The ethics of Hiroshima

[David]

[think positive]

And yet you hold the US solely responsible for the deaths?

If you attacked me with a knife, and then I pull a gun on you and say drop the knife or I'll kill all the people around you that you are responsible for, what would you do?

[David]

If I were a crazy psycho, I'd keep trying to stab you, and if you carried out your threat (say, by shooting my family), you'd have murdered a whole bunch of innocent people. You'd be getting life in jail and rightly so. Do you agree?

[think positive]

True.id just shoot you!

Bit hard to aim a bomb that accurately though, anyhow, I've said my piece

[David]

They aimed it accurately, TP.

[think positive]

I meant to pick off the military!

[stui magpie]

God almighty, talk about a dog with a bone.

David, here's another thought. The bombings of Japan indirectly saved countless millions of other lives because, once everyone had seen what they could do, no one was game to do it again.

So the whole cold war became a dick measuring contest with the ever present threat of a nuclear attack between the USA and USSR, but neither side was willing to actually push the button as the consequences were clear.

It also means that any rogue nation now knows that they can only push so far, because the big powers have the ability to turn them into silhouette art.

[David]

^ That's actually a far weaker argument. Martin Bryant likely had the same effect on a smaller scale on gun violence in Australia; what effect does that have on the ethics of his decision to walk into a cafe and start shooting random people? Are we defend atrocities on the grounds that they sometimes make it harder for people to do something twice as bad in the future?

And again, this gets back to my criticism of looking at things as binary: sure Hiroshima/Nagasaki may have been a key factor in preventing the major Cold War powers from performing some applied science on each other's civilian populations. But there were many other things that could have prevented that hypothetical scenario too that didn't necessarily involve killing hundreds of thousands, like, say, diplomacy or a mutual nuclear disarmament policy. So, no, I don't accept that as anything more than (at best) one of history's grim paradoxes.

I meant to pick off the military!

Yeah, but the point is that they weren't trying to do that. This wasn't some kind of 'collateral damage'; they were aiming it directly at a civilian population and were either trying to kill as many civilians as possible or were apathetic about how many died.

[stui magpie]

Dunno why I'm wasting my breath, but so what if they aimed at civilian population? So did the Germans during the blitz on London, so did Brits when they bombed Berlin.

They only had two bombs. What suitable military target was there in Japan that would have had sufficient impact to bring about surrender?

The decision was made at the time, by people living at that time, living through all the combined elements applicable to that time including a prolonged war, the culture etc who had access to all the information used to make that decision.

Trying to persistently reverse engineer a justification for why it shouldn't happened from 70 years in the future with the benefit of almost none of those things, simply because you don't agree with it is not going to convince anyone who didn't already agree. I'd personally also consider it's not healthy.

Let the rock roll back Sisyphus, it ain't happening.

[David]

[think positive]

[HAL]

What happened to it?

[David]

[think positive]

[stui magpie]