Without perspective, it's easy to say that the bomb shouldn't have been used. Once one learns of the other details of the war, and gains perspective, it's obvious that it was going to be used.
We're still awarding the Purple Heart medals that were produced in vast quantities in WW2 in expectation of the invasion of Japan. (or so I've heard)
I listened to this >2h essay about the atomic bombing over a year ago. I'm writing mostly from memory, so there might be errors in my summary.
I think the argument was that the reason for the atomic bombing was not really a military necessity (fleet admirals Leahy and Nimitz at least seemed to think so). The Japanese were already signaling they were willing to surrender well before the bomb dropped -- but not yet _unconditionally_. The one condition they had was that the emperor had to stay in place and should not be punished for the war. The US could have chosen to accept this condition and end the war, but didn't for a variety of reasons (none of them military).
> The one condition they had was that the emperor had to stay in place and should not be punished for the war. The US could have chosen to accept this condition and end the war, but didn't for a variety of reasons (none of them military).
They did end up doing so, but they insisted on unconditional surrender regardless. Even though they knew that they would end up meeting the singular Japanese condition.
You are conflating two separate things. The Japanese were willing to stop hostilities before Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but only if they kept large chunks of China, the mandates, and Korea. In other words, only if their war gains and goals were recognized. After the bombing they were willing to surrender. Period. Contrary to popular myth, United States never made any formal guarantee that the emperor would stay in power. In fact, it was only because of MacArthur that he did so. All they committed to that allowed the Japanese to surrender with any minimal amount of face saving was re-iterating the long-held American position that people should choose their own government.
It is unknown, and will forever be unknown, exactly which terms the Japanese would have agreed to in the event of an earnest attempt at a negotiated peace, because there was no earnest attempt at a negotiated peace. Truman was dead-set on achieving an unconditional surrender, mostly because of US public opinion.
But all in all, based on historical evidence and testimony, I find the case that, even without the bomb, Japan would have eventually surrendered on terms acceptable to the Allies the more convincing one.
> The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons
— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy
> The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
> In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
> Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
- 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey report
My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better than a land invasion, but I find the arguments against at least giving the Japanese a demonstration of the bomb - even just the footage of the Trinty test - beforehand fairly weak.
Yes, it's likely - given the Imperial Japanese military's overall disposition - that it wouldn't have been enough to cause them to surrender, in which case using the bomb on a target would be the next step. And yes, advance notice might have made those operations more difficult. But given the horror it unleashed on innocent civilians, I think the Allies had a moral obligation to try it.
> My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better than a land invasion.
Years ago I asked my buddy what was his take on dropping the bomb. He answered that when the bombs dropped, his dad was in Florida training for the invasion of Japan.
There's no snappy reply to that particular argument.
How about "it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/united-...
Ah yes, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, how could they ever be unbiased in concluding that bombing people to smithereens inevitably leads to surrender. No, I'm disinclined to trust their opinion.
We in the modern day have the benefit of being able to pull examples from more than just WW2. Before WW2, the predictions of air power theorists were that strategic bombing would end wars before the powers could properly start mobilizing (look up Giulio Douhet, this was seriously argued). Japan in WW2 is the closest any example of strategic bombing has ever come to compelling a surrender, out of a dozen or so attempts. Its exceptionality is itself a suggestion that maybe bombing's role in Japanese surrender is perhaps inflated.
People also underestimate how much death came from our firebombing which would have continued, and would have come from blockade-induced starvation, relative to the nuclear bomb deaths.
It's not like the numbers would have been lower...
This is a fair criticism (although the generally accepted story is precisely that 'bombing people to smithereens' with atomic weapons led to surrender), but the evidence they based that opinion on is generally available. Having looked at it myself, I wouldn't have said everything they did with quite the same level of confidence, but I agree with their broad strokes opinion that it was most likely possible to achieve a Japanese surrender in a reasonable time-frame without dropping the atomic bombs or invading.
My sense of it is that there was a strong feeling of the need to punish the Japanese, quite apart from any military necessity. I think that, combined with the need to demonstrate the power of the new weapons lead to a reluctance to seriously engage with the Japanese diplomatically. I take as evidence of that the fact that a key sticking point in the surrender decision was the status of the Emperor, who ultimately wasn't removed by the US anyway. The allies could have made their terms much clearer much earlier, and they could have engaged with the Japanese attempts to seek peace much more. And of course there was the ongoing worry that the Soviet Union might gain too much if things weren't sorted out quickly.
From Truman's diaries at the time:
> Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time.
One of my relatives was in Korea staging to invade when the bomb dropped. It is very likely a whole branch of my family would not exist without the bomb.
> Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass destruction, to defend themselves.
Not according to the Geneva convention. Targeting civilians is a war crime, regardless of who does it.
