It also saved Japan.  The country would have effectively ceased to exist if the US had to invade.  Their casualty rates would likely have exceeded 95%.

Could you expand on that? It's my understanding that both the US and Russia possess enough nukes to render this planet uninhabitable to humans.

It was playing in my mind while I typed that, lol.

Put that commie on the front lines on Okinawa for a month, bet he would change his tune, the twat. he was probably fed more atomic information to the soviets than greenglasshole.

If you kill enough of them, the rest of them stop fighting.

In fairness, more Japanese died in the fire bombing of Tokyo than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

My dad was stationed on Tinian at the time.

He was glad they did it.

I'm glad they did it.

Unfortunately mine refused to talk about it, found out that he had night terrors for several years afterward to an extent that my grandmother slept in a separate bed.

The only thing he ever said about the war was “I killed a lot of Japs”.

We did thisthread last week.

The Japanese deserved it this week too.

Just finished Destroyer of Worlds.  Almost finished with episode 1 of Supernova in the East.  I highly recommend them.

He talks about the soldier that held out in the Philippines for 25 years.  The dude was ordered to resist and he wouldn't quit until his commanding officer was flown in to talk to him.  Many attempts were made to convince the dude to surrender.  They left magazines and newspapers from Japan for him to read.  He thought they were fake as he expected Japan would of fought to the last, civilians included.  The women were being issued spears when the dude shipped out.

On another note, anyone that thinks the Japs would not have fought to the last should view the videos of Saipan or Guam where the women are jumping off cliffs with their kids to avoid being captured.  

Hell yes. Japan was NOT going to stop.

My dad and uncle were on aircraft carriers on their way there. I think the loss of life (on both sides) would have been horrific if we had invaded Japan.

They unfortunately (for them) had to be bitch slapped and knocked down a few pegs.

By 1945 the Soviets had the bomb as well, or at least the plans to make one.  It wasn’t until 1949 when they first detonated one.  Our bomb was two fold.  End the war in Japan and Stop the Red Army from expansion.

the genie never just goes back into the bottle, I have no doubt that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were warranted on the face value of forcing Japan to surrender but demonstrating to the Soviets that we have this capability was the right thing to do

Yes sir.

Forget the lives saved by avoiding the invasion of Japan in WWII, think of the lives saved by the wars that never happened due to mutually assured destruction.

Pretty much everyone knew it was possible to build the bomb. Nobody knew how. Japan figured the technology didn’t exist. Germany went down the wrong path.
We said fuck it and put a bunch of different approaches in operation in parallel. We didn’t care what it cost.

We built it.

It certainly was. Otherwise, I wouldn't be driving a Japanese truck. Plus, they are a great and loyal ally of ours.

FUCK China!

They're next!

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Yes it was worth it, but it should not be celebrated, ending the war yes but not the bomb.

I think the really amazing thing is no one has used these weapons since WW2. The thinking back then was that once enough countries got “the bomb” was they would be used every in every conflict with a complete world war fought entirely using atomic style weapons.

Really wasn’t as bad as Oppenheimer thought it would be.

After surviving Iwo Jima, my grandfather was training for the invasion of Japan when the bomb dropped.  I doubt he would have been as lucky as he was on Iwo Jima.  The bombs saved many American lives, and even more Japanese lives.

War is hell. We need to learn that lesson, again.

Anyone who DOESN'T think is was worth it, has no concept of the mentality of the Japanese during WWII.

"Fanatical" really doesn't cover it.

Anyone who wants to get a peek into that mentality should Read William Craig's The Fall of Japan

This is the typewriter that was used to create the orders to drop the bombs.   I got to play around with it while visiting some lesser traveled areas in the capitol.


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Good nukings.

Too bad we didn't listen to Mcarthur on using it on China

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i GREW UP NOT 20 MILES FROM A CHURCH IN SC BUILT IN THE 1500S, BURNT IN THE 1550s buy Spanish , Burnt in the 1600s by indians, , burnt in the 1700s by British, burnt in the 1800s by Sherman.

and that cocky fuck thinks he started or ended this LOL.

I have stood on the ruins of Babylon, AS A CONQUER ,WHIPPED OUT MY DICK AND PISSED

IN THE GRAND march of history the Nuclear bomb is a comma Not a period ,& certainly not he start of a new paragraph.

