- cross-posted to:
- todayilearned@lemmit.online
- todayilearned@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- todayilearned@lemmit.online
- todayilearned@lemmit.online
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And to this day there are people who believe and argue that this was fair. Propaganda is louder than a nuke.
Those certainly were appalling and destructive events. But why give them some special status over other bombing raids like the March 9 fire bombing of Tokyo, which also killed over 100,000 people in one night? Dropping 1 bomb vs. dropping 1,600 tons of conventional bombs in 3 hours?
Exactly you have to look at it objectively. It’s like the trolley problem bomb 2 cities killing ~240k people almost instantly or continue fire bombing and launching a land invasion for another year or 2 potentially killing millions.
Would I want to make that decision, fuck no.
200k people were vaporized by atomic bombs in an utterly indiscriminate manner. This is inclusive of babies, little infants literally melted in a second. The radiation persisted decades after the blast.
We give it a special status despite conventional warfare still being capable of greater numbers, because of how exceedingly cruel and indiscriminate it is.
Historians described it as an ‘ethical shock’ and I agree with the term. If the yanks did not elect to exclusively melt civilians with their demonstration history might look at it differently.
Umm, that last claim is wholly untrue. Every nuclear-armed country (save perhaps a couple) has detonated nuclear bombs. The US isn’t even the only one to use it intentionally against civilians, since the French were actively studying the deleterious effects of fallout on their colonial subjects in French Polynesia, which is what led to the Rainbow Warrior state-sponsored terrorist attack against New Zealand. I’m sure that there are other cases of the USSR or some other nuclear power testing their own devices against civilian populations if I had a mind to check.
Perhaps “the US is the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon against civilians of a country with which it was at war” or “the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon as an act of war”
I think there’s a clear difference between testing it in areas where the fallout will affect a population, and intentionally ending the lives of 200K people in a flash.
Your title would read better if you changed the second “against” to “of”, OP.
…and used them against civilians.
