I went the Nuke museum in hiroshima. will be uploading grusome pics for HERMAN2 to see as soon as Im back from vacation.
(I have a feeling that Herman will say they diserve it…)
Oh, wait, that troll was banned while I was away? Great!
Librarian:
- Merely being indiscriminate is not sufficient reason to ban a weapon - there are also tests of proportionality and military necessity. All weapons with an area of effect are inherently indiscriminate, but they are not necessarily banned.
By this standard, there are clearly some situations where the use of nuclear weapons would be legitimate - for instance if an airburst weapon was used against an enemy army in the desert with no civilians nearby. - Low level radiation is very controversial scientifically, largely because there exists no good data. What limited data there is can be subjected to multiple possible interpretations. Essentially we have two good data points for exposure - the prompt radiation emitted from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We then have a small number of halfway understood data points - the liquidators from the roof of the exploded reactor at Chernobyl, Uranium miners, etc. Finally, we have cases of mass exposure to low level radiation - from the Windscale Pile 1 fire, Chernobyl, etc. Windscale Pile 1 is a good example - it happened long ago enough that the effects will all have happened, and the UK keeps very good records allowing comparisons. Despite all this, estimates of additional deaths range between none and 20,000.
Personally I tend towards the lower end on casualties - the higher end estimates assume that there is a linear relationship between radiation exposure and morbidity at low exposures, but given that everyone is subject to a certain amount of ionising radiation from the sun, natural background radiation from rocks, etc. with no discernible increase in morbidity from area to area I suspect that there is a certain level of radioactivity below which there is no increase in morbidity at all.
you cant be sure… and, it is expensive. it was one of the causes of the collapse of the soviet economy in the 80’s.
On that point, international law during WWII had not dealt with atomic weapons per se because they did not exist.
International law to that point allowed events which harmed civilians if those events were a ‘military necessity’.
The debate then comes down to the narrow view that a military necessity was something urgent in the field, such as repulsing (but perhaps not pre-emptively attacking) the enemy with civilians in the way. This is not the way any modern wars have been fought. For example, the routine sinking of enemy merchant shipping by all sides demonstrates that civilians engaged in normal civilian activities are legitimate targets if it assists achieving military aims far removed from any immediate military impact of such events, such as starving the enemy of food and materiel.
Or the wider view, to which I subscribe, one looks to the military necessities of prosecuting a war, which puts civilians at risk at various points on land and sea from land, sea and air attacks, as in the case of sinking merchant ships.
Regardless of whether one accepts the narrow or wider view, Japan embarked upon a war of unprovoked military aggression offending every principle of international law. Everything Japan did in Chna and the Pacific was a war crime or a crime against humanity. There cannot have been any military necessity to any of those actions because they were unlawful military actions.
If everything Japan did was unlawful, then how was it wrong to use atomic weapons, which were not unlawful at the time, to stop Japan continuing to do it and to bring peace to Asia?
Arguing that using atomic weapons against Japan to bring it to surrender was wrong, immoral or unlawful is as illogical as arguing that a householder who uses a gun to shoot a threatening armed intruder is guilty of murder rather than committing a justifiable homicide in self-defence
What, in the end, is the difference between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, apart from the weapons used?
People died in both attacks, and as many people as the attacker could kill with available weapons. That is the nature and intent of war. But the Japanese and various anti-nuclear and anti-war groups bleat about how terrible using atomic weapons was because apparently there is something inherently terrible about being killed in a nuclear blast while dying in a conventional one isn’t worthy of concern.
Focusing on atomic weapons to the exclusion of all other weapons just doesn’t make sense. It’s in the same category as rejecting nuclear power just because it’s nuclear and therefore automatically bad rather than assessing objectively whether it might be preferable to conventional forms of power which might be more damaging to the planet and its inhabitants.
Hence the subsequent additional test of proportionality. The military necessity test is pretty easy - do you gain a significant military advantage from the action, and are there other ways of gaining the same advantage? If the answers to this are yes and no (or yes and yes but the other ways are worse) then you pass the military necessity test.
The proportionality test is rather harder to make a call on - it asks if the military advantage gained is in proportion to the methods used and the civilian damage caused. That is often something you have to make a best guess on from very limited information, and one that people will second-guess you on for centuries (c.f. Dresden).
The moral/legal issues with nuclear weapons are almost always with the proportionality tests, rather than those of military necessity.
Proportionality in war becomes interesting when related to other concepts of proportionality.
Western, or at least Western English speaking, jurisprudence generally thinks it better that a thousand guilty people should go free than that one innocent should be wrongly convicted.
