Fwd: The Bombs Of August - Howard Zinn

paul childs npchilds at connect.ab.ca
Tue Nov 20 20:55:56 PST 2001



>I think the idea that the Japanese leadership was unanimously ready to
>surrender is not borne out by the three day interval between the two bombs.


>
Perhaps not unanimous but allowing only three days to decide how to respond

to a new, unknown, unknowable and incredibly devastating weapon says more about

a willingness to use the weapon again and not consider negotiation than it does

about relative cohesion of the Japanese command.

Did the U.S. say at any point in those three days 'surrender unconditionally

or we will use this weapon again?' After the second bomb the probability for

the Japanese of a third, likely dropped on Tokyo, was incredibly high. Surrender

or self genocide were the only apparent options.

Did the U.S. have a fully formulated and articulated response to 911 by 914?


>Another option, I guess, was a blockade and the effect of that on the
>civilian population would have been terrible (e.g. Iraq between 1991 and
>2001).
>
Mebbe, I've never seen a model of what a blockades effects would look like in the morbid calculus this issue engenders.

If the point of departure is that weapons of mass destruction targeted at civilians

(or at least with willful ignorance of their presence) are immoral, then the

calculation of death differentials in different models is dancing on the graves

of the victims. http://netwinsite.com/dbabble/



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