Dropping the Bomb

I thought the discussion was interesting today, although sometimes it would go back in forth between a small group of people. I think I’m a little biased after having Dr. Stacy teach this subject last year, but I agree with the group 1 and 3 positions which justify dropping the bomb. Like we talked about in the debate, Japan’s army was known to fight ‘til the death, and if we decided to invade the country, we would have had to beat just about their entire army until the Japanese surrendered. The only way to quickly defeat such a determined nation like Japan and minimize casualties would be to shock or scare them into surrender. The atomic bomb would be a sure way to scare them and so dropping it was necessary. We couldn't warn them or give them a chance beforehand because for one, they might have been able to protect themselves better, but more importantly, we weren’t ever sure if the bomb was going to work. If we threatened them with this huge weapon of mass destruction and they didn’t surrender, then we would have to use it. But, if the bomb didn’t go off, we would look incredibly weak and would encourage the Japanese and Axis powers. We also couldn’t give them a demonstration for this reason; not being able to “push the button” would, again, make America seem weak in Japan’s eyes. We definitely didn’t want to inspire any confidence in the Japanese. We were trying to shock and demoralize them. Also from a more practical standpoint, we didn’t really have the resources to waste a bomb on a demonstration. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the demonstrations in a way. Like Linus said, the casualties from the two atomic bombs were actually less than the casualties from all of the fire bombing in Japan. So, dropping the bomb was basically the best option at the time. We couldn’t really afford a long-drawn out war with Japan. We definitely didn’t want a two-coast war so we had to end this quickly and I think this was the best path.