Hee in 1980, they brutally surpressed a popular uprising in Kwangju that differed from Tienanmen only in scale. The single event that marked a turnaournd for South Korea towards democracy was, of all things, the 1988 Seoul olympics. The student democracy movement took the opportunity while the world's attention was focussed on Korea in the run up to the olympics to embarrass the regime at a time when it could not afford to be heavyhanded. But South korean society remains very stratified, with a small number of chaebol families still controlling virtually the entire economy.

PS: you forgot to mention Lebanon, Haiti and Somalia, all of which are still a disaster.

[Lethevich]

Comedy is it? Yeah, right! Show us one joke from it and the overture doesn't count

I can cheat - opera tends to consider everything that doesn't end in tragedy as comedy

[drogulus]

I am not interested in that sort of "castigating a country". That is all you. Like I sad above. And like here:

"We Americans"? I thought we are individuals here discussing individual view points. I don't think you can speak for "all Americans". Especially since I happen to live in the US presently, and I know a lot of Americans who have a very critical attitude towards their country's history and who don't feel themselves collectiely attacked - like you and some other people here - when these topics come up.

Besides, I never had the impression "the British" were nearly as obsessed about WWII as many Americans (like you guys here) still are. The wound of Pearl Harbor still is very deep and one can tell that from many tearful documentaries about that event. It is obvious it simply is too much for many Americans even today to process the fact that they were totally caught with their pants down by the evil Japanese. Which is easy to understand about a nation which still glorifies military subjects as much as the US does to this very day. And which still wants to define itself by military glory and power while most other Western nations have long moved on to a more complex understanding of the relationships of nations and how to solve the problems between them. Especially since after WWII, the US military has delivered mostly spectacular failures. But since it is such a large economical and internal power factor, its mythological justification has to be upheld.
And we all know that the real reason for dropping the atomic bombs was not strategical, but emotional. They just had to "get back" spectacularly for Pearl Harbor somehow.

    It doesn't seem to me that I was castigaing a country when I noted that the British are (or were) obsessed with WWII to a greater extent than Americans. I just recently watched one of those historical drama series about the German occupation of the Channel Islands during the war. And then there's Foyles War, the series about a police inspector who chases German spies. It didn't end in the '70s. American occasionally make war films, war based TV series, and war comedies, but on the whole the British are more expert at all of these.

    It's no more illegitimate for me to refer to these phenomena than it is for you to mention American reaction to Pearl Harbor. Are we supposed to consider all such posts as racism? That's a pretty low standard, I would think, besides the fact that no actual racism is involved.

     The charge that the bombings of Japan amounted to "getting back" at them is true. The question I raised goes to what else justified them. There's a lot of getting back in war. Announcing that we got back at the Japanese is a bit like the stunning revelation that real ammunition was used as well.

[drogulus]

LOST
Vietnam*

TIED
Korea**

AS YET UNDECIDED
Iraq insurgency
Afghan insurgency
War on Terror



Sarge

     Sarge, I want to isolate this part of your post to show how these particular conflicts may be related. Korea was a stalemate that in retrospect became a huge victory, though nothing that happened at the time made clear that this would be the case. Vietnam was a defeat, and a bitter one that diminished our influence.

     Now take a look at the other conflicts. Will they be more like Korea or like Vietnam? Opponents are betting that Vietnam is the correct model, that insurgencies and terror movements are like wars of national liberation, and we play the role of oppressor/colonial power. But is that the way it will be seen in the future, or are we in a new era where the colonialist/anticolonialist paradigm is replaced by something that does a better job of reflecting what people actually want than the old Marxist model, or even the new quasi-Marxist revolutionary jihadism? Those focussing on the Vietnam paradigm may be missing something big, the Korean model, which took decades to develop. If Iraq and Afghanistan have any chance at all, it will come because we encourage and protect them, and don't get scared off by Vietnam analogies.

[paulb]

     Sarge, I want to isolate this part of your post to show how these particular conflicts may be related. Korea was a stalemate that in retrospect became a huge victory, though nothing that happened at the time made clear that this would be the case. Vietnam was a defeat, and a bitter one that diminished our influence.

     Now take a look at the other conflicts. Will they be more like Korea or like Vietnam? Opponents are betting that Vietnam is the correct model, that insurgencies and terror movements are like wars of national liberation, and we play the role of oppressor/colonial power. But is that the way it will be seen in the future, or are we in a new era where the colonialist/anticolonialist paradigm is replaced by something that does a better job of reflecting what people actually want than the old Marxist model, or even the new quasi-Marxist revolutionary jihadism? Those focussing on the Vietnam paradigm may be missing something big, the Korean model, which took decades to develop. If Iraq and Afghanistan have any chance at all, it will come because we encourage and protect them, and don't get scared off by Vietnam analogies.

