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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StormRider who wrote (1434)	4/10/2002 7:26:08 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 6945

i would dispute the estimate of 1 million american casualties That was the figure that the US Army put out in its estimate of dead and wounded. Obviously, no one knows what would have happened. By that stage in the war, the Japanese did not differentiate between military and civilian and were exhorting their entire population to fight to the death and kill themselves before surrendering. This is more or less what happened on Saipan and Okinawa. So I don't really see where your distinction between civilian and military comes in to the picture. The US naturally valued the lives of its own troops higher than Japanese troops and civilians. Is this is your objection? Also, to put things in context, this was 1945. The war had seen devastating aerial bombardment of cities for years. London. Berlin. Coventry. Hamburg. Dresden. Tokyo. In many ways, the difference between conventional bombs and the atom bomb was not with regards to the intended effect (no one even predicted the effects of fallout), but a quantum leap in bang for the buck. Before the atom bomb, you had to send hundreds of planes out every night for a week in perfect atmospheric conditions to get a firestorm. With the atom bomb, one plane and one bomb would do the trick.