To my eyes there is only one long term solution...

Apologies if any of this has been posted before but I was flying to the Vegas the day these terrible events occured... was stuck in Calgary for 4 days and havent got totally up to speed with all the posts.


On finally arriving in Vegas I met up with a good friend of mine, an Israeli and a top poker player.


He gave me an insight to terrorism I have never really encountered before. Living in England, we have at times suffered from this modern day scourge, indeed just a couple of months ago my car was parked just 50 yards from where a car bomb was placed. But, the small precautions we have to face here is nothing in comparison with what they face in Israel.


He and his family are basically in fear of their lives EVERY day. Suicide bombings, shootings, car bombs etc etc are a daily occurence there.


It would be easy for him to want retributions and "an eye for an eye" but that is surely not the solution. And his solution is the only one which has appealed to me as a possible long term answer for this horrible situation.


Against a rational opponent, severe military strikes would be justifiable and would surely prove the most effective solution. But, are we dealing with a rational foe here? I think not. These people are so committed to their crazy agenda they are quite prepared to die for their cause. Every one of this people who dies has the potential to become a martyr and therefore strengthen the resolve of those who remain behind. Just imagining the consquences of the retribution the terrorists if Bin Laden himself is killed makes me shudder.


And anyways, who is to say the Allies could ever "win" a war in Afghanistan? Throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s the Soviet Union pretty much did whatever they pleased throughout Eastern Europe but more than met their match in the mountains in Afghanistan fighting a war they never won.


And if we flatten Kabul doesnt that just lower our standards to the terrorists level? Killing thousands of innocent people will achieve nothing except perhaps sate the anger of wounded American pride. With the consequence of turning all the Arab world against the West.


So what is the solution? This idea maybe unpalateable to many.. but is the only one that i can see that will avoid a war that may last many generations. The solution is education. Perhaps the most disturbing image I saw was of 5 and 6 year old children dancing in the streets of Palestine in celebration of the massacre. The people who have brainwashed these kids are truely evil and we must find a way of teaching the generations to come the true words of the Koran which has been twisted to suit the needs of these lunatics and actually is a beautiful book which preaches peace and tolerance.


Whatever happens, I hope and pray this doesnt become another Vietnam. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone who has lost family and friends in this tragedy and I fevertently hope the further bloodshed of innocents is nonexistant.


Keith

Keith,


You make some good points. I think that the best solution is for the USA to tighten up it's immigration policy and protect it's boarders. I think the security in the USA is laughable. Just about anyone can cross the Mexican or Canadian boarders.


There are probably hundreds of these radicals in the USA already. I believe there is more damage to come, unless the USA starts checking temporary visa from the last ten years and starts tracking these people down.


I'll bet the terrorists are looking at our weeknesses and making their plans.


Because of these recent incidents, I wouldn't fly anywhere in the USA until immigration tightens up and starts expelling these people.

1.- Define the most logical, cost-effective and beneficial in the long term STRATEGY for the United States to adopt.


2.- Bet anything you can afford that the United States will follow ANY strategy but the correct one.


3.- Sit back on the couch, watch the colossal aircraft carriers sailing off on TV to "fight terrorism" (!), shake your head in disbielief - and collect.


Thank me later.

"So what is the solution? "


Yes I'm anxious to read what it is.


"This idea maybe unpalateable to many.."


Oh oh I don't think I'm going to be very impressed by this.


" but is the only one that i can see that will avoid a war that may last many generations."


Ok that's certainly at the very least palatable to many.


"The solution is education."


That's great! Let's let the world know we want to educate the Palestinians and the fundamental Islamic who hate us. I'm sure the USA will be welcomed with open arms to do this.


"Perhaps the most disturbing image I saw was of 5 and 6 year old children dancing in the streets of Palestine in celebration of the massacre."


I'm sure that there are people happy with what happened but I would caution you to be wary of media manipulation as well.


" The people who have brainwashed these kids are truly evil and we must find a way of teaching the generations to come the true words of the Koran which has been twisted to suit the needs of these lunatics and actually is a beautiful book which preaches peace and tolerance."