In many wars, both sides claim to only defend themselves, often both sides even claim to have been attacked first. Just look at the last few wars fought by the US for example. Under such a simplistic moral compass as you gave, they'd both feel justified to do anything.
> Attacking to with intent to kill even one person is crime.
Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian center is attacking with intent to kill.
Yes, wars are not simple. Fog of war may make it blurry, or enemy may fool each other. For example, soviets shelled their own territory in Finnish war, to pretend that they were attacked first, so they are defending. Russians are using same thing too: they blown up their own buildings to blame Chechen and then started second Chechen war, or, in case of Russo-Ukrainian war, they pretend that Ukraine will be swallowed by NATO and then European and American homosexuals will freely fuck Russian-speaking Ukrainian children, so Russians are invaded to protect Ukrainians!
However, this should not alter your moral compass. Those, who defend themselves, have moral rights to wipe the attackers or invaders.
I don't think there was much in the Geneva Conventions about targeting civilians until 1949 and the 4th Geneva convention. Maybe there was something about bombarding civilians from ships at sea.
I’m pretty sure morality and moral compass predate the Geneva Conventions, though. Just because it was not “sanctioned” doesn’t mean it was necessarily moral, and WEIZSÄCKER’s comment indeed shows it.
More probably exist because of the bomb. A land invasion would've killed an order of magnitude more Japanese, and of course plenty of Americans as well.
And now contrast that to all the families in Japan that do not exist because them.
War is ugly, strategic bombing never worked, proponents knew that (they saidnsouch in their own contemporary reports and statements, going as far as knowing strategic bombing of civilians was in deed a war crime). Nuclear bombs are a contiuation of of strategic bombing, and as strategic bombing goes, they were an unnecessary war crime.
Why does this affect whether it is a war crime or not?
Imperial Japan committed numerous war crimes, whether or not they agreed that they were war crimes at the time. By the same token anything that was done to them should not be judged by what their own standard was.
> by which standard that Imperial Japan recognized and adhered to?
Admonishment to get some damn perspective. What was done to Japan must be evaluated in the context of what Japan would have been doing to American soldiers and POWs had America been forced to invaded Japan proper. That war was non-stop war crimes from Japan. Particularly perfidy, false surrender, which would have gotten huge numbers of Japanese civilians killed in any case. Truman made the right call, for America and for Japan.
I have admitted that the Allies committed war crimes, so why aren't you satisfied? Why are you upset that I insist on pointing out that the Japanese did so as well?
If American war crimes are worth mentioning, then so are Japanese war crimes. Wanting to discuss one without the other isn't reasonable. What you are asking for is the erasure of context, and to that I say No.
Ego mostly, I guess its harder to be righteous and above others if you have some dark spot in your history. Also, some folks don't like complexity of real world so black and white is what they want, and obviously being on good side.
In context though the allies didn't see the difference. Missing from this account is that Japanese civilians were being continuously bombed. More died in the Tokyo firebombings then Hiroshima.
There's also the practical problems: how would you do it? How would you give the demonstration? How would you deliver the tape? And why would Japan believe an enemy claiming to have a superweapon? It'd be kind of like North Korea sending a film of why the US should now surrender because of their new space laser.
As I suggested already: whether the Japanese believed them or took it seriously is moot. Giving them the opportunity to surrender in response to the bomb helps shift moral blame onto them.
Whether the Allies cared much or not is also moot in terms of what they should've done, morally speaking. Clearly my opinion is they didn't care enough. Clearly I find the firebombings morally disgraceful as well. Clearly, at least some people involved in the decision cared a little, as several people did lobby for a demonstration. The US also was known to airdrop pamphlets encouraging civilian evacuation of cities; civilians weren't a total non-concern.
It's not anything like North Korea threatening the US with a space laser. For a multitude of reasons: US spy capability means they would know well in advance the details of any North Korean space laser. North Korea isn't an alliance of the most powerful nations in the world with leading scientific and military capability. And if North Korea did indeed demonstrate a space laser that could obliterate a city in a fraction of a second, you'd better believe the US would stand up and take notice, for that matter.
Moreover, at the time an atomic bomb wasn't science fiction. Everyone at that point had known that an atomic bomb was possible for decades; both the Germans and the Japanese were trying to develop one. Given that, if the Americans said, "we've succeeded in developing one and intend to use it to destroy your cities unless you surrender", along with a demonstration of in action, it wouldn't be unthinkable that the Japanese would take it seriously - nor would it be particularly different from the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded surrender lest they face "utter destruction" without any specifics, which the Allies did indeed think was worth saying.
Delivering a reel of film would have been straightforward; even in total war all communication channels aren't cut off. If you want to do a real-world demonstration that can be observed, find a place to detonate it where it will be observed but will do minimal damage. The Manhattan Project involved solving many, many problems; this is just another one, and a relatively small one at that. When confronted with a problem, you figure it out.
