Necessary != Right
If you have a subscription to the Atlantic, you can read this article, an eyewitness account of the bombing of Hiroshima by a survivor which was originally published in the August 1980 edition of the magazine.
To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel.
(What could I possibly mean by that title? Discuss.)
Posted by
Johno
on
| § 4
on
| § 4
§ 4 Comments
[ You're too late, comments are closed ]
I suppose it was necessary,
I suppose it was necessary, and maybe right, that we would put up these two posts within minutes of each other.
Je-sus. I guess you're right
Je-sus. I guess you're right about that.
God forbid I'd come off
God forbid I'd come off sounding like a redneck, but like B said:
The ferocious little buggers ignored the first, and got splatted again with the second, and such is war. If you're gonna fight it, you've got to win it, and the Japanese weren't amenable to a hint.
I've seen suggestions that bombing an outer island would have gotten them a clue, but the absence of immediate and unconditional surrender after Hiroshima seems to put the lie to that possibility. So one could argue there was no other choice but to double down, hard.
On the third hand, there's this assertion that Truman">http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html]Truman did not understand what he was being asked to order. Couple that with looking oneself in the face, absent the need for a mirror, and one can question both the necessity and the righteousness of the use of nukes.
Stepping back and filtering it through the prism of history, combined with an unwillingness to believe uncritically everything one reads from pacifist scientists (and not that there's anything wrong with such folk, BTW), it's possible to arrive at "necessary". There's the minor issue of Pearl Harbor, and while the nuke as a response was arguably disproportionate to Pearl Harbor plus all other Japanese actions, I can sympathize with the concept of demonstrating that there are certain things we in the US consider to be totally not-cricket, like sneak attacks.
So I'm on board with "necessary". I still haven't found a way to get to "right", and probably won't as long as I remain human.
Now, on a more mundane matter, I'm unfamiliar with the symbology =!, and I scribbled this response under the assumption you actually meant !=. Since you're far brighter than I, there's probably some deep double-secret meaning here which I've whiffed on, in which case, well, just never mind.
yeah, I did mean != but it
yeah, I did mean != but it was late on Friday afternoon and my head wasn't all there.
By the way, you hit it out of the park with your comment, Patton.