"Armstrong Illusions" Dept. -Part II of II:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

As the previous installment of this thread sets down some points on which this thread builds on, it is advisable for the reader to read it first before proceeding to the material in this thread. The aforementioned previous installment of this thread can be read HERE.

In the introduction to the previous installment of this thread, I noted that since Dave does not want to actually interact with the lions share of my arguments- then all that I can do is dispatch with his sole attempt to interact with any of my arguments and then go after the sources he uses in trying to claim to "argue" against my publicly manifested position. And as the first part of that intention was unambiguously fulfilled in the previous thread, this one will handle the second part of what I promised in like manner.

In this thread, the so-called "experts" that he posits from various sources were principly compiled by an individual named Doug Long. Another way of saying it is that Doug Long posted the sources and they are thus received second hand on his site. Dave, by linking to that site and posting the citations in his so-called "argument" to his site is thus basing his premise of making an actual "argument" on second hand sources that he got from another source or what is called third hand sources. If readers find this an odd way to ground the substance of a proposed "argument" for a position, then they are not alone in viewing things this way but that is neither here nor there. Let us move onto those sources now but not without noting that they will be posted in firebrick coloured font to symbolize two things (i) going down in flames upon my dispatching of them one by one and (ii) the atrocious lack of accuracy Dave has in citing them..."bricking" being a term for bad shooting in basketball. My sources will be in darkblue font.

The best and most obvious place from which to start this examination in my humble opinion is with the Supreme Commander of the Pacific himself one General Douglas MacArthur. Doug Long starts his quote-fest by quoting from American Caesar which was William Manchester’s well written biography on the man. As I happen to own the very same William Manchester biography of General MacArthur being cited, I will deal with that source first. Starting on page 510, the following is outlined after discussing the inter-service rivalry between MacArthur, Le May, and Nimitz, the following words from pages 510-511 of American Caesar set the stage for putting Doug Long’s quote into proper context:

Hirohito’s generals, grimly preparing for the invasion, had not abandoned hope of saving their homeland. Although a few strategic islands had been lost, they told each other, most of their conquests, including the Chinese heartland, were firmly in their hands, and the bulk of their army was undefeated. Even now they could scarcely believe that any foe would have the audacity to attempt landings in Japan itself. Allied troops, they boasted, would face the fiercest resistance in history. Over ten thousand kamikaze planes were readied for “Ketsu-Go,” Operation Decision. Behind the beaches, enormous connecting underground caves had been stocked with caches of food and thousands of tons of ammunition. Manning the nation’s ground defenses were 2,350,000 regular soldiers, 250,000 garrison troops, and 32,000,000 civilian militiamen –a total of 34,600,000, more than the combined armies of the United States, Great Britain, and Nazi Germany. All males aged fifteen to sixty, and all females ages seventeen to forty-five, had been conscripted. Their weapons included ancient bronze cannon, muzzle loaded muskets, bamboo spears, and bows and arrows. Even little children had been trained to strap explosives around their waists, roll under tank treads, and blow themselves up. They were called “Sherman’s carpets.”

This was the enemy the Pentagon had learned to fear and hate –a country of fanatics dedicated to hara-kiri, determined to slay as many invaders as possible as they went down fighting. [William Manchester: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 510-511)]

I have already discussed the concept of military conscription in part I of this thread so readers need to account for what was noted there when reading the above words from Mr. Manchester's book. From there the book discusses a dovish contingent that was also present. According to the book (pg. 511) everyone MacArthur talked to in the War Department believed that Japan could hold out for at least two more years. From there, the book quotes some Japanese persons with retrospect statements about how “Japan was finished” all of that is towards the end of page 511 leading into page 512 where the citation from Long is made. I will interact with these quotes shortly but first, here is the passage from pg. 512 as Long quotes it:

"...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary." [William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.]

Before supplying the text after the quotation for proper context, I cannot avoid mentioning here that the quote given represents equal parts MacArthur’s outlook and the opinion of the biographer. The latter gives the assertion that "...[h]ad the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary” which clearly is a normative argument and thus useless in a discussion of objective facts. Sure it is possible that the bombings may not have been necessary if MacArthur’s advice had been followed but was it probable -that is the question. And in response to the latter I must state for the record that I highly doubt it for reasons not only already outlined but also for additional reasons to be outlined in this thread you are reading.

Interestingly enough, Long does not quote the paragraphs immediately following what he does cite which state the following:

In an implacable mood, then, successive versions of “Downfall”, the code name for the invasion of Dai Nippon, were drafted in Washington, and revised in Manila. All of them assumed the worst: that Russian support would be unavailable, that B-29 raids and a naval blockade of Dai Nippon would not be decisive, and that the Manhattan project (of whose existence MacArthur and Nimitz were unaware until late July) would fail to produce practical nuclear fission devices. Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945, however, guaranteed masses of veteran Allied infantrymen. Thirty divisions were on their way to the Philippines from the ETO. In June, there were 1,400,000 GI’s ready to stage from the archipelago; another 1,000,000 were expected by December. Courtney Hodges, commander of the U.S. First Army already had arrived in Manila but MacArthur still preferred his own field commanders. “Downfall” would begin with “Operation Olympic”, a frontal assault on Kyushu on November 1, 1945, whose purpose would be to secure, in the General’s words “airfields to cover the main assault on Honshu.” The second phase, “Operation Coronet,” the landing on Honshu, would follow on March 1, 1946. He himself probably with Eichelbarger as his chief of staff would lead that.

He had no illusions about the savagery that lay ahead –he told Stimson that Downfall would “cost over a million casualties to American forces alone”—but he was confident that with the tanks from Europe he could outmaneuver the defenders on the great Kanto Plain before Tokyo. Whether he would be as adroit with Eisenhower’s generals –not to mention Ike himself- was another matter. Granting an interview to Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, he said that the ETO commanders had made “every mistake that supposedly intelligent men could make,” that “the North African operation was absolutely useless,” that “the European strategy was to hammer stupidly against the enemy’s strongest points” and that if he had been given “just a portion of the force” sent to North Africa in 1942, he “could have retaken the Philippines in three months because by then the Japanese were not ready.” [William Manchester: American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512-513]

Now then, having established the sitz im leben of Long’s quotation, let us examine the statements made on the preceding page about the dove contingent. First of all, it bears noting that MacArthur and Nimitz were not aware of the Manhattan Project until late July. The short gap in time between their awareness of the bomb's existence and its actual usage was therefore at most three weeks time. According to Louis Morton's writing The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, MacArthur and Nimitz were told of the atomic bombing after July 25, 1945:

In orders issued on 25 July and approved by Stimson and Marshall, Spaatz was ordered to drop the "first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki." He was instructed also to deliver a copy of this order personally to MacArthur and Nimitz. [Louis Morton: The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb pg. 514 (c. 1958)]

The reason I make the assertion that MacArthur and Nimitz were told of the atomic bombing after July 25, 1945 is because with the greatest likelihood -because of the degree of secrecy that surrounded the Manhattan project- that this was the first time that either MacArthur or Nimitz heard about the existence of the bomb itself. If that theory is correct, than they heard about the bomb either on the 25th or (perhaps) the 26th of July in 1945. That would mean that they would have heard of it at the most with twelve days to go before the actual drop on Hiroshima. Considering that both General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz were heavily into planning strategery for the November 1, 1945 Operation Olympic invasion at that time --and what would have been the largest land and sea invasion in history: easily dwarfing Normandy-- they were unlikely to have put much thinking into the use of the bomb and the ramifications involved in said usage at that time. So that is one consideration which Dave is hereby offered to counter with evidence to the contrary or concede the point altogether. Of course even if he somehow could prove otherwise, it would not detract from what I am about to point out viz. General MacArthur and (presumably) Admiral Nimitz too. (In light of both their service rivalry and their disputes over how to execute the planned invasion this would appear to be the correct interpretation viz. Nimitz' knowledge on the matter as well.)

What was also definitely not correct is the assessment of Japan’s lack of capacity for making war. At this point, we will consider this position as mentioned in the Manchester biography of General MacArthur. To start with, their “production was finished” and they could only “produce war materials for a few days more”, had their “factories bombed out of existence” and had “no raw materials” as Japanese industrialist Ryozo Asano is quoted as saying in May of 1945 (American Caesar pg. 511), then how were the Japanese able to continue the building of carriers and other warships in Hiroshima, various planes and other munitions in Nagasaki which we knew that they were doing???

If they were so incapable of production as Ryozo Asano claimed, then those wily Japanese must have been building their ships from May through August of 1945 out of some kind of pixiedust...it remains to see if Dave will assert that or not. Further still, how could they be in the process of producing at that time a jet powered fighter craft that (if they had later managed to put it into service in late 1945 for dealing with the impending US invasion) would have had easy pickings from our convoys of military ships due to its ability to run rings around the best planes that the US military had in service at the time???

Obviously this industrialist did not know what they were talking about viz. the whole of Japan and its capabilities since Hiroshima had not even been touched by bombs in the war nor was (to my knowledge) Nagasaki. Indeed, those targets were chosen not only because they constituted complex military industrial nerve centers of the island’s defense and production plants for the armaments to make war but also because of their pristine conditions viz. the effects of the bombings: they were untouched by any of our bombing runs. This was to show just how formidable this new weapon was –though even as I noted earlier, they knew it would be effective but not to the extent that it actually was.

Considering all of these factors, I am making an educated guess here and presuming that the aforementioned industrialist was from Tokyo, which had been decimated of its military production capacities at the time. If I am right about that, then they accurately assessed things as they were in Tokyo viz. military capacities for production but they had little to no knowledge of the capacities of production plants in cities in the south of Japan. Which reminds me.

With regards to the jet powered aircraft the Japanese were on the verge of mass producing, Germany had been producing a similar kind of plane in large numbers in the weeks prior to their surrender which was superior to anything the Allies had: including an order of over a thousand of them to have been built in June of 1945 alone. After 1945, the designer of those jet engines designed engines for the French military as well as the Israeli military –and jets from that designer were on the planes the Israelis used in their first defenses from attack as a nation in 1948. This is a little bit of additional postwar information but it serves to illustrate another fallacy in our beliefs in the capabilities of our Pacific enemies: the belief that we had cut the Japanese off from German scientists and their technology in 1942. Well, that assessment was highly inaccurate. If Germany had held out longer in the European arena, their planes would have wrecked havoc on the Allies in Europe.

Likewise, the Japanese jet planes (based on blueprints obtained from the Germans but with some modifications viz. economy of construction) if the November 1, 1945 invasion had happened as planned would have been in production for at least a month or more at that point. And those planes produced in that span would have been a huge factor for not a few reasons. For example, we would not have beaten them in dogfights as a rule and they would also have been too quick for our missiles. The only way we would have beaten them was to overwhelm them with trained military men flying the planes we had in a sheer numbers advantage since we were not producing planes anywhere near comparable to what the Japanese’s jet fighters would be capable of doing. (Not to mention that Japan had actually tested some atomic devices of their own in 1945 but nothing quite like what we had at the time.)

This is another reason why the blockade idea of The Commentator was so ludicrous: it would have taken a lot of ships to attempt it and our ships would have been sitting ducks for not only the kamikaze prop jobs but also for the jet fighters Japan was on the verge of producing at the time but were not able to produce and press into service before we dropped the two bombs. Germany had pressed their jet planes into service in the last two weeks of the war so we got them to surrender before those planes were even a factor. If we had not gotten an early surrender from Japan in that invasion, we would have been in a similar quandry with them viz. their jet technology as we narrowly averted with Germany in the European arena.

