I know very little about this topic, but the last quote is interesting to me because I have heard that something like 1 million people died of starvation in Japan after the end of the war. The blockade was so successful and the Japanese infrastructure for delivering supplies was so disrupted that even when food became available, they couldn't get it to people. As an aside, for those who live in Japan, this is why the JA exists: it was set up by the Americans to ensure good food distribution in the years following the war. I constantly marvel at how good the JA is for ensuring the local produce makes it to a local market.

In any case, even now, virtually every person who was a child during WWII in Japan suffers from severe osteoporosis which is apparently a result of malnutrition as a child. For those who have never been here (especially in the countryside), a huge percentage of the population over the age of 70 is doubled over, unable to stand upright (they are still out in the fields working, though... which blows my mind on a daily basis). The difference between health issues for the elderly in Japan and my home country of Canada is really amazing.

Again, I have no idea about any of this stuff, but my experience here in Japan lends some credence to the idea that a land invasion of Japan would have been completely unnecessary. Just keep mining the seas and in a year the war would have been over, I think.

One of the most ironic things about thinking about this is that without the unconditional surrender of Japan, I think it is unlikely that MacArthur would have had as much success in rebuilding the country. I think I would get no argument from anybody here that some of the best things of modern Japanese culture arose from that period.

To be honest, when I see articles about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wish people didn't dwell so much about the decisions made at the time. However you slice it, war produces incredible amounts of suffering. The idea that no matter how atrocious one side behaves, we can always pull out an atrocity that will shock them out of their behaviour is crazy. Possibly it is the only way we know how to operate, but I refuse to believe that it is the only way that can be effective.

They used to say that WWI was the war to end all wars because we would remember how awful it was. But it didn't take us long to realize that we didn't have the tools to stop another world war. We need to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only to avoid these disasters, but all of the disasters that come from the situations that led up to it. To think that we allowed the situation to get so bad that we can justify nuclear weapons -- that is what is scary. To think that we weighed the possible outcomes of hundreds of thousands dying in a land invasions, millions dying in a mass starvation, or tens or hundreds of thousands dying in a nuclear explosion. That's lunacy.

www.defence.gov tells me that the budget for the military is 585 billion this year. I assume that does not include the CIA. Where is the government "department for avoiding war"? I seem to see that the budget for the UN is $5.5 billion. 1% of the military budget. Will history repeat itself, or will we try to remember and learn from it?