Binoy, good try, but too easy to offer such a piece in hindsight.

How about writing a piece on the role of nuclear weapons today. Good or Bad?

I know much harder than your news stories, but you should give such pieces a go.

Atrociously naïve and idealistic story from the author. Sadly, he is the result of decades of leftist propaganda that has led many in the West to believe they are guilty and depraved.

In reality, its is the atrocities of the swarms of revolutionary terrorists who have delivered in cumulative terms far more horror, death and mental damage than the two nuclear bombs.

The "bombs" (tragic as they were) have illustrated the need NOT to use such bombs again. Terrorism and economic warfare will continue to haunt human life, far more than nuclear bombs. But then naïve ideologs like the author want it that way, it would seem.

What a mealy mouthed examination of Allied intentions from Binoy Kampmark, who appears to be another foreigner who despises the society he or his parents chose to immigrate into.

It was estimated that the invasion of Japan would have cost 1,000,000 million allies lives, and if Binoy had been an allied soldier in 1945 who had miraculously survived the war so far, one suspects that Binoy would have been overjoyed to have learned that a US Superfortress (it was nearly an RAF Lancaster) had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. So too, Binoy would have had a very different attitude is he had been one of the 100,000 Allied POW's of Japan who were all told that the second an Allied military force landed in Japan, they were all going to be executed.

Germany and Japan invented the use of terror bombing of undefended cities as a means of waging war. So they can hardly complain when the tide turns and the people they bombed returned the complement.

If you hate Australia and the western alliance, Binoy, it is a free country and you are free to leave. But one suspects that Binoy realises that his future economic well being rests live living in the western world he despises but prefers to live in. He has discovered that slagging off against western society can pay dividends among the spoiled, rich, tertiary educated class that he associates with. These specimens despise their own civilisational as some sort of class identifying fashion statement.

I'm no expert but I would guess that contemporary sources are less critical of the decision to drop the atomic bombs. The closer it was to those two awful dates in August 1945 the more supportive the commentary is likely to be. In fact I was a Sydney schoolkid who celebrated at the time and don't recall anything other than relief and joy that the war was ending. The front pages of the SMH during those days confirm my recollections. However those pages also make it clear that amongst responsible adults there was deep concern about the force that the bombs had unleashed. Binoy should read "Mr Tuman's historic announcement", SMH, Wed 8 August 1945 and try to project himself back to those awful times. The sense of a feeling of heavy responsibility shines through. Moral judgements will always be equivocal. We don't have the luxury of making those judgements had different decisions been made.

What a typical bit of bumph from someone who is in a position that they are very unlikely to ever be asked to pick up a rifle & go defend the society in some god forgotten desert, jungle or city.

Yes send in the marines is the cry from one safe back in some office, thousands of miles from personal danger. Don't kill too many of the enemy who started the whole thing with a sneak bombing attack on a peaceful harbor.

This is your most disgusting bit of fluff so far Binoy.

M.A.D. Or mutually assured destruction. As you worry how many lives a single nuclear missile could cost? Consider, even as we stand by as around, hyperventilating over hypotheticals The reality is, 2,000,000+ lives lost to curable cancer every year? Mostly curable with alpha particle, bismuth 213, in conventional western ontological radiology medicine!

The real villains and killers are, the multinationals protecting profit curves at any cost, including millions of unnecessarily sacrificed human lives.

If you're not grist in the mill? And tossed on the garbage pile when you've reached your use by date?

Then the grunt sent forth to kill on command like an automated AI and programed device!

All to make a pretty penny for the parasites, who profit from all of this, including, deliberately contrived, postcode, generational poverty?

A nuclear weapon will be used somewhere before sanity prevails and we burn these things,i.e., weapons-grade plutonium and the entire stockpile of growing nuclear waste, in safe, clean, almost free, carbon-free, MSR's to power our world for thousands of years!

And use this cheapest possible power ever, to desalinate water and turn all the arid regions and deserts of the world into ultra-productive gardens/recycle everything, in (free-market, private-enterprise) co-ops that earn a quid!