Good post.

The philosophy running rampant in this building is totally obsolete. The ugliest sight in america is this building.

[MishaK]

     Sarge, I want to isolate this part of your post to show how these particular conflicts may be related. Korea was a stalemate that in retrospect became a huge victory, though nothing that happened at the time made clear that this would be the case. Vietnam was a defeat, and a bitter one that diminished our influence.

     Now take a look at the other conflicts. Will they be more like Korea or like Vietnam? Opponents are betting that Vietnam is the correct model, that insurgencies and terror movements are like wars of national liberation, and we play the role of oppressor/colonial power. But is that the way it will be seen in the future, or are we in a new era where the colonialist/anticolonialist paradigm is replaced by something that does a better job of reflecting what people actually want than the old Marxist model, or even the new quasi-Marxist revolutionary jihadism? Those focussing on the Vietnam paradigm may be missing something big, the Korean model, which took decades to develop. If Iraq and Afghanistan have any chance at all, it will come because we encourage and protect them, and don't get scared off by Vietnam analogies.

I'm not sure the philosophical dichotomy you propose is appropriate. Marx didn't invent colonialism, nor anti-colonialism. The struggle of occupier vs. occupied is an ancient one. What differs is the method of collective identification of the occupied (faith, nationality, language, culture or political movement). But even that isn't necessarily relevant. Korea was very different from Vietnam in that the Koreans had comparatively little say in the conflict, plus the regime in the South relied on very old existing family networks. That is very different from the Vietnam model where a critical mass of the population had been fighting whatever current occupiers for generations and where the regime in the South had no popular legitimacy and no hold on power without US weaponry to back it up. Another difference is that Vietnam was a collapsing French colony, while Korea was a Japanese colony that was divvied up between the Soviets and the US. The invasion of the US half by the North had little to do with any underlying animosity of the Korean people towards the US occupiers. The two are very different and for that reason Korea is very different from Iraq. Korea as a territory also was an existing medieval kingdom whereas Iraq is the brainfart of a British colonial map designer without any direct historic precedent as a state. Plus neither Vietnam nor Korea is the multiethnic multi-confessional mess that you have in Iraq, with irredentist groups with pretensions to chunks of neighboring countries and the largest ethnic/confessional group under the sway of a neighboring regional power. This is a completely different dynamic. Where Iraq resembles Vietnam very closely is in the boneheaded decision to pursue ideological aims by military means with total disregard for the local conditions at hand or the greater strategic implications of intervening. But the difference between Marxist concepts of anti-colonial struggle and other defintional approaches to insurgent vs. occupier scenarios have nothing to do with it.

[paulb]

  with irredentist groups with pretensions to chunks of neighboring countries and the largest ethnic/confessional group under the sway of a neighboring regional power.

I did not understand the first part of the sentence, could you amplify. Are you refering to egyptians , syrians, amd others that go iraq to fight the US?
The last part is reference to Iran.
How influential is Iran in politics/religious unrest inside Iraq?

[drogulus]

     No, I think these frameworks do influence both Americans and Iraqis, as well as others who try to figure out what should happen, or what is likely to. I'm not saying this paradigm is true, and that one is false, just that the national liberation one is not the exclusive possesion of the worst elements that wield it.

     We do have some choice about which paradigm is permitted to prevail by the course we pursue. I don't see why we should support the paradigm that says Iraqi butchers are somehow authentic, so what they want is legitimate, and the Iraqis who want us to stay and help somehow aren't, so they should be abandoned. Such a narrative, very commonly advanced here, is not one I think that helps Iraqis or Afghans or anyone for that matter other than the people we are fighting.

[MishaK]

I did not understand the first part of the sentence, could you amplify. Are you refering to egyptians , syrians, amd others that go iraq to fight the US?
The last part is reference to Iran.
How influential is Iran in politics/religious unrest inside Iraq?

Irredentist group = Kurds. They also live in Turkey and Iran. Some of them have ideas of a unified Kurdish state that has the Turks extremely jittery. Largest ethnic/confessional group = Shiites, whose political leaders are very much under the influence of Iran, Iran being that neighboring regional power. Sorry for the abstractions. Hope this clarifies it.

