[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Nippelspanner

I really don't think so and it baffles me when people justify mass murder of civilians. Nothing can justify this for me.
Yes, an invasion would have been a catastrophe. Then again, why not blockade Japan completely, cut it off, wait it out, threaten Japan and drop a bomb off-shore as a demonstration, whatever I don't know but just dropping them? Shocks me.

A blockade would probably have resulted in a mass famine, and more civilian casualties than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, look at how many German civilians died in WWI during the blockade. Somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 I believe, and that's with a government that's semi-rational. The military government of Japan was anything but rational. Dropping a bomb offshore might have worked, but given the bushido mentality of the Japanese military government it would probably have just been seen as a weakness on behalf of the Americans and emboldened the Japanese government to hold out longer for more beneficial surrender terms.

They dropped the bomb(s) as soon as they could, without warning as far as I know.

There was a fairly vague warning in July, in a set of leaflets dropped on Japanese cities including Hiroshima and Nagasaki including a list of cities which were likely to be bombed, but no mention was made of nuclear weapons. After Hiroshima leaflets were dropped on Nagasaki warning of the destructive power of the new bomb, but not warning the city that they were next. Basically the point of the post-Hiroshima leaflets was to tell the Japanese people to evacuate the cities (which would never have been allowed) and to petition the Emperor to end the war.

The reason was not to prevent millions of dead, the reason was to test the funky new toy and to show the Russian bear who's running the show.

Yes, this is part of it, definitely. Not the whole part, but it was definitely a part of it. If anything I'd wager it was likely one of the main reasons that a second bomb was dropped.

I totally understand this, looking at it from a certain perspective.
But that doesn't make it right in the end.
As I said, for me - nothing - justifies these two bombs.

Nothing justifies war in any manner, but sadly it still happens. One could make the arguement that the dropping of those two bombs has lead to the longest peace that Europe has seen since the Roman Empire, but there are plenty of other factors involved in bringing that about other than Mutually Assured Destruction. That being said, if and when that peace does end, those two bombs will make sure that it will end extremely tragically. It's very much a double-edged sword.

But I'm just some sissy liberal anyways, who cares about a few thousand fried civilians, as long as they are on the right side.

I'm the Chief Commander of the PC police, so you're preaching to the choir here. The thing is though, there was no right solution in August 1945, no way forward that would have avoided civilian casualties because these civilians were subserviant to a government that considered them as much weapons of war as the military. It's difficult to wrap your head around that mindset, the warped mentality of Japan under the military government. Yes, they didn't indulge in the kind of industrial slaughter that Germany undertook, but instead made brutality a norm, made harsh living a cultural fact. Honestly Japan of that era terrifies me, and I'd much rather have been deployed to Europe to fight Germany than in the Asian theatre to fight Japan. At least if you were taken prisoner by German soldiers you had a reasonable chance of not being shot or worked to death (providing you weren't Russian, or on the list of undesirables, of course) but taken prisoner by the Japanese made you automatically subhuman and ready for exploitation in any manner that your guards saw fit.

In short, I agree with you, morally, dropping the bombs was an evil act, but it was only one step in a series of morally dubious acts that saw war break out across the world in the first place. That is, sadly, war.