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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (61518)	4/24/2008 2:20:30 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542125

Would an invasion that would have killed more innocent civilians have been morally defensible? In general terms I'd agree that mass city attacks aren't morally defensible. But in the case of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and just possibly Tokyo, they may have shocked the enemy enough to end the war and save lives, and likely saved lives even if your only counting civilians (and I do not think you should only count civilians)

To: Cogito who wrote (61518)	4/24/2008 2:49:55 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542125

I stand by my position that such bombings were not justifiable. Killing innocent civilian men, women, and children is not morally defensible. So you would trade killing 60-120 thousand innocent enemy civilians for an equal or larger number of our own troops dead on the invasion, and maybe ten times that number of innocent enemy civilians to boot? I think you have to look at the end result, which was a quick end to the war with Japan. Anything else would have been devastating to both sides. A former colleague of mine is the son of parents who were saved in Hiroshima by the intervention of a small hill that shielded them from the blast. They immigrated to the United States and became citizens.