In so many words IMO George Bush said the same thing in his speech.


Listen your call for an educated population is fine and noble. An overwhelming majority of American citizens believe that this was an attack on our homeland. When our homeland is attacked we fight back. It's as simple as that really. Perhaps the USA has made foreign policy blunders up to this point and perhaps in the future there are foreign policy options that would provide long term solutions to the problems that exist in the Middle East that the USA has not considered. However, the terrorists attacked our homeland and we're fighting back.

You still haven't explained the "correct" strategy, unless I somehow missed it.


What exactly is it?


BTW, even if the Israeli/Palestinian conflict were somehow "miraculously" resolved, I can't imagine we would see a complete end to terrorist activities. We would see less of course, but I think that the ingrained ideological and cultural differences are going to remain significant obstacles until, perhaps a few hundred years from now, mankind realizes that these religions which are at loggerheads are founded on a mixture of mythology and history. Perhaps one day rationalism will be a much more widespread approach. I'm not talking here about the differences between atheism, agnosticism, or believing in God; just about an approach which puts logic over emotion, or at least on a par with emotion, in many aspects of philosophical or spiritual thinking. Blind faith in holy texts is tragic; more so for some than for others. Understanding (to whatever degree we can truly attain understanding) is more important than comfort.


Education is a great key.


The technologies available to mankind are far outstripping our spiritual and psychological development as a species. This presents a great danger. It is also a great danger that so many in the world have never learned to think logically at a rather rudimentary level. These people have access to all kinds of weapons: this is like toddlers playing with guns, but far worse because adults have developed hatreds, whereas toddlers have not had time to develop deep abiding hatreds.

"When our homeland is attacked we fight back. It's as simple as that really. Perhaps the USA has made foreign policy blunders up to this point ...."


We're not going to accomplish much in the way of self-education if we enter the debate with unshakeable assumptions about the moral legitimacy of U.S. actions. If we do, we'll merely limit the bad things the U.S. does to the morally neutral categories of error and miscalculation, "blunders," while characterizing what others do to the U.S. as crimes and "attacks" that warrant violent retaliation. I realize that this is the paradigm through which the media filters almost all discussion of U.S. foreign policy, but it's a crude propaganda model that prevents us from drawing obvious conclusions from undisputed facts, and mocks any notion of justice.

I am not referring to the solution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The only suggestion one could possibly have at this moment for that one, is for the United States to stop supporting unconditionally everything that Israel does. Only that way can there be a little more balance in the power relations of the Middle East, now disporportionately in Israel's favor, and a hope for an eventual agreement. ("A just agreement is one where both sides walk away feeling they've given up something". Negotiantions 101.)


I was referring to the struggle against Terrorism. Although the American administration got it right when they pronounced that this will take time and talked about "ten years", they seem to go about short-term solutions, which will prove disastrous down the road! If you accept that the terrorists have total disregard for human life, theirs and their adversaries', that they can possess highly destructive weapons, such as biological ones, for instance, and that the logistics favor them, not us, then the future is bleak if we blindly retaliate against whole countries. We will simply swel the ranks of their soldiers.


My way? High Desert Poker Man got some of the gist of it, somewhere below and I don't feel the need to elaborate. One can use one's imagination. It's not hard!. All one needs to remember is this : Take the war down to the scale your opponent operates. If he's in the jungle, fighting in small, mobile, specialized, independent units - don't go after him with gunships and tank battalions! Go after him with small, mobile, specialized, independent units...

I think this is much more clearly an attack than many of the debatably bad things the U.S. may have done in the past.

It can't be any less of an "attack" then sending bombers to bomb or troops to fight. I think what makes the 9/11 attacks so atrocious is the absence of any direct provocation by the U.S., and certainly by the victims (although the arguments about the "indirect" responsibility of fundamentalists, anti-American propagandists and the like suggest otherwise -- but I don't buy it). The numbers of killed and injured are actually small compared to the most violent, indiscriminate campaigns we've conducted and supported, and, I fear, the numbers of innocents likely to suffer from our "retaliation."

