Would you consider the atomic bombs a war crime?

This is one position I ran into at Purdue. "Today we will begin another round of talks on the reason the US is, was and always has been the bad guy." Problem is that a lot of "campus radicals" from the '60s and '70s are now professors.

I had fun pissing them off.

 

The bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima have been derided and applauded since the day they were dropped. One thing to look at is their use was just one more escalation in waging War. They were not used as a first strike but as another technique to carry the War to the enemy. And hopefully end it. Should there be a set number of aircraft used to deliver bombs? At the beginning of the War flights of dozens of B17's were our maximum capability and as time went on those dozens turned into hundreds. Since the B29's could carry more bombs over longer distances should their use be considered a War crime? Was the use of Napalm a "War Crime"? Same goes for the bombs, be it 2 or 2 thousand. It was not a "War Crime" to use what and as many as could be used.
The dropping of those two bombs, far from being a war crime, should be viewed as what they came to be seen as, a deterrent to War.

 

I challenge anyone to show that Germany and Japan wouldn't have used the bombs if they had them first.

 

I'm sure Hitler would have chose a remote location to demonstrate the bomb. Like the East End.

 

This argument is getting old. I'm sure that Germany and Japan would have used the bomb, if they had it. Read Hell to Pay, and I defy anyone to doubt whether the decision to drop the bomb was justified.

BTW, I am also a liberal in the current political climate, but I don't question the wisdom of this decision.

 

Oh Great, now we'll get the "So If Johnny (sorry) Jerry jumped off a cliff would you?" argument.


I apologize in advance. going to my room now.

 

I was merely pointing out that the morality is relativistic when it comes to use of the bombs.

 

OpanaPointer, Didn't mean anything by the "If so & so" remark. Vain attempt at 'levity' There are so many A-bomb 'good or Bad'? threads on here it gets kinda stale repeating the same ol' same ol'.
This small snippet from a premier site says enough for me;

At the time of the surrender Japan still had 2,000,000 men under arms in the homeland and was capable of conducting a tenacious ground defense; about 3,000 Japanese aircraft were also operational. Nevertheless, the Japanese could hardly have continued the war for more than a few months. On the other hand, the fact that an invasion was not necessary certainly spared many American lives.

HyperWar: US Army in WWII: American Military History [Chapter 23]

 

Perhaps merging would solve some problems? A post with little or no new content could be appended to a previous thread on the same topic.

And then we could shoot the poster and leave his body for the vultures.

 

From this day forward my answer will be - No.