     No, I think these frameworks do influence both Americans and Iraqis, as well as others who try to figure out what should happen, or what is likely to. I'm not saying this paradigm is true, and that one is false, just that the national liberation one is not the exclusive possesion of the worst elements that wield it.

     We do have some choice about which paradigm is permitted to prevail by the course we pursue. I don't see why we should support the paradigm that say Iraqi butchers are somehow authentic, so what they want is legitimate, and the Iraqis who want us to stay and help somehow aren't, so they should be abandoned. Such a narrative, very commonly advanced here, is not one I think that helps Iraqis or Afghans or anyone for that matter other than the people we are fighting.

Sorry, but none of this stuff applies. The principal problem is the inapplicability of the "national liberation" paradigm because there is no agreed concept of "nation" among Iraqis. This silly national liberation nonsense was projected upon a lot of the post-colonial third world (especially in Africa) where also in most cases none of this applied, because the post-colonial national borders rarely reflected the borders between ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural groups.

[drogulus]

Sorry, but none of this stuff applies. The principal problem is the inapplicability of the "national liberation" paradigm because there is no agreed concept of "nation" among Iraqis. This silly national liberation nonsense was projected upon a lot of the post-colonial third world (especially in Africa) where also in most cases none of this applied, because the post-colonial national borders rarely reflected the borders between ethnic, linguistic, religious or cultural groups.

     It only doesn't apply if it has no influence. Do you really want to go tell all these Iraqis who're obviously patriotic and want to join the army and police to fight the killers, and die in the process, that their patriotism is phoney because the borders were drawn by some Englishman? This is exactly the sort of unhelpful framework that produces all these "the war is lost" predictions. It treats efforts to improve the situation as doomed to failure, because the critics are operating from a script that says that's what's supposed to happen.

[paulb]

Irredentist group = Kurds. They also live in Turkey and Iran. Some of them have ideas of a unified Kurdish state that has the Turks extremely jittery. Largest ethnic/confessional group = Shiites, whose political leaders are very much under the influence of Iran, Iran being that neighboring regional power. Sorry for the abstractions. Hope this clarifies it.

yes, thanks for explanations.
You have good sense for international politics /history/conflict situations.

I look forward to your insights on the Pakistan Dilemma, once that starts to heat up later this yr.
i havea   topic on pakistan, i think this is where the most potentially explosive conflict may erupt.
The pakistani's are not like iraq with a  strict division between the 2 major islamic setcs.
they are more or lessa   unified group.
And they are like hornets when the nest is disturbed.
And Osama may have been re-unifying his army in that area, and when Musharraf falls, Osama may have some breathing room to work up his fiendish schemes.

[BorisG]

Where is the Information Minister? He was my favorite character of the Bush War.

[Dancing Divertimentian]

The fact that some back and forth was going on doesn't change the result that a morally wrong decision was made in the end.

Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least it paints the US brass as far less callous than you'd have us believe.

You're missing the issue completely. Over centuries, people have tried to figure out morally proper rules of conducting war (for when you absolutely have to). One central tenet is to differentiate between people who are combatants, and therefore proper targets, and people who are outside of combat - hors de combat, to use the technical term - i.e. civilians, medical staff, POWs, etc.

Was Sherman's march through the Confederate south in any way a portrait of military etiquette you just described?

Yes, the two Japanese cities took it on the chin more than any civilian population in history but to say civilian populations get all the respect they deserve from attacking armies is wishful thinking. No matter WHERE you throw the dart in history.

Besides, "rules of combat" are forever subject to situational improv. Nothing is set in stone. No matter for the defender nor the attacker (much more below...).

A nuclear weapon scorches and poisons a vast area for years to come. Not only is its radius of death so enormous as to make it inevitable that a large number of civilians would die, but the aftereffects are primarily felt by civilians. It cannot ever be used purely against a military target (with the possible theoretical clinical exception of an isolated military base in the desert - but even so, fallout will reach civilians). This is not at all the same as bombing using conventional weapons. With conventional weapons the question is always how accurate is your targeting. That issue is irrelevant with nukes, because of the vast radius of destruction and because of the fallout that follows, which can go anywhere the wind blows.

Yes, you've played this card many times and yes I do honestly understand your angle. But in 1945 weapons were not near as accurate as they are now. Especially aerial bombing. That was my angle. So a course of aerial attacks (scattered firebombing) lasting several months or perhaps even years would've been much more costly in lives. Do the math.