I repeat: our planes would not have caught them, our missiles would have been incapable of hitting them, and our ships would have been sitting ducks -particularly if we had tried the blockade approach. And as the blockade would have with a good degree of probability failed (due to what I noted above) and as you are ruling out the atomic strikes of military targets Dave, I ask you to consider what I note above as quoted in American Caesar (and with far more context than Doug Long cared to provide for his readers) and furthermore, where those men and equipment for the invasion were going to come from. They were going to come from Europe and at that point, I remind my friend Dave of what my very good friend Tim Tull noted in his response to my original article viz. Stalin and his character. I also remind him of the probability of the USSR sweeping across Western Europe. What we had there at the time would not have stopped him and by diverting those forces to the Pacific arena, it would have been a cakewalk for the Big Red Machine under the murderous dictator Josef Stalin.

Unlike President Roosevelt and the latter’s “Uncle Joe” schtick, President Truman did not trust Josef Stalin any further than he could throw him. He knew that Stalin’s word was worthless and that just as the latter had assimilated Eastern Europe into the Soviet collective (to use Star Trek Next Generation lingo), there would be nothing stopping him from doing the same to Western Europe.{1} And once that was done, a blockade of Great Britain would have sealed it. We may have been able to prevent a blockade of Great Britain by the USSR from succeeding in the capitulation of GB, but we would not have stopped the assimilation of Western Europe by the USSR without sending more military to Europe from the Pacific arena and also from America.

For more on the above Doug Long, the following observations from “Hiroshima_facts” –an internet interlocutor I will occasionally cite for an alternate take on these matters—is of interest: His words will be in blue font where applicable.

MacArthur's biographer seems ignorant of the reality of the surrender, in which Japan accepted our terms unconditionally, and in which there was no condition guaranteeing imperial reign.

The above points with regards to the surrender are a matter of record and are frankly not even disputable.

We did insist on a condition giving MacArthur the power to depose the Emperor at will though...

The biographer does note that in American Caesar interestingly enough which only underscores how those who make the “retaining-the-Emperor-would-have-resulted-in-an-early-surrender” argument missed the proverbial boat. If they were so concerned about the Emperor –and if they made his retention a matter of non-negotiation previously –then it is strange that they would agree later on to give General MacArthur the power to depose the Emperor at will: a minor matter perhaps but considered in light of everything else I noted above, it does not favour the view of those who have tried to argue against the bombings in the manner outlined above by the biographer.

Moving onto the second quote from MacArthur, we have this one:

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor. Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.]

It is obvious that MacArthur was operating from the faulty presumption that “the institution of the emperor” being retained would have resulted in a surrender. I will discuss this factor later on in this thread but not without noting that the Americans could not accept the Japanese idea of “retention of the emperor” which was vastly different from what was eventually accepted after the bombs were dropped.

More could be noted on this but perhaps the clincher is that MacArthur was not to my knowledge ever informed about MAGIC and what we knew from that source. Indeed, the biography I have cited heavily from is copyrighted 1978, which was around the time the first batch of MAGIC was partially declassified.{2} The reasons for the general's ignorance on the matter was twofold. First of all, President Roosevelt did not want General MacArthur to be too in the loop about this kind of stuff because he was capable of being disobedient to his superiors much the way General George Patton was in the European arena.{3} Secondly, President Truman (who actually served under then-Colonel MacArthur in WWI) was not unfamiliar with MacArthur’s reputation for flouting the commands of higher authorities and was not about to act any differently than Roosevelt had -particularly since General MacArthur had shown his loose-lips capabilities by being openly critical of the way military operations were handled in Europe in not a few ways. He was thus viewed as too much of a loose cannon to be trusted with this kind of delicate information. Nonetheless, considering everything noted above, it is safe to say that General Douglas MacArthur’s view on this matter was grounded on some faulty presuppositions and furthermore was not enlightened by the additional information that President Truman and the War Department possessed via MAGIC.

Nonetheless, since you want to pretend that this is a viable approach to complete argumentation Dave, let us look briefly at the Doug Long quotes one by one starting with General Eisenhower:

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." - Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson: "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

As I have pointed out in not a few threads, the presumption that the Japanese were ready to surrender was an erroneous notion. Furthermore, as I noted in dealing with the MacArthur quotes, the MAGIC cables do not appear to be anything that General Eisenhower knew anything about. He may have known about Venona at the time due to his status as Supreme Commander in Europe but Venona was Soviet-focused and had nothing to do with what happened in the Pacific arena. Indeed, by the time he would have learned about these things as president, he would not have had time to go back and review stuff from 1945 as he had a country to run by that point after all. And (of course) in 1963 he was out of the loop completely and could not have accessed them even if he was inclined to. The following observations from the aforementioned internet interlocutor “Hiroshima_facts” are also of interest on these issues:

Funny how Stimson, who always recorded dissent from officials regarding the bombs, failed to record anything about Ike.

Even funnier how Ike's own early depictions of the encounter claimed that he did not voice any vehement objection.

Notice Dave how I cite sources to complement my own arguments and not as arguments in and of themselves…that is how it is supposed to be done. As what is noted in the above paragraphs are adequate to deal with the quotes from General (later President) Eisenhower on the matter, let us move from the two Supreme Commanders to the former president Herbert Hoover. In Doug Long's citations, we see the following:

Herbert Hoover

On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly: "I am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan - tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll get a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over." Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 347.

This is of course is what is called normative argumentation since Hoover was giving his opinion on the matter. We do not see anything to substantiate said opinion and furthermore, we already know that the Japanese insisted on retaining the Emperor but not in the fashion he was eventually retained.

On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.

I have already dealt with this canard in my posting on double effect (as well as in my last posting to you clarifying with no small degree of prescience btw some of your mistakes in trying to interact with the aforementioned thread) so I will not reiterate it here.

"...the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945...up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; ...if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the [atomic] bombs." quoted by Barton Bernstein in Philip Nobile, ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian, pg. 142

Of course they were prepared to negotiate. However, they were also “prepar[ing] to negotiate” prior to Pearl Harbour…something that not a few people seem to conveniently forget. However, I for one have not.

It bears remembering that President Hoover was not in the loop on MAGIC so that needs to be taken into account as well when assessing his posited opinion above –indeed the aforementioned internet interlocutor “Hiroshima_facts” points this out as well:

That's not what the MAGIC summaries were indicating to Truman.

The Japanese government did not get behind the negotiation gambit until August 2nd, 1945.

All of that is true and verifiable by the evidences. (Again Dave, this means constructing an actual argument and not merely citing names and opinions thereof.) The next bit from “Hiroshima_facts” is subjective but I will post it nonetheless since it represents a MAGIC-informed opinion which my good friend Dave so obviously does not have:

At any rate, the war wasn't going to end with negotiations. The only way it could end was with Japan accepting all our terms unconditionally.

Of course that is not all that the former president had to say:

Hoover biographer Richard Norton Smith has written: "Use of the bomb had besmirched America's reputation, he [Hoover] told friends. It ought to have been described in graphic terms before being flung out into the sky over Japan." Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, pg. 349-350.

Once again we have normative argumentation. The late President apparently forgot that we did not know the full extent of the bomb’s power beforehand…we knew it was superior to anything ever used before but insofar as its precise power we did not know – a point that Dr. Art Sippo noted in one of the threads I posted earlier. It is always easy to play “second guess” in retrospect but that game is subjective in nature and does not actually solve anything.

In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover recorded in his diary, "I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria." Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351.

I have already dealt with General MacArthur’s statements in this thread so I will not repeat them here. Furthermore, I have effectively disqualified former President Hoover as a credible authority on these matters so no more needs to be said about those assertions. I also already dealt with Col. Carter Clarke’s quote from an earlier posting.{4} Indeed, so many of the rest of Long's quotes from Einstein (scientist) to Nitze (Air Force) to Szilard (scientist) to General Spaatz (Air Force) were not privy to the MAGIC cables so they are easily dismissed on that score as not credible due to lack of key information on the matter. I will therefore touch on some of them only briefly here, starting with Paul Nitze.

First of all, he was in the Air Force so he knew nothing about MAGIC. That is the first strike against him as a credible source. The following points from the aforementioned internet interlocutor “Hiroshima_facts” are also quite interesting –pertaining as they do to Paul Nitze’s position:

The Strategic Bombing Survey was Air Force propaganda that tried to claim that conventional heavy bombers would have won the war on their own, and so should receive the most funding from Congress in an era of rapidly shrinking post-war defense budgets.

Now as far as I know, that is an accurate assertion to some extent -a bit exaggerated perhaps but the essence of the statement is accurate. I challenge Dave to debunk it if he likes. Furthermore, I have already dealt with the rivalry element of the different armed service divisions as well as pointed out that the Air Force had no familiarity with the contents of the MAGIC cable intercepts after at least February of 1942 –the decoding of various portions being the job of the Army and Navy branches after that time. The Air Force was actually in favour of approaches such as firebombing (as advocated by General Curtis Le May) so I will not say anything more than that –as I am sure Dave and I agree that firebombing of civilian targets was an unacceptable practice even in wartime. Nonetheless, that is adequate to dispatch with Paul Nitze.

With regards to Joseph Grew (another supposed "authority" posited by Doug Long which Dave makes use of), I will defer to the internet interlocutor “Hiroshima_facts” on Joseph Grew before addressing this matter myself.

Something most people miss about Grew's suggestion. He was suggesting we allow Hirohito's son to be Emperor under a constitutional monarchy, not suggesting a guarantee for Hirohito himself.

Those who want to review Grew’s comments to check to see if that interpretation is viable are free to do so. It appears correct to me since Grew refers to the "[retention of the] dynasty" which does not necessarily mean Hirohito himself. Here they are from Doug Long's files:

Joseph Grew
(Under Sec. of State)

In a February 12, 1947 letter to Henry Stimson (Sec. of War during WWII), Grew responded to the defense of the atomic bombings Stimson had made in a February 1947 Harpers magazine article:

"...in the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the [retention of the] dynasty had been issued in May, 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the [Japanese] Government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clearcut decision.

Anyone can say something after the fact. Why on earth this should be considered a solid piece of evidence is a mystery to me. Moving on...

"If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer." Grew quoted in Barton Bernstein, ed.,The Atomic Bomb, pg. 29-32.

And if there were real leprechans and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, that would be great too. Honestly, it is quite evident that Grew was ignorant of the MAGIC cables just by the idiotic statements he made above. I will deal with this in a moment -since unlike Dave I actually present evidences and arguments for my position rather than merely assert it and then cite names of people. But let us first review the words of John McCloy which are similarly misguided before we address both of them with some explication on the subject at hand.

John McCloy
(Assistant Sec. of War)

"I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs." McCloy quoted in James Reston, Deadline, pg. 500.

And this was also wishful thinking. As the very well-read (and MAGIC-informed) historian Richard Frank correctly noted on the whole question of a Japanese surrender:

The Japanese government retained two minimal war aims: preservation both (1) of the Imperial Institution and (2) of the old order in Japan in which the militarists were dominant. They were not just seeking a guarantee of the imperial institution with a figurehead emperor as is often argued. The U.S. war aim of "unconditional surrender" was not merely a hollow wartime slogan. By 1945, it formed an essential element in an overall vision for an enduring peace. "Unconditional surrender" meant the U.S. would secure the legal authority to conduct a complete renovation of Japan to eradicate the old order and assure that Japan never again launched a war of aggression.