The 9/11 events were however a very clear-cut attack, and as you point out, without apparent provocation---some of our past campaigns or supports for organizations may or may not be regarded as such depending on points of view, I suppose.


One thing the U.S. did do, which I have never really understood: Why did the U.S. target major cities in Japan for the atomic bomb? Why could not surrender have been forced by merely dropping it on less populated regions or on military bases? Would not the Japanese have still realized they were doomed unless they surrendered? My limited exposure to the subject of "History" means I don't have much basis for this speculation; it has just always struck me that the argument that the U.S. needed to drop the bombs on those cities to end the war expediently may not have really applied (if unconditional surrender could have been forced by dropping them elsewhere).


You know history better than I; please feel free to elaborate if you care to, as I have always wondered about this.

Justice is an interesting concept in this area. What would be "just?" Coopting an Afghani airliner and flying it into an office building in Kabul?


Justice and fairness are oftentimes confused and even mistaken for each other. This is not a time for fairness. Fairness has no place in war. The US has been attacked on it's home soil. Innocents from dozens of nations have been killed in that attack. This is not the time for the "eye for an eye" concept of fairness and justice. This is a time to make it indescribably painful for anyone to ever do this again.


Nothing the US can do will prevent every possible terrorist from bringing their attacks onto US soil. That's simply not possible. But the US can make it expensive enough in terms of manpower, equipment and basic money that another attack will have to have a large enough overhead that it will be detectable in its planning stages. Of course this presumes that the US gets over the silly-assed idea that machines can do all of the jobs that people can. We need people gathering intelligence along with our satelites and electronic intercepts. We're going to need people on the ground killing other people and blowing things up by hand along with our smart bombs and cruise missiles.


The US is viewed by many as a global bully. Foreign policy blunders aside, this is the reality of our nation's global status. The US is too wealthy or it has too many nuclear weapons or too many ships or too many people butting in to local affairs. Whatever it is, the US is not the beneficient parent to the planet that many of our politicians would like us to believe. Given this, in order to resolve the problem, we're going to have to be a bigger bully. The issues of foreign policy will take generations to resolve. The issues of terrorist attacks on US soil must be dealt with swiftly, brutally and in a way that will make every potential terrorist think twice about martyring themself in an attack against the United States.


Jeff

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were major industrial centers and were both engaged in production of significant amounts of war material for the Japanese forces.


In my view, the primary reasons behind targeting these cities were because of a combination of doubt and ignorance. Doubt in the fact that the US honestly didn't know what the collective Japanese response would be to a demonstration in an uninhabited area. Doubt that the bombs would function as designed. Remember, when they dropped Little-Boy on Hiroshima, only one nuclear weapon had ever been detonated and that was under laboratory conditions in the safety of the New Mexico desert. Also, the Little-Boy weapon itself was dropped untested. Yep, that's right. They built it out of an old naval gun barrel, stuffed one end with artillery propellant and went with it because Fermi and Oppenheimer said it "should" work."


Ignorance in that the world honestly had no comparison to work with. The destruction of Dresden or of Tokyo were horrific but were the function of dozens of hours and many days of ongoing firebombing. The US policy planners simply didn't know what to expect from dropping the Bomb. Even after Hiroshima, there was a feeling that the US had to drop another just to prove to the Japanese people that Hiroshima wasn't a "one-off" and that we'd shot our complete wad with that single bomb. Then thrown in the ignorance of the weapon used on Nagasaki itself. It was essentially identical to the bomb detonated in the Trinity test. Well, no, it wasn't. The Trinity bomb had a 25X25foot cab at the top of a steel tower to hold all of its components. Fat Man had to take all of those components, along with the radar and timing mechanisms that weren't used in Trinity but were needed for a deployable munition, and stuff them into a package that could be carried by a strategic bomber.


Oppenheimer was pretty sure it would work but the actual bomb was assembled by technicians on the island of Tinian. It wasn't assembled by the engineers who designed it.


Not sure it will go off, not sure how the Japanese people will react if it does, not sure that they won't believe we've only got one of them. Many concerns about the ordnance itself and then throw in the casualty projections for the upcoming invasion of the Japanese mainland. I'm sure there was a tiny bit of, "We've got it, by damn we'll use it", but in terms of strict military utility, they pretty much had to deply the two weapons the way they did.


