Are there times when dropping WMD on cities with civilian populated buildings is justified

[jllundqu]

What do you tell a Japan with two black eyes?

Nothing, you already told them twice!

Too soon?

[PierzStyx]

Are you defending yourself against aggression? Are the people who are for some reason labeled "civilians" responsible for the aggression? Did the "civilians" elect aggressive leaders? Do the "civilians" voluntarily act as informants in support of the aggressive leaders? Do the "civilians" provide financial support to the aggressive leaders? Do they pay taxes? If the answers are "yes", then what makes the "civilians" "innocent"? Would dropping the WMD's deter future aggression?

No one "pays" taxes. Taxes don't exist on a voluntary basis. If you want to eat and have a place to sleep you have to work. The government then takes what it wants. That is how taxes work. So when your choices are starve or face extortion, almost everyone will choose extortion. Its called survival.

Also, trying to pretend civilians isn't a proper term just makes you look moronic. You sound like a Progressive trying to blame the companies that make guns for the fact that some of their guns are used in school shootings. Are you a Democrat? Because that is the only way your Leftists collectivist drivel can be explained. Only a Leftist could justify punishing everyone for the actions of a specific group instead of just punishing that group or person. Especially when the people you're trying to justify punishing are almost entirely hostages themselves.

[PierzStyx]

"The last move in politics is always to pick up the gun." -- R. Buckminster Fuller

“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire."-Roland Deschain

[PierzStyx]

If a robber sticks a gun in your face, and you know the robber is going to use your money to kill innocent civilians, you have options: You can resist, or you can hand your money over to him. Why not resist? The robber might kill you, but how could God hold that against you?

If an aggressor sticks a gun in your face and orders you to drop WMD's on innocent civilians, what will you do?

Why not resist? Because you alone have no chance of defeating a million person gang armed to the teeth who will torture, rape, and murder you, your wife, and your children if you don't comply. Its the same reason your couch warrior arse is sitting at home instead of invading DC right this moment.

If you're being ordered to operate WMDs then you're a soldier, not a civilian. Thus that argument has no bearing on justifying the murder of civilians.

[PierzStyx]

Also, screw all 33 of you who thought burning children alive in atomic weapons fire is ever a good idea. Just really, $#@! you.

[heavenlyboy34]

And the US is different? Don't remember Japan or Germany dropping nukes on cities.

That reminds me-Murica firebombed the $#@! out of Dresden.(also a civilian center) too. :'(

[Lamp]

Also, screw all 33 of you who thought burning children alive in atomic weapons fire is ever a good idea. Just really, $#@! you.

I'm sure most of them just voted that way to give the impression that their edgy.

[PierzStyx]

And the US is different? Don't remember Japan or Germany dropping nukes on cities.

In fact most people don't seem to understand that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor they went out of their way to NOT bomb and kill American civilians. Just look at the map!



Pearl City is RIGHT THERE! The only way you couldn't hit it is if you were trying not to do so.

Which is not to say the Japanese didn't attack civilians. They did. Horrifically so in China. But they never attacked American civilians.

[heavenlyboy34]

In fact most people don't seem to understand that when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor they went out of their way to NOT bomb and kill American civilians. Just look at the map!



Pearl City is RIGHT THERE! The only way you couldn't hit it is if you were trying not to do so.

Which is not to say the Japanese didn't attack civilians. They did. Horrifically so in China. But they never attacked American civilians.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to PierzStyx again.

[Ender]

Covered.

[enhanced_deficit]

Americans largely support using nukes, even against civilians



Thermonuclear test, 1952. (National Nuclear Security Administration via Wikimedia/public domain)


By David Trilling
Last updated: September 1, 2017

Scott Sagan of Stanford University and Benjamin Valentino of Dartmouth College designed a hypothetical scenario in which Iran – responding to new Western sanctions – starts a war by attacking a U.S. ship and killing thousands of American service members. The scenario, of course, is reminiscent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, which brought the U.S. into World War II. What follows, in this hypothetical, is a protracted conflict that has claimed thousands of casualties on both sides.
To win this war, Tehran must be captured. America could invade with ground troops or launch a devastating attack that would kill thousands of civilians.