> North Korea isn't an alliance of the most powerful nations in the world with leading scientific and military capability.
> Moreover, at the time an atomic bomb wasn't science fiction.
After the original Hiroshima bombing the principle reaction of the Japanese government was surprise. The Japanese were well aware of the idea of nuclear weapons, but believed they would be impractically large like the Germans did - i.e. on the order of 10 tons of uranium needed for one bomb, and were surprised the US had that much.
> And if North Korea did indeed demonstrate a space laser that could obliterate a city in a fraction of a second, you'd better believe the US would stand up and take notice, for that matter.
But again: what would make the US believe it? Footage of the thing? Camera trickery was known in 1945. Firing it at field? You can fake that by pre-planting explosives/incendiaries. With modern technology the US might be able to observe the satellite, the laser, and the damage altogether but with the technology of 1945 how would any of this have been communicated?
> The US also was known to airdrop pamphlets encouraging civilian evacuation of cities; civilians weren't a total non-concern.
> if the Americans said, "we've succeeded in developing one and intend to use it to destroy your cities unless you surrender"
The Potsdam declaration[1] said what was coming, just not the scale.
The US also dropped pamphlets on Hiroshima telling civilians to leave[2] and showing pictures of the first detonation. They were ignored.
You're misunderstanding a few things about those leaflets (which isn't entirely your fault, that page is very poorly written).
My understanding is that the "LeMay leaflets" were dropped on Hiroshima - and many other cities - but they didn't say anything specific about the bomb; just that America was bombing cities and encouraging civilians to flee. But, as we know (and they knew), America was already bombing Japanese cities - there wasn't any indication anything "special" was coming. The pamphlets actually excluded Hiroshima from the list of cities that might be bombed (with the caveat that the list was incomplete). Civilians were on edge, but often couldn't leave for various reasons, trusted things like air raid sirens, believed that their distance from military targets kept them relatively free from danger, and so on. This is documented in the essential "Hiroshima" article by John Hersey.
And these warnings weren't entirely ignored - Hiroshima's population before the bombing was substantially smaller than it was before the war, in large part because many Japanese civilians who could had fled cities.
The "Hiroshima pamphlet" - the one depicted - was not dropped on Hiroshima. This is apparent if you read the text, which describes Hiroshima as already destroyed; or the fact that it shows an image of the explosion over Hiroshima, not the Trinity test.
This [0] Reddit link - which I found by googling about the LeMay pamphlets - goes further to claim (and support, in the links) that even those weren't dropped over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. IIRC this contradicts Hersey's reporting, FWIW.
(Incidentally, based on the username, that Reddit comment was probably written by someone cited in your link. Either that or it's an eerie coincidence.)
I'm not sure what in my comment you're specifically referring to, but...sure, I'll bite.
Let's split hairs. The Tokyo firebombings killed, per Wikipedia, 80K-130K civilians, depending on your estimate. Again per Wikipedia, Little Boy killed 70K-126K civilians, as well as an additional 7K-20K soldiers and 12 American POWs. Given those numbers, rather than "more deadly" I'd prefer to say "just as deadly".
You're far from the only one in this comment thread to do this, but...I don't understand why the fact that the firebombing of Tokyo was approximately just as deadly as Hiroshima is supposed to somehow absolve Hiroshima. Most people who think Hiroshima was a war crime also think Tokyo was a war crime. The way I prefer to approach moral analysis, personally, isn't especially utilitarian - once we start splitting hairs about which war crime was more or less moral I can't help but feel like we might've lost the plot.
Now, with that aside, we can play some games here. Tokyo was (and is) a city an order of magnitude bigger than Hiroshima; 100,000 dead in Tokyo vs. 100,000 dead in Hiroshima means, in a sense, the attack on Tokyo was an order of magnitude less vicious. Maybe "viciousness" of an attack isn't especially meaningful on its own - if the US bombed the middle of nowhere to make a point and only a handful of people died it definitely wouldn't be as evil, even if the strength of the attack was the same. But this did have practical consequences - the infrastructure of Hiroshima to deal with the situation was demolished utterly. This meant no health care or support for any survivors - supposedly exactly one doctor was left uninjured. People were just left to suffer for days. In Tokyo there was still some health care available, there were still some support networks; because the destruction - awful as it was - was so much less complete, there was a much better chance that survivors could lean on friends or family for support. So the suffering of the survivors in Hiroshima was much greater. In this awful utilitarian Olympics of evil, the atom bomb takes a point.
There is, of course, the issue of radiation sickness. We do intuitively feel that, regardless of the particular numbers involved, chemical or biological warfare is a red line that musn't be crossed. It's one thing to blow people up, it's another thing to poison them - or give children cancer, as the case may be. Truman himself felt that way - although the scientists at Los Alamos had some idea about radiation Truman didn't, and some believe he might not have approved using the atom bomb if he'd known [0]. In that light, Hiroshima was definitively less moral than the firebombings.
