The Korean War Week 008 - The First UN Counterattack - August 13, 1950

Sarcasm aside, I think that the question of using nuclear bombs is accidentally two questions asked at once.

!historychads

These are two separately answered questions:

• Should we do aerial bombing?

• Should we use nuclear fuel in bombs instead of conventional explosives?

The first one was already answered way ahead of time. Bombing strategic targets -- aka disabling your enemy's war production capability -- was already decided specifically on the decades before, and generally in the century before there were airplanes. One may argue that Bill Sherman invented it when fighting against the Confederacy. "From The River To The Sea, Slaves Shall Be Free" (Savannah and Atlantic).

With the question of aerial bombing already being answered and mutually practiced by all belligerents, the next question is "should we make bombs more powerful?"

What is the difference between using napalm and burning down 16 square miles of Tokyo and killing 100,000 people in 3 hours with hundreds of planes versus killing 150,000 people in 2 days with six planes?

The deaths were going to happen. 17-year-old Americans watched the military and civilian death tolls happen when the Red Army invaded Berlin. They knew their draft number would come up in 1946 for the final invasion of the Japanese homeland. We saw what the Japs did in Saipan to the civilians, and the massive suicides the civilians embarked on. Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guadalcanal, Philippines, and the rest. We watched the exponential rise in American deaths per square foot of land as we got closer to Japan.

We saw Japan retaliate and kill 150,000 Chinese civilians in reprisal to the Doolittle Raid.

Operation Ichigo caused another several hundred thousand Chinese deaths and embedded as many Japanese troops on Chinese mainland.

How about we cut the shit and just drop two bombs and end the suffering real quick?

!ifrickinglovescience !historychads

What does sophistry mean @ACA google is down for me

>morally right

No

>tactically right

I don't know as much about that situation

It's hard to say because I don't know that he ever had a concrete plan of how he was going to use the nukes. My understanding is he just was like "oh shit we're losing, so let's use our magical new atom bomb to win". He talked about making a belt of radioactive waste along the border to block the Chinese, which would have required like a billion times more nuclear material than the US had, so apparently he didn't have any advisors who knew how the heck this stuff worked.