Given these minimal war aims on both sides, diplomacy could not work because there was no common ground for compromise between the continuation and the extinction of the old order in Japan. As the [PBS] program noted, even after the atomic bombs and Soviet entry, the Japanese cabinet deadlocked, with the hard liners still holding out for terms including no occupation -- and no occupation means no occupation reforms. As the program further highlighted, as late as the first Japanese peace offer of August 10, 1945, they were still demanding that the U.S. grant real, substantive power to the emperor so that he could veto occupation reforms and defeat the American aim of eradicating the old order in Japan. While critics speak broadly about backing away from or even dropping "unconditional surrender" they have not, to the best of my knowledge, set forth precisely how this could be accomplished and still allow the U.S. to conduct the occupation and the ensuing reforms that produced the peaceful Japan that has exited since 1945. Thus, insisting on "unconditional surrender" was not merely a matter of pride or some perverted American version of "face"; it was the key to the enduring peace. [Richard Frank: Victory in the Pacific from the thread Was there a real strategic reason for the bombing of Nagasaki? (circa May 3, 2005)]

That is more than adequate to dispatch with the fantasies of John McCloy and Joseph Grew on this matter as any kinds of "authority" to use in supporting one's argumentation. But we are not done yet as there are a couple more to tend to.

Admiral William Leahy
(Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman)

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

I have already gone over in detail why this presumption (that Japan was already defeated and ready to surrender) was false. And to show Dave how one should use sources, I will now supplement my arguments by referring the reader back to my previous citation from the historian Richard Frank. There is also these points to take into consideration on the matter:

That diplomacy offered no prospect of success was made clear to American leaders by the daily Magic Diplomatic Summary covering the decoded Japanese diplomatic communications. Copies of each day's edition were distributed to a select band of American policy makers, with the president at the top of the list. The intercepts first of all established that the diplomats of foreign (neutral) governments in Japan were reporting to their own governments by a three or four to one ratio that it was clear to them that the Japanese had no intention of surrendering and meant to fight on to the end. The intercepts next demonstrated that a half dozen or so Japanese diplomats, including military and naval attaches in Europe, who attempted to approach American officials to initiate negotiations all lacked actual authority from the Japanese government for their actions.

The Magic Diplomatic Summary demonstrated that the sole Japanese diplomatic effort that carried the actual sanction of any real authority in Japan was an effort to secure Soviet good offices to mediate an end to the war on terms acceptable to Japan. It was not, as it is sometimes represented, just an effort to have the Soviets act as a postman to deliver a "we surrender" note. The man who was supposed to present this proposal to the Soviets and secure their good offices was the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow, Sato Naotake. When you read as American officials did Sato's comments, you see clearly the diplomatic initiative was not serious. [ibid.]

It seems to me that Admiral Leahy's opinion was summarized well in the following part of the text:

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." - William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

Of course retrospect has shown us that the use of those bombs not only brought a quick end to the war and saved lives on both sides –as I noted in my original posting—but that there have been no subsequent atomic or nuclear weapons which have been used in warfare. Indeed, we even test them underground because of the knowledge of the radiation effects now, which was not available to us back then. As far as the claim that we were "making war” by "destroying women and children” I refer the readers to what I outlined not only in the double effect posting but also in my two subsequent postings on the bomb subject -including the first part of this two part thread.

To second (to some extent) my position on Admiral Leahy, I again refer to the interlocutor “Hiroshima_facts” who correctly notes the following:

This is a post WWII position, not a WWII position as claimed above.

And whether or not that is true or not is of course debatable. I have already noted the problem with retrospective argumentation so the viability of that last Leahy quote is at least called into question and thus cannot be viewed as a piece of evidence to establish an argument upon. And (of course) what is not debatable is that Admiral Leahy was presenting a normative argument on the matter.{5}

More could be noted but I think it is clear how so many of those who are cited as “proofs” do not stack up for reasons I have noted above. Frankly, I do not see much in the other statements that you cited from Doug Long that is not one giant normative argument and those will not do for reasons I already cited. But (of course) I have done more than merely assert it but indeed have interacted with all of the names on the list who were of any position to potentially have access to all the pertinent information. There is but one more remaining and that is Ralph Bard and he will be dealt with next...

Ralph Bard
(Under Sec. of the Navy)

On June 28, 1945, a memorandum written by Bard the previous day was given to Sec. of War Henry Stimson. It stated, in part:

"Following the three-power [July 1945 Potsdam] conference emissaries from this country could contact representatives from Japan somewhere on the China Coast and make representations with regard to Russia's position [they were about to declare war on Japan] and at the same time give them some information regarding the proposed use of atomic power, together with whatever assurances the President might care to make with regard to the [retention of the] Emperor of Japan and the treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which the Japanese are looking for.

We know of course that even after the bombs were dropped that the Japanese War Cabinet was considering four conditions prior to Hirohito's intervention. One of them was the retention of the Emperor this is true but not in the fashion that the bureaucrats like Bard were naively presuming. Furthermore, there was also the elements of (i) no occupation and (ii) voluntary disarmament in the mix. It is absurd to suggest that the Japanese would have settled for less before the bombings than they were seeking afterwards and (if not for Hirohito's intervention) they would with the greatest of likelihood not have budged from that position -particularly the ones on no occupation and veto power for the emperor over any US reconstruction ideas.

"I don't see that we have anything in particular to lose in following such a program." He concluded the memorandum by noting, "The only way to find out is to try it out." Memorandum on the Use of S-1 Bomb, Manhattan Engineer District Records, Harrison-Bundy files, folder # 77, National Archives (also contained in: Martin Sherwin, A World Destroyed, 1987 edition, pg. 307-308).

See my previous comments.

Later Bard related, "...it definitely seemed to me that the Japanese were becoming weaker and weaker. They were surrounded by the Navy. They couldn't get any imports and they couldn't export anything. Naturally, as time went on and the war developed in our favor it was quite logical to hope and expect that with the proper kind of a warning the Japanese would then be in a position to make peace, which would have made it unnecessary for us to drop the bomb and have had to bring Russia in...". quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the Bomb, pg. 144-145, 324.

The naiveity of the above statement is amazing!!! Furthermore, it ignores the fact that a wounded animal often fights with even greater ferocity and the Japanese were certainly wounded. The Navy had yet to face the full brunt of 10,000 kamikaze planes and I guarantee that the Japanese would have sooner chose that route than surrender: a concept foreign to their 2000 year history and something that those who opined on them surrendering never seemed to take into consideration.

Bard also asserted, "I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted." He continued, "In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn't have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb." War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb, U.S. News and World Report, 8/15/60, pg. 73-75.

See my previous citation from Richard Frank on the "surrender attempt to the Russians" red herring pro-offered by Bard above.{6} Moving on we come to this final thread from Lewis Strauss:

Lewis Strauss
Special Assistant to the Sec. of the Navy)

Strauss recalled a recommendation he gave to Sec. of the Navy James Forrestal before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima:

"I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate... My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood... I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest... would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will... Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation..."

I have already outlined in detail why the above opinions (about the Japanese being "nearly ready to capitulate" are the exact opposite of what was reflected in the MAGIC summaries. If Dave wants to explain why such ill-informed so-called "experts" are still viable for this discussion he can feel free to. I am confident though that the casual readers can put things together and see why they are not -any future attempts at Dave to spin them otherwise notwitstanding.

Strauss added, "It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world...". quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the Bomb, pg. 145, 325.

We know of course via the MAGIC Russian cryptological branch of MAGIC called Venona that the Russians had already hacked into the Manhattan Project so the idea that somehow the weapon would have not been put into the arsenals of the world's powers if we had not used it in WWII is pathetically naive at best.

In summary Dave, every single so-called "authority" you cited from Doug Long fails and fails badly to be a credible source on this subject for reasons I have detailed in this thread. And do not think because I am not addressing various Catholic names you dropped that those anointed "experts" would withstand my scrutiny any better. If anything they would fare much worse for reasons too numerous to go into at this time not to mention various pseudo-"historians" you cite in your response too. Time constraints and space factors prevent those from being interacted with here but do not believe for a second that they are any firmer in foundation than what Doug Long supplied.

Oh and lest you forget, I wanted to keep this kind of stuff private Dave expressly stating this to you more than once at your site. However, you expressed no interest whatsoever in doing that. So for that reason, I am making these threads public as I did with the originally intended private email and issue to you the following challenge:

I challenge you to try and refute what I have written in the threads I have posted thus far –the first eight, the one from yesterday, and this one argument by argument– and cease this illogical and fallacious argumentation form of merely listing names of people who disagree.

If you cannot do what is noted above, then you cannot expect me to take your attempts to refute me even remotely serious. As these two threads amply show (not to mention the ones previous to it which discuss various facets of this subject matter) you are out of your league viz. what we are discussing. I humbly request that you cease and desist before you lose any more face on this matter publicly.

I am sorry for this bluntness my friend but your mere assertions of points without sustaining them by argument -or the approach of simply naming names of people with differing opinions on the bombings of whom we have no idea how they arrived at those opinions were arrived at- does not wash, not even with Tide bleach. I will (and do) give plenty of deference to you and to many other Catholics on not a few theological issues in general{7}; however. on matters of history, I will not since there is already too much attempted revisionism by Marxist-minded polemicists as well as those who do so either out of ignorance or (in their mind) the best of intentions. Either way, these kinds of actions I will not allow to take place in my presence.

I do not care how many people you can list who disagree with me, if all you are posting are conclusions and opinions, then this attempt at dialogue is over. I do not say that such lists are without merit of course but as my good friend Tim Tull noted the other day on the phone (when we discussed your approach on these matters) what you are doing is only valid as support for arguments you have already set forth and established. Once you have done that, the value of people with concurring opinions or conclusions can have some persuasive weight –particularly if the persons are recognized experts or of otherwise high moral authority (i.e. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Pope Paul VI, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, etc). But without using such citations as icing on the cake of the arguments you set forth, they are not of much value at all if any.

In this posting, I have dispatched with the Doug Long citations which formed a large basis of your attempt to dispute this matter with me publicly. Will I (or someone else) need to expose Raico, Zinn,{8} and Buchanan in the same fashion too before things finally focus themselves for you??? Or have you seen enough of what happens when you resort to this kind of presumed "argumentation" where you do not actually make an argument but instead only cite sources: something I noted to you earlier this week before these two threads were even started.

My good friend Tim Tull can vouch for what I am saying here as he has returned to college to pursue a new vocation. If he tried to present a paper arguing a case as you have done -or if I had done that in college myself- we would have been given D’s if not failing grades altogether if our teachers were grading fairly and were not ideologues.{9} Furthermore, if an attorney tried to argue a case in court as you have done, they would be laughed out of court by the judge. Indeed, if we were in court, I would be making a motion for dismissal from the judge for want of viable evidence viz. your position. But since this is not court and since I trust you will recognize in these last three threads why dialogue with you is not possible on this subject, I humbly ask that you reconsider your tactics since I have really had to restrain myself in dealing with your inanities.

I made a statement about your view publicly some time ago which I want to reiterate at this time:

I believe in conclusion that you are WRONG (though in fairness I will give your piece a thorough read: I ask that you consider the above threads into your matrix of argumentation in return of course) but either way, I do not challenge your honesty, your good will, your sense of charity, your sense of fairness, your orthodoxy, or anything else that [not a few polemicists] would assert. And I will note this when I post your thread on the matter so that there is no confusion whatsoever -particularly since I am rather harsh about so-called "peacemakers" and do not want my readers mixing you in with that crowd.

With that note, I conclude this thread and note for the readers that the vast majority of those you cited as credible sources have been discredited Dave. And since you offered no actual arguments prior to having recourse to them, you have been confuted soundly on this subject my friend. I fail to see what more I have to say than that so I will end the thread on that note.

Addendum:

For further reading on the subject of attempted historical revisionism at the 1995 Smithsonian Exhibit, see this very good article. Readers who recognize in there some of the names I have just been critical of can consider the additional arguments in that thread as supplements to my own in this thread.

I also noted in a last minute addition to the eighth footnote a thread from Kevin Tierney where he goes into some detail on the subject I touch on in that point of the thread. If anything else becomes available in the next twenty-four hours on this subject of a similar approach, I will note it here in this posting in purple font. And though I reserve the right to call rebuttal witnesses if the need arises, the prosecution rests.

