Mooman, were you there to personally interview the general consensus of Navy seamen to make suck a ridiculous statement as you did?

No MG I was not there. But, as I said in my post, my father was on active service on a destroyer on escort duty to a battle fleet off Japan for many months and, according to him and I had no reason to have doubted him, that was the opinion of a large proportion of the serving seamen. So it is their view which is "ridiculous", I only posted what had been reported to me by someone who had been involved in the bombardment and blockade of Japanese ports and, more widely, in the Pacific campaign. As others have said, Japan was very close to total economic collapse at the time the bombs were dropped and had already begun to sue for peace. And, as for not knowing what the effects would be, plenty could be postulated following the original testing and knowldege that there was of Japanese building techniques. Certainly it would have been known in advance that 10s of 1000s of ordinary civilians would be killed instantaneously.

mooman