The scholars present three scenarios to a representative set of 780 adult Americans as an alternative to a continued ground war that would kill 20,000 American soldiers:
1) Drop a nuclear bomb that would kill 100,000 Iranian civilians in Mashhad, Iran’s second city?
2) Drop a nuke that would kill 2 million Iranian civilians? Or
3) drop conventional bombs that would kill 100,000 Iranian civilians?

The respondents were asked questions to test their approval for each of these scenarios and their preference.

Key takeaways:

• A majority of Americans approved the bombing in all three scenarios.
• In two scenarios, the respondents preferred the air strike to the risk of a ground war: The nuclear strike that kills 100,000 Iranian civilians and the conventional air strike that kills 100,000 civilians.
• A small majority of respondents (52.3 percent) preferred the ground war (and loss of 20,000 U.S. troops) to the death of 2 million Iranian civilians in a nuclear strike.
• Among those who oppose both types of airstrikes, the majority judge them unethical. There is not a statistically significant difference in moral judgement of nuclear strikes or conventicle air strikes when 100,000 civilians are killed: “This suggests that anti-nuclear norms add little to the aversion to killing civilians.”
• Those who support the airstrikes (and thus the killing of noncombatant civilians) include:
  
  • 69.5 percent of Republicans and 48.4 percent of Democrats;
  • 51.6 percent of people under age 60 and 70.5 percent of people age 60 and above;
  • 31.5 percent of Americans who oppose the death penalty and 67.3 percent of those who approve of the death penalty.
  
  
• They found no statistically significant difference by race (white or non-white), education or gender.
• In an open-ended question, the majority of those who supported the bombing scenarios cited “saving American lives” or “ending the war quickly” as their reason. Surprising the researchers, a number also suggested that Iranian civilians, because their country started the conflict, “were somehow culpable or were less than human.”
• Given the option of a diplomatic solution that would not prosecute Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but would leave him without political power: A roughly equal proportion chose that scenario as chose the nuclear air strike that kills 100,000 civilians.

https://journalistsresource.org/stud...trike-research

[timosman]

Are you defending yourself against aggression? Are the people who are for some reason labeled "civilians" responsible for the aggression? Did the "civilians" elect aggressive leaders? Do the "civilians" voluntarily act as informants in support of the aggressive leaders? Do the "civilians" provide financial support to the aggressive leaders? Do they pay taxes? If the answers are "yes", then what makes the "civilians" "innocent"? Would dropping the WMD's deter future aggression?

Extreme social engineering.

[oyarde]

I would have to vote no currently . If I do it then yes , anyone else , no.

[enhanced_deficit]

I would have to vote no currently . If I do it then yes , anyone else , no.

Excellent double standard.

[enhanced_deficit]

Photos of the World War II Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945

The bombs that exploded above the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first and last atomic weapons ever used in warfare.
Newsweek

In the months leading up to August 6, 1945, rumors spread through the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Although the city was home to a number of military headquarters, arms manufacturers and strategic shipping routes, it had been largely undamaged by the ferocious Allied bombing campaigns that hit other cities. People wondered why, and there was an eerie feeling of calm before the storm.
This storm broke on August 6, at 8:15 on a clear summer morning. A blinding flash, like a camera bulb going off, filled the city, followed by a wave of intense heat. Shortly afterward, a deep boom blasted apart walls and ignited firestorms.
In that instant, almost 70 percent of Hiroshima was destroyed, and 30 percent of the population was killed. Beyond the devastated city, the world also changed irrevocably. The bomb that exploded in the air above the city, dropped by an American bomber, was the first ever use of an atomic weapon in human history.
It wouldn't be the last. Three days later the city of Nagasaki, which was targeted for its large strategic seaport, caught 11lb of plutonium from another American bomber plane. The bomb exploded over the city’s industrial valley, completely destroying everything in a half-mile radius and killing at least 40,000 people.

https://www.newsweek.com/world-war-i...t-1945-1055913

I'm sorry, but Japan attacked US and killed a number of Americans. Dropping those bombs ended the war immediately. If it saved American lives and it assuredly did, then so be it.

