Bottom line we've moved from "an evil act of our fathers and grandfathers generation" (inherently immoral) to being a "hegemonic nation" (there being nothing inherently immoral in that).
warfarehistorynetwork.com
But it was not fully tested, kinda like a modern day vaccine.I got this from @O' Be Joyful find... We drooped an A-bomb with the same logic as we were going to kill millions of bats... You see the moral problem here going to kill millions of bats to save millions is like us saying killing tens of thousands with the A-bomb to save tens of thousands.
At first glance, attaching tiny incendiary devices to unoffending bats might seem abusive to current sensibilities. But in the climate of the time, sacrifice was paramount, and the bats were needed for the war effort. “The idea of killing a million bats wouldn’t fly very far today,” acknowledged Couffer, “and it wouldn’t have flown very far back then, except for those extraordinary circumstances. It was a time when the war meant everything, and everyone was involved in it one way or another.” Adams’s research team felt the potential loss of bat lives more acutely than anyone else, Couffer added, but they rationalized that “a million bat bombs could save a million lives.”
The bat bomb story is a great story to read for it has odd people with a bad idea that actually worked... thanks @O' Be Joyful
'Bat Bombs': WWII's Project X-Ray
Project X-Ray’s imaginative bat bombs were intended to rain fire on unsuspecting Japanese cities. They might even have worked.
Except killing tens of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki almost certainly saved millions of Japanese and American lives.
You missed that it was "personal gain" I referenced. Ending the war and saving thousands was a general goal that everybody had. A second term based on his A-bomb decision was not something that Truman would have been able to foresee as an opportunity to win a second term. That decision might well have insured that he wouldn't gain a second term. It's called stepping up to the challenge, regardless of personal consequences.
It is not my intention to "hammer" you only for you to look more deeply.
If anyone else had read the article, one of the men on the Bat team would go no and invent Napalm another ethically challenging weapon. Mr. Fieser(inventor of Napalm) was on the Bat Bomb team I am guessing that is why the bat team function at all. If anyone had read on the A-bomb ended the bat boom project, so there the connection to the bat bombs...
www.sciencemag.org
www.fpri.org
Beginning in the mid-1960s, challenges appeared to the “Patriotic Orthodoxy.” The pejorative label “revisionists” was sometimes attached to these challengers, but a more accurate term is just critics. The critics developed a canon of tenets that in their purest incarnation likewise number three: 1) Japan’s strategic situation in the summer of 1945 was catastrophically hopeless; 2) Japan’s leaders recognized that their situation was hopeless and were seeking to surrender; and 3) American leaders, thanks to the breaking of Japanese diplomatic codes, knew Japan was on the verge of surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation. The critics mustered a number of reasons for the unwarranted use of atomic weapons, but the most provocative by far carries the banner of “atomic diplomacy”: the real target of the weapons was not Japan, but the Soviet Union.
In April 1945, after nearly a year’s worth of bitter argument, the JCS reached an unstable compromise. The ongoing strategy of bombardment and blockade would continue at greater intensity until November 1945. At that point, it would merge with a two-phase initial invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) aimed first at Southern Kyushu about November 1, 1945 (Operations Olympic) and second at the Tokyo region about 1 March 1946 (Operation Coronet).
Stimson’s observation gets to the second aspect of why the casualty issue debate has parted from 1945 realities. There was not in 1945 and there is not to this day a validated method of projecting casualties. There are simply too many variables and too many of them are unknowns. The contemporary documentation on this issue illustrates that both the military and civilian leadership grasped this point.
Unfortunately, in 1945, Japanese leaders did not regard their situation as catastrophically hopeless. On the contrary, they devised a military-political strategy they called the Ketsu Go (“Operation Decisive”) that they were confident would deliver what they regarded as a satisfactory end to the war, one that would preserve the ultranationalist and militarist old order in Japan. Ketsu Go contained a fundamental premise: Americans, for all their material power, possessed only brittle morale. Japanese leaders believed that by defeating or inflicting high casualties on the initial invasion of the Home Islands, they could break American morale and secure a negotiated end of the war to their taste.
www.fpri.org
First of all there's a reason there was a broad national consensus formed around these premises. They were derived by the people that actually lived the war, those in the best position to discern the facts and the mood of the time* rather than some later post-war begoggled and cause-besotted academic who "branded" (as you put it) the facts and the mood of the 1940s second-hand.
Here the white supremacy( Right Wing) talking implying I hate America. It is far from the truth for I am willing to do the "unfinished work" Lincoln mentions in his Gettysburg Address to form a more perfect union. I am willing question when I see my nation stray down the wrong path and I willing to review our nations past wrongs and bring them to light...
I insult no one but I do hold our WW two heroes to account with hindsight. You should be proud there a name for your views on our nuking of Japaese cities. “The Patriotic Orthodoxy” The word Patriot in it...
That is my point, we have been sold the causalities for invading Japan would be so great that it justifies nuking cities. In truth, our WW two leadership had not idea what the figure was going to be. I read the Russian invasion plans and they were thinking walkover...
The broad consensus because no one in America wanted the nuclear act to be considered murder... They wanted to justify the murdering the innocents.