False dilemma. As discussed, a number of high ranking military officials disagreed that the only two options were to nuke or face a devastatingly costly invasion.

Military and civilian councils alike often disagree on a course of action but ONE must ultimately be chosen. So one was chosen...

It is morally wrong to sacrifice the lives of cilvilians to save the lives of soldiers. You are condemning non-combatants to death who have done nothing to you. You can't say, 'oh I don't want to sacrifice my soldiers in fighting the enemy soldiers, instead let's sacrifice the mothers and children of the enemy soldiers.' That is immoral. The civilians didn't pick a fight with you.

No army in its right mind just arbitrarily proclaims civilian lives should be swapped for military lives. No matter how many hoards of civilians are killed off. There's still an opposing army to consider. You'd be wasting a ton of manpower and material on basically sheep while the opposing army is left completely unchecked and on the prowl.

This simply wasn't the scenario at all.

As I said earlier on in this thread, if the Japanese were on the verge of cracking (and it seemed so) the knockout blow had to be delivered. And decisively. Else the war could've dragged on for who knows how much longer. The toll from a protracted war would've without question been much greater than had the US put a quick end to the war. Civilian instillations had already been the targets of intense bombing in order to disrupt the civilian infrastructure - which of course has a ripple effect on everything else (military and beyond...). Not to mention military production and manufacture is manned by civilians in civilian surroundings. So civilians were already targets - in both the European and Japanese theaters.

And to build on what I mentioned above: in past wars it was impossible to get 'behind the lines' to such a degree to even touch a nation's war production - nor its civilian (and thus military) infrastructure. This is a clear indication of a change in the "rules of war". For the first time in WWII targets (military and eventually civilian) NOT on the front lines were easily accessible. So the 'rules' got a bit of tweaking...for better or worse.

AT THE TIME it all seemed perfectly logical. The two bombs became a natural extension of this new philosophy. Ultimately it proved more devastating than perhaps was warranted. But war has a way of  making the soundest of decisions - on paper - look awfully bad after the fact. And morally sound decision-makers can get caught up in the lurch.

One bomb would have done that trick, if one had waited to allow the Japanese some time for assessment and reaction. If Hirohito and others are to be believed, the Russian entry into the Pacific Theater was in any case a more impressive reason to surrender than the nukes themselves, whose impact effects hadn't yet been fully understood.

You don't wait in war!!!! It's that simple!!! If you have the means to deliver the punch, you punch. The US had two bombs and they went with their choice to use them.

The Christmas time "Battle of the Bulge" (in Europe) is testament to the disastrous effects of pausing. The allied machine in northern Europe required a short period of time to collect itself and shore up its overextended lines. There was sound tactical reasoning for this pause - you simply can't outrace your supply lines - but aerial bombardments in the heartland of Germany were cut back as well. Germany seized on this opportunity to ramp up its manufacturing output and by the time of the Christmas time counter-offensive it was a (relatively) well supplied army again. Not to mention there was a morale boost amongst the German soldiers...and, so, they were off an running. (The battle might have cost eastern Europe its chance at western liberation as it severely slowed the western allied advance).

So no successful student of warfare even considers 'pause' unless conditions absolutely warrant it. The US had the, err..."luxury" () of the two bombs and used them.

Lots of flawed information and logic here. The devastating capabilities of the first nuclear weapon detonated at Alamogordo was not at all lost on those who were present and watching. There is *zero* reason why Japanese military leaders should have been immune to seeing the self-evident, had a demonstration been made over a non-human target. In fact, it could have made an even bigger impression than Hiroshima, since nobody from the Japanese military leadership was present to witness the blast. They didn't fully understand what happened there until weeks after. As to no one being able to guess the fallout consequences, that isn't correct either. There were serious concerns, but the military leadership brushed them under the table and didn't allow sufficient testing.

This exact scenario had been considered by the US brass and rejected. "Witnesses" to such an event would have proved far less convincing than an actual attack. "Self-evident" to a witness is not necessarily self-evident to someone receiving a story second-hand. That's a given...

[head-case]

This exact scenario had been considered by the US brass and rejected. "Witnesses" to such an event would have proved far less convincing than an actual attack. "Self-evident" to a witness is not necessarily self-evident to someone receiving a story second-hand. That's a given...

I can imagine the invitation.  "Dear Emperor.  You and your top military commanders are cordially invited to a remote island in the Pacific, where we will detonate a huge bomb for your edification.  Black tie optional.  (We promise you will be unharmed, really!)  Sincerely, Harry S. Truman."