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Nude Bog Lurker posted:Oddly enough, your go-to example is the exact some one the Nazi proanganda machine seized on as 'evidence' of Allied barbarity. Funny, that. Hello Forums Poster Nude Bog Lurker. Do you believe it is morally justifiable to commit war crimes? Thanks in advance.
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Oct 27, 2016 10:17
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VitalSigns posted:Then I guess I don't understand the aversion to labelling strategic bombing against civilians and nuclear attacks on civilians a war crime. It would be best served by placing the guilt for all the destruction on the instigators of a total war, not on those forced to fight them.
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Oct 27, 2016 10:22
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OP, if you want people to talk about the actual subject make a new thread in A/T. E: Or just ask in the military hostory thread.
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Oct 27, 2016 10:50
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The New Yorker had a legendary article a year after. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
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Oct 27, 2016 11:10
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If your argument is that nuking Japan was justified because the continued Japanese occupation of east asian territories was intolerable, the onus is on you to demonstrate how exactly the nukes sped up the Japanese surrender. So far nobody seems to have even attempted to do this, instead choosing to fall back on the recieved wisdom that they totally must have.
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Oct 27, 2016 12:23
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Cerebral Bore posted:If your argument is that nuking Japan was justified because the continued Japanese occupation of east asian territories was intolerable, the onus is on you to demonstrate how exactly the nukes sped up the Japanese surrender. So far nobody seems to have even attempted to do this, instead choosing to fall back on the recieved wisdom that they totally must have. Well, considering how everyone says the Soviets would have totes caused the surrender anyway, we should have just let them Eastern Front their way across the home islands, I guess. Woulda been better I suppose.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:19
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VikingSkull posted:Well, considering how everyone says the Soviets would have totes caused the surrender anyway, we should have just let them Eastern Front their way across the home islands, I guess. Woulda been better I suppose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shumshu Losing twice as many men as the defenders when invading across a few miles. I'm sure the Soviets would have rolled all over Japan despite not having any aircraft carriers, long range fighters, battleships or experience in launching an amphibious attack across open water.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:42
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CeeJee posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shumshu That's the joke. People are in here saying it was the Soviets who made Japan surrender while saying that was the sole reason Japan surrendered, and that no one has proved otherwise. Despite the fact that no one has proved conclusively that the Soviet involvement was the sole reason Japan surrendered.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:46
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The argument about Soviet involvement isn't about letting them invade the Home Islands, it merely says that their entry into the war removed all diplomatic possibilities for Japan short of unconditional surrender, and therefore possibly pre-empted the nuclear attack in its purpose. Obviously the reason why Japan surrendered was that their fleets and armies were defeated - but the reason why they surrendered at the moment they did, under the specific conditions laid upon them, may very well be more due to the Soviet involvement than due to the nukes.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:46
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steinrokkan posted:The argument about Soviet involvement isn't about letting them invade the Home Islands, it merely says that their entry into the war removed all diplomatic possibilities for Japan short of unconditional surrender, and therefore possibly pre-empted the nuclear attack in its purpose. Might even be true had they not declared war on the same day as Nagasaki. The agreement at Yalta stated that Russia should declare war within three months of German surrender. They never told us the exact date, and we never told them the exact date of the bombings. Perhaps that should have been communicated, but it wasn't to my knowledge, therefor saying that Soviet involvement after the nuclear bombings would have prevented the bombings seems rather silly.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:48
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One important piece of context regarding strategic bombing is that they dropped leaflets on cities that were potential targets telling the population to get out of town to save their lives. For the purposes of winning a war, keeping workers away from factories was just as good as killing them and it cost resources to keep them alive that wouldn't go towards supporting troops. Blankets, tents, clothing and other supplies would need to be diverted on a massive scale, preventing the enemy from mobilizing and resupplying tens of thousands of troops. Additionally the loss of homes were expected to affect enemy morale far more than casualties. Ideally according to the underlying logic, people would start clearing out as soon as the leaflets hit even if the city wasn't planned to be immediately bombed because everyone would want to save their families' lives and the destruction of other cities would demonstrate that these were not empty threats. Things clearly didn't work out that way but the original plans did at least attempt to mitigate civilian casualties.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:58
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VikingSkull posted:Might even be true had they not declared war on the same day as Nagasaki. I agree, there were structural obstacles in the international structure of the anti-Japanese coalition that made things difficult for the planners to say the least.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:12
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steinrokkan posted:I agree, there were structural obstacles in the international structure of the anti-Japanese coalition that made things difficult for the planners to say the least. That's saying it lightly, lol I mean, Russia shot down a B-29 on August 29th, as it was delivering relief supplies to POW's in Korea, and also intercepted and chased two B-24's on photo reconnaissance over the Kuril's, so things were already frosty between the US and USSR in early August.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:19
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i think dropping bombs on civilians is bad and pointing to the many atrocities committed with conventional bombs doesn't really make the few atrocities committed with nuclear bombs not atrocious
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Oct 27, 2016 15:09
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XMNN posted:i think dropping bombs on civilians is bad and pointing to the many atrocities committed with conventional bombs doesn't really make the few atrocities committed with nuclear bombs not atrocious agreed, but a disproportionate focus on the  NUCULAR BOMBS to the point where any and all talk of WW2 bombing of Japan immediately turns into an exclusive discussion of the NUKES is silly
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Oct 27, 2016 15:15
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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XMNN posted:i think dropping bombs on civilians is bad and pointing to the many atrocities committed with conventional bombs doesn't really make the few atrocities committed with nuclear bombs not atrocious If your point is "man, war sucks" then yeah, no one's going to disagree with that. The question really is "if all of your options are war crimes, what do you do?"
