Becasue if you're good, that $20 turns into $100+

Temper, if we're gonna get nuked or a strong possibility of us being nuked, I'd imagine that we'd want to "butt or noses in".

Nukes ****ing piss me off. Why, to invade a country or to take down its military forces, must millions of people die? I don't understand it at all.

"You nuked our people, so we're going to nuke MORE your people"

What the US did to Japan was 100% un-needed. They look pretty, but **** how I hate nukes.

****.

That's quite a staement right there.

It was pretty much needed. The Japanese were going to fight to the death and the war was going on too far. If Japan surrenders fighting in two blast shocks, a lot more lives overall would be saved and the whole country of Japan wouldn't face complete destruction. Plus, if the war continued on longer than it did, the Soviets might have a chance to invade Japan. Now that wouldn't be good.

this si dumb

God I love saberopus.

Yeah...you know nothing. The nukes were very necessary. It ended the war right away. If the war had continued, many more millions of peopel would have died. And millions of people did not die from the nukes on japan. More like hundreds of thousands, which is nothing compared to how many would have died from another year or more of war. People just think it's so bad because it all happened at once.

Why not a demonstration somewhere in a desert instead? Invite a few high-ranking officials, detonate a nuke, and tell them 'that's what's gonna happen to you if you don't surrender'. Would've been effective, humane AND pimp at the same time.

I don't think that would have worked against the Japanese. And the war needed to end quickly. Japan was going to fight with every last citizen. The casualties predicted by the invasion of Japan were staggering. I think it would have been as high as 1 million, IIRC. So we leveled two cities. It was that or face a helluva lot more casualties.

You think they would've listened? They didn't even surrender after they got nuked once themselves.

Yeah exactly.

And that only happened a couple of times for me. And both times the 2nd place guy flipped out because of a hand a couple of hands back that I won on the river.

If Stalin knew, how ignorant do you think the Japanese were?

Ignorant enough to not surrender before actually getting hit with a nuke twice?

That wasn't ignorance. They knew the power of atomic bombs. Why do you think they didn't surrender after the first one? They just wanted to fight to the death, and basically the government had little concern over how many of it's citizens had to die to achieve victory.

That makes absolutely zero sense. They knew the power of A-bombs, they knew they were going to be used, yet they fought on till they were actually used? Is this some kind of mass death-wish? If so, why stop 'fighting to death' after 2? Why not keep going if they want to die so much?

If they actually knew about the bombs, Japanese logic was absolutely retarded.

It was stupid for them to attack the US in the first place, but they did it anyway.

After the second nuke was dropped the Emperor, who had just been a puppet to the military high command finally stood up and told his military that he was going to surrender because he didn't want to see the country destroyed.

You also have to understand that Japanese culture at the time was still very much seeped in honor, figthing to the death, never surrendering becasue it would bring shame.

Also, the military command had made a public call to the citizens of the country to take up arms against the invaders. Not only would many American troops have been killed and wounded in the invasion, but many hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens would have been killed in this process as well.

Agreed.

I forget which commander, but the one in charge of the Pearl Harbor attack himself said that they would not win the war. He knew all along it was gonna be six months to a year before they actually started to lose. And he was right.

The only thing the nukes did good for WWII was end the war EARLY. The "hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese troops would have died in the invasion" just doesn't fly. We easily could have gotten them to surrender with conventional means. Namely a war of attrition. It's not hard to completely blockade an island. They would have surrenedered in time once the people started to starve to death. If it wasn't for the fact that conventional means would take so much more time, the nukes would have been useless. All they did was end the war quickly. Far from the only way to end it.

Uhh, we did detonate a nuke in the dessert. In fact, it took not one but two of them on their cities to win the war. Really, it was only a demonstration of what we would be able to do. We regularly did conventional raids that killed more people than one of those nukes. Why on earth are you whining about the nukes, when we did raids like the on Dresden?

/me points and laughs

You can't read!

Yep. That was Yamamoto.

[Disclaimer: I only read the initial post]

I really don't think it would come to a physical war between America and China. That would just be.. a.. very bad decision...

It's lucky that the Japanese surrendered too, because we were bluffing. We only had three nukes intended for Japan (one was sunk along with a battleship headed for Japan). It would have taken us a long time to produce more.

As the old saying goes: "Hindsight is 20\20"

Actually, it wouldn't have. Since we got the process down, we could've easily made more.

You don't know that.

Do you realize how difficult it was at the time to extract Uranium from ore? The conversion rate was 1 part Uranium metal to 500 parts ore. More than 99% of the Uranium that was extracted was the wrong isotope - uranium 238.

