At 4:12 AM 2/3/96, Rich Graves wrote:
Who holds up the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as great victories against tyranny?
Since you ask, I do. A land invasion of Japan would've likely cost half a million American lives, and perhaps a million or more Japanese citizen lives, according to comprehensive studies I think are on the mark. (Anecdotally, my father was on Guam at that time, and was part of the force being prepared for the land invasion of Japan. He was mighty happy to hear about the new wonder weapon and how it ended the war in days rather than months.) If the war was just, then ending it quickly and decisively was more just than ending it more slowly and painfully. That some Japanese died in a nuclear fireball rather than in conventional firestorms or blockbuster bombings is neither here nor there. Sometimes ya just gotta nuke em. --Tim Boycott espionage-enabled software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."