williepete
Platinum Member
- Banned
- #41
Two questions:
1. What were Stalin's "post war ambitions", and how do we know about them?
2. How many lives did the use of atomic bombs save, and how do we know that?
Hi Mememe,
The short answer to both questions is to read the 3 books in my post. They are written by historians far better than I'll ever be.
I'll try to be very brief:
What were Stalin's "post war ambitions", and how do we know about them? Stalin's post war ambitions were: 1. To create a ring of communist-controlled countries around the Soviet Union to act as a buffer between the USSR and what he considered to be the aggressive imperialistic Western countries. The Soviet Union had just survived a brutal war which left millions dead and a devastated land. In building a buffer, the Soviets intended to protect themselves from ever being invaded again. 2. Advance international communist interests by ultimately overthrowing every democratic nation and incorporating them into the communist sphere. We know about the international communist agenda by their often-stated goals, written directives and actions in the Cold War. We know about Stalin's paranoia by documents recently (post 1989) revealed by the fall of the USSR. I recommend the dozens of new books out since the fall of the USSR which have used interior Soviet documents as source material. We know about Soviet global strategy from the history of the 60-year-long Cold War. There is no end to books, records, interviews and living persons with first hand knowledge of the Cold War. (Your humble servant being one of them).
2. How many lives did the use of atomic bombs save, and how do we know that? The short answer is we'll never know since we have only one outcome. You'll drive yourself crazy in a fruitless pursuit trying to chase alternative historical outcomes. As I stated in my post, by projecting the smaller scale losses at Okinawa to the proposed larger scale invasion of the Japanese mainland, the figure of 1 million dead Allied soldiers and sailors was reached. With a kill ratio of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 or 1 to you-make-up-the-number, you're looking at combined Allied and Japanese losses well into the millions. Given the Japanese preference to kill themselves rather than surrender as evidenced on Saipan and Okinawa, the Allied war leaders were faced with a potential tally sheet that was off the scale. Just for our discussion, let's pick the low kill ratio of 1 to 3. One million dead Allied men plus 3 million dead Japanese equals 4 million dead. Mind you, this is a very low estimate. The difference between 4 million and the 110,000 estimated dead from the two atomic bombs would be the estimated number of lives saved. Those were the kind of numbers driving the decision makers in 1945.
I hope this helped but please read the books if you find this topic interesting.
Cheers,
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