Reply #108: 50 Years??? Bull***p!!!! [View All]

[Silverhair]

It definately did NOT take 50 years to come up with the idea that dropping the bomb would save lives on both sides. That idea was the very rationale for dropping the bomb in the first place. And I personally, in the 1950's, was taught that same reason for dropping the bomb.

FDR, in 1942, had set the conditions for the termination of the war - Unconditional Surrender. No negotiated peace. He wanted to be able to root out the governments that had brought such horror to the planet. Unconditional Surrender means EXACTLY THAT!!! If Truman had accepted anything short of that from the Japanese would have left in place their gov't and that would have been like Gulf War I, left the bad guy in power. It would have been political suicide for Truman. Negotiations of any sort were out.

The famous offer of surrender but let us keep the figurehead emperor was not an offer of full surrender. Remember that the militarists that ran Japan claimed to be only the emperor's servants. So keeping the emperor also meant keeping his servants. It meant leaving the current gov't in place.

It was a realistic expectation that the Japanese could be expected to fight for their homeland in the same manner they had fought for Okinawa. Every citizen would have been a soldier. Even the women were being given bamboo spears. Invasion of the homelands likely would have become a war of genocide. It is entirely reasonable to project casualities in the millions for the Japanese.

Dropping THE BOMBs stopped all of that, saving many more lives than it killed, on both sides.