Today is the anniversary of one of the greatest crimes against humanity that was carried out against the civilian population against Japan by the US. The only country to date to use nuclear weapons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

19 points · 6 comments · view on lemmy.world

6 Comments

gramie@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 29d (1 reply)

Those certainly were appalling and destructive events. But why give them some special status over other bombing raids like the March 9 fire bombing of Tokyo, which also killed over 100,000 people in one night? Dropping 1 bomb vs. dropping 1,600 tons of conventional bombs in 3 hours?

Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 29d

Exactly you have to look at it objectively. It's like the trolley problem bomb 2 cities killing ~240k people almost instantly or continue fire bombing and launching a land invasion for another year or 2 potentially killing millions.

Would I want to make that decision, fuck no.

deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 30d

...and used them against civilians.

brachiosaurus@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 29d

And to this day there are people who believe and argue that this was fair. Propaganda is louder than a nuke.

NOT_RICK@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 30d

Your title would read better if you changed the second “against” to “of”, OP.

wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 29d

Umm, that last claim is wholly untrue. Every nuclear-armed country (save perhaps a couple) has detonated nuclear bombs. The US isn't even the only one to use it intentionally against civilians, since the French were actively studying the deleterious effects of fallout on their colonial subjects in French Polynesia, which is what led to the Rainbow Warrior state-sponsored terrorist attack against New Zealand. I'm sure that there are other cases of the USSR or some other nuclear power testing their own devices against civilian populations if I had a mind to check.

Perhaps "the US is the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon against civilians of a country with which it was at war" or "the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon as an act of war"