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Where do you see anything about MacArthur objecting to using the bomb? He’s the one that tried to nuke China after he knew what it would do.You can't really dismiss the objections of Ralph Bard, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Leahy or McCloy as people "without skin in the game" or because they also wanted an end to the war.
However, unless you are enamoured with national myths, you should be able to clearly see from the written evidence that the statements about Hiroshima as a military target, the targets being selected to "avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians", the justifications with ever inflated casualty estimates and the lies to congress about the nature and effect of radioactive fallout were all bullshit.
Not just in hindsight. With the declassification of records, their own previously written words reveal that they knew better.
Would you really argue that indiscriminately using weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations is ethically justified by hypothetically averting the exaggerated estimates of casualties of an invasion? A number which grew as the years passed after the event and never featured in the original decision?
You’re putting your own spin on this. It’s evident when you type things like “exaggerated projected casualties”. They weren’t exaggerating. Japan was ready to fight to the death. There was literally a story last week about how we finally ran out of all the Purple Hearts that had been produced in anticipation for the invasion.
When you say things like that it makes me think you either really don’t understand how determined and terrible Japan was. When you ask if it was ok to kill civilians, I would point out that they had already been doing that and more on an industrial scale. No I do not feel like we were obligated to send hundreds of thousands of our own conscripts to die in order to stop them. I’m not sympathetic to the idea that young men ripped up from their home should be sacrificed to spare the civilians of a country engaged in mass war crimes