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The U.S. never even bothered to warn the Japanese that we were going to drop the a-bomb on them if they didn’t surrender.
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Well, I've always thought this was covered by the message sent to Japan in late July that stated
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The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan....The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.(Potsdam Declaration July 26, 1945).
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I would say that the A-bomb basically did exactly what the US, UK and China told Japan they would do.
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This is the stuff the Greek tragedies are made of: People with good intentions drift into a catastrophy they believe not to be or actually ARE not able to prevent.
Cynical as it may sound to some who can't follow my semantics: A villain butchering his victim is what I consider sad/gruesome/horrible/... but not "tragic".
Calling the holocaust a "tragedy" (and I'm talking about the sense here and not the actual words) is IMHO one of the biggest mistakes still made in my country or Germany. It is fatalistic and suggests that the German people (and especially the active Nazis) had no choices against their doing. It presents this ultimate regress of civilisation as their inevitable fate, which is just not true. These people had choices and made the wrongest ones possible.
This is not a tragedy, it is wrongdoing.
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There is a reason some can't follow your semantics, it's because what you really mean seems doesn't seem directly related to the words that you use. Were not talking about plays, or other works of art, we're talking about a real event where real people died. I would suggest you consult a good dictionary.
tragedy:
1)a) A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.
b) The genre made up of such works.
c) The art or theory of writing or producing these works.
2) A play, film, television program, or other narrative work that portrays or depicts calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending.
3) A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life4) A tragic aspect or element.
As the WWII was not a literary work, a work of art, a play, a film or a television program, the acceptable definition to be appled to a statement like "the bombing of Hiroshima and "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century." would be #3.
[ 02-16-2004, 01:30 AM: Message edited by: Seraph ]