And I guess it's worth stating that the truly deadly firebombing of Tokyo, Operation Meetinghouse, didn't come out of nowhere. The US had been bombing Japanese cities for three years. Operation Meetinghouse wasn't a surprise; it wasn't the first bombing of a Japanese city, it wasn't the first firebombing (that was in Kobe), it wasn't even the first firebombing of Tokyo (which happened a month prior). Since my argument here has been primarily "the US should have given the Japanese an understanding of their capabilities and given them an opportunity to surrender in light of them", I think you can make the case that they had with Tokyo in a way that they hadn't with Hiroshima, and that - at least by my own standards - that makes Hiroshima far more morally problematic.
I’m more wondering aloud whether the option to surrender is just tacitly always on the table during war.
If the allies had said ‘we will firebomb Hiroshima unless you surrender’ it might almost seem like a meaningless endeavor since it’s hard to draw the line when you should alert your enemy of your next military action since ‘surrender’ is (probably) always tacitly assumed an option.
In this sense, giving an enemy an option to surrender (again) seems moot on the moral framework of ‘we are at war and will continue to bomb until the enemy officially surrenders, since we both know it is always an option.’
But the US had already destroyed multiple Japanese cities through firebombing and killed ~900k civilians. How would the threat to destroy one of the few surviving cities left have any creditability at that point?
What do you mean by "credibility"? By the definition as I understand it, "believability"...I don't see how the current war situation would affect that. If the US had destroyed many cities already, why wouldn't the Japanese believe that they'd be willing to destroy more?
If you mean something like, "why would the threat to wipe out a city have an impact?"...I mean, clearly it did, because it led very quickly to surrender.
But if you look at Japanese leadership at the time, even after two bombs were dropped, the military leadership still didn't want to surrender. So a demonstration likely would not have achieved anything.
Japanese leadership was zealous in the extreme, at a level that is difficult to understand from a modern perspective. The difference between Japan then and Japan now is an order of magnitude larger than the difference between America then and America now.
but I find the arguments against at least giving the Japanese a demonstration of the bomb - even just the footage of the Trinty test - beforehand fairly weak.
An enemy that doesn't surrender until you drop two atomic bombs on them was probably not going to surrender if you set one off in an unpopulated area as a demo.
I mean, I'd run up the white flag after being nuked once. You wouldn't have to tell me twice.
Consider how many people were dying EVERY DAY during World War 2. Sure, they may have been able to industrialize, but the world was in the midst of experiencing death on a scale we can't even really imagine today. The pressure to end the war must have been enormous. Which isn't to say that it was an easy, or even correct, decision, but we can't really do a simple calculation of "well they could have waited a few more weeks/months" and get a feel for the gravity of the situation.
Something that I've wondered - a kind of weakly held theory that, from various references, seems plausible - is:
The US military betrayed the trust of many of the scientists and engineers who worked on the atomic bomb, by not doing a demonstration of the bomb first for its enemies, before dropping the bomb on civilians.
I watched "Adventures of a Mathematician" yesterday which really, really dwells on Ulam's reluctance to work on a weapon of death. There is a dramatized scene there of how upset many of the scientists were, that the bomb was dropped without a demonstration. The movie is based on his memoir, and based on that, it really seems that the 'deal' that many of those scientists took, was something like a) we'll work on an atomic bomb so Germany won't get it b) but we won't use it recklessly, it'll be demonstrated first.
Now of course the military didn't promise that in so many words, but that seems to have been very strongly understood, and the fact that the bomb went directly to killing people seems like a violation of what so many of the people who made that bomb possible, expected.
They knew what they were doing, or should have but were lying to themselves. Even if some of them got verbal contract pinky promises when they signed on, all of them knew they were building a bomb which would be given not just to the current government but to future governments as well. It would take profound willful naivety to believe they had any meaningful assurances whatsoever.
The brutality of the Japanese military didn't mean innocent Japanese civilians deserved to suffer or die.
I don't know what nationality you are, but I have no doubt that members of your country's military - very possibly within your lifetime - have committed atrocities, even if not at the same scale as in Nanjing. Do you feel personally responsible or deserving of retribution?
Ah, so we already killed hundred of thousands of innocent civilians, so of course it is ok for us to kill a some more? Not sure that this is a solid argument...
>Once one learns of the other details of the war, and gains perspective, it's obvious that it was going to be used.
That doesn't prove that it should have been used. It was also not a given even a year earlier. If Henry A. Wallace had remained Vice President, it's likely his lack of antagonism towards the Soviets would have led him to avoid the show-of-force that the bombings were. The moment separating 150,000 Japanese civilians from life and death is the one where the DNC went behind the backs of the American people and chose Truman, chip-on-his-shoulder and all, to be FDR's last running mate. We're still paying for that bit of hubris.