The same nations which support that jurisprudence happily supported and acted upon in WWII, and still support and act upon, the notion that it doesn’t matter how many innocents we kill in war, as long as we win.
they should not today there is huge radiation in the place where the bombs fell even today children with problems are born they could just starv japan they would surrender and the losses would be mutch less then its today 60+years after the day it happned
how is a long drawn out death by starvation preferable to a nuclear attack?
- Capital letters and punctuation are your friend.
- Care to provide any evidence that there is any measurable residual radiation at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki due to the nuclear weapons used there?
- Children with birth defects are also born in London, a city which has never been attacked with nuclear weapons. I have yet to see any evidence to demonstrate increased levels of birth defects among children conceived after the bombs were used, although it is theoretically possible that the mutagenic effects of ionising radiation on the parents could lead to this.
Yeah. I mean, typhus cholera, malnutrition, or nuclear bombing? To be or not to be. How is the question?
Which cancer do you prefer?
Only the significantly less painful one, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. And I am assuring you that I do know the difference between those numerous variants of cancer.
You know too much.
Oh, that’s only part of my job. 
Which bombings in Europe or Japan were against completely legitimate military objectives?
For example this one:
Low-level precision bombardement of the “Fortuna” factory performed by RAF - Germany, September 1941.
If the European targets and the Tokyo fire bombings were acceptable…
Who told you that, my dear Rising Sun? In our previous threads (Firebombing of the Japanese cities, for example) these questions about acceptability were already explained.
But, as I indicated in an earlier post, isn’t international law or, more accurately, the international law of war, farcical?
Oh, this is truly colossal theme, my dear Mr. Rising Sun… But briefly I shall say only that the limits of International Law are basicly within the limits of power. The International Court of Justice has no army, no police, no executive to fall back on for enforcement of its decisions. The International Court cannot raise even a brigade, and in fact the record of compliance to its decisions has not been good. It seems to me that the nineteenth-century British scholar, honorable John Austin, was right when he held that every law is a command from a enforcing superior that is binding on inferiors – superior in this context signifies the power to force compliance. That’s all. 
Where is the sense in, for example, outlawing all dum dums but not a .50 sniper rifle which in the current conflict cut a man in half in Iraq at 1,400 metres?
Perhaps because a 0.50 caliber bullet fired in Iraq is not capable – unlike nuclear warhead!- to destroy physical existence of our precious little Christine inside the neutral Vaduz?
A sensible humanistic approach would start from the proposition that war is bad because people get hurt, and that any weapon used in that deplorable exercise is as bad as any other.
Unfortunately, my dear Mr. Rising Sun, some weapons are worse than the others. Nevertheless, generally as an active member of the International Red Cross I am completely supportive toward this view of yours. 
Merely being indiscriminate is not sufficient reason to ban a weapon…By this standard, there are clearly some situations where the use of nuclear weapons would be legitimate - for instance if an airburst weapon was used against an enemy army in the desert with no civilians nearby.
Understood, my dear Mr. Pdf 27. However, it has to be emphasized that even in this case patterns of radioactive follaut are completely incontrollable, thus jeopardizing population in neighboring regions of our planet, for example civilian lives in our dearly beloved and completely neutral Switzerland.
In addition, another fact has to be accentuated too: neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki represented “clean” military targets without civilian population, which unquestionably has been exposed to absolutely indiscriminative attack in the very moment of bomb dropping.
In addition, if pure indiscriminativity is insufficient as a legal reason for abandonment of nuclear weapons, I wonder why the use of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, or bacteriological methods of warfare still would be illegitimate against that previously mentioned adversary army in the middle of desert? Economy of power, as well as all cost-benefit analyses are strictly suggesting that 2-(Fluoro-methylphosphoryl) oxypropane, for example, is much more efficient in this case than a nuclear weapon. Would you be so kind to elaborate this knotty and deeply illogical issue for us, my dear Mr. Pdf 27?
Sorry, honorable ladies and gentlemen- yet again that well-known, boring message: The text that you have entered is too long (12997 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long.
No problem – here we go… :roll:
Low level radiation is very controversial scientifically, largely because there exists no good data.