Jeff

The Japanese had time to surrender between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They didn't. Surrender was not an automatic response to the Nagasaki bomb. It was a big step for Japan. But they did surrender, so we didn't go for a third. We would have if they didn't surrender. The bombing order for the nukes was open-ended. It was essentially drop the bombs and keep dropping as many as we can assemble unless and until they surrender. It took two. The planners weren't sure how many it would take. The big problem was getting the bombs made. Baron's posts made that clear, and it's obvious from those posts as well as his prior ones that he knows something about our nuclear arsenal and how the bombs work. I think if we had three or four assembled at once we would have dropped them at the same time. We were in an all-out war mode, not a measured response mode. We were not interested in probing the minimum limit for Japan's surrender. Right or wrong, that was the case.

Thanks for the info; this has always been an issue I have found disturbing.

I agree that it isn't primarily an issue of fairness or rightness at this point.


Although the U.S. can perhaps rightly be considered at times to have been a bully, I firmly believe that the U.S. defintely has been at times a beneficient parent as well. Wouldn't the whole world be either Nazi or Soviet (not by choice) if the U.S. hadn't stepped in when needed? Also, the U.S. must surely donate more money in relief and other assistances overseas than any other country.

I'll have to look it up to be certain but as I remember it, the high explosive components and the electronics were already in place on Tinian for four more of the Fat-Man type bombs and the plutonium production would have allowed the US to produce (ack... memory isn't what I remember it being) I believe the production estimate was 7 bombs total by December of the year and then approximately 1 per month after that.


Those estimates were likely off by quite a bit as the test series' that began the year after the war showed that the US was capable of producing significantly more than that. The Mk-III bomb, "Fat Man", was produced as a standard weapon until 1949. Approximately 120 of them were made total. I suspect that the vast majority of these were actually assembled between the latter part of 1947 and the end date of production in late 1949. My reason for this thinking is that only two of these devices were used in the "Crossroads" test series in June/July 1946. One of these tests, Crossroads-Baker, was the famous shot where the fleet of surrendered naval vessels were placed around the lagoon where the shot was actually fired. The Crossroads-Baker blast is one of the most commonly seen images of a nuclear explosion. Interesting to note that Crossroads-Baker used a weapon very similar to that used on Nagasaki and that within 8 years, the US had fielded bombs bombs with three times the yield of the Nagasaki bomb and only 1/3 the size.


This progression continued until the current generation of nuclear weapons wherein we have man portable, ie less than 50kg, devices with yields upwards of five times that of the Nagasaki weapon.


Jeff

Absolutely. Even today, the vast majority of international aid organizations use United States materiel, personnel or equipment. Until the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was a very rare international aid mission that wasn't deployed in a Lockheed C-130 cargo plane or on either Bell or Sikorsky helicopters.


The problem is that humanity as a species is incredibly tribal. If aid is being given to the Whatchamacallians then the Whoozmawhatzians may well feel the US is being arrogant because they're not getting their share of the aid money.


A very common issue is brought up over the Gulf War. Why did the US jump in to save Kuwait when Rwanda had already suffered almost ten times the number of deaths? Unfortunately the answer comes down to Saddam Hussein and Gerry Buhl. Buhl had designed a high-energy artillery piece for Hussein which would give the Iraqis the ability to deliver strategic sized payloads to the entire peninnsula, including Israel. This would have effectively put 1/3 the worlds total oil supply within the crosshairs of the Iraqi government. When Iraq jumped into Kuwait, it was a near certainty that, if left unchecked, they would then have enough ready capital to finish their nuclear weapon program.


Morally there was no functional difference between the typical murdered Kuwaiti and Rwandan. Strategically, the Rwandans weren't sitting in the middle of the flash-pan for the largest conflict in the history of human kind. The Gulf War was large, try to imagine what it would have been like if the Iraqis had been allowed to continue for another year and pay off all of their debts incurred against Iran. Suddenly the same war has to be fought but there are no ground bases, no safe sea lanes and the entire area is literally within gunshot and nuclear shell of Iraq. The 100-hour War would still be going on.