It's not even clear in retrospect; the minutes of the Imperial war cabinet show they were confused as to what was going on after the first bomb.
Note that there was a third bomb scheduled and in preparation and it was decommissioned and returned to Los Alamos.
Also note that the conventional bombing of Tokyo just a few months prior caused greater destruction and loss of life.
Evaluations have to be made in context, which is very hard. There was a lot of anger and pain on both sides, which lead to irrational "momentum" in prosecution of war. Also there is the logic of industrial warfare: look at Europe: many smaller German cities were bombed for the first time just in the the last month of that war, because a huge machine had been switched on that just kept emitting planeloads of bombs which had to be dropped somewhere.
The Germans did terrible things, but the allies definitely did not have the moral high ground on all fronts. This is for me the horror of war: that because of one side losing its humanity the other side will too.
Yes, and precisely the large industrial areas of Dresden were not targeted but the inner city with lots of civilians was.
Note that I have no love for Nazi Germany, my family suffered tremendously at their hands and the results of that are still felt today. At the same time: I am categorically against indiscriminate firebombing of cities leading to 20K+ civilian deaths and if you feel that those civilians were a legitimate target because they happened to be in the city then you and I are probably not going to have a very productive discussion.
I've read that already (note: history is written by the victors) as well as a whole pile of other books on war (WWI, WWII) and ethics, rules of engagement and so on. My takeaway is that if you want to be able to take the moral high ground as a nation state you play by the rules even if that gives you a disadvantage on the off chance that you win the war. Because if you do you will end up with a more broken world than the one that you had before and now you have no tools to fix it without being labeled a hypocrite. This is all pretty complex stuff and not worthy of treatment by comment (books would be more appropriate) but that's how I feel about it and I don't think that it is going to be a trivial affair to move me from that position.
It also informed my stance on how I perceive war and my own possible role in it: I would definitely find myself mobilized (financially, personally) to help defend countries that are overrun by obvious aggressors, including my own but I would under no circumstance allow myself to be roped into a war of aggression up to the point where I would be happy to go to prison or worse if it came to it. This is not trivial stuff and I have so far been fortunate enough not to have seen this put to the test in a practical sense.
I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target, but civilians were fairly explicitly targeted, either that or you'd have to chalk that all up to extreme sloppiness, which is not a case that anybody credible has ever made.
I really don't know why all the people defending strategic bombing of civilians, targeted at civilians at that, ignore all the contemporary documents from the people doing it, Harris, the RAF, USAAF and so on, clearly showing they knew already back then that a) it was a war crime and b) didn't even have remotely the effect they used to sell it in public (namely destroying enemy moral to the point the enemy surrenders).
How many would be civilians who were drafted to be soldiers are you willing to sacrifice so that you don't kill 'civilians'? If you are talking professional armies it is one argument, but when you are talking civilians that have been dragged into a conflict their nation did not start are they 100% not-civilian simply because of circumstance? Being a drafted non-aggressor army should also be part of the consideration in my mind.
We're talking about people that were at zero risk to be drafted as soldiers. You can put civilians in quotes but these were actual civilians. Boys too young to be drafted, women, girls, babies... Targeting them was a huge mistake, especially because that ordnance could have been put to far better use a few kilometers away, 30 seconds flying time.
Are there any "pure" civilian targets then, or is absolutely anything a legitimate military target? Was that pizzeria in Kramatorsk a legitimate military target because, as Russia claimed, soldiers were among those eating there?
I think the debate as such is around insurgent warfare, where you're not fighting organized, unformed armies so much as bands of militias and guerillas, and the line between combatant and civilian is entirely transactional.
Total war stopped being a thing once it became certain the next one would lead to global nuclear annihilation.
From the wikipedia article on the surrender broadcast:
As many as 1,000 officers and army soldiers raided the Imperial Palace on the evening of 14 August 1945 to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the palace and were unable to find the recordings, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The two phonographs were labelled original and copy and successfully smuggled out of the palace, the original in a lacquer box and the copy in a lunch bag. Major Kenji Hatanaka attempted to halt the broadcast at the NHK station but was ordered to desist by the Eastern District Army.[2][3]
Even after two were dropped members of the armed forces still wanted the war to continue.
After the coup failed, Hatanaka shot himself. Many others did the same, and some were hung following war crimes tribunals. These people knew exactly what Japan had done under their leadership, and presumably assumed that surrender meant death.
One bomb may not have been enough evidenced by the fact that even junior level officers attempted to thwart the surrender. One bomb might have been enough. The decision to drop the second one was not entirely unjustified since the Japanese government was, apparently, in no hurry to end the war after the 1st one was dropped.
The question of the role of the atomic bombs in compelling Japanese surrender is one that is still debated among historians to this day, and will continue to be debated for as long as I live.