[Update: I suspect that Dave will yet again begin writing a response without reading what I have written in these last two postings and/or post something in response within the next three days in true de ja vu fashion...let us see if he vindicates NostraShawnus on this score or not. If he does, then he vindicates my premise from over a week ago that he is not interested in dialogue at all on this subject. If he does not, then I predict he will only wait out the three days and prove by what he writes in response that he has not assimilated my arguments yet again before presuming to try and disprove them. -ISM 9/06/05 7:00pm]

[Update: Greg Mockeridge has weighed in on this subject from the standpoint of so-called "Catholic Consensus" in a thread which can be read HERE. -ISM 9/08/05 1:10pm]

Notes:

{1} This is a point brought up in some of the feedback to my original Hiroshima thread from a good friend (and WWII maestro) who did not think I took my arguments on some of the subjects I covered in my original posting far enough:

Imagine this homeland invasion scenario...our casualties are higher than expected or the campaign is dragging out a couple of years. The Soviets sensing a weekness in our massive transfer of forces to the Pacific (which was in the works), saw an opportunity to quickly gobble up Europe including England. Don't put it past them! Don't forget that Stalin declared war on Japan upon hearing of the first nuke falling. Do you think Stalin wouldn't have done it because he believed in a man's word and a handshake - ha! This would have been his one shot at Western Europe. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 18, 2005)]

{2} They would not be fully declassified until 1995 as a result of the tireless efforts of the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

{3} I will not go into the problems that General Eisenhower had with General Patton and who I side with on that issue as it is not germane to this discussion.

{4} See my post prior to the previous one made to this weblog (footnote 4) for details.

{5} The reason I posted a "points to ponder" thread on the subject of normative argumentation back on August 13, 2005 (four days before the original Hiroshima posting) was because I anticipated that this may well happen with those who disagreed on the issue of the bombings . And with the above words, you have played according to my predicted script by trying to make an objective principle of argument into a subjective one by postulating the subjective notion of "too many" into the mix. And with that, your entire thread of argument inexorably unravels. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 28, 2005)]

{6} Also worth considering is this observation from Austin Hoyt:

People who argue Japan was about to surrender also ignore the military intercepts which indicate an increase in the divisions defending the invasion beaches on the southern island of Kyushu from three in June to nine in July to 13 in early August and a fight to the death attitude on the part of the Imperial Army.[Austin Hoyt: Victory in the Pacific from the thread Are there historians who believe that the atomic bombs were not justified? (circa May 2, 2005)]

Those who recognize those military numbers as being from my original thread are correct. I did not get them from Austin Hoyt or even from the Truman library but they are common facts for those marginally familiar with these subjects.

{7} Provided of course that they actually demonstrate their assertions rather than merely make assertions –as anyone can do the latter.

{8} Indeed, if Dave had been paying attention to recent threads to Rerum Novarum, he would have been informed that Howard Zinn is a communist propagandist and is not a serious scholar. This was pointed out courtesy of my very good friend Tim Tull. The first was on education in general and the problem with history revisionist texts being commonplace in today's colleges:

One Cabrillo College English 2 class requires reading Communist propagandist Howard Zinn's book People's History of the United States. Zinn got his start in politics the day he was beaten by police while marching in a Communist Party rally in New York. When asked in an interview for clarification on describing himself politically, Zinn's reply is, "Look at Alexander Berkman's pamphlet, 'Communist Anarchism'" (Perspectives of Anarchist Theory Vol.7 – No.1) Zinn personally traveled to Cuba where Castro warmly received him to perform pro-Communist plays in a country where any speech critical to the government means imprisonment. RateMyProfessor.com has a long list of students almost exclusively saying how the entire English 2 class consists of being fed radical views or having to regurgitate the opinions of the class lest they be punished in their grade. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (Tim Tull's Guest Editorial circa July 13, 2005)]

The second posting was from one of the very threads in the post-8/17 thread string which was directly related to this very subject matter in question -so Dave has even less of an excuse for missing this one:

Thank you for pointing out that Hiroshima was a major military logistics and munitions center. The rekindling of this debate points out the real dangerous poison coming from the Zinn-like authors and their Cool Aid drinking followers[.] Going down this path of selective examination of our national history usually roots in Marxist philosophies veiled in objective research. The debates always have in common a very narrow focus that omits the major information. Our whole media industry is based on the strategy. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 18, 2005)]

{9} See footnote eight.

"Armstrong Illusions" Dept. -Part I of II:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)

As it is becoming more and more apparent that this will not be a dialogue -particularly since Dave does not want to actually interact with the lions share of my arguments- then all that I can do is dispatch with his sole attempt to interact with any of my arguments and then go after the sources he uses in trying to claim to "argue" against my publicly manifested position.

Because of the nature of this situation, I will have to handle these things in two parts to be less cumbersome to read so please bear with me on that score. It is after all easy to make a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions and throw up reams of non-sequitur stuff and call it an “argument” but it is not as easy or economical on one’s time to respond to such things. And since my time for these things is significantly less than Dave’s is, please pardon me in advance if I am more critical of my friend than one would suspect…again Dave is the one who wanted to air this stuff publicly rather than first hashing them out in private as I would have preferred to do for various and sundry reasons too numerous to outline at this time.

Though I will deal with them in detail later on in this multipart thread, I will give a brief prelude to them by noting for the reader at this time that the veracity of the citations posited by Doug Long (and uncritically parroted by Dave) will therefore be a primary purpose of the thread following this one. (As well as the actual competence of the people listed to give authoritative positions on the matter.) And while what I note there may not deal with everyone Dave has mentioned -since that would take more time and type than I have the patience for at this point of the monologue{1}- what is noted will more than amply implode the foundation from which he presumes to set forth an “argument.” I have already explained HERE why Dave’s methodology is so fatally flawed from an intrinsic standpoint so I shant reiterate it anew in this thread or in the thread following it except (at most) briefly and in passing. Hopefully Dave will change his mind and make this a dialogue but I am frankly near the point of no return viz. assuaging my doubts that this is possible. He may be able to fool those who react to this issue as a result of either emotionalism or the historical revisionism that passes for "history" in today's school system. However, those of us who know better will not be swayed by his overall lack of anything resembling an original argument.

Now to casual readers, it may appear that he has made an argument with the interaction with my thread on double effect. But that would be an erroneous premise for reasons I will soon make apparent. In scanning his various threads, the very things he says make it clear that my assertions that this is no actual dialogue are correct. For example, in one of his latest assemblages of random out of context citations (where he now fancies himself as someone who actually is familiar with MAGIC), Dave repeats the assertion that Brigader General Carter Clarke was an expert on MAGIC and applies it in the context of him knowing about MAGIC with regards to the Japanese situation. Of course readers of my last post know that I have discredited Colonel Carter Clarke (he was a colonel in 1945) as a credible authority on this subject. But Dave ignores what I wrote and again posits Clarke as a viable authority, which only shows that he is not assimilating my arguments. He did this in the first response he made as well with the citing of Ralph Raico and Patrick J. Buchanan as credible sources. To explain why the latter two examples are yet more proof of him not listening to my arguments, pardon me this brief explanation please.

In my original posting, I absolutely destroyed the credibility of the “46,000 deaths as a worst-case scenario” argument. Dave then quotes Raico making it and Buchanan as concurring with it and somehow expects this to be a viable response to my arguments from the first thread. It does not take a rocket scientist to recognize that you cannot reassert the argument previously debunked by an adversary as if it is still a viable one. But by citing Raico and Buchanan in doing this, that is precisely what Dave has done. This is at best the accepting of a questionable premise which would mean that the argument is fallacious even if it was valid. I will deal with these factors later on in this thread but want to note them briefly at the outset since they present no small problem with his entire methodology of attempted "argument."

When you take it down to brass tacks, Dave does not make his own arguments on the subjects I raised. Instead, he makes a laundry list of people who agree with him irrespective of their actual agendas or the arguments they advance to arrive at their conclusions and opinions. This is nothing more than the fallacious form of appealing to authority which I pointed out in my last posting. And since Dave has not to my knowledge interacted with that criticism, it stands to reason that he does not dispute it. Indeed, it is indisputable as anyone even vaguely familiar with how to construct and present a viable argument is well aware. But enough on that and let us deal with the mirage of argument that he presents trying to oppose my thread on double effect.

I cannot deal with that thread without noting first of all that his statement that I have appealed to double effect with scarcely any necessary additional supporting argumentation is…well...let us be honest about it: a profound prevarication. I have after all posted nine threads on this subject of which only one of them was on double effect. Frankly, I should not have even had to post the latter but I relented and did so nonetheless in the interest of leaving no lace untied on the matter.

In response, Dave takes the non-normative (and objective) standards of the double effect principles and makes of them in response a normative (and subjective) argument against the first premise. He says that the act cannot be morally good or indifferent (the premise of point one) for this reason:

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki...involved the killing of over 200,000 civilian noncombatants. Such an act is condemned in traditional just war criteria which forbids deliberate targeting of such non-military populations."

I have (of course) already explained that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians but Dave continues to assert the opposite view without a counter-argument; ergo, he fails to disprove my argument in support of the applicable criteria. Something he has not proven does not by dint of repetition become truth. I will for the sake of charity not note the sorts of people to whom this methodology was a way of advancing very evil agendas -preferring instead to simply exhort my friend Dave to not tacitly consent to such an approach and actually make an argument of his own instead. I spent the first thread I wrote on the bombings explaining in detail why these cities were legitimate military targets. My friend Dave has merely said they were not and then resorted to positing contrary opinions of others on the matter rather than constructing a counter-argument of his own on the matter. If we were in a courtroom, I could right now be filing with the judge a motion for dismissal for lack of evidence on his part: that is how seriously weak the argument he advanced actually is in the realm of actual arguments and supporting evidences for them. But that is not all.

You see gentle reader, Dave further betrays his lack of knowledge of this principle when stating that:

[T]he target areas (the centers of both cities) and the knowledge that the effect of the bombs spread outwardly from ground zero to cover a known area of a particular estimated size, and the obvious fact that cities contain citizens and population (read: people, persons, human beings; read, "including many elderly men, women, and children"), make it quite implausible (I think, virtually impossible) to maintain that those who ordered such a strike were targeting only military installations and not also people.

Again, double effect requires four principles at once to be concurrent and one of them is recognition of a proposed action where a good effect is sought with the conscious recognition of a corresponding bad effect from the action taking place. In other words, the targeting of the military installations (and the bomb was targeting military installations as I explained in earlier threads) was in and of itself sufficient to meet the required good (or at least indifferent) part of the equation and thus neutralize the bad effect part. That is how the principle works Dave and I would appreciate it if you would reflect on these matters before attempting more “cut and paste” style responding. I have given you several advanced lessons in both history as well as military calculations if you will which go into explaining the proportionality aspect of this subject. If you continue to ignore them then I see no reason to continue trying to dialogue with you on this subject.

Dave then tries to argue that firebombing a city where there is a deliberate targeting of everything in sight (and thus civilians) is no different than an atomic blast which targets military installations and (as a derivative effect) happens to also kill civilians. This is a distinction with a difference but it rises above standard garden-variety boilerplate apologetics arguments. That is one key reason I wanted to discuss this privately with Dave because it will be exceedingly difficult for him to save face after this one. After all, we have only just begun and it will not be prettier from here on out by any stretch.

