I’m confused about why Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction are characterized by Bush as ‘evil’ and ours are not. What could be more ‘evil’ than dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and killing countless innocent civilians? Is it only ‘evil’ when you use such weapons on your own people? Why can’t we just re-tool Saddam’s weapons to accept that ‘good’ ingredient all of our weapons contain? Maybe Bush should be working on making sure that the entire worlds supply of weapons are made so they only explode love and happiness upon unsuspecting enemies.

Ka-Blam! Oh look honey...marigolds! What a thoughtful enemy we have.

Well, I’m a liberal leftist, and I feel that the bombs in WW2 were justified. The situation was completely different from what we faced now: if we’d waited to invade Japan with Operation: Olympic, a million US casualties were the best guesses by the military. No idea what the Japanese would lose.

There’s a time for WMD, and this ain’t about that at all.

One bomb was justified, two was “Wow! did you see that? Let’s do it again”. Sure it saved lives, but it took lives too so is it only wrong when they kill us but not when we kill them? Is it less evil because a million projected casualities were averted? Do the ends justify the means?

I am not trying to say that because we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima we are as bad as Saddam, but I would point out that our hands are not clean and we are still the only country to ever use a nuclear device on another country. My argument is against the hyperbole being pitched about evil them and good us. God is on our side. Damn the torpedos.

If someone puts a bullet in Saddam’s head and then in the heads of his sons I would not shed a tear, the man is a vile turd. His sons are rapists and sadists. I believe the Iraqi people have a better shot at a happier life witout them. But let’s be clear...we will use our evil weapons of mass destruction if he uses his.

WW2 was fought on a scale we can’t even comprehend today. Just look at the Eastern Front, and the sheer number of Soviet soldiers and civilians killed in the war (about 30 million).

I do believe the bombs were justified. Hell, more people died in Dresden from the firebombing than from either of the atomic weapons, and that was just traditional bombing with napalm.

That nuclear bombs haven’t been used since is a testament to the world’s realization of their destructive abilities.

Not that I’d put it past terrorist organizations or N. Korea to use them at a moment’s notice.

While I wasn’t originally arguing justification (although admittedly my vitriolic outbursts do tend to be somewhat muddled at times) I still maintain that one bomb may have been justified but not the second. The firestorm that destroyed Dresden was certainly horrific but I do not think that it was the intent of those doing the carpet bombing to create such an effect. Of course they wanted to rain down destruction on the Germans, but who could have forseen the cyclone of fire that resulted, sucking all of the oxygen out of the city and reducing it to ash?

When we dropped the first atomic bomb nobody knew what the effect would be. Would it ignite the atmosphere and kill all life on earth?

One of Teller’s bright ideas was also very frightening. Late in the conference, he arrived one day with calculations suggesting the possibility that the fission reaction in the atomic bomb might generate enough heat not merely to trigger the super bomb but to set the earth’s atmosphere afire. The idea of an atomic chain reaction run amok was not new. Ernest Rutherford, who posited the structure of the atom, had suggested in 1903 that it was conceivable that “a wave of atomic disintegration” might be initiated that would destroy the planet.

Obviously that did not happen but after the first detonation the terrible destructive power of this weapon were evident. My original post was pointing out that “weapons of mass destruction”, no matter who uses them, are “evil” (not in the religous sense, just that they are reprehensible). The second bomb was dropped after the devastating effects from the first could be seen, the intent was to punish the enemy who had the audacity to hit us on our American soil, and justified or not the weapons are horrible no matter who uses them.