Cooperation with evil - nuclear weapons

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jfz178 said:
My point is that every US Catholic should be held responsible for the US nuclear posture.
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Just the Catholics? This sounds like the nuclear force is operational under the Catholic Church. As I do not recall either Catholics be a solid voting block on anything, or any election on nuclear proliferation, I do not think the Catholic Church would impute this responsibility to every Catholic.
 
You can believe all that if you want. I have been studying the open military literature since the 1980s. The data is very complex and there’s no reason to post all of it here.
  1. There is no fully reliable figure regarding the number of nuclear weapons the United States has, from ICBMs, to air-dropped and other.
  2. The published figures for what they can do are quite good, and are in line with other information in books.
  3. This country went into Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. Using nuclear weapons there was discussed but the enemy would walk through irradiated land in too short a period of time.
During World War II, the Office of War Information would tell newspapers what they could and could not print, not including imminent threats to the mainland. The same in England.

Tom Clancy was not the only author subjected to this. The Intelligence community went after another author for similar reasons. The government does make mistakes when declassifying documents. After he named his sources, most of the declassified documents he had found were reclassified.

Yes, there’s a lot more. You can file a Freedom of Information Act request. A response is required.

Sure, others have gone after the government about releasing data, but got nowhere or were stopped by “national security.” In other words, the documents, the information you want is protected under National Security laws.
 
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Lately, in terms of top decision-makers, the choices the electorate gets range from very bad to worse. If the devil was on the ballot, I wouldn’t vote for him, but he did come to mind over the last half dozen elections. I was surprised when I had to add complete idiot to the list.

Find out how many lobbyists there are in Washington and who and what they represent.
 
The bishops’ letter has 339 numbered paragraphs on war and peace.

They do say we should pray. paragraphs 290-296

But which paragraphs specifically are prayers for abolition of nuclear weapons?

This thread is about nuclear weapons.

Here is what the Catholic bishops said in their letter about prayer:

. Prayer
  1. A conversion of our hearts and minds will make it possible for us to enter into a closer communion with our Lord. We nourish that communion by personal and communal prayer, for it is in prayer that we encounter Jesus, who is our peace, and learn from him the way to peace.
  2. In prayer we are renewed in faith and confirmed in our hope in God’s promise.
  3. The Lord’s promise is that he is in our midst when we gather in prayer. Strengthened by this conviction, we beseech the risen Christ to fill the world with his peace. We call upon Mary, the first disciple and the Queen of Peace, to intercede for us and for the people of our time that we may walk in the way of peace. In this context, we encourage devotion to Our Lady of Peace.
  4. As believers, we understand peace as a gift of God. This belief prompts us to pray constantly, personally and communally, particularly through the reading of scripture and devotion to the rosary, especially in the family. Through these means and others, we seek the wisdom to begin the search for peace and the courage to sustain us as instruments of Christ’s peace in the world.
  5. The practice of contemplative prayer is especially valuable for advancing harmony and peace in the world. For this prayer rises, by divine grace, where there is total disarmament of the heart and unfolds in an experience of love which is the moving force of peace. Contemplation fosters a vision of the human family as united and interdependent in the mystery of God’s love for all people. This silent, interior prayer bridges temporarily the “already” and “not yet,” this world and God’s kingdom of peace.
 
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  1. The Mass in particular is a unique means of seeking God’s help to create the conditions essential for true peace in ourselves and in the world. In the eucharist we encounter the risen Lord, who gave us his peace. He shares with us the grace of the redemption, which helps us to preserve and nourish this precious gift. Nowhere is the Church’s urgent plea for peace more evident in the liturgy than in the Communion Rite. After beginning this rite of the Mass with the Lord’s Prayer, praying for reconciliation now and in the kingdom to come, the community asks God to “grant us peace in our day,” not just at some time in the distant future. Even before we are exhorted “to offer each other the sign of peace,” the priest continues the Church’s prayer for peace, recalling the Lord Jesus Christ’s own legacy of peace:
    Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles: I leave you peace, my peace I give you. Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom.
    Therefore we encourage every Catholic to make the sign of peace at Mass an authentic sign of our reconciliation with God and with one another. This sign of peace is also a visible expression of our commitment to work for peace as a Christian community. We approach the table of the Lord only after having dedicated ourselves as a Christian community to peace and reconciliation. As an added sign of commitment, we suggest that there always be a petition for peace in the general intercessions at every eucharistic celebration.
  2. We implore other Christians and everyone of good will to join us in this continuing prayer for peace, as we beseech God for peace within ourselves, in our families and community, in our nation, and in the world.
 
jfz178 said:
Your efforts to convince me have been no more successful than my attempts to convince you. And they never will be. I don’t take pastoral advice from faceless people on the internet. So we are done.
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So, you have no answer. I guess there wasn’t much more to expect.
 
jfz178 said:
No, I have a clear answer. I have had for a long time.
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Naturally, I meant, an answer to my arguments.