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Oct 27, 2016 15:15
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Fojar38 posted:Except when fighting Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan you actually are, in fact, the good guys. Yes, but that's not because of some inherent moral superiority - it's because we committed fewer war crimes and engaged in less blatant abuse of both domestic and foreign civilian populations. It doesn't excuse the abuses and war crimes we did commit. steinrokkan posted:Doing whatever it takes to end a war soon is not a crime, and strategic bombardment was considered a legitimate strategy in WWII because surgical strikes were impossible. The nuclear weapon made surgical strikes impossible by design, but in practical terms of 1945 the difference between it and a raid against a city was in how many planes were needed to deliver the payload. This is a prime example of an argument that can be used to justify anything. If committing war crimes is okay as long as you thought at the time that it might hasten the end of the war, then basically every war crime committed during WWII could have been stretched to fit that definition by a sufficiently clever propagandist. Fojar38 posted:Does a blockade count as directing attacks against civilians? Traditionally, and according to various international law, blockades are supposed to target only the military, while minimizing the effect on civilians. Generally (although the exact requirements have shifted slightly over the decades) this means that goods necessary for the civilian population's survival (like food and medicine) are to be allowed through after military goods are confiscated. It's a limitation that's been frequently flaunted over the course of the last century or so, but typically by the winner, so no one really cares. computer parts posted:If your point is "man, war sucks" then yeah, no one's going to disagree with that. If all your options are war crimes, then at some point you have either made an incredibly terrible mistake or deliberately restricted your options to war crimes only. It's like the question about the self-driving car with failed brakes - the real answer is that it should have taken safe corrective action well before it got into a situation where it was impossible to not kill someone. 
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Oct 27, 2016 16:05
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It's not just 'war sucks' though, it's that engaging in total war is a one-way street. If your opponent engages in total war, and you do not, you are at a massive strategic, logistic & tactical disadvantage, and that disadvantage has a cost, in terms of lives & resources. And when that war is a war not over some limited objectives, like a small area, but the complete dissolution of the opposing sides ability to fight, that disadvantage now expresses itself as a probability of self-preservation, and you cannot hold a rational action made out of self-preservation against someone (This may not have been true for the US, but it was definitely true for the USSR, which is why banging on about red army rapes or whatever is stupid. The people doing the raping were criminals who had been drafted into the army, not professional soldiers {you can't exactly run prisons when you can't even feed your own civilians most of the time}. Ergo the blame for the rapes lies on the nazis, because they forced the soviets to have to resort to such tactics in the first place). So long as the goal is just & reasonable, the optimal strategy for achieving that goal cannot be unjust, and the speedy end of the war is a just goal, and entirely reasonable, and going by what was known at the time, the bomb is the optimal strategy.
rudatron fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 16:11
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Main Paineframe posted:This is a prime example of an argument that can be used to justify anything. If committing war crimes is okay as long as you thought at the time that it might hasten the end of the war, then basically every war crime committed during WWII could have been stretched to fit that definition by a sufficiently clever propagandist. You will notice that the Nazis weren't indicted for acts of war that their attorneys argued were also part of the Allied war effort.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:14
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Main Paineframe posted:If all your options are war crimes, then at some point you have either made an incredibly terrible mistake or deliberately restricted your options to war crimes only. It's like the question about the self-driving car with failed brakes - the real answer is that it should have taken safe corrective action well before it got into a situation where it was impossible to not kill someone. There's really nothing that would have caused the Japanese government to collapse without inflicting an enormous amount of suffering.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:22
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Main Paineframe posted:This is commonly cited as a reason, but the "the civilian government betrayed the military by offering up a premature surrender" myth isn't affected by surrender conditions or lack thereof. Documentation on the reasoning behind the demand is pretty scarce, since it sprang forth fully formed from Roosevelt's mouth without any discussion with the other Allied leaders, but it was likely for simple political reasons - either to reassure Stalin somehow, or more likely, to counter American public's discontent over leaving Vichy officials in charge of French North Africa. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc_large_image.php?doc=78
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Oct 27, 2016 16:23
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The Operation Meetinghouse raids are estimated to have killed 1-2% of Tokyo's population and injured perhaps 10%. The bombing of Hiroshima killed 25-50% of the city's population. Clearly, nuclear weapons are no different from conventional explosive and incendiary bombs.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:38
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It's almost as if Tokyo had a far larger population and had been evacuated already....