Oh, there is a plethora of scientifically highly useful and completely verifiable data, my dear Mr. Pdf 27. The only problem is that those scientific results are - more often than not! - unavailable on-line, that’s all. Certain materials, however, are completely obtainable. Please, just follow these links:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309039959
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/89/1/4
http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/beir_vii_final.pdf
Other highly prescribed literature is available within good scientific libraries. For example these scientific woks:
Preston DL, Shimizu Y, Pierce DA, Suyama A, Mabuchi K: Studies of Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 13: Solid Cancer and Noncancer Disease Mortality: 1950-1997. Radiat. Res. 160, 381-407 (2003)
Preston DL, Pierce DA, Shimizu Y, Cullings HM, Fujita S, Funamoto S, Kodama K: Effect of Recent Changes in Atomic Bomb Dosimetry on Cancer Mortality Risk Estimates. Radiat.Res. 162, 377-389 (2004)
Thompson DE, Mabuchi K, Ron E, Soda M, Tokunaga M, Ochikubo S, Sugimoto S, Ikeda T, Terasaki M, Izumi S, Preston DL (1994)
Cancer incidence in atomic bomb survivors. Part II: Solid tumors, 1958-1987, Radiat Res 137: 17-67 (1994)
Otake M, Yoshimaru H, Schull WJ:Severe Mental Retardation among the Prenatally Exposed Survivors of the Atomic Bombing of Hlioshima and Nagasaki : A Comparison of the T56D and DS86 Dosimetry Systems. RERF TR 16-87, Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Hiroshima (1987)
UNSCEAR Report: Genetic and Somatic Effects of Ionizing Radiation. Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, United Nations, New York (2000)
SHIMIZU Y, KATO H, SCHULL WJ: Life Span Study Report 11. Part II. Cancer Mortality in the Years 1950-1985, Based on the Recently Revised Doses. RERF Tech Rep No. 5-99. Hiroshima: Radiation Effects Research Foundation, (1988)
SHORE RE, HEMPELMANN LH, KOWALUK E, ET AL: Breast neoplasms in
women treated with x-rays for acute postpartum mastisis. Jap. Natl. Cancer Inst. (1977).
BOICE JD JR, LAND CE, SHORE RE, ET AL: Risk of breast cancer following
low-dose radiation exposure. Radiology 131:589-597(1979)
HARVEY EB, BOICE JD JR, HONEYMAN M, ET AL: Prenatal x-ray exposure
and childhood cancer in twins. New Engl Journal of Medicine 312:541-545, (1985)
UNITED NATIONS SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE ON THE EFFECTS OF ATOMIC RADIATION: Genetic and Somatic Effects of Ionizing Radiation. New York: United Nations, (1986)
UPTON AC: The question of thresholds for radiation and chemical carcinogenesis. Cancer Invest 7: pp. 267-276 (1989)
WANG Z, BOICE JD, WEI L, ET AL: Thyroid nodularity and chromosome aberrations among women in areas of high background radiation in China. Natl. Cancer Inst. 82:478-482 (1990)
We L, ZHA Y, TAO Z, ET AL: Cancer mortality study in high background radiation areas of Yangjiang, China. In Epidemiology Investigations on the Health-Effects of Ionizing Radiation. Cologne, Germany: Institut fur Strahlenschutz, pp. 7-21. (1988)
NATIONAL COUNCIL ON RADIATION PROTECTION AND MEASUREMENTS: Inductionof Thyroid Cancer by Ionizing Radiation. NCRP Rep No. 80. Bethesda,
MD: NCRP (1985)
NATIONAL COUNCIL ON RADIATION PROTECTION AND MEASUREMENTS: Influence of dose and its distribution in time on dose-response relationships for low LET radiations. Rep No. 64. Washington, DC: NCRP (1980)
LLOYD DC, PURROTT RJ: Chromosome aberration analysis in radiological
protection dosimetry. Radiat Protect Dosim 1:19-28 (1981)
Care to provide any evidence that there is any measurable residual radiation at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki due to the nuclear weapons used there?
With your permission, I shall do that, my dear Mr. Pdf 27. Yes, we still do have measurable residual radiaton in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is produced by a very rare and highly specific radionuclide Nickel 63 (half-life 100.1 years) which actually has been measured in copper samples in those coursed cities. Please, just follow this link:
https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2003/NR-03-07-11.html
If you have any additional scientific wishes, just give me a memo. I am assuring you that I shall succed in giving satisfaction to all who honour me with their confidence. 
I have yet to see any evidence to demonstrate increased levels of birth defects among children conceived after the bombs were used.
Are you absolutely sure that you want to see those factual levels of the Atomic Human Toll, my dear Mr. Pdf 27? If you do – no problem: at a National Medical Institute in Kazakhstan a plethora of fetuses deformed by radioactive fallout will tell you more than statistics ever will. Alas, nuclear explosions do have a grievous legacy – for those who survive, and those who never got a chance to. Here is a short prewiew:
Fetuses malformed by radioactive fallout, IRZ Kazakhstan
After that we will be able to analyze certain undully forgotten examples of nucler fallout in USA as well. For example this everlasting and highly enlightening story of Mr. Dave Timothy, whose only sinn was that one beautiful day he was cutting hay down there in Utah, when some bluish gray haze arrived with the wind. The sweat on his hands, arms and face felt like stinging nettles, and he had to take a rag and keep wiping off, because it burned so bad. By the time he was 18 he had thyroid cancer. His neck is still scarred from a series of operations. By his own words: “I have medical bills there’s no way you could ever pay, and every time life gets going, here comes cancer again.”