I just wish the US government would have the decency to come right out and admit to their financial and political reasons for acting or failing to do so. Trying to hide behind a shield of false benevolence is one of the United States' most irksome public policies.


As always, YMMV. And mind you, this is not to say that I don't support the US. I do, I just wish we had some politicians who had the balls to tell the world, "Sorry, we're more worried about Hussein getting the Big-Bomb(tm) than we are about the Rwandans. Get back with us later after we've made sure we've still got petroleum to keep our nation running."

"Justice is an interesting concept in this area. What would be "just?" Coopting an Afghani airliner and flying it into an office building in Kabul?"


I take it this equation occurred to you partly because of the magnitude of the tragedy but primarily because the terrorists were foreign. After the Oklahoma City bombing, also on "home soil," no one suggested bombing militia strongholds in Michigan or Idaho, or risking the killing of innocents to ensure we get all those who might be indirectly responsible. Nor was there any frustration at our inability to do these things. The first attack on the U.S. by foreigners since Pearl Harbor, however, has incited a primordial kind of patriotism, and we lack the maturility and morality to restrain the impulse to simply kill people elsewhere, or as you put it, or need "to be a bigger bully."


To answer your question, I'd favor the sort of process that followed the Oklahoma City bombing, the unabomber and the prior WTC attacks. All very serious crimes, but they hardly justified terror-retaliation. If the criminals are foreign, we should use the diplomatic and other non-violent methods of coercion that we employ in such cases, such as after the Lockerbie bombing. In all four cases I've mentioned, the murders were almost indescribably viscious, they were brought to the dock for trial, they were punished in accordance with due process of law, and no one, to my knowledge, felt short-changed because the U.S. failed to use military force. It is only when these methods fail that we should consider more drastic, less discriminate means.


If, on the other hand, we're not really interested in pursuing "justice" but "war" against "international terrorism," we should define it and decide what causes it and adapt our remedies to the conclusions we draw. We should also clean house of our own terrorists before punishing those that do the same. Bombing Sudan, bankrolling Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, killing Iraqi children with sanctions in order to get at their dictator, and terrorizing Central America, while denouncing foreign terrorism, is arbitrary and hypocritical.


"[T]he US can make it expensive enough in terms of manpower, equipment and basic money that another attack will have to have a large enough overhead that it will be detectable in its planning stages."


If that's true, we should do it, but it has nothing to do with retalliation.


"The issues of terrorist attacks on US soil must be dealt with swiftly, brutally and in a way that will make every potential terrorist think twice about martyring themself in an attack against the United States."


Do you think that the WTC terrorists wanted less brutality by the U.S., or more? It's obvious to me that they want the latter, and that the course you're advocating will play right into their hands, with predictable effects.

I haven't explored this much, but my impression is that the U.S. officials that made the decision didn't recognize it as morally different from their prior decision to target large population centers for the primary purpose of killing civilians instead of accomplishing some military objective. I've read that Dresden, for example, had no military facilities at all. Gen. Lemay's prior raids over Tokyo, beginning with concussion bombing to destroy and open up structures and followed by phosphorus in order to create firestorms, was designed to kill civilians, and did so, if I recall correctly, to a greater extent than the Hiroshima bomb.


Liberals make a big deal out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps they should, but I think these cases are just another manifestation of the genocidal impulse that infects people during a long and frustrating war.


There's no question in my mind that dropping the bombs on civilian centers wasn't necessary to force a surrender. Their effects could have been demonstrated elsewhere.

M,


I wish I had the essay at my fingertips, but I might be able to root it out for you; anyway, the author suggests that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the result of intertia--that is, once processes are set in motion, they tend to remain in motion--and the dropping of the bombs was inevitable. The historian goes on to refute many of the claims made by those who supported dropping the bombs. Most trenchant, perhaps, is the claim that the bombing enabled the US to avoid an invasion of Japan that would, it had been estimated, cost thousands of lives. The truth was that since we had these weapons, an invasion would never have taken place. After all, why would anyone decide to invade when those bombs were sitting there waiting to be used. The author argues convincingly that a "demonstration" certainly would have been enough. Who knows?