The limiting factor wasn't production or knowledge - not by a long shot. It was fuel. And yes, we expended our entire arsenal at the time on Japan. It would have taken a while to get more into action.

You're forgetting about the Plutonium bomb which, while not as powerful, was infinitely easier to make. The only problem they had with that was the collapsible shell wasn't working right, and they fixed that problem rather quickly. The problem wasn't fuel, it was the knowhow.

Japan was blockaded long before we every dropped nuclear weapons on them. Our submarine force had virtually annihilated the Japanese merchant fleet almost a year before the end of the war. At that point the Japanese mainland was virtually cut off from any sort of outside supplies.

And while the US might not have specifically said to Japan that we were going to drop a nuclear bomb on them, we DID however tell Japan right before dropping them that they had the choice to either surrender or face complete destruction. Only when the Japanese refused to surrender did we drop the first atomic bomb. After that they were actually preparing to surrender, but not fast enough for the US leaderships tastes, so the order to drop the second bomb was given. Conventional means had been used for quite some time already. We had firebombed several cities, including Tokyo, and completely destroyed their industrial capacity, and yet they still didn't surrender. While we could have defeated them by regular means, the atomic bomb was certainly the fastest way, and probably the lowest in terms of cost of life. The US had anticipated over a million casulties if they invaded the Japanese mainland.

The Japanese new that they were beat. They were actually trying to get Russia to come in as a third party and negotiate peace. The problem was, the Japanese wanted to keep their emporer. The US, however, wanted a complete surrender. Thus, they dropped the bomb(s).
In the end... they kept their emporer anyway.
I really think the bombs were dropped for the -wrong- reasons...

(I hope I don't get flamed to death...)
----
I didn't read the pages of comments (just the couple above mine)

I don't think we'd go to war with China... If they decide to take over Taiwan... I'm all for them doing it. A war with Iraq is in no way a good thing, but at least we could beat Iraq.

China.... I think could really screw us if they wanted to.

Where is the sense in it all, if more people die in a war over Taiwan then the number of people that actually live there?

Why, because they have more troops than us?

WW2--Russians VS Germans. The only thing that saved the Russians was the cold.

Well, China has nuclear weapons. And a plethora of other weapons. It's not just man-power.

And who's to say a complete blockade and war of attrition wouldn't have made them surrender in due time? I'm not sure if it would have saved lives or not, but at least the deaths would be the cause of Japan itself, not the United States' nuclear weapons. They're given the option to either surrender or have their entire civilization starve. It would've taken a long time, but it may not have resulted in as many casualties. Perhaps more. I'm not arguing either way, just something to look at.

I was under the impression that Germany surrendered after Japan did mainly because of the nukes. Once Germany realized Japan had surrendered and that we had working nukes and would USE them...they surrendered. I'm not at all sure what would have happened if a war of attrition was used against Japan. Germany wouldn't have surrendered any time soon. I always heard that Germany was close to developing nuclear weapons of their own. If the war of attrition against Japan took over a year or two (and I'm guessing it would, since they were nuts) Germany may have finished their nuclear weapons and used them on us. And then we'd probably retaliate, resulting in loss of life far greater than what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So yeah, I think what I'm tried to say is that Japan could've been forced to surrender without nukes, but it could have had unforseen consequences. There's also Russia to worry about - god knows what they would've tried to pull whilst we wait around for Japan to surrender. I would have been more worried about Germany and Russia than Japan, now that I've thought about it. I suppose the nukes were the best way to end the war.

Yeah, and how many ICBMs do they have? About 20. Not to mention their other weapons are crap compared to what we have, their airforce sucks, I mean the list goes on and on. All China has, in reality, is manpower.

At that time, did we have any idea the Germans were developing nukes? And if so, I think the fall of Germany had more to do with the whole Normandy invasion and such then if we dropped nukes on Japan or not.

It had more to do with the fact that we took North Africa, France, along with almost every single one of their acquisitions within a matter of months, than anything else. But Hitler wasn't exactly keen on giving up.

Yeah, see now why we had to speed things up. World War 2 might have become the so feared WW3. Germany was developing its own nuclear weapons program. But much like their jet, day late dollar short.

Edit: The whole Normandy invasion could have collapsed in on itself. The time around the Battle of the Bulge, Germany had new found gusto. They were at least holding back the Western Front. They even made a thrust in Belgium. Their goal was to capture a port town who's name escapes me ATM. Should they have succeded, Germany could have been resupplied easier. Patton said after Operation Market-Garden failed, "we can still lose this war."