Using neutron bombs on taliban safehavens

Dancing David said:
Not really, our records show that the japanese had tendered offers of surrender, with the only condition was that the emperor would not be deposed. Now yes, i know the casuality estimates for Operation Coronet (3 million) and I know that there are some who say that the japanese did not offer to surrender until we dropped the bombs.

We just accepted the same offer they has made after we dropped the bombs. Now i think it was sort of inevitable given the money spent on the bomb, to want to test it against real targets.
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No, they surrendered unconditionaly. McArthur decided not to go after the Emperor and rather enlist his aid in reforming japan in the immage he wanted. If the US wanted to charge and hang the emperor it could have with out violating the surrender agreement.

Of course how things would have played out with out the bombing is something interesting to speculate about
But i don't beleive it was done to make the japanese surrender, they had already made the same offer that we accepted. It may have been done to enforce the surrender, or it may have been done to piss off the Reds. Or it may have been done to see what the bomb would do.
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You can believe that all you want, but it is not clear in the historic record.
 
ponderingturtle said:
No, they surrendered unconditionaly. McArthur decided not to go after the Emperor and rather enlist his aid in reforming japan in the immage he wanted. If the US wanted to charge and hang the emperor it could have with out violating the surrender agreement.

Of course how things would have played out with out the bombing is something interesting to speculate about


You can believe that all you want, but it is not clear in the historic record.
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As I said it has been 19 years, I only have an opinion not clear memories.
 
Pardalis said:
His "motivations" are irrelevant, for all we know he could have bombed them because he didn't like his coffee that morning.

The surrender was on september 2nd, after Nagasaki, not before. That's what happened.
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And even after the decision to surrender had been made, there was a attempted coup by die hard members of the military to overthrown the Emperor that damn near suceeded.
The whole "The bomb was dropped to scare the Reds" theory seems to me to be ignoring the realities of the situation. Just another blindly accpeted left wing meme.
 
Left wing? How far left are we talking about, exactly? I've never even heard this one. :boggled:
And regarding the OP... isn't the entire point of a neutron bomb to produce massive amounts of radiation? It's true that there's less of an explosion, as atomic bombs go--but that's sort of like having the best tan in Siberia.
 
dudalb said:
And even after the decision to surrender had been made, there was a attempted coup by die hard members of the military to overthrown the Emperor that damn near suceeded.
The whole "The bomb was dropped to scare the Reds" theory seems to me to be ignoring the realities of the situation. Just another blindly accpeted left wing meme.
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Not really, I heard it first from an ardent old school republican, who would probably be a centrsit by now. (Who is also deceased.)

Really it is a left wing meme?

that is news to me.

Now saying that the rise of industrial consumer culture and the military industrial complex was accompanied by the McCarthy red scare, that is a left wing idea. Especially if you add the stuff about consumerism being a way of blinding the middle class to the plight of the working class and binding the worker class to the industrial wage.

Yuck, not very good is it?
 
ponderingturtle said:
No, they surrendered unconditionaly. McArthur decided not to go after the Emperor and rather enlist his aid in reforming japan in the immage he wanted. If the US wanted to charge and hang the emperor it could have with out violating the surrender agreement.
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The Japanese Instrument of SurrenderWP does however indicate that the Emperor will stay in place.

We hereby undertake for the Emperor, the Japanese Government, and their successors to carry out the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration in good faith, and to issue whatever orders and take whatever action may be required by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers or by any other designated representative of the Allied Powers for the purpose of giving effect to that declaration.
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The decision to keep the Emperor was made before the surrender, not afterwards.
 
Tumbleweed is assuming that we know the exact location of the Taliban safe havens. We may have suspicions, but we don't really know for sure.

Wherever the Taliban is hiding, they are most likely mixed in with a large number of civilians. People who may not even be aware that Taliban leaders are hiding in their community. Even if they are aware, they have little choice in the matter.

Dropping a nuke and slaughtering large numbers of innocent civilians would simply confirm to the Moslem world that we are the Great Satan. It would play directly into the hands of the terrorists.
 
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Kestrel said:
The Japanese Instrument of SurrenderWP does however indicate that the Emperor will stay in place.



The decision to keep the Emperor was made before the surrender, not afterwards.
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True, though the Potsdam Declaration, which Emperor Hirohito declared as accepted in his radio address for the surrender of Japan, says nothing of granting immunity to the Emperor or anyone else for war crimes.
 
Kestrel said:
The Japanese Instrument of SurrenderWP does however indicate that the Emperor will stay in place.



The decision to keep the Emperor was made before the surrender, not afterwards.
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Before the papers of surrender where written up, not before the bomb was droped. Japan had no conditions on its surrender, after they surrendered unconditionaly a formal document is needed, when writting that up they decided that he would be more useful helping with reconstruction than being hung.