The distinction between the two approaches as noted above is chiefly in methodology viz. the active human cooperation involved. In the act of detonation, the atomic bombs exploded of their own volition as well as the effects of that cause acting in like fashion. By stark contrast, the fire bombings involved a variety of elements not exploding of their own volition but through human direct cooperation in the process. Here is what went into the gumbo of a firebombing campaign:

The ordinances loaded aboard a B-29 for an incendiary rain contained one of three combustibles: the bombers in the leading formations generally contained napalm, or jellied gasoline bombs, which ignited small fires. A second wave of bombers usually dropped clusters of oil containers, which splayed their contents over the napalm fires in showers, and the mixture ran through the streets in fiery streams. Magnesium thermite bombs, mixed with the oil and the napalm, set fires of fierce intensity [From World War II: Time Life Books Chronology of the Second World War pg. 408 (c. 1989)]

There is a difference between dropping an atomic bomb -where there is very little if any human cooperation in the direction and intensity of the effects upon explosion- and a firebombing campaign. In the case of the latter, there is a lot of direct involvement manifested in that there is a process of bombing in three waves various fuels and combustibles to create the effect. If Dave cannot recognize the differences here in these two distinctly different approaches, then what is the point of having this discussion??? A bomb intended for a military target which takes out derivative structures and personnel is significantly different than an indiscriminate bombing campaign where combustibles are dumped from one wave of bombers followed by burning fuels to heighten the blaze from a second wave of bombers and then by magnesium thermite bombs from a third wave to ratchet up the intensity of the blaze and its corresponding destructive effects. One of these circumstances fits the parameters for double effect and the other quite evidently does not. This is why to mix them as you have is to mix apples and oranges as I have already explained Dave. (And to which you have not responded to thus far with an actual counter-argument I again remind you.)

As far as how the atomic bombs were detonated, they were detonated about half a mile above the city with the deliberate intention of limiting fallout: which in case you did not know it Dave, is increased the closer to the ground that the bomb is detonated. So this action itself further demonstrates an interest in trying to limit derivative effects which also is an important point to consider from within the matrix of double effect principles. For if we were simply out to get everyone, a more efficient approach would have been to explode it at ground level for maximal effect. But one of the principles guiding the double effect is seeking to avoid as much as possible the bad effect resulting from the good or morally neutral action.

In light of the various scenarios for deaths and other casualties generated by the other military options I outlined in my original posting -as well as numerous subsequent postings elsewhere on this weblog to which you have been thus far generally ignoring Dave{2}- the above timing of the blast as well as the intention of limiting overall deaths and casualties (which must accompany any approach under the rubric of double effect) was easily met with the atomic bombings. However, I cannot see how a firebombing campaign achieves any of these aims since the very approach taken is intended to be indiscriminate and utilizes a three-step bombing wave approach that strives to insure maximum destruction. (Not to mention General Curtis Le May picked a circular bombing pattern to prevent civilian retreat from the effects of the firebombing campaign on Tokyo.) That is adequate to dispatch with your attempt to posit a kind of “moral equivalence” between the dropping of the atomic bombs as we did with the earlier indiscriminate firebombing campaigns.

Dave then notes that [i]f indeed only the military targets were in mind, then why drop these horrific weapons on the center of the city? Was that the way to take out the most military targets?

Finally, a decent question. If I recall correctly (and I may be mistaken on this one), the original target was partially over water which would have also mitigated the effects of the blast if they had hit the target. As it was, they missed it by over a thousand feet and ground zero was on land instead.

I have read that the bulk of these targets were on the outer peripheries of the city, not in the center.

Where did you read that Dave, after all, anyone can say something. The proof is in the pudding and just because you read something somewhere does not make it so. The renowned and original thinker Arthur Jones once said that ninety-five percent of what is published on all subjects is hogwash. I have often said the same thing over the years and have found through experience that it is true. It would help if Dave remembers that the next time he wants to play “Google scholar” but lest I digress, let us look at this logically:

I remind Dave (yet again) that the primary military production unit of Hiroshima was warships which generally are things like carriers, battleships, destroyers, etc. There were three waterways through Hiroshima and the bombing was aimed at the nexus of two of them in the center of the city. Simply from the standpoint of odds alone, there is far greater likelihood of destroying shipyards, military ships, dry docks, etc. by aiming at the main waterways in an industrial city since it is on the edges of these that ships are actually built and launched.

Again readers, I have not merely made assertions as to Hiroshima being a military target (as Dave has in saying it was not) but I have actually set forth arguments and stated evidences that anyone can verify. And while I could draw out this post with yet further reinforcements of my assertions, I will remember my readers and their patience and stick to one for now: Wikipedia. This is generally a source I do not like for various and sundry reasons but I will use it as a lawyer uses a “hostile witness” in court to point out some facts on this matter that seem to elude my good (but misinformed) friend Dave:

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of considerable industrial and military significance. Some military camps were located nearby such as the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a major supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It was chosen as a target because it had not suffered damage from previous bombing raids, allowing an ideal environment to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb. The city was mobilized for "all-out" war, with thousands of conscripted women, children and Koreans working in military offices, military factories and building demolition and with women and children training to resist any invading force. [Wikipedia: Entry on Hiroshima]

I will return to these points later on when delving into my copy of American Caesar and pointing out where Doug Long is deceptive in quoting the source. But before doing that, let us deal with the subject of conscription since it also changes the landscape of this issue and is a detriment to Dave’s argument:

The opposite of voluntary enrollment is conscription, carried out by the nation-state. The resulting military force lacks the moral characteristics of a volunteer army; it is essentially a machine requiring severe discipline, its cohesion being maintained by the threat of punishment. Its great problems, desertion and slackness among the troops, can be kept within bounds only by strong organization and leadership…

[Most often], conscription is part of a program of universal military service accepted by the public and carried out in cooperation with it. [Encyclopedia Brittanica Fifteenth Edition: Excerpt from War, the Theory and Conduct of Macropaedia Volume XXIX, pg. 705 (c. 1985)]

Obviously, where you have conscription taking place of giant chunks of the population, that changes the dynamic of a key point of the argument altogether. Again, this is not secret knowledge but to listen to Dave’s arguments, he evinces no familiarity whatsoever with this factor of the overall equation. But I will pick this subject up in the thread where I go over the various third hand quotes from Doug Long.

Having noted all of that, let us now interact with Dave’s attempted syllogistic argumentation with regards to point one of the double effect principle.

1) Deliberately killing civilians in wartime is wrong.

Without question.

2) The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did that (to the tune of 200,000 + casualties).

Again, you have not proven this but merely asserted it over and over again. Appealing in true emotions-to-the-expense-of-sound-thinking fashion is not how you construct a viable argument. Your syllogism therefore breaks down at this point and does not require me to interact with it further. I will do so nonetheless of course since there are more flaws in your slaw here which may not be so apparent at first glance.

3) It cannot plausibly be maintained that this was a non-intended effect of a moral good (taking out military installations) because of the nature of the weapon, where it was targeted, and immediate historical precedent.

Yes it can be plausibly argued that this was not intended if in the process of doing so it is recognized that the bad effect will take place concurrent with the moral good of destroying military targets. Indeed I have already done this in more than one place by pointing out and detailing arguments that point to the proportionality standard which unquestionably is more than amply met in this circumstance. The argument for the nature of the weapon is a subjective one and thus does not pass muster for attempting to interact with the non-normative nature of the elements that go into the matrix of double effect methodology. (Nice try Dave but we need to deal with objective reality here.)

As far as where it was targeted, I already dispatched with this canard further up –the fact that I even have to do so points to Dave’s obvious ignorance of the geography of Hiroshima as well as the substance of my original arguments for why it was a legitimate military target and the correlative ramifications thereof. And finally the immediate historical precedent argument also falls flat since Dave does not actually argue for this point but again merely assumes it. So point three likewise fails to sustain itself in all four parameters which Dave framed it in.

4) Therefore, it was an evil act, since contrary to Catholic just war criteria, and inability of justification by this criterion of double effect.

Since points two and three fail to sustain themselves, Dave’s conclusion in point four likewise fails to materialize. I will note in brief that Dave seems to have a confusion about these matters since (i) double effect is not required to be sustained by just war criteria since the act in conforming to its intrinsic principles already meets that standard and (ii) a seeming unawareness of what a proper appeal to just war theory actually is. On the latter, I will now briefly touch on so that readers do not think I am merely asserting something without proof (as my good friend Dave seems wont to do with this subject matter):

[I]n medieval times, the term “just war” applied to the authority for levying the war, rather than to the substance of the cause or the complaint. If levied on the authority of an independent prince, the war was considered just, since there was no higher authority to judge the cause, and battle settled the issue. [Encyclopedia Brittanica Fifteenth Edition: Excerpt from War, the Theory and Conduct of Macropaedia Volume XXIX, pg. 643 (c. 1985)]

Dave by trying to apply it to the substance of the cause or the complaint rather than to the authority for levying the war thus misappropriates the principle in no small detail. And lest he object to me quoting a non-Catholic source above on the matter, I will now quote from my copy of the Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary on the subject of war:

War. War is waged justly if it be initiated by public authority for a sufficiently grave and just reason. Soldiers enlisted before the outbreak of war can take its justness for granted unless the contrary is apparent; after the outbreak, those who join the army must first be morally certain of its justness. In a just war all means are licit which necessary and suitable for carrying the war to a successful end, provided that they are not contrary to natural or international law; e.g. the killing of any man under arms or of spies but not of non-combatants, the laying of ambushes, the destruction, but not the poisoning, of wells, are lawful acts of war. For a war to be just the motive must be the vindication of a certain right, of proportionate importance, which has been certainly violated, or a just intervention to defend the rights of others, and then only when other means of redress have failed. [Catholic Encyclopaedic Dictionary Tenth Edition: Donald Attwater - General Editor pg. 553 (c. 1941)]

The above definition in all of its parameters has more than amply been met with the first eight posts of the nine I have posted on this subject since August 17th.{3} The reader can notice that Dave’s appropriation of the principle has been seriously flawed all along. So point four fails both by virtue of the two previous points it builds on failing to sustain themselves but also by virtue of its own argumentation. That brings us to point five of Dave’s syllogism which is the following one:

5) Conclusion: the bombings violate double effect by being morally bad and not at all indifferent.

Obviously, as three of the four points in his syllogism fail to withstand scrutiny, this conclusion is thus an invalid one. But enough on point one of the double effect matrix of argumentation.

Though I see no real reason to continue this thread, I will anyway since there are more misunderstandings of this principle enunciated by Dave in his statements on points two through four. The other notes will be in firebrick fontage:

The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may merely permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect, he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.

As argued, I think it is impossible and ludicrous to maintain that 200,000 deaths as a result of a bomb of known proportions and effects were not willed, but merely permitted.

This gets back to the subject of numbers and my questions to Dave in the previous posting that he has thus far not deigned to give answers for.{4}

How can one drop such a weapon and claim to not know that such a result in human cost would happen?

It is not a matter of knowing Dave, it is a matter of not permitting the action but not positively willing it. The doctor who does not will the abortion of an unborn child when operating on its mother for cancer of the uterus but who knows that an abortion spontaneously will likely take place as a result is not held as blameworthy. That is the principle in play here. It is an objective one not a subjective one as you try to make of it.{5}

As I stated previously, one can't simply play word games and act as if the magic words "military target" wrap up all the difficulties of this cynical, downright malicious (from the standpoint of the victims) reasoning.

Notice that Dave is now trying for cheap shots rather than actually interact with my arguments and also interact with double effect principles in a non-normative fashion. I am not playing word games Dave, I am applying these principles in their proper (non-normative) fashion and I have spilt a lot of type explaining such factors as legitimate military targets. It is you who are acting emotional here and making assertions without actually sustaining them as if that constitutes a viable argument when it does not.

The second sentence is also quite applicable and damaging to the proponents' position, thought not fatal in and of itself, due to the nature of probabilistic or contingent or theoretical calculations of what would happen in the future.