The indisputable fact is that Japan had thoroughly lost the war at that point--it was either losing or had already completely lost in every theater. I tend to think that the atomic bombs played a big role in the decision to surrender in that it showed that the Americans were capable of devastating entire cities with a single bomber: air defenses are unlikely to score any hits against a single bomber unlike a large fleet of bombers carpet bombing cities into oblivion, robbing Japan even of the chance to die in a blaze of glory.
But this also raises a tricky moral question. The decision to end a war is not made by the victor but by the loser. What should you do if the loser refuses to admit the loss?
By the time the atom bombs were used the 60 or so major cities in Japan had been destroyed by the firebombing. Whether it was done with one bomber or dozens didn't really matter. Japan didn't have the capacity to stop either at that point.
On the Japanese side there were multiple factions. Everyone in leadership understood the war was lost, but a large fraction still had hope of making things costly enough for the US to negotiate a conditional surrender that preserved the Emperor.
From what I’ve read I think the japanese strategy, from the very beginning was to bleed the americans. They new they couldn’t compete with the US industrial strength, even before perl harbor. The idea was that if they killed enough soldiers and “showed horrors” to enough of them, then the US public would falter and withdraw.
Because you know democracies are weak and monarchies are strong kinda thing.
There was a real feel of “we’ll be a 110M martyrs, before japan surrenders its land”. And as vietnam war later showed us, a strategy like this can potentially work.
The bombs I think showed that the US appears to have the ability kill those 110M people without setting foot on the island.
Nobody can predict what would have happened without the bombs, it was a very complex situation, but after listening to dan carlin’s Hardcore History account of the pacific war, I’d say I’m convinced they played a major role for sure.
The only slight correction I would add here is that the Japanese were not playing to win the war at this point. They were simply playing to not lose. Their calculus was that they could inflict enough casualties on invading forces that any surrender would take into account them, continuing the whole China, Korea, and all of the other Pacific islands that they had seized. casualties were not a bug, they were a feature.
This is what all of the constant debates on hacker news failed to take into regard. If you look at the correspondence and the commentary of the people making decisions, it is quite clear that prior to the atomic bombing, the only side that was trying to minimize casualties was in fact, the United States. In fact, even on the allied side, neither Russia nor the United Kingdom, were particularly concerned with minimizing casualties. Since Stalin felt that he would gladly trade Soviet lives in favor of land that he could hold after the war, and the United Kingdom government was determined to make an example to justify their occupation of Asia .
It’s also worth noting that Nimitz and King, were proposing a path that would’ve led to an order of magnitude more death than either an invasion or the atomic bombs. A fleet blockade of Japan would’ve starved everyone in Japan.
Did the first and second ones prevent the next war?
I'm not sure of the answer to these questions; they're obviously important and difficult to answer. The timing certainly hints to "no, yes, maybe" but we're not going to get a do-over.
If it doesn't hold we won't be able to continue the conversation so I hope that we can extend that 80 years. Proxy wars are still wars though, and proxy wars always have the possibility of escalation built in to them.
Historically cold war proxy wars were unlikely to escalate as even when a major power had troops on the ground it was on behalf of another country and also we seem to have had sensible leaders.
Ukraine does differ as a major power is involved in its own name.
Ukraine definitely does not have a sensible leader. In 2021 he declared both that "he does not like the Minsk agreements" and that "Ukraine needs to obtain nuclear weapons". After the start of the war, he insists that Ukraine be allowed to join NATO, which would automatically mean World War.
Alright, from his point of view, perhaps this is sensible: Ukraine stands to lose otherwise, so for him the World War might be preferable.
Ukraine's probably not going to join NATO. Obviously they really want to but it's hard to imagine a future where both Russia and Ukraine don't retaliate against even non-government and uncommanded (i.e. soldiers fire without authorization) attacks that go back and forth across the border.
This is a question with no answer, but even with two parts of Japan's military tried to stave a couple to ensure the war would continue. Either way, even if dropping the second bomb only decreased the likelihood that an invasion of Japan was necessary or only shortened the war in China by a few months, it was worth it in human lives saved.
I don't know about that. It brought nuclear weapons into the world in a way that I'm not sure we could have done without. The answer that the question of whether or not that was ultimately beneficial will quite possibly not stop with the end of World War II, but may well carry over into the beginnings of World War III.
A book I read way back in the 70s quotes Groves as saying that one bomb could be seen as a one-off but two bombs would make the Japanese think there's more to come.
Possibly but the idea was to demonstrate that the allies had more than one bomb. It might have been possible to just make enough fissile material for one weapon, then take another 2-3 years to make a second one. In that case if you're Japan you don't need to surrender.
I lean towards it being morally wrong to target civilian areas, but to claim ahistorically that the targets were intentionally purely civilian is false. Being of military importance (military post, arms manufacturing) was a requirement of the choice for both cities. Both had military significance.