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Oct 27, 2016 16:49
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VikingSkull posted:It's almost as if Tokyo had a far larger population and had been evacuated already. Little Boy's overpressure area was ~12 square miles, Meetinghouse's area of effect about 15 square miles. This is conservative, because the effects of Little Boy extended beyond the overpressure area.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:00
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Meetingshouse was one raid. Americans were virtually unlimited in their ability to repeat such raids with impunity, at which point the destructive potential of conventional bombing becomes massive. In total there were probably more deaths in Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:04
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Brainiac Five posted:Little Boy's overpressure area was ~12 square miles, Meetinghouse's area of effect about 15 square miles. This is conservative, because the effects of Little Boy extended beyond the overpressure area. Ok, but what does that have to do with casualty figures? If Tokyo had been unscathed and the population was at pre-war levels, the number of dead and injured would have been far larger. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were untouched and hardly anyone evacuated. By the way, that measly 10% injured in the Meetinghouse raid was one million people.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:09
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steinrokkan posted:Meetingshouse was one raid. Americans were virtually unlimited in their ability to repeat such raids with impunity, at which point the destructive potential of conventional bombing becomes massive. In total there were probably more deaths in Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The point, you moronic Bohemian, is that conventional bombing kills proportionately fewer people because each bomb falls individually where the fireball and thunderball hit everyone at once. There is no possibility of survival- you are either shielded or dead. Nukes aren't just big conventional bombs, they operate qualitatively differently and our ethical understanding of them should reflect reality rather than some motherfucker writing "nucular" to disparage Chester Nimitz.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:11
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The difference with atomic bombs vs. conventional bombs in 1945 was essentially a) psychological shock and b) the future potential. Nobody had seen 1 plane do the work of an entire bombing raid before, and if you have hundreds of atomic bombs, or later hydrogen bombs, that's a sea change in warfare as we know it. Two 15-20kT bombs let you duplicate the bigger single bombing raids with one plane, twice, and then you got to sit around and wait for more to be made and a snail's pace.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:11
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Bombs are basically just extremely advanced spears, there's no ethical distinction between bombing a city and throwing a spear at it.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:14
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Nice meltdown. Fortunately the US had no intention to launch twenty nukes per day, so your "point" is moot.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:15
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steinrokkan posted:Nice meltdown. Please explain what you think my point is, because your response suggests you didn't read it or lack the brainpower to comprehend it.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:19
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Ad hominems, shifting of goalposts, just waiting for the eventual puppetmaster at this point.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:19
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VikingSkull posted:Ad hominems, shifting of goalposts, just waiting for the eventual puppetmaster at this point. No one who has ever squeaked out "ad hominem" has a life worth living.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:27
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The only qualitative difference between nuclear and conventional explosions is the radiological effects. For the immediate bombing, there's no much of an ethical difference, any bomb either kills you or it doesn't, and the whole thing happens in an instant. It's just a probability game. Again, the 'special' ethics with which we treat nuclear weapons has less to do with the weapon itself, than it does with the implication of the weapon, and the environment it creates, for everyone who lives on this planet. That is entirely a product of the cold war, and did not exist in the context of its use in ww2.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:32
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rudatron posted:The only qualitative difference between nuclear and conventional explosions is the radiological effects. For the immediate bombing, there's no much of an ethical difference, any bomb either kills you or it doesn't, and the whole thing happens in an instant. It's just a probability game. A punch can kill someone, punching someone in the arm is ethically equivalent to shooting them. I see.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:34
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Not seeing the relevance of that analogy tbh. You argued that nuclear weapons should be treated differently because they affected a larger area, but from the perspective of the individual being bombed, that doesn't actually matter, what matters is the probability of dying and the experience of dying, both of which aren't that different.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:44
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rudatron posted:Not seeing the relevance of that analogy tbh. You argued that nuclear weapons should be treated differently because they affected a larger area, but from the perspective of the individual being bombed, that doesn't actually matter, what matters is the probability of dying and the experience of dying, both of which aren't that different. No, I'm not. I'm arguing about the probability of dying, specifically that nuclear weapons are deadlier than the equivalent in conventional weapons. It would behoove to spend less time typing and more time reading.
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Oct 27, 2016 19:05
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rudatron posted:The only qualitative difference between nuclear and conventional explosions is the radiological effects. For the immediate bombing, there's no much of an ethical difference, any bomb either kills you or it doesn't, and the whole thing happens in an instant. It's just a probability game.
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Oct 27, 2016 19:07
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rudatron posted:The only qualitative difference between nuclear and conventional explosions is the radiological effects. For the immediate bombing, there's no much of an ethical difference, any bomb either kills you or it doesn't, and the whole thing happens in an instant. It's just a probability game. No, the real difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction is the inability to discriminate between military targets and civilians. A missile with a conventional warhead can be aimed, a missile with a nuclear warhead can effectively not since it brings so much destruction with it.
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Oct 27, 2016 19:19
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Svartvit posted:No, the real difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction is the inability to discriminate between military targets and civilians. A missile with a conventional warhead can be aimed, a missile with a nuclear warhead can effectively not since it brings so much destruction with it. I don't think they had ICBM's in WWII
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Oct 27, 2016 19:23
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