If country's A's military attacks country B's military installations, it would be justified in your view for country B to retaliate to use WMDs on civilian populated cities of country A (because overwhelming force would terrorize/bring other country to its knees quickly/shorten military expenses)?

[enhanced_deficit]

Dec 19, 2018

The Hiroshima Bombing Didn't Just End WWII—It Kick-Started the Cold War

The colossal power of the atomic bomb drove the world’s two leading superpowers into a new confrontation.
Sarah Pruitt

Soon after arriving at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman received word that the scientists of the Manhattan Project had successfully detonated the world’s first nuclear device in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert.
On July 24, eight days after the Trinity test, Truman approached Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who along with Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (soon to be succeeded by Clement Attlee) made up the “Big Three” Allied leaders gathered at Potsdam to determine the post-World War II future of Germany.
According to Truman, he “casually mentioned” to Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” but Stalin didn’t seem especially interested. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese,’” Truman later wrote in his memoir, Year of Decisions.

President Harry Truman, with a radio at hand aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, reads reports of the first atomic bomb raid on Japan, while en route home from the Potsdam conference on August 6, 1945.
AP Photo

Soviet Intelligence Knew About the Bomb

For Truman, news of the successful Trinity test set up a momentous choice: whether or not to deploy the world’s first weapon of mass destruction. But it also came as a relief, as it meant the United States wouldn’t have to rely on the increasingly adversarial Soviet Union to enter World War II against Japan.
READ MORE: The Inside Story of Harry Truman and Hiroshima
Truman never mentioned the words “atomic” or “nuclear” to Stalin, and the assumption on the U.S. side was that the Soviet premier didn’t know the exact nature of the new weapon. In fact, while Truman himself had first learned of the top-secret U.S. program to develop atomic weapons just three months earlier, after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Soviet intelligence had begun receiving reports about the project as early as September 1941.

While Stalin didn’t take the atomic threat as seriously during wartime as some of his spies did—he had other problems on his hands, thanks to the German onslaught and occupation—Truman’s words at Potsdam made more of an impact than the president realized.
“We now know that Stalin immediately went to his subordinates and said, we need to get Kurchatov working faster on this,” says Gregg Herken, emeritus professor of U.S. diplomatic history at the University of California and the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War and Brotherhood of the Bomb. Igor Kurchatov was the nuclear physicist who headed up the Soviet atomic bomb project—the Soviet equivalent, in other words, of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer.
‘Little Boy’ Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, just days after the Potsdam Conference ended, the U.S. bomber Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb known as “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Despite its devastating effects, Japan didn’t offer unconditional surrender right away, as the United States had hoped. Then on August 8, Soviet forces invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, violating an earlier non-aggression pact signed with Japan.
READ MORE: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki




Herken argues that the Soviet invasion may have had at least as great an effect on Japanese morale as the first atomic bomb. “The last hope for the Japanese government, the peace faction, was that the Soviet Union might actually agree to negotiate a peace with the United States as a neutral party,” he explains. “But once the Soviets invaded Manchuria, it was clear that was not going to happen.”


https://www.history.com/news/hiroshi...-wwii-cold-war








RELATED CONTENT



Live from Nevada…It’s an A-Bomb Test!




The Myth That Reagan Ended the Cold War With a Single Speech




Why the Berlin Airlift Was the First Major Battle of the Cold War





HISTORY Vault: The Cold War




The Man Who Survived Two Atomic Bombs









https://www.history.com/news/hiroshi...-wwii-cold-war

[enhanced_deficit]

Today is 75th anniversary of Heroshima WMD attack:




This is what it looked like after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima 75 years ago

Jay Cannon, USA TODAY Published Aug. 5, 2020


On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, marking the first time the bomb was used in warfare. Wochit