But it was a tragedy. Even if you think the decision to drop the bomb was defensible, no one’s conscience should be at ease when making such a terrible decision even if you feel like you’re forced by necessity. Which I don’t think was necessarily the case.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets, unless you define every urban center a military target, by virtue of its productive capacity. Once you do that, the entire idea of separating civilian and military targets becomes an absurdity, and you might as well admit that you consider "enemy" civilians to be fair targets.
Historically, the major reason why the US targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the US military wanted to test its two bomb designs on large, pristine urban centers. Attacking pristine targets made measuring the effects of the bombs easier. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been significant military targets, they likely would have been bombed much earlier. In a perverse way, they were chosen because they weren't military targets.
It was as close to "purely civilian" as anything could get. A large city with no particular military value, whose urban center was explicitly targeted (rather than any particular industrial site).
By that time, 1945, no city, or town, of any of the beligerents was "purely" civilian anymore. Doesn't excuse the deliberate killong of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants so.
Hiroshima wasn't a major industrial or military target: there was a military base on the edge of the city, but only about 10% of the civilians killed were military workers. Nagasaki is a better example, and the bomb did hit industrial targets. However, this is mostly an accident -- the primary aiming point was the residential center of the city. Bad weather forced the crew of Bock's Car to choose a secondary target, which happened to be located away from the residential center.
This is a simplification that doesn’t really work. Japan decided as part of their war economy to decentralize their war industries to protect them from bombing - literally putting furnaces into small urban and rural environments rather than centralizing production as all the other powers did. This is why they failed to accomplish real industrial scaling during the war.
As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit’s way of war was to go through and around way the jungle. The Americans simply leveled the jungle.
That’s why the Japanese strategy didn’t work. That decentralization became a liability even before the cities were destroyed and why you can’t divide Japanese cities into civilian and military targets.
This is more or less verbatim the justification given in US public messaging around the bombing of Japan’s cities, and it’s heavily reiterated by Rhodes. The problem is that even if you fully accept the bloody logic of this, it wasn’t what the Interim committee specified for the atomic bomb target list: “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” This didn’t apply to Hiroshima. It did apply to the secondary target used in Nagasaki, but not to the primary target. The fact that more appropriate targets were passed over in favor of (largely unbombed) residential targets is not some unfortunate necessity of the war, it was a deliberate decision made to show the world how powerful the bomb was. That decision might - in the very long run - have saved more lives than it took. We should talk about that. But we can’t talk about it if we’re busy fooling ourselves.
We were running out of unbombed cities to drop the nukes on. They wanted to see the full effects of only the nuke. They had to request for a few spots to be saved for them even.
In your morals perhaps. If you were to run a utilitarian calculus, bombing such a target could deliver the most morally optimal solution. If the war had not have ended, the Japanese could have continued to potentially kill millions. The bomb was a clear and final “you cannot win if you continue to wage war” that they came to accept. The Americans could have as easily dropped it on Tokyo.
First, by this argument, literally every urban center is a military target. Put another way, it's an argument for total war, in which nothing is off limits, and every "enemy" civilian is fair game. Is that the world you want to live in?
Second, the US did not target any specific industrial areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In each case, it targeted the center of town, with the goal of inflicting maximum destruction on the city as a whole.
> First, by this argument, literally every urban center is a military target. Put another way, it's an argument for total war, in which nothing is off limits, and every "enemy" civilian is fair game. Is that the world you want to live in?
Industrial bases, military bases, centers of government: these are all legitimate targets in a time of war and all are built in and around cities. The difference today is we have precision weapons so they can be reasonably targeted accurately, and the side-benefit is that night-vision capability favors night-time strikes which minimizes the number of civilians around.
But don't delude yourself into thinking that there's any such thing as a "clean war". It's a war.
It was just a matter of time, right? The US had the ocean by that point, so presumably we could have just bottled them up on their island and then take our time making more bombs.
Grim stuff. As horrible as the war was already, glad it didn’t come to that.
As someone whose grandfather was fighting in the Pacific, looking back sure seems easy to judge but there are no guarantees and in the horror that was WWII you don't really take risks 'because'. You ensure victory. My grandfather was forced to call in flamethrowers on other human beings that would not come out of tunnels. He never forgave himself for that. Was he a monster? Should he have told his supperiors to stall out their plans, maybe wait the guys out instead? He was part of the occupation and saw the damage the bombs did first hand, helped cleanup the damage, but he never doubted the need to end the war or the way it was done. But glad you looking back figured out a better way by volunteering to let my grandfather 'bottle them up'.
I wasn’t proposing a better method to end the war (sieging the island wouldn’t have been a tidier or more humane end to the war anyway, it would have probably involved mass starvation, etc); I was just pointing out that “only two” was not really a limit in any practical sense, it was at least as many as were needed.