MAYBE BUT WOMAN SURE AS HELL DO

This, absolutely.

Japan was already on terms to surrender.  We basically just wanted to use our new toys and so after two drops, were satisfied and so we accepted.

Personally I hate the stigma against them. Tactical nukes should be used as often as JDAMs, or at least as often as MOABs or MOPs. Some targets just need a few kiloton nutcracker.

can't really say ti better than that

WRONG THE TWO DROPS WERE TO KEEP the Russians out. Truman was not willing to split Japan as FDR had Germany. so we split Korea, Truman wanted Korea whole as well. but alas
[img]/images/smilies/icon_smile_dissapprove.Truman was in many ways the  most important Democrat president of the last 150 years.

His decisions on Israel & the cold war strategy basically  created the 20th century. with all the flaws we know.

Harold Agnew carrying the plutonium core of the Nagasaki Fat Man bomb, 1945






The plutonium core (the box) in the Fat Man weighed 6.2 kg or about 14 lb, the pit is 9 cm (4 inches) across. And only about one fifth of it, a bit over 1 kg (2 pounds) undergoes a fission reaction. And only a gram (1/30th of an ounce) of that gets converted into explosive energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT.




The rising mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, a few minutes after the nuclear bomb was detonated, August 9, 1945. Picture taken from Koyagi-jima, 5 miles from the center of Nagasaki.





Japanese coins melted by atomic bomb





Haunting imprints of people killed by the blast

I don't know why, but I hate that quote.

And one of the greatest technological accomplishments in history.

it is pure arrogance . he was nothing of the sort. Just another primate with a better stick.

The whole story about it being to save lives was a lie cooked up afterwards.  The Japanese were willing to surrender before the bombs dropped. This was the work of the evil one.

Not really. This is a myth for the most part. Our use of the bomb was to show the world we had it, and would use it. It was a show of force.

As all things with history, and war, nothing is so simple.

Japan was absolutely planning to fight to the last man on the mainland, provided that was what the emperor told them to do. At the time, Japan was already trying to negotiate terms of surrender to the US through the Soviets, who they thought would present their argument on their behalf. We were intercepting these communications for months before dropping the bomb so we knew Japan wanted to surrender.

We demanded unconditional surrender. Japan wanted to surrender, asking that it could keep its emperor as a religious figure. Truman wanted to show that he was tough and could get them to an unconditional surrender.

Japan didn’t surrender after we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th. While it was an impressive new weapon in many of the worlds eyes, it didn’t matter much to Japan. They’d been having entire cities and populations wiped out from “terror bombing” for a while already, and the details of it being done by a single bomb didn’t make it out to the public or even the emperor until Nagasaki had already been bombed on the 9th. And even still, Japan didn’t surrender. Two bombs unlike the world had ever seen and Japan and the emperor were still not willing to surrender under our terms.

On August 9th, the Soviets invaded Japanese Manchuria the same morning we dropped the bomb. Their campaign was brutal, sending over 1.5 million troops through Mongolia against 750,000 Japanese troops, which was a large consolidation of their already decimated military force. The Japanese lost over 50,000 men in the fighting and had roughly a half million taken prisoner by the Soviets. The Soviets continued pushing through Japan.

On 15 August the emperor announced that Japan would accept the terms of the Potsdam agreement. But nobody knew what that meant exactly, and there was no clear message from the emperor stating in no uncertain terms that the military was to surrender. So, as the Soviets continued their push south to Korea, they continued encountering resistance. By the 20th of August most of the military had received word that they were to surrender, but by then it was largely a moot point as they were nearly defeated by a Russian amphibious landing on the coast, where they had been backed up against by the sweep from Mongolia.

It wasn’t until Sept 8th that Americans landed in Incheon and then the surrender of Japan was completed and the war was over, there would be no mainland invasion of Japan by American forces.

So, while the bomb was a factor in shaping our geopolitical role on the world stage from the end of the war forward, it’s not true that it ended the war. Neither of the bombs had made any significant progress towards that end. All of Truman’s advisors, even LeMay, had told Truman that the war would be over in two weeks with or without the bomb and they were correct. Many of them opposed the bomb, believing that its use would instantly put us in an arms race with the Soviets that would put America in its entirety in danger. And they were right again, though their worst fears were fortunately never realized.

