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Politics : World Affairs Discussion

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To: Thomas M. who wrote (2570)	12/11/2002 1:28:22 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) of 3959

That isn't even a serious topic of debate That simply isn't true. Its even a further stretch to call the source dishonest instead of (in your opinion) mistaken. since the post-war study revealed that a US invasion would have cost 20-40,000 lives. I have never heard of this study. Who did it? Its very unlikely that an invasion would have only cost 20 to 40k lives. Iwo Jima cost about 28,000 lives and Okinawa might have cost 250k many of them Japanese civilians. It is not reasonable to assume that you could have counted on less death then that from an invasion. If you are just talking about deaths of American soldiers then you ignore all the Japanese that would have died, and in any case avoiding 20 to 40k American deaths would have in the minds of those at the time and probably most people today been enough justification for the dropping of the atomic bombs. okinawatimes.co.jp geocities.com trumanlibrary.org emory.edu We could likely have gotten a Japanese surrender without an invasion. The only serious debate is whether it was known BEFORE the bombing that Japan was ready to surrender. That's not the only serious debate but even if it was, if we didn't know that Japan would surrender without an invasion then the prospect of death from the invasion still serves as justification for the bombs. The lack of knowledge would make the bomb dropping a horrible mistake rather then an unjustified atrocity. And there where many in Japan who did now want to surrender even after the bombs where dropped. A surrender probably would have happened without either an invasion or dropping the bomb but it is not certain, and in the mean time many Japanese civilians would have died from conventional bombs, incendiaries, or from starvation do to the destruction of Japan's economy (and the fact that what did survive was used for the war effort). Tim

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