Little Hawk,

Good questions, and I appreciate the give and take of this thread. I would like to say again that I think one of the worst things we can do to history is place our present understanding of things back into a situation so far removed from our own. I stand guilty of it myself, and I appreciate it when someone corrects me of my own pet peeve. You asked if it would not have been better to just blockade Japan into surrendering, as they would have done so within a short period of time (according to your understanding.) Well, let's then just back up and say, why not blockade Japan after the battle of Midway? Why not just starve Germany following the invasion at Normandy? These battles (Midway and Normandy) effectively spelled the final result of the Pacific and European conflicts, but the wars raged on for some time following each of them. And, we had just developed a weapon of untold destructive power. How much did we know of our enemies' capabilities to have the same or a similar weapon? It turns out they did not. However, even as Germany was surrendering they were launching a new U-Boat that could out run a surface escort vessel while remaining submerged. Would it have turned the tide of the war? Probably not. It sure could have lengthened it though. My point is, humans have to use what knowledge and intuition they have to rise up to the situations they face when they face them. The world was reeling from two world wide conflagrations in less than a generation. People wanted peace. They wanted security. The quickest and surest way to achieve those goals AT THAT TIME was to get both Germany and Japan to surrender unconditionally, and that would involve invasion, or, as what happened, the use of the bomb.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to learn from the decisions of those who were victorious, as well as the vanquished, and see if we cannot keep ourselves from making the same or similar choices again. (As an aside, our economic embargo against Saddam Hussein was having exactly the opposite effect that what we wanted. Saddam was able through the black market to enrichen himself while thousands of the poorest Iraqis starved. Saddam then used their plight to create anti-western sentiment. The embargo might have worked if we could have completely isolated Saddam, but we didn't come anywhere close.)

The question is, are we any smarter??

Freightdawg