John Turco said:
Yes, but without the US providing post-WWII "protection," so to speak,
wouldn't Europe have returned to its traditional, warlike ways?
Thats harder to say. It does seem pretty clear that the only reason
the krauts were actually stupid enough to let that fool Adolf drive the
bus was the rather desperate economic situation they ended up in
after the great depression and reparations etc. Once he was driving
the bus, it wasnt feasible to get rid of him, even when it became
clear that he was about to get involved in another military adventure
and that that was coming unstuck pretty spectacularly eventually.
You can make a case that the krauts got so dramatically mentally
scarred by the result they got that they wouldnt have been stupid
enough to let anyone get that much power again, even without
the Marshall Plan stuff that revived the kraut economy so effectively.
Certainly the east krauts didnt appear to be interested in
getting involved in invading anyone even when they never
did get anything like the Marshall Plan result themselves.
Harder to say what they would have done if say
Honecker had been into invading adjacent countrys
and the russians hadnt stomped on that tho.
Certainly the Japs got so mentally crippled by the
outcome that they got that they werent stupid
enough to let their military rule the roost again.
And then there's the other massive change to the
psychology that the bomb produced. Tends to change
things pretty dramatically when the consequence of
attempting to rule the world is that your country ends
up fried from end to end in an hour or two etc.
Its never been very clear what produces big changes in
mentality, why the Vikings rampaged all over the place for a
long time and then got sick of that and dont bother anymore etc.
No evidence that the worst of the eastern europeans will come
to their senses any century soon, but with the clamoring of so
many of them to get into the EU now, maybe things are changing
there too. Gunna be interesting to see if Greece and Turkey will
actually be stupid enough to try ripping each others throats out again
and if they dont, it wont have been anything to do with the yanks.
France quickly and completely collapsed, against Nazi
Germany; so, what chance would it have stood, against
the Communist hordes that engulfed Eastern Europe?
There isnt much evidence that russia even wanted to do that.
They certainly wanted to ensure that they wouldnt ever be
invaded again, but there isnt any real evidence that they
ever wanted to invade France at the end of WW2 and would
have done that if the yanks had decided to do nothing about it.
Perhaps not, yet his intelligence services >had< to be aware of the
Manhattan Project and its successes. (The declassified "Venona Papers"
tend to back up this idea, clearly proving Soviet espionage's shocking
penetration of the highest levels of US government.)
There wasnt much of that info available at the end of WW2 in europe.
Also, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki must've discouraged any of Stalin's
plans, concerning a Russian invasion of Japan.
Dunno, he took some encouraging to get involved
with Japan directly after WW2 had ended in europe.
That may have been one of the main American
motives for such drastic actions, in the first place.
Unlikely given that they encourage him to get involved
against Japan before it became clear that the bomb
would bring the Japs to their senses.
It wasnt even completely clear that the bomb would do that,
they could have been rabid enough to carry on regardless.
The damage to Tokyo that was done with convential bombing
was actually much worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The main advantage to the US was that the bomb involved
no real risk of any losses on the US side and was much
more operationally simpler once the bomb was available.
Well, I wasn't implying that the US could eliminate >war<, itself.
I'd been contemplating the disastrous "world wars," mostly.
Yeah, its clear that they are gone for good now. If
Vietnam and Korea didnt produce one, nothing will now.