As the national/median, prosperity improves, we also bring down and reverse population growth! And by the only means wth a proven outcome!

This is what a sane world led by sane leaders would do! And in one fowl swoop end all poverty, population growth, climate change and the threat of M.A.D!
Alan B.

Alison Jane,

Can there be no hope for 'Peace in out Time'?

Surely humankind has to learn that from the very beginning our 'nature' has been to nurture and to share. When was this lost, and why?

We must surely all be suffering from subconscious PTSD, running from one crisis to another - and ever trying to find some new technology to relieve the never-ending torment.

Can it be that peace may only be attained under a Global Autocracy?

Such a weak creature, surely we do not deserve this Eden - which we ultimately seem bent on destroying.

"Surely humankind has to learn that from the very beginning our 'nature' has been to nurture and to share. When was this lost, and why?"

Are you serious? that would only be half the story.

I believe that life is the struggle between two different impulses, both good and bad.

IMO, Australia too may need nuclear weapons one day, assuming that the USA does not increase its presence here and nearby.

Nuclear weapons will be here for a long time yet, especially with the CCP and Russia around.

Trying to cancel the outcome of ww2 now are we..

Does that mean we're advocating cancellation of the UN as well?
That one's still causing harm.

Oh dear, which makes me despair the most... Saltpetre's bizarre, isolated world, Binoy's "cancel culture" attitude to the Bomb, or the indoctrinated students who must listen to Binoys lectures at Uni?

At least China, the Green Meanies, Climate Change Cultists and the anarchists ( XR, BLM, Antifa....) will have a friend in Binoy and his ilk.

Binoy and the 'cancel culture kids' will never see war, but they will write the propaganda that will deliver, execute and sell future 'righteous China/eco-warrior' wars to the proletariat who will fight those wars for them.

"A study done for Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff by William Shockley estimated that invading Japan would cost 1.7–4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities."

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties

Instead the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved more than 4.5 million to 9.5 million Japanese lives...

Speaking of Hiroshima and "cancel culture" I quite like this truth-telling essay:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/06/the-american-narrative-of-hiroshima-is-a-statue-that-must-be-toppled

Alison Jane,

I'm sorry to have troubled you, and I suspect this follow-up will also result in nought, but I assure you I do not live in a bubble, nor am I demented.

My original query was based on my, perhaps mistaken, impression that you might care to elaborate on the fundamental question of where we may go from here - in a nuclear-armed world troubled with far more than just Covid-19, an expansionist China, a virtually defunct UN and veto-prone Security Council, a US in financial, government and racial-tension-ed turmoil, and Afghanistan misguidedly releasing genuine terrorists back into circulation in a fragmented Middle-East based on a mistaken, insane and absolutely unreliable so-called Peace Initiative brokered by perhaps the greatest liar ever to present himself as the Leader of the Free World?

Your posting:
"Binoy and the 'cancel culture kids' will never see war, but they will write the propaganda that will deliver, execute and sell future 'righteous China/eco-warrior' wars to the proletariat who will fight those wars for them."

I have to ask Why you may be quite so certain that your 'cancel culture kids' (and the rest of us, presumably) Will (as against 'may') Never see War?

And, who pray tell may in fact be the 'Proletariat' who will fight - or could it be 'instigate' - that, or those, Wars for Them?

Any interest beyond Hiroshima - justified, justifiable, or a crime against Humanity?
In any event, a sad, closed, monument to history's sad record of humanity's decline into a xenophobic 'existential' abyss?
And, without any hope of encouraging a pathway to a nuclear-armed-free-world?

I'm not expecting too much, am I?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes of the highest order and the perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Endless mythology has been built up over the years in an attempt to neutralise their horror and justify their deployment ... much of it alive and well here I see.
A whole city and its inhabitants incinerated and irradiated in a world first ... perhaps the Americans didn’t fully anticipate the horrific destructiveness of what they were unleashing on Hiroshima. But by Nagasaki, they knew ... and went ahead anyway ... an unbelievably cruel and barbaric obliteration of human life.
Archived documentation clearly shows the Japanese were making peace overtures well before Hiroshima. These were ignored. Peace was never the West’s objective.