THere is also the point that various groups in Nazi Germany tried to negotiate a surrender with the allies, they of course did not have official sanction, so it is hard to say how serious the noises they were making were and how serious it is reasonable for the US president to enterprete them as.

But the point is that this is something historians argue all the time, it is not relevent to this thread. There is no clear answer to why the US dropped the bomb.
 
To those of you aghast that I would risk civilian deaths in order to eradicate Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens/ training camps/ supply lines. What a bunch of damned hypocrites you are. Ever hear of Mutual Assured Destruction? We were MORE than willing to fry tens of millions of Russian civilians for NOTHING more than REVENGE. Is or is not that so!?! Reagan blew away Gaddafi's daughter. Clinton killed many civilian is the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Japan and Germany (Dresden?) And why? For the better good, so that violent bullies cannot prevail. If N Korea was to launch a nuke at us they would be annihilated, civilians and all, and you damned well know it - and with YOUR hefty approval. So go suck and egg for criticising me for having the same mind set. I must assume you are turn the other cheek pacifists
What we did in Afghanistan has NOT WORKED. Try something else or are we too stupid to foresee the results if we don't
And to those of you who say violence has always begetted more violence I say no crap? And guess what ya Pollyannas: It's gonna go right on staying that way as long as there are two humans still breathing. I suggest you get used to it with 5000 years of history cementing the idea. So don't go messing with me is the message, or I'll mess back
 
I know! Let's just let those daring dashing brave Che Guevara type Taliban guerrillas take over. They are really just like Pat Robertson with muscle , making sure everybody stays in God's line, uncorrupt and pure. Then we can woo them with billions in foreign aid like we used to do with them and Saddam as a hedge against Iran. And the cute little guys can make an American talk show circuit to win American support and sell books about the war
 
oldhat said:
One good rule of thumb: The war is lost when people start talking about how miracle weapons will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Arguments were made in the same vein about using nuclear bombs in Vietnam.

Also, Hitler believing magical Nazi jet planes and rockets would stop the Allies from closing in.
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For the sake of putting the E in JREF, and because I'm a right pedant, there is the case of the Koreans and the Kobukson;).
 
No, the point of MAD is to deter an attack in the first place, by making it known that anyone who nukes us will be nuked back. The bombing of Tokyo, like the use of the atomic bombs, was intended to win the war as quickly as possible by breaking the Japanese civilian's will to fight--and if we hadn't terrified them into submission, then when we finally made it to mainland Japan after months of bloody conflict, those same civilians would have been handed bamboo spears and told to charge American troops. These people had been told that in order to become a United States Marine, you had to murder your mother and father--and that we had been given permission to rape any Japanese woman we got our hands on. If we hadn't taken that extreme measure--if we hadn't utterly broken their spirits and convinced them that we had the power to kill every man, woman and child in Japan--they might still be fighting.
 
Tumbleweed said:
To those of you aghast that I would risk civilian deaths in order to eradicate Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens/ training camps/ supply lines. What a bunch of damned hypocrites you are. Ever hear of Mutual Assured Destruction? We were MORE than willing to fry tens of millions of Russian civilians for NOTHING more than REVENGE. Is or is not that so!?! Reagan blew away Gaddafi's daughter. Clinton killed many civilian is the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in Japan and Germany (Dresden?) And why? For the better good, so that violent bullies cannot prevail. If N Korea was to launch a nuke at us they would be annihilated, civilians and all, and you damned well know it - and with YOUR hefty approval. So go suck and egg for criticising me for having the same mind set. I must assume you are turn the other cheek pacifists
What we did in Afghanistan has NOT WORKED. Try something else or are we too stupid to foresee the results if we don't
And to those of you who say violence has always begetted more violence I say no crap? And guess what ya Pollyannas: It's gonna go right on staying that way as long as there are two humans still breathing. I suggest you get used to it with 5000 years of history cementing the idea. So don't go messing with me is the message, or I'll mess back
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Thank the lord this man is not in any position of authority.
 
Germany and Japan: great violence was perpetrated against them by us and yet not a peep from them about getting even for it. The survivors are, dare I say it , grateful instead for rescuing them from under their thumb dictators. Kind of throws a monkey wrench into the violence ALWAYS begets more violence. Ditto for the American Revolution: violence beget freedom, not revenge. So sometimes violence merely settles the issue for good, especially if it is retaliatory in nature, against oppression or attack
 
Tumbleweed said:
So sometimes violence merely settles the issue for good, especially if it is retaliatory in nature, against oppression or attack
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I agree with this statement. But it's got little to do with the suitability of using nuclear weapons in this particular conflict. They are not the appropriate weapon. Nobody in the military wants to use them, and with good reason.
 
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