From: seawasp@vm2.cis.pitt.edu (Sea Wasp)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.anime
Subject: Nukes, atrocities, etc (was Re: Gundam: Amuro here... (repost))
Date: 6 Oct 92 17:34:01 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Originator: seawasp@unixd1.cis.pitt.edu

In article <1992Oct6.145508.19935@athena.mit.edu> cam@athena.mit.edu (Daniel Cameron Daly) writes:
>Yes, there are people out there who identify with Amuro before Char.
>Char advocated the deaths of billions of people through asteroid dropping, 
>people who had committed no crime other than being in the wrong place at the

	[...]

>military groups which believed that they had a good reason.  Look at the
>Japanese civilians who were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The majority of them
>had not raised a weapon against the US, and still they died by the thousands.
>Why did that weapons have to be used?  Because US strategists decided that
>it would save the lives of many thousands of servicemen who would be
>involved in the invasion of Japan. Was the deaths of so many justified?
>perhaps.  That is still a question being argued by historians today.
>But what if we had had the capability to drop hundreds of nuclear bombs,
>enough to completely destroy Japan?  To sink it into the ocean, make it a

	Well, this is a complex question, but there are some answers..

	The justification for dropping the Bomb was NOT only to save the
lives of OUR servicemen; it was also to save the lives of the thousands
of Japanese who would be killed -- quite possibly many more than the Bomb
killed -- in an otherwise very long drawn out war. How many people would
have died in Japan had we subjected it to the sort of intensive conventional
bombing which Dresden and other areas of Europe underwent? 
	How much time and resources and energy would have been wasted?
How much more destruction of the infrastructure of Japan?

	So the decision was made that it was better to deliver one or
two TREMENDOUS, impressive, devastating blows and demonstrate an overwhelming
capacity for war, in the hope that this would cause Japan to surrender.

	You have to remember that it was the considered opinion of many
strategists (and I think it was a justifiable opinion, if not one which
can be verified for certain) that without some kind of awesome display,
the Japanese high command would NEVER surrender, and a fight against a
fanatic enemy whose troops were quite willing to dive into ships and
blow themselves to kingdom come could have lasted more years than the
prior war against Germany.

	Moreover, had we posessed that monstrous arsenal you ask us to
assume -- that is, that we had bombs enough to blow Hokkiado and the 
other Japanese islands out of the water -- I suspect we would instead
have first dropped a couple of WARNING bombs -- one within sight of 
Tokyo, perhaps -- into the OCEAN, hopefully doing considerably less
damage. I believe Truman actually considered a warning shot, but we
simply COULD NOT AFFORD to "waste" a weapon of that expense and rarity.
His advisors told him that if we didn't use it, the Japanese might
very well think we didn't dare to drop such a weapon on an INHABITED
area, and if they didn't surrender quickly we might need to use 
all the bombs we had in order to convince them that we could keep
this kind of thing up (I think the total number of atomic bombs available
or able to be made in the next few months didn't total over 20) even
though in actuality we would not have been able to maintain a long
term bombardment with atomic weaponry. 
	Remember also that the full awful POWER of atomic bombs simply
COULD NOT BE GRASPED until it was seen. In order to have the impact
desired, enough to cause Japan's surrender, Hiroshima might well
have been NECESSARY -- and Nagasaki was bombed to emphasize that this
was NOT just a one-shot deal.

	To get back to ANIME --

	Char's attack was insane. It isn't as though there aren't unlimited
numbers of rocks of all types in space. If he'd done a warning bombardment
(drop smaller but nonetheless very destructive meteoroids all over lightly
inhabited places) he could have gotten lots of concessions, and would
certainly have scared the crap out of all opposition, especially if he
demonstrated that he could send something FAR larger at them if he wanted.

	Char's action would be roughly equivalent to America, given a huge
nuclear arsenal, blasting the Japanese islands out of the water without
even a warning shot.

>	As for Char, I am not entirely sure that his motives were as 
>honorable as might appear.  In the original series, his entire basis for
>action was revenge against the Zabi family.  When he had finished killing
>them, he departed for a time, until the Titans forced his return into
>the central conflict to protect the people he called his own, the spacenoids.
>Only in Zeta Gundam were his motives noble, IMHO.  By CCA, he had become
>as petty as those he would destroy, wasting valuable resources and risking
>the betrayal of so many just to finish his battle with Amuro.  I cannot
>respect his actions.

	Char evolves through the sequence. After accomplishing his revenge,
Char finds life empty and eventually tries to become what his father had
been. Nonetheless, even in Zeta Char is a schemer, manipulating everyone
around him to produce his desired result; his motives may be better, but
his methods are still nasty, if more subtle. Char's Counterattack, 
however, shows a Char who has gone completely over the edge. If you 
INSIST on trying to fit it into a timeline, I'd venture to guess that
Char's direct contact with the wholly evil Papsimus Scirocco had combined
with the stress of his former actions (and his empathic resonance, as a
Newtype, with all the death and destruction he'd witnessed) to drive him
quite mad. In the end, he becomes sane and unites with Amuro to avert
the disaster he's summoned into being.

                                 Sea Wasp
                                   /^\
                                   ;;;