That’s why navies stopped using broadsides and went to turrets about 150 years ago. Well, it’s one of the reasons anyway. Turrets also worked a lot better once you shifted to steam power and didn’t have to worry so much about rigging. Additionally, you could mount a much bigger gun on a turret than you could using broadsides on the sides of a wooden sailing ship.

Or, you know, they want to make sure that the hostages aren’t executed before they agree to a cease fire.

This is like asking for medical advice on a naturopathic forum; sure you might get some vaguely correct answers, but mostly it’s just going to be a lot of feel-good nonsense from partisan idiots who want to see the world in black and white.

Typical oversimplified tripe. Soviet bodies played a huge role, but US and British mechanized force projection, naval power and industrial capacity were at least as important.

It’s also just bullshit that the Axis had already lost. That’s the worst kind of historical revisionism. It might be obvious to us looking back, but it wasn’t even remotely obvious to anyone alive then.

Close. What they were worried about was a hot war with the Soviets. There was also a great deal of uncertainty about Japanese willingness to continue to fight. It’s simply not the case that they had clear unambiguous intelligence on Japanese leadership’s intentions, which makes sense since there were several schools of thought among the Japanese.

Any respected historian on the subject will tell you that it’s way more complicated and nuanced than your average social media user is aware of. If, like Truman, you honestly believed that using atomic bombs on Japan would ultimately result in less loss of life, on a purely mathematical basis it was the only moral decision.

Well that and the fact that there was a huge Irish-American population that was hostile towards the UK in ways that I think a lot of younger people and non-historians have really lost sight of because it’s not really a thing anymore. The idea of taking sides with the British Empire was a very tough pill for a lot of Irish-Americans, most of whom, unlike today, still had direct connections to Ireland. The famine was no longer really in living memory, but the children of the famine survivors were definitely still alive and influential and they absolutely despised the British for understandable reasons.

History is always way more complex and nuanced than some half-baked one-liner trope on social media.

I mean, that’s part of the given justification for the veto, but it doesn’t take a PhD in international relations to figure out that the real reason is obviously that both the US and Israel --and a number of other relevant players-- are currently knee-deep in operations and negotiations and that a cease fire, by changing the dynamic on the ground, would seriously screw those efforts.

My guess is that Israel has a plan that it wants to execute before implementing any cease-fire, and that the US is on-board with it for now.

Unlike most social media users, I don’t feel like I know enough to take a position on whether this veto is morally justifiable or not. On its face it seems kind of lame, but I can easily think of reasons why it might actually be entirely justified. We will see.