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To: craig crawford who wrote (131965)	9/27/2001 2:54:47 PM
From: Skeeter Bug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

craig, my issue with dropping a-bombs on japan is that it sets a clear precedent... it is ok to directly target civilians if one deems it "expedient." osama is a sick sob, but perhaps, in his distorted mind, he believed that killing our civilians would "save lives" in the end. what is good for the goose is good for the gander unless we want to be moral relativists. i see a BUNCH of problems once we leave the realm of "we did it, i think we are good people, so it must be ok." i'm sure there were alternatives to slaughtering civilians in that matter that would have gotten the "unwinnable war" message out. a nuke off the shoreline and/or in an uninhabited area, coupled with the threat of more to come, would have done wonders, imho.. we'll never know, though.

To: craig crawford who wrote (131965)	9/27/2001 3:06:32 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

"actually saved lives" Yes, I said exactly this in my post. But make no mistake, we have targeted and killed many, many hundreds of thousands of civilians and killed them with nuclear weapons and fire bombing -- btw, fire bombing is far more gruesome and has been used to kill far more people than weree killed in nuclear attacks. Our motives and the results we can debate, but the fact is we have indeed engaged in this form of mass murder when it suits our objectives. I am simply not a big fan of mass murder -- no matter what the justification. Do you understand why Hiroshima was selected as a target? It was selected because it was largely in tact, having escaped the bombing because it had little if any military significance. The geography is well defined with a slight bowl shape. It made the perfect place for a "live test" of the destructive power of the bomb. We also wanted to see what this little baby could really do. And we used women and children as test subjects in our experiment -- nothing noble about that Craig. The bomb ended the war. But we did not need to target women and children to make our point -- unless our point was to instill the terrifying possibility that we were preparing to kill every man, woman and child in Japan without setting foot on Japanese soil -- that we were indeed capable of mass murder on a scale never before comtemplated. That is the part I do not like so much.