BF2S Forums The weapon that ended a war

Havok wrote:

Deadmonkiefart wrote:

So what do you suggest the US should have done, rather than invade or nuke Japan?

We were already working out a peace treaty when we dropped the bomb(s).  We knew that if we made the Japanese feel like they were surrendering, mass numbers of people would commit suicide because of their Bushido Code.  We dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a reason; to scare the Soviet Union.  The Cold War started right after we split up Germany and Berlin.  We knew that when the Soviets had pushed through Eastern Europe to get to Berlin, and that they would continue to spread communism in this region even after WWII had ended.  We decided to prove to the Soviet Union and to the world that capitalism is better by being stronger.  To do this, we dropped the bombs.

It may sound far fetched, but why else would we attack non-military targets unless we wanted to show the devastation we could cause?  If we truly wanted to cripple Japan into surrender, attacking military targets would have been much more effective.  Instead, we wanted to show our might by using a weapon that brought the Cold War to a whole new level.  What we didn't expect was that the Soviet Union was also very close to a nuclear weapon.  We thought that we could show and maintain our superiority, but it wasn't so.  As seen by this Tsar Bomb, the Soviet Union's nuclear program was stronger than our own.

To answer your question though, we should have sent an emissary to Japan with a surrender treaty that would not make the Japanese feel like the losers of the war, which is exactly what we did after we atom bombed them.  Since we had already knocked the Japanese out of every foreign island they had captured, it's likely they would have surrendered had we worded the treaty correctly.  Violence breeds more violence.  This can be seen back from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the creating of M.A.D.) and even in Iraq today (the insurgency formed due to our invasion).


EDIT:

imortal wrote:

Now, for the atomic bomb.  Yes, it was attrocious, but there were not "100,000+ vaporized" as you have hinted at.  First, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were realatively small villages.

Wrong.  Have you read the book Hiroshima?  I recommend it.  Combined in the two bombs, yes, over 100,000 were vaporized instantly.  These 'villages' each had over 100,000 people.  Hardly a village.  My city (Melbourne, Florida) only had about 75,000 people, and we're pretty big.

imortal wrote:

They were chosen because they had SOME military function, albeit a small one, having minor factories.  And, since they were so minor, they had not yet been attacked or bombed in the war.  This was because the atomic drops were also a test, and any damage seen could be assumed to have been caused by the bombs.

Wrong again.  They may have had minor military function, but I think that could be said for any industrial city in Japan during WWII.  We dropped a test bomb in New Mexico in June of 1945.  We knew exactly what it was capable of.  That's why President Truman delivered a speech over radio waves to Japan about the approximate strength of the bomb.  All of the info he described could not have been recorded in a day, especially when we had no satellites or scientists in Japan to watch the bomb happen, other than the cameras on the B-52's that dropped the bombs.

imortal wrote:

The total populations of the 2 villages were not in the hundreds of thousands, and realatively few were "vaporized."  Most that immediately died would have been do to blast damage or radiation poisoning, with many more dying over the next decade.  Many thousands survived the blasts.

Wrong.  The populations of these cities was over a hundred thousand.  You are correct that many died or were disfigured due to radiation damages, but you cannot exclude the immediate damages that the bomb did.  Literally tens of thousands were killed instantly in both bombings.  Even though some thousands survived, the damages done to their lives were almost as bad as death, considering almost every building was destroyed in the centers of these cities, family members were likely to have died, and there was no able government to help them until the war had ended.

WinterWayfarer wrote:

Anyone seen this yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

A Japanese secret biological warfare laboratory..

Trigger_Happy_92 wrote:

couldnt pinpoint any tsar footage, but the one at the very end looks pretty damn close.

for those who dont know, Tsar's blast was so great, that even though it detonated well above the ground (few hundred feet) its shockwave was measureable on the ground even after its 3rd trip around the globe.