Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Are you being deliberately facetious?

Operation Downfall, the plan for the invasion of Japan which was cancelled as the Japanese surrendered after the second A-Bomb would have been horrendous. A fiercely loyal Imperial Army was already making plans to shore up the few places you can invade the Japanese main islands properly from. There would also have been a large and hostile civillian population quite willing to die for the Emperor too. Deaths would have been high on both sides if that had happened.

A study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated 90 days of fighting to establish and secure the main Honshu island would have been half a million American dead (and far more Japanese dead). If the fighting went on another 90 days to capture Tokyo it would have been around 1.4million dead just for the US alone. The plans to capture Japan made D-Day look like a training exercise...

William Shockley's study for the Secretary of War estimated that conquering Japan would cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000–800,000 fatalities, and five to ten million Japanese fatalities.

None of these estimates were based on crystal balls but came from very serious and educated people. You have a pitifully childish mentality towards the greatest conflict in human history.

N.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

So instead of invading Japan they just nuked it. Had no-one invented the concept of a third option back then?

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

I think most people would have wanted one, except those in power in Japan. The Emperor had virtually no authority, and most elements of the Japanese armed forces would probably not only have fought to the death but also operated something similar to a scorched earth policy. Although I question the dropping of the second bomb, the solution taken was almost certainly the lesser of two evils.

Do you have a suggestion of what a third option might have been?

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

The US should have dropped the bomb on an uninhabited Japanese Island or on the mainland in a sparsely populated area. That would be enough to send the Japanese a message.

Even if the Americans thought the above was not going to convince the Japanese, they could have given the Japanese more time after the 1st bomb, instead of dropping the 2nd only 3 days later. It wasn't like Japan was going to mount an offensive as their force projection was destroyed , so the US could have just waited.

They could have followed a plan of waiting from the very start, without even resorting to the A-Bombs, they could have cut embargoed Japan.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Pop round to their house with a homemade cake and a box of matcha.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

They dropped two bombs killing around 240,000 people - they didn't nuke the whole of Japan.

What would you suggest as a third option looking back with your evidently immense knowledge of military history?

N.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Always easy to look back and second guess people's actions during Total War...and just as easy to dismiss those guesses.

Japan was already embargoed. It responded by invading much of South East Asia in addition to years of brutalising China and Korea. It was declared Total War - the sheer brutality of the Japanese against anyone they fought, the millions of civilians experimented on, raped, put to the sword, babies spiked on bayonets, the death marches, use of chemical weapons, the poisoning of rivers when they were pushed back by the Chinese and the countless atrocities Japan has never truly apologised for make two nukes for the price of peace seem quite a good deal.

Let's put the total dead in the two nuclear bombs into perspective of the time: Upper estimates state 240,000 died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'll take 250,000 for the sake of rounding numbers.

Then we can look at the Battle of Kursk alone which tallied some 250,000+ deaths - and by total dead that was number eight in the battles of world war two. To give you an idea of how nasty world war two was - 1.2 million died in the capturing of Berlin and the ending of the Third Reich...that's just one city and it happened in about 20 days. (another comparison: the total dead in the Arab-Israeli conflict which everyone is always harping on about from 1947 until today has been around 100,000...including civilians - more people have died in road accidents in the USA in that time probably).

So Uncle Sam ended the war with two bombs and a fraction of the human life cost of the top 8 battles of the war...number one being Stalingrad where between 1.2 and 1.7 million people died. It was a nasty war and the numbers show no one was giving up easily on either side.

Japan is now one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world - why is this even being brought up? The topic at hand is state sponsored child rape in Iran and Saudi Arabia not military history.

N.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

My dentist's wife is Iranian and was telling me her parents married when they were both 13. She wasn't necessarily condoning it but did say they had been happy all their lives.
So that makes it OK then.

You are mental.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Not too sure why you quoted me there when I was answering someones question about the legal ages. I am also sure there are childhood sweethearts that meet at 13 and get married in the west, some will work some wont. I can guarantee though that both parents would not be letting them have sex at that age and if they did I hope the authorities would take the appropriate action............

And Norm is also absolutely right with the figures when it comes to lives lost. They were far less fatalities by dropping the bombs, not that I condone it. But when people argue about lives lost the facts are there for all to see Bombs v Land War.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

I just wondered if they had got married below the legal age.

I think the point is that it's more difficult to lay down the law to other cultures when we are obviously not blameless.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Waiting between bomb 1 and 2, or using them on an uninhabited island, as Boomhauer suggested.


250,000 does sound like a bargain when compared to the millions in estimates. Still, it is chilling to imagine an entire city looking up to see death falling from a plane.


The dentists' wife's parents who got married at thirteen may have worked because that's the way things were back then. Iran is much more urbanised now and that kind of child abuse would be far less common now. It simply would not work practically to have children getting married, for many of the same reasons why it wouldn't work in any civilised place.


The Iranian authorities are merely posturing (which they love doing as we all know) , in this case they are trying to keep up with the Saudilanders. Over there it is still possible to rape a child and still be considered respectable. Nobody even has to know you've just gotten married, let alone to whom and how. If you're a man.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

One of the more disturbing things i have read is about a Saudi 80+ man who got an "implant" before marrying a girl in her teens, and how the man was congratulated in hospital by his family members, including children, on the successful "operation"

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

The war was effectively ended before the bombs were dropped, America had all the time in the world to deal with Japan. So it wasn't a war at that point .

You are talking about events that happened Before the US destroyed Japan's ability to invade and project force. Just prior to the A-bombs, Japan was effectively defeated, Japan had no navy to speak of, she could not move out of Japan and do anything.

Uncle Sam didn't need to drop the A-Bombs, Japan was over, she could not move out of her island. So to compare the deaths from the A-Bombs to that of some WW2 battles is erroneous because there was no risk of losing the war in the days just prior to dropping the A-Bombs.

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

So, to summarise all these logical fallacies and wild conjecture...

Should we nuke Iran and Saudi?

Re: Child marriage in Iran & KSA
 

Are you suggesting that based on this anedotal evidence that Iran's policy of now allowing girls as young as 9 to be married is not something we should be concerned about (especially since we can instead go off on completely unrelated subjects like nuclear weapons use in world war two, right?).

I'm curious if you would be happy seeing your own daughter married off at that age - especially when the most common way is for much older men to marry young girls. And some of these girls die because their bodies are not mature enough to handle sexual intercourse and/or childbirth?

What exactly are you trying to say? Please explain yourself? Are you condoning paedophilia or just saying sometimes it works out ok?

I was not attempting to evaluate the moral implications of this or provide a justification. I was providing an explanation based on what the people at the time did, thought and said about it.

You don't seem to know the difference between explanations and justifications. But go ahead and keep calling me mental - as you keep jumping to false conclusions, providing ambiguous statements which appear to condone child marriage.

N.