John

Chris,


This is a very intelligent, thought-provoking post by someone who obviously cares about his country and hopes for an ethical solution to a very difficult problem. Thank you.


KJS

The United States could have detonated the atomic bomb over any key Japanese military base and inflict devastating damage, on a scale that would be as convincing to the opponent as the bombs over the cities were.


The Americans opted for the cities because they were sending a message not just to the Japanese but to the rest of the world as well. The bombs rang the bell for the birth of the new super-power! The effects were supposed to be felt as far away as the Kremlin. And the argument that the Americans "were not sure" about the effectiveness of the atomic bombs just won't wash. They used them after only 1 test! Unprecedented in the history of air bombing. The scientists and the military realized immediately that they had exactly what they were chasing after for many years.


The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a clear violation of the Geneva Convention - as were many other things that the Allies did in the war, like the Dresden bombing for example, which also was justified as having armament factories nearby , etc. Well, they were practically everywhere, in both Japan and Germany, since physical concentration of military industry locations is always very risky.


But, "Vae victis". History is written by the victors. While I'm glad, naturally, that the victors were the Allies, painting an absolutely saintly picture of how they won is not acceptable for me.

The invasion of Japan was tentatively scheduled for November of 1945. Army troops in Europe were already receiving their orders to travel to the Pacific to assemble for the invasion.


The first home island to be taken was to be the Southernmost, Kyushu. The Japanese had already divined that this was to be the first objective and were preparing its defense. The nature of the Japanese defense was to use all, meaning ALL, Japanese as warriors. Not only were the elderly and infirm to participate, not only did the Japanese possess over 10,000 aircraft suitable for Kamikaze attack and 4,000 motor boats being prepared for suicide attack upon the invasion fleet, school girls of the age of twelve were being trained in spear fighting and elementary school children were to be given knapsacks packed with explosives which they were to detonate in the proximity of American troops. This would mean that American fighting men would be shooting on sight every Japanese they saw above the age of three.


The Imperial military leadership did not envision that they would reap from this sacrifice of their population a victory. They understood that victory was lost to them. Their goal was to make the invasion so bloody that the Americans would negotiate an end to the war, and not pursue the absolute surrender called for in the Potsdam Declaration.


MacArthur had already guesstimated that American casualties would be one million. I do not fault the estimate.


The prospect of American soldiers butchering the Japanese by the literal millions was so irksome that some dramatic end to the carnage, however bloody it was to be in itself, was considered preferable. I know that nuking a city and killing a hundred thousand in one blow hardly seems a humanitarian act, but I believe the bombing of Hiroshima to be probably exactly that.


I also believe that we did not wait a sufficient time for the surrender, and the bombing of Nagasaki, the second nuclear target, was most probably gratuitous and unnecessary. The ultimate outcome was obvious to every Japanese who was informed. We could at least have waited more than three days for the Japanese response.


See http://home.att.net/~sallyann4/invasion2.html and

http://www.lclark.edu/~history/HIROSHIMA/ and

http://www.exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/mainn.html.

...that the Manhattan Project produced just three bombs. The first was consumed in testing in the New Mexico desert. The other two were transported to the island of Tinian. If we had used one bomb as a demonstration that left Hirohito and the war cabinet unconvinced, we would have but one device left. This made a difference.


But please appreciate that use of these weapons, even if one would have sufficed, saved millions upon millions of lives. My father was a naval officer in the invasion of Okinawa, where over 400 ships were struck by Kamikaze. Naval casualties were so great (close to 10,000) that the Department of War refused to release the number publicly. In an invasion of the home islands, the cost of suicide attack would have been magnificently higher. It would have been almost likely that my father be killed (and I never conceived).


Truman made the right choice.

"The United States could have detonated the atomic bomb over any key Japanese military base and inflict devastating damage..."


Four cities were never bombed by conventional means. All damage inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nuclear. This was quite deliberate.


"The effects were supposed to be felt as far away as the Kremlin."


