17th March 2015, 12:51 PM
I don't think there was any other way, not when the stakes are all life on earth. If we didn't see firsthand what sort of shit we were playing around with, if we didn't see what they did when they were used where a lot of people lived, it seems obvious to me that the people wielding these horrifying sabers would have been much more willing to do more than rattle them.
That doesn't make Hiroshima right, but whether or not it was right is is a question more suited to the "would more people have died in a conventional warfare invasion of the Home Islands" debate. My position is that what happened to Hiroshima was just about certainly going to happen somewhere else, and it would have definitely been a catastrophe many orders of magnitude worse if it had happened later, when there were thousands of warheads that were thousands of times as powerful. Maybe it would have happened in Korea or Vietnam, or over Able Archer 83. And maybe nobody would have survived to learn from it.
That doesn't make Hiroshima right, but whether or not it was right is is a question more suited to the "would more people have died in a conventional warfare invasion of the Home Islands" debate. My position is that what happened to Hiroshima was just about certainly going to happen somewhere else, and it would have definitely been a catastrophe many orders of magnitude worse if it had happened later, when there were thousands of warheads that were thousands of times as powerful. Maybe it would have happened in Korea or Vietnam, or over Able Archer 83. And maybe nobody would have survived to learn from it.
YOU CANNOT HIDE FOREVER
WE STAND AT THE DOOR
WE STAND AT THE DOOR