Thank you for that much of an acknowledgment.

As many high military figures felt at the time (Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, Halsey, Carter Clarke: who was in charge of the radio intelligence summations that Shawn emphasized in his "case"; also former President Hoover, etc.), surrender could have been achieved by the end of 1945 without recourse to such horrible measures. There was certainly enough opinion and evidence along these lines for us to have at least more seriously considered such an option, in accord with this principle.

Once again, Dave is dealing with “feelings” as if that is a valid way to argue. I will deal with most of the figures noted above in a later posting but first, notice that Dave repeats the claim that "Carter Clarke...was in charge of the radio intelligence summations that Shawn emphasized in his 'case'” In previous postings, I dispatched with this assertion both briefly{6} and also in subsequent detail with another history lesson for my confused friend.{7} Nonetheless, Dave once again does not bother listening before he repeats already disproven sources and continues to claim that they are viable ones when they are not.

Or else, I suppose Shawn and other proponents could simply argue that all these military experts were ignorant, misguided, acting on emotions alone (as if the pro-bombing crowd did not have a large amount of emotions clouding their reasoning, too), or (as Shawn has now asserted) that they only reported their supposed feelings anachronistically, and after the fact (due to the Cold War, the second-guessing of hindsight, etc.). Shawn feels himself able (as a non-military and non-academic person), 60 years after the fact, to better make such judgments than folks like Eisenhower and MacArthur. Is that not exceptionally presumptuous?

I will deal with all of this in the next thread where the readers can observe that these personages are not as credible on this subject as Dave is making them out to be (for reasons I will outline in that thread).

If we grant that President Truman acted in good faith, with good motives (as I freely do), then we must also grant that those opposed to the decision at the time were equally in good faith, with roughly equal the information needed to make the decision one way or the other.

No, I do not have to grant the second premise because it is false. This will be demonstrated in a later thread when I interact with Doug Long’s quotes. That is right interact with the work of someone else appropriated by Dave (who did not bother doing his own research) whereas by contrast I did do my own research and Dave summarily ignores virtually all of it.

This was not a unanimous consensus at the time, however one wishes to slant or spin it.

I did not claim that it was. But once again, I will deal with all of this in the previously mentioned followup posting.

In other words, many thought that we could achieve the good end without the bad effect of what the bomb in fact caused. it was a viable option; therefore it should have been seriously considered and (I say) chosen as the more moral option of the two.

Of course Dave provides no arguments of his own to sustain this position of his, he merely posits the opinions of others on the matter. Thus, he once again falls into argumentation fallacy mode and I need not say anything more about this point than that. Moving onto the third of the four points, we have this one:

The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words, the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise, the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.

This criteria applies, because the good end desired (the surrender and thus the end of the wanton slaughters of the Japanese army and suicides even of Japanese civilians) was promptly achieved. So far so good.

Thank you.

The good effect was also produced by the action; yet it was also produced by the bad effect of the action (the mass killings convinced the Japanese of the futility of continuing). Thus, this would seem to suggest that Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not meet the criterion expressed in the second sentence above.

Dave is missing the crucial point here in that the principle presumes that the bad had to flow out from the good does not have to be in sequence of time. Furthermore, he ignores the various arguments I have posted which heavily factor into the issues of proportionality as well as the worse scenarios from the other options being considered at the time.{8} Those are also of no small importance in discussing this matter.

And thus we arrive at the crux of the matter: the previous state of affairs being true; therefore a good end was achieved by a bad means, and this (as Shawn tells us) is "never allowed."

Once again, Dave is confusing this issue by presuming that since the damage took place before the good end (surrender of the Japanese) that this proves a bad means achieved the good end. In other words, he is assuming that these things have to be in sequence of time when indeed they do not have to be for double effect to remain in effect.

Therefore, the bombings are unjustifiable once again, on this separate and distinct ground.

I have already disproved this notion so we need not say more about it.

If, to speak theoretically, somehow we had had the technology then to wipe out 200,000 Japanese soldiers, and very few civilians as nonintended "collateral damage," then the act would have been quite acceptable by these standards. But since the dead were some 95% civilians, the rationale doesn't wash (as that is the very opposite ration of what should be for this to be a moral act). It was, therefore, an evil act. And one must not commit eveil, even for the achievement of a great good. Such is not Christian ethical thought. Period.

The readers are asked to notice that again Dave states his personal opinion as if that is somehow a constituent factor in making non-normative assessments. Furthermore, he goes back to the numbers game again and fails to recognize that double effect does not depend on factors such as “few”, “many”, or “all” to be viable. What is the issue here is the objective assessments themselves and a bomb is not unjust or just based on the number of people it can kill. Instead, it is either unjust or just by virtue of whether its use conforms to objective moral principles. And double effect is an objective moral principle. That is not to say that we can or cannot differ on how it applies but subjective arguments (as Dave is using) cannot trump objective ones (as I am using). If Dave wants to trump me on this subject, he has to approach these things from a non-normative standpoint. Otherwise, he fails to make his case with equal viability as I have done.

The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect. In forming this decision many factors must be weighed and compared, with care and prudence proportionate to the importance of the case. Thus, an effect that benefits or harms society generally has more weight than one that affects only an individual; an effect sure to occur deserves greater consideration than one that is only probable; an effect of a moral nature has greater importance than one that deals only with material things.

If the pro-bomb calculations of the potential future dead in a non-bomb scenario are anywhere near correct, this criteria would seem to be met also.

Thank you.

However, as in the previous example, it cannot be reasonably argued that the bombings were a morally good or neutral acts themselves.

I have already disproved this notion so we need not say more about it.

Since the principle itself (and Shawn's own commentary on it) rules out using a bad, evil, immoral act for the purposes of producing good effects, this is a moot point, no matter how good the effects may be. A good effect indeed was produced (the surrender), but the means to achieve it were evil. Therefore, they are not justifiable.

I have already disproved the second premise he makes in the last sentence so we need not say more about it.

Of these four conditions the first two are general rules of morality. A person is never allowed to perform a morally bad action. Nor may one ever positively will an evil effect of an action, even though the act would otherwise be lawful...The third and fourth conditions enumerated above pertain specifically to the principle of the double effect.

The bombings fail the criteria of the second sentence above, and the second (the evil effect if civilian deaths was in fact willed, and it is absurd to rationalize otherwise, as if it were not a certainty beforehand; so evil effects were willed by means of inherently evil acts).

Again, notice that Dave fails to recognize this principle of argumentation for what it is. Again, it is not a matter of knowing whether or not there will be civilian deaths Dave, it is a matter of permitting the action but not positively willing it. The doctor who does not will the abortion of an unborn child when operating on its mother for cancer of the uterus but who knows that an abortion spontaneously will likely take place as a result is not held as blameworthy. That is the principle in play here. It is an objective one not a subjective one as you try to make of it.{9}

The bombings (in terms of good effects alone) can pass muster for Principles III and IV, but since the crucial premise ("such an act must be good and not evil in the first place") is absent, and since good effects alone were not all that was accomplished, it ultimately fails there too. Shawn and proponents obviously emphasize almost entirely Principles III and IV, because these are most plausibly met by the result of surrender and the saving of so many thousands of lives. But they neglect (as is quite evident in his present argument) the presuppositional, preliminary ethical considerations of Principles I and II, which bring down the effort, and make III and IV null and void, as instances of use of a bad means to achieve a good end (violation of a bedrock principle of Christian ethics and morality).

I have already proven that Dave is wrong on his assessments of my arguments on double effect (which I remind the readers were given thumbs up by a trained Catholic philosopher) with regards to the first two points so his concurrence on the last two means that the arguments remain intact, stable, and valid.

I freely grant the good intentions and good faith of those who disagree with me on this.

As do I Dave. You have shown a remarkable unfamiliarity for the complexities of this subject matter but I do not for an instant believe you are of poor intentions or poor faith. Good people with good intentions can be spectacularly wrong at times after all. In your case, that is what we are seeing here as my arguments more than adequately demonstrate.

But I cannot agree with their moral logic.

Since you do not properly understand the moral principle of double effect, I can understand why you do not agree with my logic here. Logic is objective not subjective and you have been arguing from a largely subjective weltanschauung. This has been well established and is not even debatable: heck, your very arguments speak for themselves in this respect.

In my opinion, it violates traditional just war criteria, the specific principle of double effect, and also the standards of the larger natural law, whereby it is instinctively known by virtually everyone that deliberate killing of women and children (in wartime as well as outside of it) is inherently wrong.

I have shown that Dave's premises on all three of these points is in error. He is right about the part viz. deliberate killing of women and children but he is wrong to assert that it applies in this instance without actually positing an argument for the assertion first. That is not to say that the latter would vindicate his view mind you but at the very least it would present a viable alternative viewpoint for consideration.

It's been argued that one might obliterate the civilian / soldier distinction in a militaristic society like wartime Japan, with its suicides and maniacal tendencies, etc.

To a certain extent this is true.

But how could a three-month-old baby be part of that, or a senile old woman, or a mentally ill man, etc.?

No one says that they would be Dave. Indeed, even by military conscription requirements in Japan at the time of the war (which I will go over later), these parties would be excluded. This is like saying, “even if we could obliterate the cancer in a woman’s womb with its obvious deadly implications, how could the death of an unborn child be part of that process”??? And it is in providing an answer to that kind of question which is why theologians have long propounded the double effect principle for explaining situations with varying effects (some good, some bad) and seeking to provide a barometer for regulating such situations.

Even if we were to grant that (which would take some doing), there would still be many exceptions to the rule. The bombings, therefore, would still have to be judged as immoral, since they involved the killing (and I am not averse to using the word "murder" after having established the ethical reasoning chain above) of many "innocents" in terms of the war.

Since I have already broken his "ethical reasoning chain”, I do find the use of the word “murder” to be highly inappropriate for this discussion.

This is a far different scenario from a smart bomb taking out a munitions factory (the intent), with part of the shell skidding off to a house a mile away and burning it and its inhabitants (not the intent at all). That is tragic but justifiable.

That is retrojection since such weapons were not available in 1945; ergo, we need not interact with it.

Dropping a nuclear bomb into the center of a heavily-populated city is not.

Of course Dave ends his statements with that sentence because it gives a veneer of legitimacy to his arguments. And I must at least acknowledge that Dave did mount a effort at interacting with one of my threads so for that I thank him. However, he errs in thinking that he can argue this thread without taking into account the seven threads I posted which preceded it and which set forth many of the key points which this complex issue requires if it is to be properly comprehended.

Dave apparently thought that he could blithely dismiss my other threads (and my last one as well) and that somehow seeking to disprove this one would make my entire structure fall like a house of cards. If that is the case, then he at least deserves credit for trying some strategery in his overall approach of “cut and paste citation” prooftexting coupled with highly subjective argumenation. But as I noted in the post you have just read, his arguments on double effect fail since he does not grasp the concept properly nor how to argue it in a viable manner. Nor for that matter does he properly represent either the nature of the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the principle of just war. That is all I will say on the above stuff except to remind the readers that in the next thread, I will be showing why the third hand citations on which he built his original attempt at “argumentation” collapse like a cheap tent in a big wind when subjected to moderate scrutiny.

To move onto part II of this thread, click HERE...

Notes:

{1} And yes, this has been a monologue. It cannot be a dialogue until you actually interact with my arguments and engage in non-normative arguments as I have presented with non-normative responses.