Mr. Dave Timothy, US victim of the nuclear fallout
What, in the end, is the difference between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, apart from the weapons used?
Undisputable verity that after December 7 not a single civilian inhabitant of Pearl Harbour died due to previously undertaken enemy action, my dear Mr. Rising Sun.
If everything Japan did was unlawful, then how was it wrong to use atomic weapons, which were not unlawful at the time, to stop Japan continuing to do it and to bring peace to Asia?
Because of the idea of an Impartial Higher Law, or the Right of Man, Woman and Children not to be immeasurably injured by any government - domestic or foreign - which was incorporated at the end of the WW2 into the international law.
And just an additional legal caveat, my dear Mr. Rising Sun: extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Communists and other sub-humans was not strictly and stringently legally forbidden before 1946. You know… just another tiny allusion about perils of firm legal formality within boundaries of the International Law from a devoted, old iuridic idiot located on the coursed Balkan Peninsula, who is not a devotee of the strict and stringent legal reevaluation of the past. :evil:
How is a long drawn out death by starvation preferable to a nuclear attack?
Simply, my dear Mr. Overlord 644:
- Significantly lesser amount of physical pain is induced to the injured party;
2)There are no casualties within non-beligerant, neutral states, or transborder damage caused to a neutral state by the use of a weapon in a belligerent state.
Yes, I know: this sounds horrific, and you probably do think that I am a complete lunatic. However, I am assuring you that the US Army undertook scientifically valid starvation experiments in a 194-room laboratory housed in the football stadium at the University of Minnesota, where 34 young Americans were systematically starved. They were conscientious objectors from all over the U.S. who volunteered as human guinea pigs in a completely scientific study of starvation.
After five months in a volunteer starvation study Mr. Samuel Legg has lost 35 ponds
It has been shown that menthally the men were in a general lethargy, having little or absolutely no interest in conversation or sex. They reported an inability to keep warm, and the single consuming thought uppermost in their minds – day and night – was food. They adored to plan meals, to spend hours with lavishly illustrated cookbooks and to have guilty nightmares in which they dreamed about feasting on huge meals. Highly intriguing material about this unusual experiment is available here:
http://gunpowder.quaker.org/documents/starvation-kalm.pdf
Till our next meeting, honorable ladies and gentlemen – all the best!
Um, you are incorrect sir. I believe around 60 civilians perished due to enemy action on that day…About half that number wounded. In fact, if anecdotal reports are to be believed, Japanese pilots intentionally strafed hospitals and civilians areas and motor vehicles.
And about 150,000-300,000 Chinese civilians were raped, slashed, or shot to death in Nanjing alone. I am not making the case that the Imperial Japanese Army’s wanton murder of Chinese civilians beginning in 1931 in any way justifies the nuclear bombings. Nor is it my contention, as shown in my posts, that Japanese women and children deserved to be burned to death in conventional firebombings --nor atomic ones-- for the sins of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Men whose continual behavior showed a complete and obscenely callous indifference to the sex-slaves they raped or the Chinese villagers they starved, shot, or beheaded. It is however pretty clear whose lives the Japanese gov’ts, both current and past, value above all others --those of the Japanese martyrs that died in the A-bombings. But not so much the lives of the Japanese civilians that were taunted into suicide by their gov’t officials rather than surrender on Okinawa. But, the very reason the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor was a direct outgrowth of America’s political reaction to the outrages there resulting in the tensions and, ultimately, war…
When it all comes down to it – it was Imperial Japan that started WWII (in my and some other actual historians’ opinions when they invaded Manchuria in 1931).
There would no need the long draw out by starvation the state , that prevuously lost all their armies and fleet , and meet the threat of full-scale invasion and finally lost o all of their territories , separated by the two sides ( kinda Europe in 1945).Hardly the Japanes , who was absolutly insensitive to the human loses during the previous firebombings , would pay so serious attention to the victims of a-bombing.
Especially if keep in mind the fact of propogandic censorship that hided the scale of suffering.
Theres no residual radiation-yes, but gandchildren of the “hibakusha” seem to inherit genetic defficiency caused by the initial radiation. This is common knowledge in japan where Im on vacation.(I went to the nuke museum in Hiroshima) so, lasting effect is still visible, not as radiation but the genes of their offspring. Its something like what “agent orange” did in Vietnam.
