Originally posted by: Obi Jeewhyen
Yes, to answer bluntly and honesty, I would rather the ENTIRE military personnel of our nation be killed than drop nuclear bombs on CIVILIAN targets. It was a crime against humanity which can not be justified in any manner, not even as a last resort to win a war. Pfft, there have been many wars since then. Shall nukes be the denoument all all wars?

If the choice you presented were between our civilians and their civilians, I would have a different response. But only military targets - including ours - are legitimate in warfare. We "cheated" far worse than Pearl Harbor when we chose to sacrifice the enemy civilians rather than our own military personnel.

If we were unable to prevail any other way ... we should not have prevailed. Why were nukes not necessary in Europe? Why did an invasion work there?

It's very sad that oftentimes the side of "good" is not the mightier side. Perhaps that was the case in WWII, and we were simply not able to honorably defeat the Empire of Japan. I'm sure many reasonably aggrieved parties today cannot honorably defeat the Empire of the United States. Should they resort to defeating us by nuking Los Angeles and Pittsburgh?

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If the atomic bombs had not been dropped far more civilian casualties would've been incurred than were actually claimed by the two nukes. Do you realize this? You have a naive and high-schoolish notion of how wars should be fought.

There was no question that we were able to "honorably defeat Japan" in the way you're suggesting, especially considering the impending Russian invasion. Is your idea of an "honorable war" one in which we send American and other Allied soldiers into Japan to battle not only Japanese soldiers but the whole of the Japanese citizenry? Do you have any idea how the citizens of the surrounding islands reacted to our invasion? Do you realize how much worse and compounded the reaction would have been in the heart of the Japanese homeland? Hirohito didn't surrender after witnessing the devastation left in the wake of the first bomb, if we had been fighting "conventionally" the Japanese (civilians included) would have fought (or been forced to fight) until the country had been completely drained. Even though the nukes were frighteningly powerful they actually saved lives in the long run, in their absence there would not only have been many more lives lost on the Allied side there would've been many times more civilian lives lost on the Japanese side than were killed by nukes.

Would you be opposed to the American government shooting down a hijacked plane full of innocent, foreign civilians on a crash-course with a stadium full of ten times the amount of innocent civilians? In essence it's the same situation on a much, much smaller scale.

Also, nukes "weren't necessary in Europe" because by the time atomic weapons were available for use the war in Europe was all but over, Einstein. Germany surrendered on May 7th, 1945. The first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945.

The world isn't anything like a cut-and-dried fantasy. You make it sound as though our Vader bested Japan's Luke, ridiculous. Google the Rape of Nanking.... I guess Luke got horny. You should reserve posting your silly opinions unless it concerns some imaginary fantasy-world.

EDIT: Now that I've read everything you said in this thread it turns out you're just dumb.