General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Under what circumstances is it justifiable to use nuclear weapons against a civilian population? [View all]lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)I'm saying that I'm not at all confident that the world is a worse place because we did.
And no. The US had a very clear perspective of how bad World War II was (a perspective that I think has dimmed with time) but a different perspective about the ways in which nuclear weapons differ from conventional warfare.
Of the 85 million people killed in WW2 (55 million of whom were civilians) 246,000 or 0.29% were killed by nuclear weapons.
Estimates of the number of Iraqis who have died due to the most recent war range from 174,000 to 1million+. I fail to see the logic that explains why one is worse than the other.
The quick end to the war is what enabled Japan to exit it with it's industrial capacity intact.
Contemporary advisers to Truman believed that the US military would experience 400,000800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.
Simply put: the only justifiable reason to kill someone is to save two others. Or in this case, 40 others.