Actually about 60 civils died, however most of them was the service personel of US Naval base and hospital.
Indeed in the PH the civils deat-rate was one of the MINIMAL during the entire ww2.
From 2340 americans , killed in PH were just 60 civils ( less then 2,5%)
And about 150,000-300,000 Chinese civilians were raped, slashed, or shot to death in Nanjing alone.am not making the case that the Imperial Japanese Army’s wanton murder of Chinese civilians beginning in 1931 in any way justifies the nuclear bombings
Nick, just not tell us that the fate of Chinas civils worry the US politicans too much:)
The Americans oil companies pretty well supplied the Japane Imperial Army during the Rape of Nanjing.And nobody in America even worry about this.
Besides you know better then me that the US was close to the a-bombing the Nothern China in 1951.
Where a millions of civils should die, and ONLY the possible direct Soviet intervention into the war prevented them .
When it all comes down to it – it was Imperial Japan that started WWII (in my and some other actual historians’ opinions when they invaded Manchuria in 1931).
How?
Was it not bloody SOviets who started the war attacked the poor little innocent Poland in 1939?:)
When it all comes down to it – it was Imperial Japan that started WWII (in my and some other actual historians’ opinions when they invaded Manchuria in 1931).
How?
Was it not bloody SOviets who started the war attacked the poor little innocent Poland in 1939?
I think nick meant the Pacific War.
Yes, i mean the neitron stream that realised from the decay of U-235 during the explosion.
As it was mentioned- although the Fireball did not touch the land - it was still very close to surface.( Up 100-200 metters).So ,sorry, but i hardly doubt that the amount of neitrons that reached the ground was tiny.
There is no doubt - the neitron radiation caused the charging the land right under and near Epicentre.
Were there any? I’ve never been able to find any references to anyone suffering from radiation sickness in Japan who wasn’t directly exposed to the dropping of either nuclear bomb. If you know anything different I’d love to see your source.
I’ve already linked the book of Japanes author where hew rote abotu group of workers who cleaned the city streets after the explosions. Most of them later suffer from ray-ilness.
Besides there a lot of cases when the peoples, who coem to Hiroshima after the attack, suffer from the cancer. You can find it in net in english( sorry this sould be easy for you ).
I found the interesting article of australian veteran John Collins who served on British Commonwealth Occupation Forces, BCOF since feb 1946 till the 1952
http://urakami.narod.ru/main/mainichi/ma_pages/aussie.html
This man was in Hirosima together with other 45 000 of soldier. Soon after he has arrived here- he was sick the “odd ilness” when hairs comes out of head by bunch. He is know for sure now that it was a ray-ilnees and fight to recognize him as a victim of a-bombing.
The other veteran of BCOF Ron Orvin claims that about 70% of personal BCOF suffered from consequences of radiation fallout.
Correct. However, because this was an airburst bomb (i.e. one where the fireball never touched the ground) the smallest particles will still be a very fine dust and so will fall down far enough away that dilution will deal with most of the problem.
Really it will fall down enough away?
And what about black ashes rain that started soon after the explosion right on the heads of survivers and inhabitans of neighbourd villiages?
In any case, the worst of the fallout will decay away within a few hours of the bomb going off, meaning that the chances are anyone exposed to it will have been exposed to far worse from the bomb already.
Actually through the couple of weeks not hours the radiational background falled down to a relatively safe level.
Becouse the Japanes themself define the Hibakusha as a peoples who
[ul]
[li]peoples who was on a distance till the 2 killometres DURING the explosion.
[/li][li] peoples , who arrived , nearer 2 km to the Epicentre , DURING TWO WEEKS AFTER the explosion
[/li][li] peoples , who suffered the radioactive fallout like the post explosion Ashes-Rains and ets
[/li][li]children who were born from the woman , who come to be in three groups above during the pleagant
[/li][/ul]
Note that I’m not saying that fallout is safe (had the cold war ever turned hot it would probably have killed more than any other cause, depending on what year it happened), but rather that it wasn’t a significant killer at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Agree it was insignificant “killer” at the first period, however don’t forget it had spoiled the life or killed the tens thousands during the further decades.
Just one notice- the post-war consequences of a-bombing killed as many peoples since the 1946 as the explosion itself.
The Japanes themself provide a lot of documents and evidences that peoples who has arrived near epicentre ( up 2 km) were automatically have been recognized as a victims of resudal radiation.
Besides the honorable mr Librarian provided you a links . Does it help you much?