60th Anniversary of the end of World War II (VJ Day).

[grim_tales]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/date ... 581971.stm

Did the US need to drop the bombs? There's no denying allied POW's and many others were treated appallingly by the Japanese. What about their occupation of China and HK?
Since the dropping of the bombs brought an end to the Pacific War, is it not positive that more lives were saved (on both sides - allied and Japanese) because of this? I think the Americans used them as a weapon to put an end to the war quickly. Then again when you look at the massive casulaties (200,000 at Hiroshima/Nagaski) it is very People are still being affected by radiation.

[grim_tales]

No one got on views on this..?

[Killer Meteor]

It's a complicated issue. Japan was not willing to surrender, even AFTER the nuclear bombings, and it got to a stage where the military tried to kill the Emperor so that he could not surrender.

And let's be honest. People all over the world died in conventional bombing throughout WWII. Tokyo was practically obliterated in fire-bombings.

[grim_tales]

I didnt know that Ivan.

[Markgway]

Mass extermination can never be an acceptable option.

Bomb the shit out of the military by all means... but hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?

[Killer Meteor]

The sad fact was the military was more than happy to sacrifice those civilians. Two atomic bombs, and they still wanted to fight. The Japanese population was being trained to mass suicide. And Hiroshima was a producer of military hardware so its not like they attacked a little hamlet in Izu.

The shocking thing is, the atomics bombs didn't do the trick. It was a sudden mass invasion from Russia that finally did it.