Ultimately, the amassed Soviets coming from Siberia were the ones who would have to bear the casualty tolls we hear referenced a lot to justify the bomb. And those deaths were likely never going to be Americans anyway, as the Manchuria invasion was already going as planned. Our use of the bomb wasn’t even learned about for some time, and when it was assessed in detail, it proved to be a nearly complete waste. Of the hundreds of thousands killed, less than 4,000 were military, and many of them were administrative staff. No significant military targets were destroyed.

On the contrary, anyone who insists that the Japanese would have fought to the last man, needs only to realize that they did not. They surrendered. And it wasn’t because of the bomb, at least not in my significant way.

The Japanese would have continued to fight as long as the emperor, a deity to them, said to fight. As they did in Guam and Saipan. But they DID surrender on the mainland, and it wasn’t until weeks after the bombs. They were defeated by our then-Allies the Soviets after we destroyed much of their supply lines, Air Force, and supply depots.

It's fake, it's an army propaganda piece.  He's putting on an act.

Agreed. That was the real reason the bombs were dropped. To show that we had them, we could reproduce them (and had stated that we had far more of them than we actually did, but nobody called our bluff) and that we would use them.  

The bombings were strategic in shaping the way Europe would be drawn up after the war, and where we would have bases built to keep a global influence. For this they were incredibly effective.

They didn’t really spare hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans from a mainland invasion though. That’s one of those things that’s just been repeated for so long we accept it as fact.

To keep the Russians out of what? Because the Russians invaded Manchuria, as our allies nonetheless, on the morning we bombed Nagasaki. And it’s a damn good thing they did or we would have had to consider a ground invasion which is the backup plan many Americans were being trained for. That’s why many of our grandfathers and fathers had been training to invade the mainland.

The plan was and had been for the Soviets to invade, and they did.

I hate Russia today far more than most people on this board, and get accused of being a Democrat because of what I understand about them. I’m in no way wanting to put them in a good light. But our victory in the Pacific is largely owed to their ground invasion with our material and aerial support.

Damn I was gonna agree with you, but then you lost me at the end haha. Who is the evil one, Truman? Satan? Podesta?

Because that snarky little socialist acted like he built the bomb. He was a key player for sure, but one of many who deserved credit.

I personally hate the quote as well because of the grammar. Like, we get it, the translation isn’t perfect, but it’s so pretentious to steal the quote with poor grammar and all. “I am become” sounds like a Slavic attempt at English. Obviously, “I have become” is the translation of the meaning, not the literal translation of the wording, but noooooo. Little Commie McDork has to sound so intellectual.

A myth that the Reds spread. Several of my teachers growing up taught us that both the Soviets and US had enough nukes to kill all life on Earth several times over.

The dude felt the singular responsibility for inventing the single most destructive weapon ever developed and the saw it employed. I can understand his guilty feelings.

And it was the right move, those two bombs saved millions of lives.

That doesn't change the fact two cities full of civilians were vaporized. He felt that.

The commie part had nothing to do with that interview.

He got a sweet beach cottage out of it.

Oppenheimer was well educated in the Arts as well as theoretical physics. He read and spoke Sanskrit.
His comments imminently after the July 16, 1945 first test of the Pu implosion device were

"A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

In real time, soldiers stationed in the Pacific almost all assumed if they invaded Japan hundreds of thousands of them would die.  That was the general consensus.

My father was one of them and he told me more than once "if we had invaded Japan I believed my luck would have run out" (he fought for over 2 years in the Pacific by then and survived).

My father told me more than once that this "was the general consensus of the troops throughout the Pacific Theater".

So the actual soldiers who were there and FOUGHT disagreed adamantly with you (and I assume they adamantly would disagree with the liberal professors that have espoused this alternate reality theory since then).

The general consensus back then, viewed by the soldiers also, was that Japan was not trustworthy and lied too many times over the years, much like we view China today.  So, their talk of surrender was just that "talk" and viewed as disingenuous and not to be taken seriously in terms of the surrender really being a "serious" surrender.