posted on Oct, 7 2010 @ 02:00 PM
You have to put it into context. From today's perspective, it wasn't justified. Back then there was a different issue. Nobody really understood what
was at stake. They just thought of it as a big bomb. There was a general back then who said, "You guys got another one of those things?" wanting a
third bomb. Today that's abhorant.
My father was in the Phillipines during the war. His unit was goping to be part of the invasion force. The military expected to lose 1 million
American soldiers in an invasion of Japan. A total of 160,000 people died in the two explosions. My father told me they knew something big was up. Had
the bombs not been dropped, his feeling was that he would not have survived and I would not be alive.
That begs the question of whether the assumptions were correct. There is some evidence that the Japanese were nearing the end of their rope anyway and
were considering a surrender. If that is actually true, then the bombs were, quite literally, overkill, because the equation wasn't simply a million
to 160K.
One possibility would have been to evacuate an island, invite the Japanese to a little show, and blow up the island with no loss of life, then suggest
Tokyo was next. That, it seems to me, would have been a reasonable alternative under the circumstances.
Back then, they just did the math.