Will terrorism be the future of warfare?

[W3pcq]

No doubt dropping the bomb on large cities full of civilians was an act of pure evil. They could have dropped a warning bomb somewhere near, then one bomb on a city if that didn't work.

I think that the idea was not just to end the war, but to make an extra bold statement to the entire world. The message was that we now had the power to do this, and nbot afraid to do so, so don't f with us. The more damage and horror of the stronger the statement.

 

[TVP45]

There are good arguments about why the bomb should not have been used, but there are a couple reasons why it was almost unavoidable.

The investment of money, manpower, and resources in the Manhattan Project was so huge that it might not have been politically possible to simply "turn it off".

Truman simply did not understand the enormity of an atomic explosion. He was relatively uneducated and had no scientific training at all. His military experience was WWI.

There is no reason to believe the Japanese Army was ready to surrender or even to stand down. The vast majority of troops had not been engaged by Allied forces. Getting top military brass to go out somewhere to watch a demonstration would have been difficult.

The Kamikaze attacks made support of an invasion problematic.

There was only one proven bomb and one unproven bomb. Production of another bomb would have taken months, had the original been used for a demo.

I quite agree that the use of the atomic bombs was unbelievably horrible. As were the terror bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. Yet, I remain skeptical that there was any real alternative.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I think that terrorism is the future of warfare because then there is no place to counter attack. When all countries have nukes, then terrorism will be a way of war for all nations including superpowers.

It's already been done. Technology and Intel have gotten to the point that such things are extremely hard to hide anymore, and I doubt that there was much question about who was behind these things in the past either.

On a side note, you might like a book called 'The Cool War' Frederik Pohl.

winning before Stalin got the opportunity to get in. I had the impression that that was Truman's most important argument.

And why would you say that is?

Possibly because the Cold War had more or less already started. The Russians had already been caught spying on us, including nuke research facilities.