User Comments

1. 

   9/11/09

   Bullgrit

   "The real truth"? You mean some truth more real than the regular ol' truth?

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2. 

   9/11/09

   husdal

   Aslam, since you are trying to start a discussion, what is your opinion, before asking for my POV?

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3. 

   9/11/09

   NT77

   The official version is that it was to shorten the war, making the invasion of Japan unnecessary and thereby saving the lives of countless US soldiers.
   
   Supposedly, a test was considered to show the Japanese the power that the bomb had, but that option was scrapped for fear that the bomb would fail and boost Japanese moral.
   
   That's the "official" version . . . .

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   1. 

      9/11/09

      jeremyjanson

      Not quite. The official version is actually that the Atom Bomb was another weapon of war that was not actually expected to be as powerful as it ended up being. Indeed, it was a test, hence the selection of a previously unbombed city (Hiroshima) to be tested. But the original idea of the Atom Bomb was not that it would actually vaporize a whole city but that it would release blinding radiation that would blind the cities AA gunners and allow additional bombers (the two bombers that accompanied it) to drop their payloads free of hinderance from flack guns and MG's.
   2. 

      9/11/09

      NT77

      Jeremy, you just like to argue with anything I say
      
      I was a US Air Force Nuclear Weapons Instructor. What I said above is the official, military, unclassified version of why the bomb was used. Hiroshima was supposedly selected because there were no US POWs there (yeah, I know that evidence says otherwise - I'm just telling you what we taught).
4. 

   9/11/09

   aslam9895

   okay, was Nuclear weapon the only way to stop japanese invasion and to save US soldiers by killing innocent japanese lives.... US must have adopted some other way. Nuclear "TEST" on innocent lives is just a terror act according to me.

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   1. 

      9/11/09

      jeremyjanson

      The rules of war were a little bit different back then. Infantry still had to be respectful of civilian life but all sides (Japanese, American, Russian, German, British) considered bombardment of civilian population centers a neccesary step towards thwarting enemy industry.
      
      It wasn't until the 1960's that they changed the rules in that regard, partially as a result of entire cities (Tokyo, Dresden, Stalingrad, large swaths of London) that were killed off either by the sheer level of bombardment or in the firestorms resulting from incendiary bombardment. Hiroshima may be more controversial, but the firebombings of both Tokyo and Dresden actually took more lives, as probably did the arteliery bombardment of Stalingrad.
5. 

   9/11/09

   Onchong

   Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, for the primary reason of intimidating the other world power, Russia.

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   1. 

      9/11/09

      aslam9895

      So basically US wanted to show its power to the world and hence dominate in which it has been successful since then..is that right?
6. 

   9/11/09

   drjay1966

   Ummm...I think it had something to do with a war or something...and, yes, obviously it was also successful in showing Russian and other countries that the US had a weapon that they didn't.

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