The most powerful weapon to ever be used against other humans was detonated by the United States in Japan 75 years ago.
On August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber famously known as the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, marking the first of two times the bomb has ever been used in warfare.
The death toll itself was mind-boggling. As many as 140,000 people ultimately died from the blast, but not all perished immediately. The residual health issues caused by intense radioactive fallout claimed thousands of lives in the months and years afterwards as well.
The city was leveled – less than 10 percent of the buildings in Hiroshima were left undamaged by the bomb, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Days later, on August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, putting Japan on the brink of surrender.
The atomic bombings effectively ended WWII, but they have since served as a brutal lesson about the dangers of nuclear warfare. Three-quarters of a century later, tensions over nuclear weapons and how to ensure they are not used again are still very much with us.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...an/3292406001/

[enhanced_deficit]

76 Years Later, Debate Persists Over Hiroshima, Nagasaki Atomic Bombings

By Carlin Becker, Zenger News On 8/9/21

Hydrogen Bomb vs Atomic Bomb: What's The Difference?

Seventy-six years after the United States dropped nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities, World War II historians still hotly contest president Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atomic weapons on civilian populations.
Japan was stubbornly refusing to surrender in the summer of 1945 despite suffering crippling blows in battles with Allied Forces in the Pacific theater. "Operation Downfall," a plan to force a surrender by invading and occupying the country, would require 1.7 million U.S. troops, according to U.S. War Department estimates. The invasion would have resulted in 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400,000–800,000 dead, and 5–10 million Japanese dead, according to military leaders at the time.



The radioactive plume from the bomb dropped on Nagasaki City, as seen from 9.6 km away, in Koyagi-jima, Japan, August 9, 1945. The US B-29 superfortress Bockscar dropped the atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man," which detonated over the northern part of Nagasaki City just after 11 a.m. Hiromichi Matsuda/Handout from Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/Getty Images/Getty Images Truman learned of America's effort to develop an atomic bomb only after the death of his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He ordered the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9.

Determining the death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been difficult, because injuries and radiation exposure killed people for years afterward.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that 70,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the initial blast when the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, dropped the "Little Boy" bomb on Hiroshima. The death toll likely climbed to 100,000 by the end of the year, and related deaths after five years may have pushed the total to 200,000 as long-term effects of the radiation emerged.
When "Fat Man" flattened Nagasaki three days later, according to a Department of Energy estimate, the initial blast killed 40,000 and injured 60,000 more. The five-year death toll may have reached 140,000.
The death and destruction was not out of proportion with aerial bombing campaigns that had already been raging for three years, including those carried out by the United States. "Operation Meetinghouse," the fire-bombing of Tokyo by U.S. Army Air Forces on March 9, 1945, had a higher immediate death toll and destroyed more territory than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

President Harry S. Truman, pictured at his desk in 1945. The multibillion-dollar U.S. program to develop a nuclear weapon was already in motion when he learned of it after taking office. Getty Images

But the atomic radiation's lasting effects, and death tolls that kept growing, set the two apart from other bombing campaigns.

"No one knew," said Thomas Sutton, a political science professor at Baldwin Wallace University whose parents both worked on the Manhattan Project.
"There were all kinds of hypotheticals, and they certainly knew about the effects of nuclear-induced illness from other experiences, " he told Zenger, "but the mass scale and lingering effects — it was hypothetical versus seeing it happen."

newsweek.com/76-years-later-debate-persists-over-hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic-bombings-1617625



Related

A socialist (self claimed 'oppressed people united') school of thought view:

Class forces behind U.S. genocide in Hiroshima, Nagasaki
John Catalinotto August 12, 2021

[osan]

Voted no.

But there are many who attempt to justify it.

I don't think the answer is quite that simple.

What have modern "nations" tended to do? They tend to intermix military and civilian populations. Americans, Brits, Krauts... the list goes on. So when a direct and present threat issues from such a population center and the consequence of doing nothing results in your own being annihiliated, I would say that nuking the threat stands centrally within the circle of reasonable response.

It's a $#@!ty circumstance, to be sure, but when the result of inaction is suicide...

I see not only no reason to hand the lives of one's own over for destruction, I see an obligation to protect those lives, even if it means genocidal acts against an aggressor. At the end of the day, civilian populations are effectively complicit for having tolerated the intolerable. We Americans are as guilty of this as anyone else on the planet.

