Reply #269: So, being worse than our enemy was better?

[knitter4democracy]

First of all, the war was mostly over. If we'd given the Emperor more time, and possibly done a demonstration we'd invited the Japanese to, there is darn good evidence that it would've worked.

Many of the scientists who worked on the bomb wrote a letter asking for just that. The President ignored their warnings, and people were vaporized.

It's not like I haven't studied this or had a million arguments about it with my dad--who was in Pearl Harbor when it was attacked and whose father was a chief in the Navy during the War. There are still major false assumptions we keep using to justify vaporizing people and only leaving their families shadows in the pavement for their grief. We'd already beaten the Germans--we didn't need the atomic bomb to fight them. To keep the atomic program going, though, we let a lot of Nazi scientists come to our country and keep doing research with no repercussions.

I did not say that fighting against tyranny was a bad idea. I said that vaporizing people was wrong--there are other ways to handle it. The Russians I talked with when I studied there in college were very dismissive of our war efforts. They took on Hitler by themselves on the Eastern Front. They lost more men in one day than we did in the entire war. They had entered the war against the Japanese to squeeze the Emperor (and to gain a port on the Pacific), and they were winning.

FDR was a good president, but he wasn't perfect, as no president ever is. We only started the Manhattan Project after hearing that Germany was working on it. We only used it because we had it and feared an escalation when the war was winding down. We used it to show the USSR we were boss and to keep top-dog status at the time. Many, many suffered for our actions, and we are responsible for that.