The Atomic Bomb - Hiroshima (Just really gotta get this off my chest)

First of all, this should be moved to the political palace forum.

While I understand where your rant is coming from, yes, it was a pretty devastating weapon to use, but as far as we knew, the Japanese were putting up really stiff resistance, and were pretty much willing to fight to the death.

While I wouldn't want to see the A-bomb and its effects, I certainly also wouldn't want to see street to street fighting the way the Germans and Russians fought against each other on the Eastern Front. There would've probably been more casualties if the Allies had to launch a ground invasion on Japan, and it would've been even uglier to watch/go through.

Also, the Japanese aren't entirely innocent either. They were pretty cruel during the war (Rape of Nanking comes to mind, as well as the Bataan Death March), and I'm guessing the Allies thought dropping the bombs would end the war faster and stop those kinds of atrocities from happening. The fact that Japan seems to not want to paint the entire picture in their history books and pissing off the Chinese and Koreans should be evidence of what Japan did.

Again, you have to view this from the mindset of people living during World War 2, not someone looking back in history through "2006 eyes". Of course hindsight is 20/20, but at the time, they did what they thought was the best choice overall (and if Japan still didn't surrender, you can bet the Allies would've launched a ground invasion, and not only that, the Soviets would also invade Japan, and we'd probably have a situation in Japan similiar to what's going on in the Korean penninsula right now. And we can all see what's going on there now).

Would you rather drop a devastating weapon that can kill lots of people, but bring the war to an end faster, or would you rather launch a ground invasion where the casualties would inevitably be higher (and again, uglier/bloodier)? I'm sure if you were the president of the united states at the time, you'd probably also try the nuclear bomb first, rather than send many of your own soldiers to their deaths.

In a way, it's also good that the nukes were dropped then, because being able to observe its destructiveness made it so that leaders during the Cold War were reluctant to unleash that kind of power on anyone, unless the other side did it first. Had they not of dropped it, we'd probably have nothing to look back on, and you can bet a nuke would've been dropped during the Cold War because the leaders wouldn't have anything to base the destruction on (tests can only tell you so much, to actually use it shows what kind of things it can really do).

Yes, I sound a bit harsh, but this is a touchy subject. Things have changed a lot since then, and a lot of it was the result of what happened in WW2, and while dropping the bomb probably might not have been necessary, it certainly saved more lives in the end.

Jam it back in, in the dark.