Today is the 70th anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic weapon against civilians. The Japanese people gathered for ceremonies to mourn the tragedy. John Iadarola (Think Tank) and Ben Mankiewicz (Turner Classic Movies), hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“Seventy years ago, the city was incinerated by an atomic bomb, its population halved by the new and terrifying American weapon nicknamed Little Boy.
On Thursday, political leaders, aging survivors and ordinary citizens gathered at 8:15 a.m. to mourn the moment when the city unwillingly became part of the world’s introduction to the nuclear age. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, together with another that hit Nagasaki three days later, killed more than 200,000 people, most of them civilians.”*
Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/wor…
Comments
I was thinking recently about nuclear proliferation and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japanese civilians, but I had no idea about the huge number of civilians killed in the firebombing campaigns. According to a couple of sites I found with a quick search, the size of the Japanese army at the time was around 2 million. This is relevant to the question of whether Japanese lives may have been saved by dropping nuclear bombs. We killed roughly as many civilians as there were Japanese soldiers. In order to claim that those civilian deaths saved Japanese lives, you therefore have to assume that we would have killed nearly every man in the Japanese army before the war ended.
It’s also interesting to compare these terror attacks–that’s what it’s called when you intentionally kill civilians to weaken an enemy–to more recent terror attacks on the United States. In particular, if the attacks of September 11th had been as damaging to the American people as these campaigns were to the Japanese people per capita, New York City would been so completely destroyed that we may not have bothered to rebuild it.