No, not a miracle. Widely accepted propaganda. It is true that there may well have been a substantial saving in total lost lives. But it was an extreme propaganda excess to suggest that this number was in the millions. I was just a young lad at the time, but I was paying a lot of attention to what was happening, because I was having, like Diogenes, great difficulty finding an honest man.

I had already concluded that people don’t really even need a good reason to lie, especially to children. I was still chaffing over Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. I could not fathom why grown people would deliberately feed little children this sort of nonsense.

My father, a Presbyterian minister at the time, was a consummate liar with the children of his congregation, of every age.

The best of liars sow great confusion, expertly blending a lot of truth with strategic error and falsity. They capitalize on the deep wish to believe.

I do not believe my father ever prayed. He preyed. And when the Presbyterian Church tired of transferring him into new congregations, they cut him loose in a cosmetic way (simply retiring him, with the gift of a new car), leaving it for the rest of his immediate family to cope with carnage and criminality they should have and could have addressed more appropriately.

Not a second thought was given to his wife and children and what they had to deal with. How very Catholic of the Presbyterian Heirachy.

But I digress. Getting back to the bombings of the two pristine, non-strategic civilian target cities, it is not just a matter of should we have or shouldn’t we have. Could we have done it in such a way as to reduce casualties? Could we have accomplished the same purpose with only the immediate loss of fifty thousand souls, instead of almost triple that? Could the first bomb have been dropped a few miles off the coast of Japan? Then we would still have done significant damage, but at the same time have demonstrated a certain restraint to the rest of the watchful world. Such restraint might well have had a salutary effect on international politics.

I was once unable to avoid being face to face with General LeMay who was a central planner in these bombings, and who, seventeen years after Hiroshima, advocated much more aggressive actions than we ultimately employed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Actions which could quite easily have ended all life as we know it on Earth (at almost the first moment in time in which that was really possible).

This is called latent lethality. Ususally starts with a whole body dose of 200-350 cGy. But even then up 50% can survive with supportive care. 350-550 cGy you have maybe 10% chance of surviving. One of the best things you can do if you recieve above 550 cGy is dig your own grave as it will cut down on the resulting disease associated with rotting bodies.

It was not neccesarry, and most generals agree Japan was ready to surrender.”[/quote]

too bad that all people cant be as all knowing as you seem to be.