To Bronwyn.

"Peace was never the west's objective."

Sounds like that was programmed into your head by some Marxist professor who despises the society he chooses to live in, Bronnie.

If not, by what reasoned argument have you come to that extraordinary conclusion?

You don't bring about peace by deliberately and unnecessarily incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The Truman government could easily have held peace talks. The Japanese had already offered to surrender. The only sticking point was their request to spare the life of their emperor. This could have been granted and a nation truly interested in peace would have done so. But no, Truman wanted to demonstrate to the world and in particular to Russia the might and ruthlessness of US weaponry.

I repeat, peace was never the objective. If it was, it would have been achieved without unleashing this evil experiment on innocent people.

Bronwyn, you either young, very naïve or just privileged. The world does not run on wishful thinking and according to the fairy tales we seem to teach in our so-called "university seats of learning".

Resorting to labels (all of which are wrong by the way) only indicates an inability to engage with the issues and to refute the points raised.

Peace is not some hippie dream. It's a state we all aspire to live in. And it will never be achieved through inflicting violence on others.

Another history Lesson Binoy

President Harry S. Truman did not have a 'tired' mind.
He was installed as Vice President in January 1945. In April 1945, after the death of FDR, he became 33rd US President. In May 1945 he oversaw the surrender of Nazi Germany. During his period he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime before August 1945.

Hardly, if anything, in the lead up to the bombing, could be shown to have possibly tired him in the seven months of his presidenc..

In the 'wheels' of Truman's mind not only did the American casualties, worry him but he also considered the Japanese casualties and the civilian suicides.
Iwo Jima:
Imperial forces deaths 21,000
US forces deaths. 7,000
US wounded. 18,000
Civilian Suicides. 200 estimate. Half the civilian casualties.

Okinawa:
Imperial forces deaths 110,000
US forces deaths. 12,500
US Wounded 36,000
Civilian Deaths. 149,000 (half the Civilian Population.

While the death rate was horrifying, particularly on Okinawa, foremost on Truman's mind, as commander - in - chief, would have been the force required, in both men and equipment, to overcome resistance on the Japanese homeland especially given the amounts needed to overcome the resistance on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

I'm sure given the experience on Okinawa he would not have wanted to be responsible for the deaths of 36 million Japanese civilians. (1945 Population 72.2 million.)

Dropping the bombs, showed the Imperial Japanese they would be defeated without a single Allied death. My uncle was to be among the NZ troops landing on the Japanese homeland.
Truman is the greatest leader ever ... while he was responsible for approximately 250,000 atomic bomb deaths he saved more lives than anyone before or since in history.

He also served the troops he led. He saved them the need for sacrifice by not invading in force.

I disagree, Truman wasn't an agent unfettered by history. Truman was a great US President and military leader who made history and who shaped the future.

His legacy to us all should not be cheapened with a shallow re-write such as yours.

Another little footnote Binoy

China.
The US ending of the war saw another unintended consequence in your 'battered' Asia.
The soviets were also involved in fighting Japanese /imperialists ... in China.
However their campaign began, on the 9 August, after formally declaring war on Japan on 8th August 1945, two days after Hiroshima.
The lead up to that were the discussions between the Allies at Tehran in 1943 and more importantly Yalta in Feb 1945, prior to FDR's death.

When the conflict ended in 1945, the Communist Soviets, gave all their arms to the Communist Chinese of Mao. Nothing was given to the official Nationalist Government and forces of Chiang Kai-shek.
Even then it took the communists, with all that assistance, until 1949 to defeat the Nationalists on the mainland.

Some claim it was the declaration of war by the Russians, rather than the bombing , that finally swayed the Japanese imperialists to surrender.
I confess I don't know. Perhaps its an aspect that appeals to you. you might research and write about that.

btw Japan and Russia, on paper, are still at war.