fire

Submitted by the Grand Infidel of Kaffiristan (Australia), Feb 19, 2009 at 18:54

Chino - some of your points on Japan were correct - that their industrial centres were already crippled. Dresden in Germany was far worse in terms of conflagrations where up to 300k people died with incendiary bombings. So the fact that it was a nuclear bomb in one sense is neither here nor there. The point is though - because of the nature of the military and samurai culture - and devotion for the Emperor - they would have most probably fought almost till the last man, defending their land.

Not sending a strong signal by using an atomic bomb would have meant many, many times more deaths The relatively quick incineration of 200,000 could have been achieved by conventional incendiary bombs.
Of course there would no slow lingering deaths from radiation poisoning - and in the ensuing decades - cancer.

Using the newly developed atomic bomb proved beyond doubt that resistance was futile.

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