First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are We Could Be Heroes by Done With Mi…

First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here,  and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council li…

I don’t have the energy to look up my sources* for this right now so you can this with as many grains of salt as you wish.
But I read that at Yalta conference Stalin agreed to fight Japan 90 days after the defeat of Germany. VE day was May 8th. So Stalin did what he agreed to do.

*Wikipedia agrees but I don’t trust wiki.

I have been to the park twice, and it is definitely a place Americans should visit in Japan if they have a chance, regardless of your feelings on whether dropping the bomb is right or not–just like the Japanese should visit the Pearl Harbor memorial when they have a chance.

The only problem I have with the memorial is that it seems to pit the event in almost isolation, without the context of the brutal Japanese war campaign across East Asia. But at the same, I can understand the localized perspective of the memorial and as one commenter mentioned above, a reminder of the destruction of atomic weapons and the vigilence we need to have in making sure we never have to use or experience such destructive tactics again.

…The religious zeal with which Japanese soldiers were inculcated with the “no surrender” philosophy resulted in a brutish and barbaric form of war: “At Kwajalein, the Japanse garrison lost 4,938, with only 79 taken prisoner, a fatality rate of 98.4 percent.”

The result was a perceived need on the part of American military planners to devastate the Japanese homeland, knowing that surrender was untenable. To put this in perspective, D-Day required 175,000 invading troops. 7,000,000 American troops were in the Pacific by 1945 preparing for Operation Olympic, the first phase of the invasion.

A War Department report concluded that, “defeating Japan would cost [them] five to ten million deaths and the United States between 1.7 and 4 million casualties, including 400,000 to 600,000 fatalities.” Postwar analysis of Japanese homeland defenses indicate that Allied planners actually underestimated these casualty rates. Put in these terms, the fire-bombings and atomic attacks seem almost humane in that the corrupt Japanse military government was forced to succumb before millions of more lives were snuffed out.

Two points:

First, my father was a sergeant in the Army, already fighting in the Pacific. He almost certainly would have been part of any landing on the Japanese homeland. There are good odds that without the bombs, he’d have been a casualty and I’d never exist.

Second, here’s something I never see addressed: The actual bombings showed the horrendous results of atomic weapons. Would the Cold War have stayed cold if people didn’t have the evidence of the horrors of such weapons?