Political Crossfire Forums

[Eonve]

thundertaker wrote: Come on, Resistance to invasion would have been even more fanatical than that which was put up by The Nazis in Germany. Japanese civilian casualties would have been enormous, especially if the Red army had landed and raped it's way all the way to Tokyo.........

i don't think so. however committed they might have been, they were not stupid enough not to realize that with USSR, USA and UK all allied against them they did not stand a chance. i think that after the first serious offensive they would move to make peace with the US and the war would come to an end. there is no real basis to claim that the casualties would exceed the number of the bomb victims. but then Japan would probably be divided into at least two occupation zones and i don't think it is the kind of arrangement Truman would like.

[thundertaker]

They wouldn't have just given up without a fight. They needed, to use a more recent expression, to experiance 'shock and awe' from a terrible new weapon for which there was no defence. They could fight allied soldiers landing on the beaches of their homeland and do some damage.
If Germany was stupid enough not to realise it couldn't take on the BE, the US and the USSR by itself, what makes you think the Banzai-minded japanese would have had any more sense?

[Canada_Rocks]

Nuclear weapons are like a thread in the taspastry of the world. If you pull it out, nothing may happen, then again the whole thing might fall apart.
World war II is a bad example. If America played it's hand a bit differently against a nation like Japan before Pearle Harbour..Thngs would have resulted differently.
Then again hitler was months away from producing the bomb when Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up.

[theresbears]

if we can rish nuclear war, we can risk nuclear disarment

[Angela]

thundertaker wrote: Come on, Resistance to invasion would have been even more fanatical than that which was put up by The Nazis in Germany. Japanese civilian casualties would have been enormous, especially if the Red army had landed and raped it's way all the way to Tokyo.........

Well at the time Japan was ready to surrender: some historians say that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria had the same if not a bigger impact on the Japanese decision to surrender than the Atomic bomb. Probably Japan would have surrendered in a few months without an invasion but the dead toll wouldn't have been lighter for the Japanese people: a 500 B-29 incendiary raid wasn't much different from an atomic bomb, on the contrary: in March about 300 B-29 attacked Tokyo and caused more than 200.000 dead, more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
this is a picture of Tokyo after that raid:

not much different from the Hiroshima or Nagasaki pics.

[Angela]

Canada_rocks wrote:
Then again hitler was months away from producing the bomb when Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up.

Not really the Germans were years behind the Americans, they were probably behind the Soviets too: Heisenberg miscalculated the critic mass by a 50 factor (somebody says he did it on purpose to avoid Hitler to have such a weapon) so they thought they couldn't have produced enough enriched uranium to build a bomb and lost the foundlings. Another mistake was to use "heavy" water instead of graphite as a moderator.

[cap'n queasy]

Angela, you know too much about nuclear bombs! :lol:

[Angela]

cap'n queasy wrote: Angela, you know too much about nuclear bombs! :lol:

:lol: 3 physics exams at University including nuclear physics