Speak for yourself. I would not have done so. Killing of massive numbers of civilians is a war crime, even if many Americans think it can be excused.

So if you're Truman, how do you get Japan to surrender?

Let them know about it. If knowing aobut it didn't work, hit a ship near the shore with a bomb. That would have had the same result

heh, good one. about as sensical

Thank you. I really wish we could recommend comments.

How can you trust Colin Powell's judgement after his betrayal of the military in the first four years of this administration? That's the last thing an Obama administration needs is a holdover from the Bush years.

You seem to be placing 'military decisions' into a special category of decision-making.

My own sense is that we Americans are apt to either denigrate or glorify our behavior in battle - and, in either case, always beyond all proportion - because, as a mostly civilian country, we only begin to contemplate such behavior in extremis, by which time it is always already too late ...

We are not so different from the Japanese and the Germans, except that we're suckers for the ahistorical struggle, because dammit if we didn't prove history wrong. Once. And it was glorious. But now, here we are, and we're moving on ...

The world has not been made safe for democracy, but in our own haphazard way, we've made it safe for America to rejoin history and reassume our place among the nations of the world.

Or something like that.

In response to the thread, it's presumptuous to act as if you knew how Obama would act, for no previous decision he has made can offer evidence to this decision, so we've left guessing, or offering our own views and labeling Obama's name on them.

In response to your post, I have some discrepancy with your claim that "the Japanese mindset then was not one in which just talking to them would work." In fact, the Japanese were willing to negotiate during 1945, however they wanted conditions to their surrender, one being that their emperor remain in full power. This was not acceptable to the US, as we desired "unconditional surrender", something the Japanese were not willing to accept.

You were correct when you said that there were only two bombs, though Truman threatened to bomb Tokyo (a bluff) after Nagasaki was bombed.

I also question your desire for Colin Powell to remain in his cabinet, for if you support Obama (an assumption on my part), it would be strange to support a man who helped enable the Iraq War, something Obama objected to at the time Powell advocated.

If you head over to the Book Club, the idea of comparing situations from then and now, and the validity of such comparisons is under discussion. You are making an important point in how that may not work. Why not make the point over there too?

Sorry, I meant to type Chino....

I have no idea what Obama would have done -- or anyone else for that matter. One thing for sure: nearly all the US Generals were against it.

So, what you have is a decision what was made for political and not military reasons.

Given the last line of your blog, this puts into serious question the nature of the atomic bomb topic here.

Two salient features:

a) Truman was a combat vet (WWI)
b) Obama has lived (as a civilian) overseas

However, both are politicians. Also, much of the radiation-related deaths from the use of the bomb were not known at the time (as evidenced that US observers went into the hot areas way to soon). At the time, the atomic bomb was thought of as a very large single bomb, a more efficient one.

As Kurt Vonnegut points out in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, the bombing of Dresden was just as horrific in terms of immediate damage.

They did estimate a million American casualties for the invasion and I'm sure they could imagine the public outrage if they didn't use the bomb, thus resulting in a million dead and wounded.

Absolutely not true. The "million" figure came well after the decision to drop. This is the key point.

There is no contradiction: the 5th point is that if even one soldier died when you had this bomb, it would have ramifications.

The fact is that by August 1945, Japan was barely standing. It was difficult to even find targets worth bombing.

Politicians and their followers use wars and threats of wars to gain political advantages. In this, they assume that they are of greater value than other people. As one of the posts above wrote, Americans have greater value than others, as do Israelis, and the lives of Iranians, etc., are of lower value. This I find repulsive. What makes an American or an Israeli life of greater value than the life of an Iranian? If you aren't alarmed by this, you should be. Simply to say that wars always put civilians at risk does not justify such an immoral attitude. To say that one simply has to accept civilian casualties (collateral damage) is appalling. If you and your loved ones become collateral damage, will you accept this as blithely as you accept the deaths of others? If not, you should be ashamed that you can casually accept murdering others. Whether you have met true pacifists in your life is irrelevant to your apparent acceptance of massive deaths in the service of political ends.

Sorry. My comment was mean and unnecessary. My apologies. It's just that I'm still high on the possibilities and hopefulness of what has just happened. It's far to early for me to begin considering whether Obama has what it takes to wipe out the civilian population of a foreign city. Maybe next week. :) Sorry for being a downer.

Speaking of cynical and depressing...

Ok, now you've created a paradox.

Yeah, but I'll take it further than you. I followed the Iran/IAEA cat and mouse story for a long time. I think a lot of blogosphere blinds themselves by looking at it throught the prism of Bush admin idiocy and the Iraq war. But the truth is that most of the rest of the world does not want Iran to have nuclear weapons. What the Bush admin. has done to fuck up the situation does not change that. It's not like because Iran is Bush's enemy, everyone in the world is rooting for the Iran regime. In a way, that's looking at it in as much black and white as the Bushies do.

I do think a lot more of the rest of the world might be more relaxed about it if Iran had a different and stable government, but they aren't now. It's the same as with more worry about Pakistan's nukes than with India's.

I feel sick.