{2} Threads on the Atomic Bomb Droppings, Military and Statistical Calculations, the Moral and Ethical Aspects of the Subject Matter in Question, Etc...A Rerum Novarum Recapitulation Thread (circa August 28, 2005)

All threads posted between August 17, 2005 and August 26, 2005 pertaining to this issue are listed at the above link:

Clarifying Some Additional Points on the Atomic Bombing Subject With Dave Armstrong (circa August 28, 2005)

{3} See footnote two for details. The last of the two threads in that note was mostly a clarification of some points and an exhortation to Dave to actually have a dialogue –which I remind you involves listening which he obvious has not been doing–and also to can the “Google scholar” schtick.

{4} The reason I posted a "points to ponder" thread on the subject of normative argumentation back on August 13, 2005 (four days before the original Hiroshima posting) was because I anticipated that this may well happen with those who disagreed on the issue of the bombings. And with the above words, you have played according to my predicted script by trying to make an objective principle of argument into a subjective one by postulating the subjective notion of "too many" into the mix. And with that, your entire thread of argument inexorably unravels.

Your use of "too many civilian casualties" is the downfall since you are then obligated to tell us what "enough" would be in your scenario. Would 50 be "enough"??? What about 1,000??? 10,000??? 40,000??? 70,000??? 100,000??? 400,000??? 1,000,000??? At what point is your subjective criteria of "enough" met and we have moved into the realm of the "too many"??? And furthermore, how can you objectively verify that you have reached the point of "too many" in your statements Dave??? That is a trick question actually because the answer of course is that you cannot. The reason you cannot is because you are arguing from a normative standard which is by its very nature subjective rather than objective. And that is why you have yet to actually enter into the subject of double effect and whether it does or does not apply. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 28, 2005)]

{5} Another way of saying it is this: even if this situation happened a thousand times or a hundred thousand times, the principle I have outlined is viable because it is an objective one. It does not depend for validity on a certain number to be valid and another to be invalid as that is subjective criteria. If it is valid for one, it is valid for one hundred, one thousand, or one hundred thousand, etc. If it is not valid for one, it is not valid for one hundred, one thousand, or one hundred thousand, etc. That is what I mean by objective criteria but note again gentle readers, Dave has been avoiding that like a vampire fleeing from a crucifix.

{6} The same thing happened when Dave reposted an argument I shredded in detail as if reposting the discredited argument meant it was still a viable one. Here is how I responded to that in a previous brief posting:

I would be remiss in not noting that you seem to be posting anything (and from whatever dubious sources) in a disjointed fashion to try and make your case. For one example of many which could be mentioned, you cite Ralph Raico and treat his stuff as "much needed information." Dave, I absolutely destroyed many of the arguments he makes in my posting…particularly his regurgitation of the 46,000 figure:

But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.

I explained in detail and with actual mathematical models of battlefield casualties in the Pacific theatre why that figure was a pipedream. You not only do not interact with my arguments but you place them on the same plain as Raico's drivel. And that brings us to Patrick J. Buchanan who reiterates the same stuff and tries to pass off Raico as a respectable scholar.

I will not go into how shoddy Mr. Buchanan's scholarship is when discussing these issues as I have done this at other times. He is so partisan that he is willing to prooftext sources to present his case. I originally thought that [a certain ideologue] was the culprit when I wrote that thread but discovered later that [the ideologue] got his information from Mr. Buchanan. Now you are citing the same Mr. Buchanan on this matter -not to mention on the subject of just war??? Who will be cited next, Mother Jones??? The World Socialist Workers Party Newspaper??? The Journal of Historical Review??? Any source you can remotely find to give credence to your already held position??? How is that in any sense to be a constructive dialogue.

You should recognize that not all sources are of the same weight and anytime you have third hand quotes (of which many of your quotes happen to be btw) that there can be misrepresentation or quotes could be posited without concern for actual context[...]: all of which mitigates against their viability as evidences...

Remember, people can say anything and I have not merely undermined many of the arguments from many of the sources you cite but have obliterated them. You cannot expect me to take your reposting of them as if they are still viable to be serious…that is not only not authentic dialogue but it is its very antithesis. [I. Shawn McElhinney: Excerpt from Cor ad Cor Loquitur Comments Thread (circa August 27, 2005)]

{7} Here is an argument I made in reasonable detail which Dave evasively passed over as if said evasion constitutes a valid response to what I said:

Carter Clarke was not a Brigader General in 1945 but was instead a colonel. And as he was in the Army and assigned to head up SSA in early 1943, Colonel Clarke would not have overseen the dispatches on the Japanese from at least early 1943 onward. The reason of course should be obvious: he was the founder of the Venona branch of the MAGIC network and the Army had no involvement in the Japanese decoding from that point onward. Colonel Clarke worked on Venona from February 2, 1943 through at least October of 1949...I am uncertain as to if he was involved with Venona past that point. Nonetheless, it is not even deniable that Colonel Carter Clarke was involved in the founding of Venona in early 1943 and that with Venona, Colonel Clarke was involved with Soviet cabels not Japanese ones. For this reason, citing him as MAGIC operative in the position as Doug Long does (in the context of Pacific Theatre codebreaking and information gathering under MAGIC) is very sloppy scholarship (to put it nicely). [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 28, 2005)]

The readers can note that Dave quite obviously did not bother reading what I wrote...as what is noted in this footnote as well as footnote six are adequate evidences of.

{8} See footnotes two, four, and five.

{9} See footnote five.

Miscellaneous Musings:

I have been too busy with business and various writing endeavours to post anything much in the past week. Hopefully a fair amount of what I have worked on (and am working on) will be posted during the week sometime including a JYB update which remains to be finished. (The latter should be posted on or before Thursday time and host patience-willing.) In the meantime, I want to comment briefly on a couple of items in the news which I may expand upon in the coming weeks and months so here goes...

---The primary subject in the news is Hurricane Katrina and its decimation of New Orleans -Our hearts and prayers fo out to those who have suffered as a result of this catastrophe. And while there is a fair amount of wheat and chaff to discuss in that subject viz. how various parties have responded to the circumstances that took place down there but right now, it is more important to help out those afflicated. With that in mind, anyone who knows of some worthwhile charities which are targeting that area with their resources, please let me know and I will mention them on this weblog.

---The death of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rhenquist was front page news (may his soul rest in peace). Rhenquist was one of the few constructionists on the court and that means it is imperative to hold serve on his position just to not lose ground. For that reason, I want to remind readers of two posts to this weblog of the many I have put up which deal with the subject of supreme court and judge nominations. Here they are by name and time stamp:

On the Supreme Court and the Nomination of Judges (circa September 8, 2004)

On the Upcoming Supreme Court Retirements/Nominations (circa July 08, 2005)

And while much more could be noted than this{1}, that suffices for now on the subject of the upcoming nominations.

Note:

{1} Such as this basic philosophical approach long taken by your humble servant at Rerum Novarum viz. evaluating the judiciary:

I use a simple acid test. To me, the key variable is how they view the proper function of law in a just society. Any candidate that endorses a differentiation between the laws of the individual and the laws of society at large is one who inexorably endorses the plunder of one class of citizens to enrich another class is not a real conservative. And sadly, almost all who run for office under the conservative banner support legal plunder in some form or another. It then becomes a case of ascertaining whether or not their support of legal plunder is based on ignorance of what they are actually supporting or whether they are intentionally in support of it. That is admittedly not easy to determine but a safe norm to follow is to see how much they favour federal involvement or intervention. For the greater they favour those factors, the more they inexorably endorse legal plunder.[...] And no just society can countenance such an abomination and expect to avoid dissolving as a nation at some point or another - either through military conquest or revolution. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 24, 2004)]

Clarifying Some Additional Points on the Atomic Bombing Subject:
(With Dave Armstrong)

Since Dave has expressed the desire to not have a discussion on the material below in the private forum, I post it here to Rerum Novarum since what is noted there pertains directly to his attempt at arguing against the material in five of the eight threads to Rerum Novarum on the subject of the atomic bomb droppings (excluding this one). Briefly, they are accessible HERE. In the interest of fairness, I should note that Dave's thread from above does link to the first five threads duly noted at the latter thread. And while each of the posts in that thread deal with a different facet of the subject in question; at the same time, all of them are built off of what was posted in the first thread of the list. Having noted that briefly, let us move onto the purpose of this posting.

Though much of what is posted here is a duplicate of an email I sent to some parties in question (including Dave) yesterday morning, I have made some changes to the text in spots including the addition of three new footnotes. As Dave apparently wants to have this discussion fully in public view, I post this thread to respond to his manifested wish on the matter. Dave's words will be in dark green font and any sources I cite will be in darkblue font.

Hi Shawn,

Hola Dave!!!

I continue to vigorously disagree (so do many prominent orthodox Catholics such as Pope Paul VI, Fulton Sheen, etc.) that double effect can legitimately be applied in this instance.

Dave my friend, with all due respect, you are not engaging in dialogue on this subject yet. Instead, you are merely making assertions and stating names of people who agree with you. That is a fallacious approach to argumentation of no small import. Indeed, I have discussed the argumentation fallacies involved here not a few times including in two weblog postings -the first of which was posted in August of 2004 and the second in May of 2005.{1} With both postings, I pointed out five principles that needed to be taken into account for valid argumentation if seeking to argue from authority -three of which were as follows:

--On topics which are of a controverted nature (or where there are disagreements among recognized experts), it is fallacious to accept the opinion of an authority.

--In areas where there is disagreement among recognized experts, individuals then have to turn to various sources. However, whatever the sources turned to, the purpose cannot be for conclusions or opinions of said authority.

--Appeals to any presumable "authoritative" source should take into account (to the extent this is possible) the trackrecord of accuracy of the source being utilized. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 14, 2005)]

It cannot be denied that the subject we are discussing is one where there are disagreements from recognized experts on the matter...we can surely agree on that as it is a well established fact beyond debate. For that reason, it does not suffice to merely posit the opinions of experts whomever they are. You have thus far done this a lot and have not interacted with my actual arguments or the threads from our mutual friends Dr. Art Sippo, Greg Mockeridge,{2}, and also the points noted by my very good friend Tim Tull.{3} It is not a matter of merely disagreeing with us my friend, there must be posited viable arguments by you in return.

On the above score, even your citing thirdhand a presumed quote from a MAGIC operative falls into this since (i) they were quotes after the fact and (ii) in the midst of the Cold War arms race. There was a lot of second guessing at that point on various issues which is why I do not place much value (if any) in statements made long after the fact. What would carry more weight is if you had quotes from the person contemporary to the time...that is the only way to insure that the person being quoted was not in second-guess mode. There is also the question of whether their actual position was accurately rendered by the source you cited but that is another subject altogether.{4} Furthermore, that is not all that should be noted here.

It also bears noting that many of those who posit that such and such a party opposed the bomb droppings are quite selective with their citing of sources. That is not to say that it is a one-sided issue in that respect --or even that you would resort to such things of course-- but prooftexting is quite common for those who react to issues emotionally rather than engage them logically. The atomic bomb issue is one where reason and logic often take a back seat to solipsistic emotionalism and that needs to be recalled at all times. And while as a rule, you do (to your great credit) approach subjects with reason and logic, thus far on the issue in question, I believe your emotions are playing a larger factor than you would probably admit to.

I would be remiss at this point in not noting that this is a very gruesome subject matter to discuss as we are doing. But just as judges are supposed to leave their private opinions at the door when they enter the courtroom, we should act in like fashion in seeking to dialogue on these kinds of delicate issues to insure that we do proper justice to all sides involved. And one of those factors is considering the foundational presuppositions from which the lions share of the atom bombing critics (if not all of them) were operating from: that Japan was on the verge of surrender. That assessment (as the MAGIC cables themselves well confirmed) was a patently false one. If you needed any proof of this resolve -as well as the falsity of the "ready to surrender" claim, all you need to do is look at the events as they happened chronologically and do so from a logical frame of reference.

