I have beeen thinking lately about how it is such a strong condemnation of american thought that destoying the entire world was a valid option in tbe cold war
Probably says more about global warming than I'd like as well.
One of the things Daniel Ellsberg goes into detail about in Doomsday Machine is how the actual plans that were drawn up, with highly trained and qualified people, were all complete bullshit. They involved hundreds of plains criss-crossing all over China and Russia (both were to be targeted no matter the circumstances), dodging each other's nuclear blasts by seconds, but the plan only worked if all the planes took off at the same time, were all travelling the same direction, and that wind didn't exist anywhere on the planet. They actually had people working hard on formulating plans where all three impossible parameters were assumed. It's really amazing we aren't all radioactive soup by now.
Every time I hear some ndw detail about it I am even more impressed we made it through.
First there was the launch codes being all zeros. This plan that would immediately fall appart causing more chaos. The russian radar systems kept having false alarms they woudl juzt ignore
We made it through
I wouldn't be so sure. I think a very likely scenario is that climate change causes the kind of political chaos and upheaval that could send nukes flying, and that's basically game over. Another fun fact about those impossible plans (that might very well still be enacted in an extreme scenario) is that, while they knew at the time that it would only take a few thermonuclear bombs to irradiate the entire world, they didn't have any concept of nuclear winter, and if I remember correctly, the threshold to trigger that doomsday scenario was even lower than the "hot planet" scenario. Nukes may very well still be the endgame one way or another.
on the plus side, a global nuclear war should put a quick temporary halt to global warming. technocrats could call it rapid fission modulated geoengineering
Nuclear Winter was a valid risk, but more recent studies have shown a long term climate impact (ie, more than a few years of failed harvests) from nuclear war was unlikely (barring something like nuking the permafrost, which would take things in the other direction.)
It's really insane how a bunch of world leaders basically have a button that says "END WORLD", and we are not absolutely scrambling to reach some sort of global disarmament agreement.
Where can I read about this? I googled "American plan to destroy the world" and it showed me a bunch of stuff about China destroying America???? (inshallah)
and it's not even true. the Japanese government tried to negotiate a surrender like two weeks prior
And the real rub with those negotiations was the U.S. simply did not want Japan to keep the emperor, their religious head. That was the whole point of the unconditional surrender. It would be like saying to a Christian "We'll only allow you to surrender if you let us crucify Jesus" and then being like "Why won't these motherfuckers listen to reason?"
BIG TRUTH, the nukes were just a ginormous dick-swinging move and the U.S. needs to be held accountable (lol.)
While we're at it, fuck Truman for literally creating the conditions for mutually assured destruction.
Yeah, Truman deserves tons of blame for both the Cold War and the postwar weakening of U.S. labor. Real high up on the list of worst presidents when you look at the big picture.
I’ve had people on HERE push that shit on me. I got called a fucking cracker last time this came up, lol
Yeah I've noticed that a lot of americans' brains go squirrelly when it comes to the nukes, even if they're completely reasonable people otherwise. I had this as a debate topic in a 200 level philosophy class on ethics, and I was maybe 1 of 5 people in a class of 30 or so who argued it was completely unjustified.
I just mean that we essentially required the destruction of their religion (by proving the non-divinity of their spiritual head) as a part of their surrender which I think most rational people would see as unacceptable terms.
people might view getting away with mass murder on the pretense of 'divinity' as unacceptable as well
Okay but they didn't punish Hirohito, he lived on as a nominal emperor until 1989. They wanted to humiliate the Japanese people, not punish a war criminal. In fact, I'd absolutely give legal amnesty to a war criminal if it meant a peaceful surrender without nuking two cities.
the early japanese peace attempts also wanted to have self-supervised disarmament and war crime prosecution. if there was a plain choice between emperor and nuking keeping hirohito would be the correct choice, but it was really closer to 'maintain the japanese empire pre-1936' or continuing hostilities.
I mean, I certainly agree but I think most people do not; as evident by the fact that throughout history and to this day mass violence and murder is perpetrated in the name of faiths widely held in high regard and unquestioned in their divinity by the larger global community.
E: I don't want this to come off as argumentative so I'll explain a little more. With Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. we don't force them to accept their god isn't divine. We (assuming you're a faithless heathen as well) carry on about our lives with this knowledge, but we don't force the major faiths of the world to confront this truth. I think quite a few people would call that some kind of cultural genocide or something if you tried. I'm not defending the Shinto Nationalism (or whatever the proper term is for it,) just saying that it's kind of unprecedented to just demolish an entire faith like that.
secular states are not religioualy inert. forcing people to abandon religion as the guide for government does change religious belief imo.
and the us did force the japanese that way
Remember a chud history teacher in high school that was all like, "by bombing them we actually saved even more lives" or something like that. Same teacher that asked the class why we went into Iraq, we tentatively answered for oil, and she yelled at us saying we did it to spread liberty or some bull. This was like 2010 I think.
