Interesting thread.
I only clicked because I was in Hiroshima about 3 years ago this September and this reminded of it. Today it is a beautiful city, with wonderful people, and a very sad past. The Hiroshima Peace Museum is a very sobering experience.
As for whether those bombs should have been dropped...fuck. I'm not sure there is a right answer. I couldn't have done it. It almost certainly did save lives, in terms of raw numbers, but I don't know how you can think of lives as a statistic. I think they estimated ~5 million allied casualties and triple that in Japanese deaths, including civilians - compared to a few hundred thousand that perished from bombs, but that just doesn't register.
Too much time has past, and I'm fortunate enough to have no frame of reference to what things were like in 1945. I know the US military is still using the purple hearts they made preparing for the invasion of Japan to this day, which is wild to think about. But I couldn't have done it. It changed the world, and not in a good way. Let's all just hope it never happens again.
I only clicked because I was in Hiroshima about 3 years ago this September and this reminded of it. Today it is a beautiful city, with wonderful people, and a very sad past. The Hiroshima Peace Museum is a very sobering experience.
As for whether those bombs should have been dropped...fuck. I'm not sure there is a right answer. I couldn't have done it. It almost certainly did save lives, in terms of raw numbers, but I don't know how you can think of lives as a statistic. I think they estimated ~5 million allied casualties and triple that in Japanese deaths, including civilians - compared to a few hundred thousand that perished from bombs, but that just doesn't register.
Too much time has past, and I'm fortunate enough to have no frame of reference to what things were like in 1945. I know the US military is still using the purple hearts they made preparing for the invasion of Japan to this day, which is wild to think about. But I couldn't have done it. It changed the world, and not in a good way. Let's all just hope it never happens again.