Roosevelt had hinted to Stalin at the conference at Teheran the US was working on a super weapon that might end the war. Stalin seemed unimpressed. In fact he already knew about the atomic bomb from the Soviet spy network. He probably had a better technical understanding than Roosevelt had.


"They used them after only 1 test!"


We couldn't afford a second test. The Manhattan Project produced only three bombs. After Nagasaki we were A-bombless. And Stalin knew it.


"The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a clear violation of the Geneva Convention..."


This is probably true. But anyone familiar with the behavior of the Japanese Army from the 1930s through the end of the war would find pity impossible. The reason they feared surrender so was their knowledge of what their own troops had done.

The English have been very successful at portraying the gratuitous burning of Dresden as an American inspiration. It wasn't.


Why was it destroyed? Two reasons: there were no other undamaged urban centers left (and the RAF was unable to attack anything smaller than a city with their night bombing) and as a showpiece for the advancing Red Army (to see the destruction wrought).


That's not a lot of military purpose.

"With the consequence of turning all the Arab world against the West."


It appears that the attack was a provocation, the retaliation for which is to be exactly the consequence you state.


Kill bin Laden. Yes, but insufficient. The organization he heads must be (substantially) extirpated. Such extirpation shall be a perpetuated exercise.


War against the Afghani people? Unthinkable. Replacing the Taliban with a popular government will be, I hope, feasible.


We live in a world of restricted choice.

"'Four cities were never bombed by conventional means. All damage inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nuclear. This was quite deliberate.""


My point exactly! The U.S. intended all along to detonate the atom bomb over a city. They deliberately left a few cities "intact" for that purpose.


""Roosevelt had hinted to Stalin at the conference at Teheran the US was working on a super weapon that might end the war. Stalin seemed unimpressed. ""


I believe it was President Truman who made the hint to Stalin, at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. The USSR leader already knew about the bomb from the Americans working as Soviet agents (see "The Mitrokhin Archives" for the details on those spies).


But the U.S. President did NOT know that the Soviets knew! So it was the American delegation that was rattled by the other side's (non) reaction. Check the link for details on how the decision to drop the big one was taken, according to the U.S. Army Archives. Meanwhile, here's a sample:


QUOTE

...

The secrecy that had shrouded the development of the atomic bomb was torn aside briefly at Potsdam, but with no visible effect. On 24 July, at the suggestion of his chief advisers, Truman informed Marshal Stalin "casually" that the Americans had "a new weapon of unusual destructive force." "The Russian Premier," he recalled, "showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make 'good use of it against the Japanese.' " In fact he already knew about the atomic bomb from the Soviet spy network.""

...

UNQUOTE


""Anyone familiar with the behavior of the Japanese Army from the 1930s through the end of the war would find pity impossible. The reason they feared surrender so was their knowledge of what their own troops had done.""


I don't think it was a question of fear of retributions for war crimes. I believe that the Japanese were simply too fanatical to surrender. Not when they were going on to their deaths so willingly.


We can call them anything we want, but we can't call them "cowards"...

It was Truman and Potsdam.


In my mind's eye (I did write extemporaneously) I confused Potsdam with the Teheran.


I used to know an elderly Polish gentleman who had flown Spitfires for the British. He had been a resident of Eastern Poland and was rounded up and sent into the Gulag in September 1939. In June 1941 the Soviets sent him, near death from overwork and starvation (40 Kg in body weight), West by railroad car. He escaped (!) and found his way to Palestine.


He enlisted in some form or fashion and ended up as one of the RAF's Polish pilots. At the time of the Teheran Conference he declared he would intercept Stalin's plane and shoot it from the sky. He spent the Conference in confinement but was released without consequence after Stalin departed.


Sometimes we old people become confused.

...the Japanese feared enjoying the same treatment they'd dealt to others. They are remarkably arrogant people and I don't like them still. Thank God their martial traditions were broken. They still mourn their "great white fleet".

The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz


I'd be very interested to hear a counter by anyone who's read this extremely well-documented book and still clings to the notion that dropping the bomb was necessary to end the war.


