1. Was dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary and justified or unnecessary and unjustified?You are DEAD WRONG.
Even Japan agrees that the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the right thing to do. They gave Japan an honorable excuse to surrender, rather than fight to the death even though the war was clearly lost. The late Emperor Hirohito has said as much.
2. Under what circumstances (if any) would the use of nuclear weapons be justified today?
For openers, I don't think that anyone will disagree with the idea that an attack with nuclear weapons, whether or not any of the weapons hit anything (as opposed to being shot down in flight) fully justifies a nuclear response. If the attack was fully successfully defended (not currently possible, but we are getting there, despite the Left's most desperate protestations that strategic defense is impossible), it MIGHT be reasonable to give the attacker one chance to surrender, unconditionally, before turning them into radioactive ash.
During the Cold War, the United States (and NATO) refused to sign up for the Soviet-pushed "No First Use" doctrine, because first use of tactical nuclear weapons was (and still is) the only feasible defense against a Soviet conventional attack into Western Europe. The conventional force numbers were (and still are) incredibly lopsided. The Soviets could line up a skirmish line from basically the Med to the Baltic, and head West, and the NATO conventional forces would be not much more than a speed bump. Under those conditions of asymmetry, the choices are starkly limited: surrender or nuclear response.
Today, it is doubtful that the Russian Federation and its allies would seriously consider mounting such an attack, but "doubtful" and even "unthinkable" are not the same as "It won't happen."
Second, in the days immediately following 9/11, nobody on the planet would have argued for a moment if the United States had turned Afghanistan into a radioactive glass parking lot. An attack similar to 9/11, launched by a nation in the control of thugs (as was the case in Afghanistan: the payroll records surfaced in a Kandahar safe house) would certainly justify and probably merit such a response. Originally Posted by Sidewinder
If you read McNamara you would know that General LeMay told him personally that the allied strategic bombing campaign was a major war crime. Everybody at the time knew that, and it was a major reason for the Nuremberg trials and the trial of General Yamashita.
The dropping of the atomic bombs DID NOT lead directly to the Japanese surrender. After the bombs were dropped the Japanese government didn't realize what had happened, and the US resumed firebombing operations. It wasn't until after Tokyo was firedbombed AFTER Nagasaki was nuked that the surrender finally came.
The entire story that the US was going to invade the Japanese home islands is a myth. The islands were surrounded and the whole place blockaded and cut off. They had no fuel, etc... US public opinion would never have held for huge casualities for such an unnecessary campaign and the real plan was to blockade, have small incursions, and starve them into a peace settlement. There would never have been hundreds of thousands of Americans sacrificed for the "unconditional surrender" that Americans didn't really support anyway.
There's about a dozen books written in the last years from de-classified archives about the real reasons for the decision to use the atomic bombs. It had more to do with just the momentum of the bombing campaign combined with political fear by Truman that he's be criticized if he didn't use all available weapons.
They just didn't understand at the time that the weapon would have such profoundly horrible results, and after the event Truman shrank in revulsion and spoke continually thereafter about how the bombs must never be used again.
And that is the truth, not stupid myths.