Unless, of course, you did have an answer to my arguments long before I presented them, and yet refused to write it down here. 🙂
 
The Pacific Ocean War of World War Two was an all-out declared war. No holds barred.

At no point did Japan stand down or offer any kind of terms.

Japan did not waver in the severity of their military conquests.

They were fighting to the end.

Without nuclear weapons, the Allies would have conducted an opposed amphibious landing on the Japanese homeland islands.

We already knew from reading their communications that the Japanese army had figured out where we would land.

So it would have been a protracted mess with hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties.

Nuclear weapons were no worse than the firebomb raids we were already conducting.

There was and is no special evil associated with the word “nuclear”.

We just threw everything we had into the Pacific Ocean war portion of World War Two.

We were making about two nuclear bombs per month.

Japan might have test fired one nuclear bomb. [In fact, the current North Korean nuclear weapons program might well be based on Japan’s Navy’s World War Two nuclear weapons program based near Wonson.] [Some of us disagree on the details. But a lot of the details remain “shrouded” as the Japanese participants were fearful of being punished for participating in the Japanese nuclear weapons program.]

There are differences of opinion as to whether Japan and Germany had an atomic bomb or if they were working on one.

You could call it a “uranium bomb” instead of a nuclear weapon. In fact, Germany did ship a submarine full of uranium [German submarine U-234 - Wikipedia] to Japan with the intention that Japan should use that shipment to build a nuclear weapon to use on the Americans. That particular German shipment of uranium to Japan got diverted to the United States when the German government surrendered.

Unknown to the Americans, Japan had constructed the I-400 Class of gigantic submarines. They built three of them and depending on the size of their nuclear weapon, they could have used their I-400’s to deliver a nuke to the United States or perhaps to destroy the U.S. invasion fleet.

In addition to the B-29 bomber, the U.S. also built the B-32, which was the same size, but built in smaller numbers. In addition, the U.S. also designed the B-36 bomber which was much larger and had ten engines and eventually built around 400 of them; it could stay up for almost 48 hours without refueling.

In addition, Germany had developed a long range “bomber” Junkers Ju 390 - Wikipedia

In his book, The Bunker, author James P. O’Donnell mentions a flight to Japan. O’Donnell claimed that Albert Speer, in an early 1970s telephone interview, stated that there had been a secret Ju 390 flight to Japan “late in the war”. The flight, by a Luftwaffe test pilot, had supposedly been nonstop via the polar route.[16] O’Donnell is the sole source for the story. Speer never mentioned the story in any of his writings or other interviews. Kössler and Ott make no mention of the claim.
 
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Any decent human being should feel terrible about civilian casualties in a major war, any war. Having said that though, anyone feeling total outrage about the bombing of these two cities should google what is now called the rape of Nanking. [Which is also the title of the book about it.]

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China’s capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. The six weeks of carnage would become known as the Rape of Nanking and represented the single worst atrocity during the World War II era in either the European or Pacific theaters of war.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/nanking.htm

After the destruction of the POWs, the soldiers turned their attention to the women of Nanking and an outright animalistic hunt ensued. Old women over the age of 70 as well as little girls under the age of 8 were dragged off to be sexually abused. More than 20,000 females (with some estimates as high as 80,000) were gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, then stabbed to death with bayonets or shot so they could never bear witness.

The atrocities get much much worse after this. Worse than you could imagine from any nightmare. This was to serve as a new standard for the Japanese Imperial Army to follow in subsequent invasions. They had to be stopped.

I hesitated to cite the source as it is NOT suitable reading for children and teens, but it is the truth. These facts are widely available. I detest nuclear weapons and their use, but in this case, to stop this type of thing, I would have rolled the bombs out of the back of the plane myself.
 
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Mostly, yep.There is no doubt that Japan and Germany both had atomic weapon development programs during the war. For that matter, the Soviet Union had started one such, around 1942 (IIRC the date) (Wilcox/JAPAN’S SECRET WAR, Grunden/SECRET WEAPONS & WORLD WAR II, Baggott/THE FIRST WAR OF PHYSICS). There is no general belief that the so called Japanese test, just before the Hiroshima bomb, ever took place. And good reasons to doubt it was anything but rumor.