[tebowlives]

I don't think the answer is quite that simple.

What have modern "nations" tended to do? They tend to intermix military and civilian populations. Americans, Brits, Krauts... the list goes on. So when a direct and present threat issues from such a population center and the consequence of doing nothing results in your own being annihiliated, I would say that nuking the threat stands centrally within the circle of reasonable response.

It's a $#@!ty circumstance, to be sure, but when the result of inaction is suicide...

I see not only no reason to hand the lives of one's own over for destruction, I see an obligation to protect those lives, even if it means genocidal acts against an aggressor. At the end of the day, civilian populations are effectively complicit for having tolerated the intolerable. We Americans are as guilty of this as anyone else on the planet.

Agreed. Nuke them until they glow.

[Anti Globalist]

Certainly wasn't justifiable to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[osan]

Certainly wasn't justifiable to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

How do you reason?

[osan]

Certainly wasn't justifiable to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Depends on the assumptions going in. Whose lives are more valuable to Americans, their own or those of the of the Japanese? I'd vote for the former, all else equal. Sue me for being clannish.

Regardless of who was at fault, and I submit that we were all there, the war had become fact. Therefore, the first question to be answered was whether we wished to prevail, or be defeated. Prevail, you say? Right. So that immediately answers the question of whose lives are of greater value TO US (or should be for any rational human possessing an IQ, such as they may prove). Looking at it in simplest terms, I value American lives more than those of the enemy. Were it otherwise, I would not be fighting them, but would indeed remain inert and submit myself to their mercy, which in the case of the Japanese, would likely have cost me my head.

The grim reality was this: invasion of the Japanese homeland was going to likely cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. Under conventional conditions, there was no way the Japs were going to roll over. The bombs convinced them that annihilation of the genotype was next on the bill and that the Americans were more than willing to wipe them out to the last child. This placed before their Jackass In Chief the very real, stark, and immediate choice of whether "honor" was worth the price of a real and true genocide. He wisely decided it was not and capitulated in a matter of a couple of days. This was the best possible outcome, given the reality of who the Japanese were, just prior to the bombs. Months more of saturation raids on all the large Japanse population centers would have taken a far higher toll, likely in the millions or even tens of millions. The shock factor of the bombs bought the Japs some much needed religion, so I must submit that using them was indeed justified. It was $#@!ty, mind you, but so is the reality of industrialized, mechanized warfare with which we humans have saddled ourselves.

We are a really $#@!ty species. We suffer FAIL far too often. We do good things, true - lots of it, and yet the truer measure of the beast rests with the worst it is willing to do, and we are ever so willing to sound the depths of unspeakable depravity. In short, there is very little, if anything, to recommend us, which I suspect explains why nobody from other star systems have contacted us. Why would they? Other than to eat or enslave us, what would be the benefit of contact? I see none, given how wildly dangerous we tend to become, even on the flimsiest of pretexts. We're a raft of horrid little animals who pretend to be "civil", but only when it suits our purposes, our proclivity being to retreat into unspeakable viciousness the moment we deem it fitting, and again for the least reasons.

So at the end of the day, while I deplore what we do in a general sense, I cannot disagree with the decision to level two entire cities in the way we did, given the realities of humans with tech. In a word, and speaking to the mean as I am oft wont to do: we suck.

Final word: to those who believe war should have rules, I say get bent. War should be with but one rule: defeat the enemy no matter what it takes. Let it become so incomprehensibly horrific such that nobody would so much as contemplate it, regardless of how power hungry. That is what MAD was all about and it was the one single right thing America and the rest of the relevant powers did in the post-war world. The prospect of universal annihilation was so scary, it kept everyone nominally polite... for a while. But being the rotten little monkeys we are, even that wore away in surprisingly little time with America deciding to screw around in SE Asia, Soviets in Afghanistan, and so on right down to this very day. We never learn because we don't want to. We like playing the odds and one day snake eyes will be rolled and then things will get really interesting. And I don't think it's that far off.

Humans.