From Buddhist view, was dropping bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 evil?

hermitwin

From Buddhist view, was dropping bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 evil? Can we equate it with what happened on 9/11?

Talisman

Hindsight is 20/20. This extremely destructive act ended the lives of many innocent people but the saved the lives of many more by definitively ending the war in the pacific.

Roger

War is an embarrassment. Literally just a gang of idiot men who mess things up for everybody, not in a bar room but on entire continents.

Hiroshima and 9/11? Not a worthy comparison EXCEPT in terms of the hideous suffering. Why? Because the argument is strong that more lives were saved by using those stupid bombs than by not using them.

OTOH, "terrorism" is a very effective weapon, used in 9/11 and Hiroshima etc. Instilling terror in the minds of civilians by various means is used by everybody who engages in "war." No matter how "war" defined.

UGH! Thanks for the reality check.

Linc

From a Buddhist view, is it appropriate to judge past generations from your vantage point in the present?

compassionate_warrior

From a Buddhist point of view? How about from a Christian point of view, or simply humanitarian point of view? I find it alarming that it's even being asked whether it can be equated with 9/11. Hiroshima was far more destructive than 9/11, and the nuclear radiation left by the blast affected subsequent generations (deformed births, illness and early deaths of survivors). The argument that the bomb was justified because it ended the war has been questioned by historians (and many members of the general public) ever since it happened. There's evidence that the Soviet army had planned a surprise attack on Japan that the US knew about, but they wanted to try out their new weapon anyway. The controversy has never ended. And don't forget: a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Theswingisyellow

War is the greatest travesty mankind can engage in, it just destroys things and kills people and for what. My grandfather was a marine in WW2 who fought the Japanese for 3 years in the pacific. Now they are our friends. What governments make people do. :shake: Dropping those bombs was really no diffrent from what we were already engaged in. A bit prior to dropping the A-bomb we had firebombed Tokyo to the tune of appx. 100,000 people. Was it ethical or moral, no. But it is what happened. These poor people has a leadership that would not consider stopping the war and felt no compunction about sacrificing their lives. Was it a lesser of two evils, maybe. Untold numbers would have died with an invasion of Japan itself. Was it also calculating on our part (in terms of the Soviets)? Sure it was.
All the best,
Todd

Roger

War is the greatest travesty mankind can engage in, it just destroys things and kills people and for what. My grandfather was a marine in WW2 who fought the Japanese for 3 years in the pacific. Now they are our friends. What governments make people do. :shake:

Yeah! What Todd said. P*sses me off big time. I'm not unusual, I guess. Although everywhere on TV there's this military programming, Hitler BS and people shooting people up. It's like NORMAL.

Oh well. It's biology I guess. We're predators. We're in a kill-to-survive biological world. We're stuck until the last war mongers and their cronies get transformed.

Get me out of here!!!

StaticToybox

It was evil from any point of view. And several of our military leaders at the time were of the opinion that the bombings were completely unnecessary to end the war. Japan were ready to surrender, they had already sued for peace under certain conditions (such as the preservation of the imperial house) by that point. America wanted an unconditional surrender. The irony is that after the bombing America conceded to many of Japan's terms.

Dakini

Let's not forget the effect of war on the natural world; wildlife was nearly wiped out in Germany and parts of Western Russia as a result of WWII; Western Russia was heavily forested and had very rich fauna. This, too, is tragic.

Vincenzi

the war was almost won, it was a civilian population.
I don't see how a nuclear holocaust can ever be right.

DhammaDhatu

Personally, my view is if one is an awakened Buddhist,it is best to go beyond these things. Wars are instruments of economic policy. The two atomic bombs were part political bravado (imo). An awakened Buddhist, following the first precept, sees the underlying causes of war.

9/11? This has been discussed many times. There is no evidence yet who was behind 9/11. Given the US is strong allies with Saudi Arabia, given the Bush family & the Saudi families are friends & interested in oil, given Iraq was an threat to the Saudis, given Iraq was the instigator of a threat to start trading oil in Euros rather than US dolars, given Saudis were allegedly the perpetrators of 9/11 and given the US used 9/11 as an excuse to invade, of all places, Iraq, who were not even connected to 9/11, such speculative theories point the finger of cause to the Bush people.

To believe the economic elites of nations will not exploit, abuse & even murder the populations of those nations is naive. The history of the world is rulers of nations enslaving the common peoples of those nationals, whether it be feudal Europe, feudal Tibet or the overt or subvert caste systems of India or Thailand.

Avoid war, be personally free it, see thru it, is my opinion.

Mountains

I agree that such a comparison or Monday morning quarterbacking is pointless. I will however, take issue with the revisionist historical point of view that the USSR was about to invade Japan and that Truman just "wanted to see what the bomb could do". There is *ZERO* evidence to support either of those cockamamie ideas. Not one shred. The USSR was close to collapse from the strain of the European war, and was in *no* position to mount any kind of expedition in the Far East by the furthest stretch of anyone's imagination. It simply would not have been logistically possible for them to do it. And there is *ample* historical evidence (including his own words) that Truman worried a good deal about the consequences of his potential actions against Japan with the atomic bomb. Far from being a slapdash "let's see what will happen" whacko, Truman spent a great deal of time and energy on the matter before finally deciding (wisely, I think, given the information he had at hand) to use the bomb to end the war quickly, and with as little further loss of life as possible. Was it horrible? Of course it was. But so was the preceding 7 years of world war. The tens of thousands who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (given what they knew at the time) were, in his mind, a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things, given the tens of millions who had already died. Would you or I have made the same decision knowing what we know now? Probably not. But we're 65 years out with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, so it's not a fair question to ask.

hermitwin

"War is old men talking and young men dying" forgot who said it.
WAR= DEATH + DESTRUCTION.

Its interesting that US army use video games as a recruitment tool. Young people loves video games. Does that make game programing wrong livelihood?

hermitwin

They could have bombed Tokyo where all the generals lived but they chose Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Thats like bombing Seattle and ignoring Washington DC.

Cloud

I think everyone knows it was regrettable, and doesn't wish for anything like that to happen again. Holding onto it or judging the people involved only leads us to our own suffering. That said, let's leave it be.