We had the capability to produce roughly 2 bombs per month, at the point the Japanese surrendered. Production ceased rapidly there after, and did not resume significantly until later in the 40s.Don’t recall what the stockpile was, but it was small.

The uranium oxide cargo carried by the U-234 fell into US hands when that boat surrendered, 14 May 1945, 9 days after Germany surrendered. Speculation exists as to what the fate of that cargo was. It is not likely that it contributed to Little Boy, and no further effort in producing gun-type uranium bombs was made, the plutonium production line being more expeditious.

The I-400s, only 2 of which became operational, could not have delivered a nuclear bomb, of the size that technology then dictated, by use of the small aircraft they carried.

Little credence is given to the story of a long distance flight, by any of the America bombers.

History is my interest, as to this subject, not the judgement of the RCC on weapons of mass destruction. But any RC should affirm, at the appropriate level of theological certainty. whatever the RCC teaches on the subject (personal opinion).

The B-32 was a far inferior aircraft to the B-29, beloved only by General Kenney, commander of the FEAF (and later first commander of SAC), It did have the distinction of being involved in the last American air death of WWII, when a B-32 was attacked by Japanese fighters, 18 August 1945.
 
And if anyone needs more examples, I can give titles of 6-8 other books on the subject, off my shelves.
 
MonteRCMS said:
The nuclear weapons used in World War Two save millions of lives.
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What exactly does that mean? What alternatives are being compared?

Of course, even if they did “save millions of lives”, that is irrelevant, for it is not just results that matter. But something tells me that the claim itself is also rather questionable.
MonteRCMS said:
Without nuclear weapons, the Allies would have conducted an opposed amphibious landing on the Japanese homeland islands.
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Yes, perhaps they could only think of a badly thought out strategy of attacking where enemy most expects you. It doesn’t mean that no other strategy was available.
MonteRCMS said:
The Pacific Ocean War of World War Two was an all-out declared war. No holds barred.

At no point did Japan stand down or offer any kind of terms.
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That’s not unexpected given that Allies demanded unconditional surrender and loudly talked about impoverishing defeated countries. Not the smartest move, I’d say.
MonteRCMS said:
Nuclear weapons were no worse than the firebomb raids we were already conducting.
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Yes, those were war crimes too.

And a bad idea.

Just imagine, what would have happened, had Western Allies actually chosen to avoid war crimes at any cost, preferring losing honourably to winning dishonourably. They would have been building fighters and tactical bombers instead of strategic bombers - and they would have had air superiority over the Western front. Victory in Europe in 1941, anyone? 🙂

Even in war, crime doesn’t pay. 🙂

Although yes, if you do not think about it, then it does look as if it does.
 
The alternatives being considered were the two fold invasion of the Home Islands (Operation DOWNFALL), a policy of continued massive bombing with roughly 40% increase in the available B-29s, by Jan 1946, concentrating on the 180 cities of at least 30,000 population, which had not been hit systematically through July, offshore bombardment and increased interdiction of all food shipments still getting to the Home Islands from Asia, with all the butcher’s bills associated with each of the these, added to the on-going casualty rate in the Pacific theater outside the Home Islands, of around 200,000 a month. Plus some other possibilities.

Estimates of all these possibilities varied, but were in the 1-2 million if DOWNFALL was included, for Allied losses, 7-10 million for the Japanese.

The 2 bombs ended the war in the least amount of time, with the least costs in lives, of any alternative. Unless we had surrendered to them.

Indeed we talked about unconditional surrender. It appears just once, in the Potsdam Declaration, and refers to surrender of the Japanese military to the Allies. It also implied that the Japanese would no more be allowed to set conditions for ending the war than had the Germans. In both cases, there would be no repetition of the negotiated peace of WWI. That had not worked out well. German and Japan were going to be restructured, into more suitable citizens of the world. That worked out quite well.

The story of the use of the bombs has been a major hobby of mine for around 20 years. I’d guess that on the old board, I had posted 500+ posts on the subject, over the years. I am not interested in anyone’s moral assessment of what happened, I have my own. But I do have an interest in the history.
 
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Your posts on the old board were so thorough they should probably be assembled into book form.
 
You are very kind. It was books from which the relevant history came. Around 150 on hand, in the related subject area, amongst the far greater number on the the Pacific theater, and on WWII. Overall, around the first book collecting area I started, 60+ years ago…

It’s been frustrating and tiring, over those 20 years of posting.

Bought a book on the general topic, emphasis on the Japanese use, or non-use, of technology during the war, yesterday.
 
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