To start with, consider that the bomb on Hiroshima did not result in an immediate surrender by the Japanese. If they were really so interested in surrendering so readily (as the critics of the bomb droppings to a man almost uniformily asserted) then it only would have taken one bomb and they would have responded with acceptance of the terms of surrender on August 7th. But instead, after Hiroshima's bomb drop on August 6th, they had not surrendered. Two days later, the USSR declared war and even at that point, they still had not surrendered. President Truman then had the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki on the 9th and even then, there was no immediate surrender. Indeed, in case you did not know it, the Japanese government was deadlocked on whether or not to surrender after Nagasaki was bombed. The one who broke the tie was the Emperor Hirohito himself on August 10th. (And even then, an end to hostilities was not called by the Japanese government --in the person of Emperor Hirohito-- for five additional days after that.)

The hard cold truth of the matter is this Dave: the Japanese were not only not ready to surrender but they were intent on fighting to the last man...even going so far as to train the populace in using weapons to help repel a presumed invasion of the islands. These are things that you need to account for that as well as the evidences I presented in my original posting to really see the picture in full. We cannot anachronistically retroject on these issues my friend...it is very easy to do since atomic bombs by their very nature are horrendous things. But that is not the way to have a viable dialogue on these matters.

Dialogue must involve some form of interaction and exchange of viewpoints. Thus far this has been a monologue of sorts between you and I.{5} I say this because posting names of people who disagree with me and Greg -and not considering the sitz im leben in the process- along with posting pictures to try and draw on the emotions of readers is not achieving that. In your other use of sources, you are heavily positing conclusions of others but conclusions and opinions are not what should be our concern here. It is the arguments advanced by said parties that is the issue.

I have put forth a theory{6} on this matter and it deserves interaction. Thus far, you have not done that in a fashion befitting a viable counter-theory. This is an area where we can disagree certainly but what sets those on this list apart from persons such as [certain-parties-who-shall-remain-nameless] is the willingness to enter into the arguments of the other. You have not put together cogent arguments yet but instead have merely quoted persons and opinions. I am afraid that will not do my friend...not by a long shot.

I think it is rather ludicrous, when you are talking 100,000 + deaths. See my analogy to the Detroit area being hit as a "military target" . .

But Dave, you admitted a week ago that you were not well acquainted with many facets of the discussion{7}...heck yesterday you even admitted to this in your posting viz. the nuances of double effect methodology. I cannot believe you assimilated it all in a couple of days my friend...not by a long shot. And furthermore, your very arguments themselves betray this as I will now briefly document using your own words from your posting on the matter:

In particular, the justification of "double effect" cannot, I think, be reasonably, plausibly maintained with regard to these bombings. There were simply too many civilian casualties. The scale of death and destruction does not allow it. It is -- with all due respect to my friends, who offer some very harsh criticisms of opponents themselves-- hopelessly naive and muddleheaded and a denial of concrete reality to suggest that these were only peripheral, and non-intentional, while military targets were primary intentions. [Dave Armstrong: Cor ad Cor Loquitur posting circa August 25, 2005)]

I explained how the principle applied in my August 26th posting on the matter...you did not have that thread to work with on the 25th so I have to extend to you some leeway of course.

I wrote the post outlining the double effect principle back on August 17th in a private email in about ten minutes. For that reason -and because of the complexity of the subject involved- I felt that it was necessary to submit it to a trained Catholic philosopher to analyze my arguments since I am not a trained Catholic philosopher by any stretch. For that I picked the very esteemed Dr. Philip Blosser (aka "Chris' dad").

The verdict from Dr. Philip Blosser (the trained philosopher) was that the arguments I used were sound ones. I noticed that in your posting (written before my double effect thread was posted), you were trying to disqualify the double effect principle on the subjective principle of quantity. You repeated this in your Detroit arguments of which you sought to recall me to in your comments boxes. Rather than bring this up publicly (for the time being) I remind you of your words above and will explain why this methodology will not wash. But first, the foundation of your arguments against double effect can be boiled down to this one sentence from your above paragraph:

There were simply too many civilian casualties.

The reason I posted a "points to ponder" thread on the subject of normative argumentation back on August 13, 2005 (four days before the original Hiroshima posting) was because I anticipated that this may well happen with those who disagreed on the issue of the bombings . And with the above words, you have played according to my predicted script by trying to make an objective principle of argument into a subjective one by postulating the subjective notion of "too many" into the mix. And with that, your entire thread of argument inexorably unravels.

Your use of "too many civilian casualties" is the downfall since you are then obligated to tell us what "enough" would be in your scenario. Would 50 be "enough"??? What about 1,000??? 10,000??? 40,000??? 70,000??? 100,000??? 400,000??? 1,000,000??? At what point is your subjective criteria of "enough" met and we have moved into the realm of the "too many"??? And furthermore, how can you objectively verify that you have reached the point of "too many" in your statements Dave??? That is a trick question actually because the answer of course is that you cannot. The reason you cannot is because you are arguing from a normative standard which is by its very nature subjective rather than objective. And that is why you have yet to actually enter into the subject of double effect and whether it does or does not apply.

I have argued that double effect applies to this subject and I have made my arguments in a non-normative fashion. You have disagreed and have done so on a normative fashion. Double effect argumentation however is not a subjective principle of argumentation which is to say that it is not normative. So in trying to argue against it with normative arguments, you are involving yourself in the logical fallacy of context-switching my friend.

For double effect is a universal principle and as a result it is both (i) non-normative as well as (ii) objective in its import. That is not to say that you cannot argue against it in the context whereby I have appropriated it of course. However, to do so you must strive to do so from a non-normative context if your arguments are to be viable theories with which we can comprehend and interact with.

Anyway, I hope this note has amply clarified some points that needed to be touched on. If it reads rather hard in spots, I apologize but I will not sugarcoat things as I see them. I look forward to a dialogue with you on these matters my friend with the confident hope that we can do so amicably. But one part of an authentic dialogue is frankness and it is with that in mind that I hope you approach what I have outlined in this thread.

Notes:

{1} The reason for the second posting was because [the person in question] was falling into this trap and it seemed proper to revisit the subject in a briefer form than I had previously enunciated it in for that reason.

{2} The A-Bomb Drops on Japan: Is There Room In the Catholic Conscience to Support Truman's Decision? (Greg Mockeridge: From his weblog circa August 19, 2005)

{3} Tim was author of the most recent Rerum Novarum Guest Editorial and his knowledge of WWII is as extensive (if not more so) than the war archives themselves. For that reason, I will accept any corrections of fact that he has either for my posting or Art's should he send any. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa August 18, 2005)]

{4} There is also the issue of context in that we only have one source verifying the position of Brigader General Carter Clarke as being involved with MAGIC. We do not know from this whether or not he was in that position at the time of the bomb droppings or not. This is highly improbable for reasons I will not outline in brief. The reader is asked to notice that rather than merely posting names, I am actually making arguments and stating facts: the antithesis of my good friend Dave's approach to discussing this subject matter thus far.

To start with, at one point, all the intelligence cabels from MAGIC were under the same umbrella of control if you will but that changed in the early 1940's. The signal date of sorts was February 2, 1943: the date when there was a division made within the MAGIC cooperative of sorts by President Franklin Roosevelt. The divisions were along military service lines. Starting on February 2, 1943, the Navy was placed solely in charge of the Japanese intelligence cabels (their decoding, etc.) while the Army was given a new assignment altogether. Then-Colonel Carter Clark was the founder of Venona or the Russian chryptological branch of MAGIC charged with working on Soviet decoding. The agency under which that decoding was to take place was renamed the Signal Security Agency (SSA). This is not insignificant when you consider that Dave is quoting a third hand source from Brigader General Carter Clarke on Hiroshima fourteen years after the fact. For those who missed the problem with this source being cited, I will reiterate it at this time.

First of all, Carter Clarke was not a Brigader General in 1945 but was instead a colonel. And as he was in the Army and assigned to head up SSA in early 1943, Colonel Clarke would not have overseen the dispatches on the Japanese from at least early 1943 onward. The reason of course should be obvious: he was the founder of the Venona branch of the MAGIC network and the Army had no involvement in the Japanese decoding from that point onward. Colonel Clarke worked on Venona from February 2, 1943 through at least October of 1949...I am uncertain as to if he was involved with Venona past that point. Nonetheless, it is not even deniable that Colonel Carter Clarke was involved in the founding of Venona in early 1943 and that with Venona, Colonel Clarke was involved with Soviet cabels not Japanese ones. For this reason, citing him as MAGIC operative in the position as Doug Long does (in the context of Pacific Theatre codebreaking and information gathering under MAGIC) is very sloppy scholarship (to put it nicely).

So contrary to your assertions that I was "wrong" in what I said about MacArthur and MAGIC, the above material amply vindicates my position. I wanted to keep this private Dave but since you want it made public, there you go.

{5} Greg is involved too but he and I are discussing this from different angles in some respect. For that reason, I refer here only to the attempted dialogue between you and I since there are two different discussions going on with you on this subject: one with me and one with Greg.

{6} [W]hen one is dealing with a theory, they are dealing with both abstract notions as well as coordinating dynamic principles of action. One of the author's intellectual mentors once defined a theory as "a set of non contradictory abstract ideas (or as philosophers like to call them 'principles') which purports to be either a correct description of reality or a guideline for successful action."...

Having established a working meaning of the term theory, it is worth noting also that the word thesis according to the Merriam Webster Thesaurus is related to the word theory. (Both of them having a foundation in the term assumption.) A good way of looking at this in the current context is to view a thesis as "an abstract principle or proposition to be advanced and maintained by argument" and a theory as incorporating a thesis -or a series of theses -with a guideline for successful action. The reason for this is because a theory by its nature must involve either (i) a correct description of reality or (ii) a guideline for successful action. For this reason, any viable theory involves several principles if you will which work together.

Or another way of looking at it would be to consider that a theory is being conceived of a series of non contradictory coordinative theses or points of presupposition. When viewed in this light, a theory clearly is only as strong as the theses which support it. [Excerpt from the Rerum Novarum Miscellaneous BLOG (circa January 14, 2004)]

{7} Obviously, you and Greg have studied this particular matter in far more depth than I have. So I eagerly look forward to considering your arguments carefully when I return. [Dave Armstrong: Email to this list circa August 12, 2005 (as reiterated in your Cor ad Cor Loquitur posting circa August 25, 2005)]

Are we to believe that you have assimilated all of our arguments in the span of three days my friend??? Trust me, neither Greg nor myself are unfamiliar with the arguments advanced by people who hold to your general viewpoint. And speaking for Greg, we would appreciate if you give our greater in-depth study on these matters more due than you have done thus far.

Threads on the Atomic Bomb Droppings, Military and Statistical Calculations, the Moral and Ethical Aspects of the Subject Matter in Question, Etc...
(A Rerum Novarum Recapitulation Thread)

To precede the next post I will add to this weblog, the following is a list of some of the threads on this weblog from newest to oldest dealing with the subjects in question. My reasons for this posting will soon become apparent{1} but first, let us revisit the eight threads posted on these subjects since August 17, 2005:

On Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontifications (circa August 17, 2005)

Some Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (From Dr. Art Sippo circa August 18, 2005)

More Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (From Tim Tull circa August 19, 2005)

More Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (From Tim Tull on Dr. Sippo's Email circa August 21, 2005)

Points to Ponder --On the Atomic Bombs and Their Usage (By Dr. Art Sippo circa August 22, 2005)

And Yet More Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (circa August 25, 2005)

And More Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (circa August 26, 2005)

And Yet Still More Feedback on the "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Profound Problems With Ivory Tower Revisionist Pontificatons" Thread (circa August 26, 2005)

Expanding Futher on the Subject of Double Effect Viz. the Atomic Bombings (circa August 26, 2005)


Note:

{1} See this link for details.