[UFO Chicago] Re: [sklyarov-chicago] September 11th, 2001

[Jordan Bettis]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 02:30:19PM -0500, Nate Riffe wrote:
> "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
> a military base..."
> 
>             President Harry S Truman
> 
> "We're all sons of bitches now."
> 
>             Scientific Director J. Robert Oppenheimer
>             of the Manhattan Project

See, I've always felt that the bombing of Hiroshima was justified. The 
Japanese were not prepared to surrender before that, the only way to 
have ended the war would have to have landed an army on the main island(s)
and fought street by street, which would almost certainly have been the
bloodiest battle of the entire war, with a very high Japanese civilian
casualty count.

Besides, the bombing of Hiroshima was child's play compared to the Tokyo
firebombing. 300 bombers dropped oil slicks across the wooden Tokyo houses,
then another wave dropped napalm on top of it. Bomber crews reported being
able to smell burning flesh from inside their planes, and the glow was
visible from Guam. Estimates of the dead are between 88,000 and 200,000
according to a web page. I think the 88,000 number is way too low, all
estimates I've found elsewhere have been over 100k, which is considerably
higher than Hiroshima. One of the problems is that they set the rivers on
fire to prevent people from jumping into them, so the bodies burned there
could not be recovered.

See this: <http://tvtokyo.com/Burning.html> for more information.

The United States (as well as everyone else) committed unforgivable 
atrocities during that war, but I don't believe that the Hiroshima bombing
was one of them.


-- 
Jordan Bettis <http://www.hafd.org/~jordanb>
To understand a program you must become both the machine and the program.
          -- Alan J Perlis: Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN 1982