An overlooked A-bomb issue: the wait-a-couple-weeks argument

[hunter]

7. I agree with this post.

We were sending a message to the Soviet Union and testing out our new atomic might on living cities while we still had some pretense of "reasonable cause."

The supposed imminent "invasion of the Japanese mainland" was a display of force too, meant for both the Japanese and the Soviet Union, but was a moot point by the time of the surrender. The unacknowledged plan was to keep hitting Japan from the air with conventional bombs and atomic bombs until they surrendered or starved.

U.S. motives were clear, primarily American racism and hatred of the Japanese, and big businesses' hatred of communism. Stalin's Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire were very clearly toxic and genocidal societies, but it was never an ethical question of "saving American and Japanese lives" by use of this horrible weapon.

The U.S.A. had the tool, and we used it. We were all over Nagasaki after the bomb to record it's impact, primarily because we'd created the infrastructure to build hundreds of plutonium bombs, and we did indeed build them.

We built 120 bombs of the type used on Nagasaki, and all were retired for "more efficient" easier to handle atomic bombs by 1950.

The myths surrounding our use of the atomic bomb are still ugly and abhorrent, but the raw reality is even worse, far removed from any reasonable discussion of ethics.

There are no winners in wars, only losers. Some lose their lives, some lose everything but their lives, and some lose their souls.