Letter: President Ronald Reagan Believed in ‘Peace Through Strength,’ As Do I

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Neville Chamberlain was naive, he didn’t understand Adolph Hitler. Chamberlain, England’s prime minister, thought he could appease Hitler, who would be satisfied, ergo would not go to war.  

The prime minister of England was exceedingly wrong. Hitler intended to crush all the nations that defeated Germany in World War I.  Lesson:  Appeasement is always a losing strategy when dealing with homicidal maniac tyrants like Kim Jung Un of communist North Korea.

President Reagan believed that if the USA is overwhelmingly strong militarily and economically, tyrants will then mostly not test your resolve.  

Japan was perhaps a rule exception at the beginning of World War II. Japanese Admiral Yamamoto told Prime Minister Tojo et al, “Do not wake up the sleeping giant, the USA.”  

Japan didn’t listen but attacked Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, destroying many warships and over 2,000 men on that “Day of Infamy,” as FDR stated. The USA went to war. Admiral Yamamoto was correct. Germany, Japan and Italy were totally defeated by late August 1945, in 4.67 years (I was then 11 years old.) 

The USA managed to design and build the first atom bombs just barely in time to negate an invasion of Japan. Japan had decided to defend its islands to the last man, woman and child.  

Estimates are that an invasion would have cost over a million American men’s lives and 3 or 4 million Japanese lives.  President Harry Truman made the correct decision to use nukes to force Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese military to surrender unconditionally.  

It took two nukes, one each for Hiroshima and Nagasaki military targets.  

The Japanese had co-located their military industry with residential areas; to hit the military targets, you had to take out the people. 

It was unfortunate, but not as bad as the saturation fire-bombing of Tokyo and other cities that had already occurred.  

It cost far fewer Japanese lives to use nukes to end the war than to use conventional weapons.

Arguing we could take the money we spend on nukes and spend it on other things is disingenuous, not useful.  With Japan defeated but without American nukes, the U.S. would now either be speaking Russian or Mandarin; they do have nukes.  

We can ask what it is worth to more than 320 million American citizens to have our God-given freedoms, our own country, language and society. We love God, the USA, our Constitution and flag. We reject Russia’s Putin or China’s Xi communist-atheist tyrannies.   

We favor improving our ICBM’s MIRV’s (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) as Russia recently did. 



I agree with President Trump that we must immediately cancel the harmful Obama/Clinton 2011 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty; it is in our security interest to upgrade our strategic triad. It’s past time to implement effective space-based Ballistic Missile Defense [BMD], e.g. Brilliant Pebbles.

Given a forced choice between communist North Korea’s Phat Kim Jung Un et al being vaporized or U.S. citizens being vaporized by Phat Kim, loyal American citizens agree Phat Kim et al must be eliminated, not our USA cities.

 Most sincerely and with Sorrow,

 

John F. Cramer 

Onalaska

 

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