Looks bad and 2nd Tsunami warning is in effect there and across Hawaii, Indonesia, PNG and Australia.

Just been reading about the bombings of Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Why would anyone ever do that to a country?

In Hiroshima an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people died instantly in the bomb! That's over a tenth of the population of the UK now.

Just reading it sent shivers down my spine. Never really read about it in detail before. It is truly horrifying that anyone would do something like that. It puts a perspective on the terrorists that the US are currently talking about.

9/11 was child's play in comparison to this.

And then why would you do it again having seen the results of the first?!

It's sickening.

There was a war on and and projected casualties for actually invading the japanese mainland were truely astronomically high also the Russians had decided to come into the pacific war arena and the Americans wanted to show them they had a weapon that could devastate them

is it? Your maths might just be failing you there.



because the Japanese didnt seem to want to surrender.

Wouldn't that be 1% rather than 10% Ollie?

I think to understand why the option was chosen, you need to look at the mindset of the Japanese in a war. I suspect considerably fewer lives were lost by dropping the bomb than would have been lost be finishing the conflict by more conventional means.

I'm not trying to justify the action, just provide some understanding.

or 0.1% even...

Aye, was basically a real life testing. AFAIK one detonated on impact, one just before imapct (the latter is more 'effective' apparently).

Funny how there's always scaremongering about countries and nukes when it's only the US who have used them in warfare.

My uncle joined the Navy as soon as he could, one of his first jobs apparently was to travel to Japan and to see the devestation at first hand...

Ah yes, you are right

It's worse than that. By the time they got to Okinawa, the Allied forces had already taken control of several Japanese 'territories'. In those places they had seen.. horrific things. Not just in the fighting, even though that had been some of the most fierce and brutal of the whole war; they had seen whole villages of Japanese civilians who had killed themselves rather than be 'captured', women, children and all. During the battle for the Island of Saipan , over 10,00 (TEN THOUSAND) civilians committed suicide, most them by jumping from cliffs far away from the fighting. This wasn't modern Japan as we know it today, it was a Japan still in the grip of the feudalist Imperial society. A society that essentially still subscribed to the samurai code of ethics and behaviour in many ways.

If the allies had even set foot on mainland Japan, it would have been carnage. Literally. Both in terms of the actual fight with the Japanese armed forces - who the Allies were in no doubt would have fought to the last man and last bullet - and in terms of what the civilian population might do, both to the allies and to themselves.

So the Allies were left with three choices - give up and go home, leaving Japan in a state where it could both continue to wage war and even possibly rearm itself, invade possibly leading to both huge casualties for both side's armed forces plus an unknown but, they suspected, very large number of civilian casualties or find a way to 'shock' the Japanese leaders enough to surrender - and remember this was a society where large potions thought suicide was preferable option to surrender. Nuclear weapons were the only option they had that could possibly provide that 'shock'. That's a pretty awful choice to have to make - You're signing the death warrant of thousands of people either way and it's definitely 'the lesser of three evils' more than one choice being 'better'.

Was it the 'right' choice? We can't ever know that.

Japans leaders were divided as to whether to fight on or surrender. The government was run by the Army who wanted to fight on. The politicians could not see it ending well and wanted to surrender. The estimated allied losses from an invasion were estimated as more than half a million men. Then if you add in the civilian casualties that would occur in the millions then even 90 000 would be minor in the overall context. Was it the right decision? Who knows?

Can someone tell me what anything after the second post here has to do with the subject matter of the thread itself ?

An 8.9 quake is devastating for a country that is relatively used to this over in that part of the world. I've been watching the news and tv pictures this morning and am left almost speechless at the power of mother nature.

Here's hoping that any further tsunamis in the pacific don't provide us with even more terrible news footage and that the poor Japanese nation quickly get to grips with this disaster, accepting also the unconditional offers of help pouring in from around the world.

Sorry, my fault.

I was reading about the quake and read about it being equivalent to a 238Megaton bomb and it got me thinking about the WWII bombings.

I was just shocked by what I was reading.

You are right though. I've been watching some of the footage and it looks terifying out there. I can't imagine being in something like that. I just hope that it starts to quieten down as soon as possible so that the work on restoring life to some sort of normal can begin.

Yes I have just heard the scale of it on the radio. 8.9 is a huge earthquake. It is one of the strongest earthquakes in the world. If my memory serves me well the worst was of 9.1 in Chile. Just heard that the tsunami in mid pacific might only be metre high, but hundreds of miles long.

6th biggest earthquake ever recorded, according to the BBC.


Apparently, it's hard to judge exactly how big the wave will be when it hits any particular piece of land as the shape of the wave varies depending on the shape and structure of the bit of 'shore' it rolls over to get there i.e. the land that's normally just submerged off the coast.

The BBC were also reporting this morning that for certain pacific islands, the expected height of the wave when it hit them was higher than the highest point of the island . They've evacuated the 'coastal areas' of Hawaii. I wasn't aware there were any bits of it that weren't 'coastal'... Kawaii (one of the islands in the same chain as Hawaii) has already been hit by a 2m wave.

The area of Sendai seems to have been really battered. Reports of over 200 dead, a petrochemical plant on fire and bits of it exploding, one of the japanese nuclear reactors has had a coolant system failure and has had to be shut down. Just disaster. It's like something you only expect to see in cinemas.



Jon

I've just seen some of the BBC footage

That is just staggering - a huge churning mass of water, trees, buildings and vehicles (and probably the bodies of the poor sods who were unable to get clear of it) pushing straight across the landscape. You see it approaching a river cutting and half expect it to be halted, but it just blasts straight through it. The power on display really is awesome.

The level of devastation is horrific, I can't begin to imagine what some of the Japanese population is going through.

The moon passes closest to the earth in it's eratic 15 to 20 year cycle later this month, how much of the recent events within the Pacific rim are influenced by that do you think?