That seems like a common US history class experience. I was in high school in the mid 2000s and we had the same story told to us. I think a lot of people have that totally unexamined justification still floating around in their heads. But I also had a history teacher around 2005 that unironically shouted at a girl in the front of the class that terrorists wanted her to die because she had a refrigerator.
Only 00's kids remember being lied to about the imperialist nature of the Iraq war in high school.
My 6th grade history teacher in the early 2000s told us in the class that the Native American genocide was completely justified and without it "you wouldn't be here today". That woman was bat shit fucking crazy. Her son went to war in Iraq and she had a shrine for him in the class room. This was in 2003 when the War on Terror was starting to get hot. I was still in elementary school when 9/11 happened and for the rest of that year, every morning we had to stand for the pledge of allegiance and sing that stupid Lee Greenwood song. This carried over into my 5th grade year. I heard that song so many times, I still have the lyrics memorized and I'm 28 years old now ugh.
Ngl had to look up where Burma was. Death to america I guess even if I don't make it out it'd be worth it.
Oh shit I thought you meant after the Iraq war so I got confused. Sorry about that I could get rid of the other post if I offended.
I recall reading a book about the Manhattan project, where it mentioned that Truman rushed the testing of the bomb so that he could tell Stalin at an upcoming meeting that the US had one tested and working. Cold War anticipation was absolutely a factor.
IIRC he didn't rush the test, he pushed back the conference with Churchill and Stalin.
I wasn't sure so I decided to look it up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)#Detonation
Wikipedia says that they detonated it a few days before ideal weather conditions to have the test done before the Potsdam conference.
I stand corrected! I was doubly wrong because I thought it was the conference at Yalta, which I now see was still under FDR.
I wonder how people in this thread view Hamburg, Dresden, or any of the other strategic bombing.
The fact nukes weren't conventional kinda changes that tbh.
Sure, firebombing is scary but it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, and a whole bunch of men and metal to pull it off.
The atomic bombs were "we can destroy an entire city in seconds and we can do it again and again". That's what makes them so scary.
They directly asked a pilot, under torture, how many nuclear weapons the US had at the time. They were early concerned on some level. The pilot even lied and said they had hundreds of bombs (torture works, clearly) and even then some of the council didn't want to surrender non-conditionally or at all.
And the Soviets invaded after Hiroshima had already happened so I'm not sure the timeline works there. Not say the invasion didn't also have an effect on the decision to surrender.
War Minister Anami even seemed to desire nuclear devastation when the alternative was surrender, saying "Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?", and eventually committing seppukku after the surrender.
Eventually, after an attempted coup d'état, Japan surrendered unconditionally. The attempts to surrender before were an attempt to gain favourable conditions for their empire and they expected to get them from Moscow, which is why the invasion was so shocking to them as well.
The use of these weapons is horrific, doubly so against what truthfully was a civilian target, but I don't really buy the idea that the Japanese were just secretly willing to surrender but just couldn't for whatever reason.
"Dresden? It was alright, I lthought Watchmen was a better series overall."
If there was no bombing of hiroshima, we would have unified korea and socialist republic of hokkaido, so thats the main reason for the bombing, so that the soviet wouldnt have more gains from the war
Also Truman legitimately thought that since Congress was complaining so much about a secretive Manhattan project burning a ton of resources, he better show them what they paid for.
My favorite is that it "saved a million american lives" and now we're well on our way to killing a million americans and no one in power cares at all.
My favorite is that it “saved a million american lives” because that is actually a point in my favor.
There is no justification for using nukes. Even just keeping them on standby led to tons of accidents that almost resulted in detonations or nuclear war.
I know that's not a very nuanced take and there are reasons countries pursue nuclear arms, or maintain nuclear stockpiles, and a lot of that has to do with the USA having a giant arsenal of them. They're bad though, folks. Ideally nobody should have or use these wretched machines. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are crimes against humanity.
double down on it and make their heads spin
"did you know that 95% of Chinese people support the CCP? The US made its bed itself"
Youtuber that does informative videos. https://www.youtube.com/user/Kurzgesagt
They actually took down a few older videos of theirs when they got funding from him because they were a bit too pro the government doing stuff
no this is good, the precedent is now set for me to blame 9/11 on the US foreign policy and no one can get mad.
imperial japan was horrible. nothing justified hiroshima and nagasaki.
trolley probleming the from henociding the Japanese seems like a pretty good reason to get them out of the war ASAP, but why celebrate it?