Among the many points Alperovitz provides evidence for are:


Virtually every military leader in the US was against its use - the general who had to issue the final order for the flight to drop the bomb demanded written orders to this effect from his superiors so he would be protected in case of a war crimes tribunal.


The Japanese were pursuing a peace on largely the same terms we offered after the bomb (mostly that we wouldn't take their Emperor) through a couple channels (Alperovitz even cited Truman's diary to support this).


The 'we would have lost a million men invading Japan' argument is a myth foisted on us by the politicians responsible for the decision to use the bomb.


The bomb was dropped to position the Soviets in the post war negotiations.


I used to have the traditional jingoistic view of the dropping of the atomic bomb before reading this book. Now, I'm pretty turned around on the topic. I'd love to hear the arguments of someone who's read this book and has detailed evidence to refute it.

"The 'we would have lost a million men invading Japan' argument is a myth foisted on us by the politicians responsible for the decision to use the bomb."


The information presented at http://home.att.net/~sallyann4/invasion2.html would seem to indicate that the risk of a million casualties isn't greatly overstated.


Don't be like (almost) everyone else who posts here and become hot and defensive. I haven't read the book, and with my deteriorating eyesight (sigh) I never may. But I did know the Japanese were attempting to do something like resuscitate communications between the warring powers by talking to the Swiss. I had understood that the Japanese wanted substantially more concessions than we were willing to give. Essentially, our only concession was to preserve the Emperor. There was never a doubt that the war cabinet and certain commanders would be defendants in war crimes trials.

The site you cite is interesting, but I'd want to know a lot more about the person who put it together and his sources before I'd believe it. The author clearly has an axe to grind, so he's going to have to put up some serious documention (as the author of the book I mentioned did - over 100 pages of footnotes) before I'll give the site credibility. He makes an awful lot of both sweeping and specific claims without providing any sources (for example, the comments allegedly made by various military figures in the piece are tough to square with the documented views of those same men in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb).


I will note that I felt this part (the claim that it's a myth that the loss due to invading Japan would be horrendous) was the most weakly argued of the book's points, so it could well be true that it would have been as costly as this site suggests. However, I do think there's pretty strong evidence that such an invasion would not have been necessary even without the bomb. (Indeed, there's evidence that the war could have been ended on the same terms it eventually did months earlier, thus saving the 5K or so American fatalities in the interim.)

You're looking at a war where air power was delivered in terms of bombs per square mile rather than in terms of the circular error probability radius of a single bomb.


To destroy a bridge in WW-II, we used dozens of planes dropping dozens of bombs and hoped to hit the bridge or destroy enough of its infrastructure to make it unusable. To disable a military facility such as a communication center, we hit the city in which it resided in hopes of getting a solid hit on it.


The concept that civillian targets weren't legitimate military targets is an evolution of later and more political conflicts. The idea that somehow the military is not part of the society it protects but is inherently separate from it and able to absorb damage on behalf of the society.


Look at the armies of the times. Conscriptees which were, supposedly anyway, made up of all walks of life from that nation. Rich, poor, educated and not. The military was just an aspect of the society. The idea that a nation can make war on the military of another nation and not on that nation itself is something to be discovered resting under the fig leaves of political conscience in the late Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Then Nixon through Reagan making sure that the military is seen as disparate and disconnected from the society which it serves.


In many ways, the concept of a superpower was doomed the instant they accepted that the military wasn't actually part of that society and as such, were able to be placed in the way of troubles that the "real society" wouldn't deal with.


We now live in a world where we can fly a Tomahawk through the windows of a third-world despot's bedroom windows or drop a LGB down his air conditioner's intake shaft. Civillians, "society", is no longer taking part in warfare. They're secondary bystanders to the acts of war. This is where the absurdity comes in when you look to the Gulf War as some sort of brilliant victory. It was nothing of the sort. It was simply a bigger, better equipped military squashing the smaller, more poorly equiped. There was little risk to society once the first coalition troops were on the ground and as such, it ceased to be a "war" in the eyes of those within that society. It was something for the military to do rather than something for the entire nation to be a part of.


Jeff