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Persuasive Essay On The Atomic Bomb

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In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt approved the funding for the American-led effort to develop an atomic weapon. This project was codenamed “The Manhattan Project.” The original motivation to create an atomic bomb was out of fear that Nazi Germany was pursuing their own atomic project. When the United States successfully tested their nuclear weapon in July 1945, Germany had already surrendered, and the focus of the Allied powers was on the defeat of Imperial Japan. Ultimately, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities in early August 1945, leading to the end of the Second World War. The dropping of the bombs led to over 150,000 civilian and military deaths. Despite the massive loss of innocent life, I believe that the United …show more content…

Conservative estimates have said that a million lives could have been lost had the US launched a full assault on the Japanese home islands. Strictly looking at the numbers, dropping the atomic bombs saved nearly a million lives. Also, Imperial Japanese forces controlled hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indonesian people in 1945. On average, about 10,000 civilians and POWs under Japanese rule were killed every week the war continued. Not only were the bombs dropped to save the lives of those American soldiers that were invading the Japanese homeland, but it also saved the lives of innocent civilians in mainland Asia who were suffering under Japanese rule. In addition to these innocent civilians, by the end of the war, Japanese military leaders were training civilians to fight. It was the Japanese belief that despite the lack of military training, these civilians, often women, would overcome American soldiers with their “Japanese spirit”. These soldiers would have stood no chance against a well trained American Marine, especially a Marine who had just fought at Peleliu and Okinawa. Marines who had fought in these previous battles would have been so mentally and physically fatigued that the difference between civilian and soldier would have been indistinguishable. These “trained” Japanese civilians would have been annihilated by US soldiers. The mental effects

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