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

[Nate Riffe]

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On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Jordan Bettis wrote:

> 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.
>

I disagree.  Of course, the firebombings were terrible, and perhaps more
people died, but I belive the atomic bomb had a much greater impact on
Japan as a nation.  Everything used against Japan before the atomic bomb
was tactics the Japanese were familiar with, and many of them were used by
the Japanese as well.  But the atomic bomb was unprecedented and
completely unanticipatable.  As a result, it had a tremendous
psychological impact.  You can see the cultural trauma to this day, just
look for the hugh explosions in anime that engulf whole towns, or in the
case of Giant Robo, whole hemispheres.  No other film genre so
consistently has this feature, and no other nation has had an atomic bomb
dropped on it.  I don't think that's a coincidence, and I'm not even sure
many Japanese have made the correlation.

- -Nate

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