I had grandfathers on the Western and Eastern front in Europe. Them being there doesn't mean they had any real idea of what they were doing and what was going on. Beyond short term survival that is.
Yep, I only counted the ones intended for Japan. The demon core was finished a few days before Japan's surrender, but never shipped to Tinian base for assembly. Iirc they would've been able of making three bombs per month.
Japanese command conveyed surrender offers through Macarthur months before the battle of Okinawa. The terms they offered were substantially the same as what terms America set upon their final surrender- full surrender, but with the institution of emperor remaining intact as a puppet of the American occupation government.
Forcing people to take the covid vaccine violated the Nuremberg code. Do we see anybody on trial for that? It's never what you do, it's who has the power to hold you accountable.
I didn't downvote you, but in this very article itself that these comments are discussing, the German scientists talked about how it's possible that even if Germany had developed the bomb, perhaps all they would've been able to do is destroy London and a few other cities but still lose the war.
No one needs to explain it because it's irrelevant. It's about that winning does not make war crime or crime against humanity magically stop being war crime or crime against humanity. To reduce to absurd for the sake of example, if US develops a weapon that allows it to kill the entire population of China and uses it in a war then US can't possibly lose that war but it would still be an unthinkable crime against humanity and the punishment should be appropriately severe (it's an absurd example so I can't even think of what it could be, probably US should stop existing or the entire government be put in whatever the IRL equivalent of Azkaban for lifetime).
I'm not sure you can differentiate the horror of what actually happened in Japan with the existential threat posed by the proliferation of thermonuclear devices immediately after the war.
If the threat stayed in the small-kiloton range, I think we'd very likely have seen them used again -- especially if one nation had a monopoly on such weapons.
But that's just a supposition; in the real world, we went from "there are two bombs, and we used 'em on Japan" to massive proliferation of weapons orders of magnitude stronger by opposing superpowers in a really really short period of time.
I was surprised to learn, in the wake of online discussion after the release of OPPENHEIMER, that the weapons on hand now in the US (and assumed in the former USSR) are actually much SMALLER in yield than what was on deck from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s.
The Nagasaki bomb was ~ 22kt.
We (the US) built a 500kt fission-only bomb (the Mk. 18), so 20x that power; that was thought of as the functional ceiling for a simple atomic bomb.
But then came Teller-Ulam and the mk 17 thermonuclear bomb (no, I don't know why it's a lower number; maybe they started over with the thermonuclear devices?), which came in at 15,000 kt. A linear-scale graph showing Trinity, the Mk 18, and this bomb is hilariously inadequate; it's an object lesson in how warping it is to consider enormous numbers.
But with more precise delivery, and a large shift to multi-warhead ICBMs, the actual individual device yield shifted downward. There wasn't a need to fudge your margins with huge bombs if you could be reasonably certain of hitting a given target. Further, hitting anything with 15,000 kt would be absurd overkill unless your whole point was to wipe out an entire population center.
The biggest active US bomb is the B83, at about 1250 kt, or an order of magnitude less than the Mk 17. It's a gravity bomb, ie, requires a bomber. The bulk of the arsenal is, I believe, still tied to ICBM delivery, and hover under 500 kt per warhead (W88 in the Trident II; W78 and W87 in the Minuteman).
At first blush, the idea that we aren't arming ourselves with 15,000 kt weapons anymore SOUNDS good -- except analysts worry that less terrifying yields makes them more likely to use.
I'm paraphrasing from an excellent Twitter thread from nuclear weapons policy & history analyst Andrew Facini at
The US government didn't drop the bomb to avoid a violent invasion. They were half-sure they might get an easy surrender anyway.
They needed to show the Soviets what they could do. It was 100% a demonstration. The Soviets knew about it of course, but no one had really seen what it could do.
And if it helped end things early enough that the Soviets didn't invade themselves and partition Japan as they were already starting to do in Germany, then that was a bonus.
Whether it was morally sound to use it to intimidate Stalin is another question entirely, and I don't know what the answer is. But let's not pretend that it was some balance sheet calculation about how many lives would be lost... it was never that.
This is a conspiracy theory people like to spout when they want to seem like they really understand realpolitik, or because they just can't comprehend the US not having an ulterior motive behind everything, but all of the actual documentary evidence from the time says otherwise.
In what sense? It required no conspiracy at all. You might call it a political science theory... but only in the sense that the theory explains much more than others and is easily corroborated.
Just because you find an explanation distasteful, it doesn't make it a "conspiracy theory", and jumping to that label shows how poorly you argue.
> or because they just can't comprehend the US not having an ulterior motiv
The United States isn't a person. It can't have a "motive". It's a large group of people, a group with ever-changing membership. Each of those people can actually have their own motive, and many of them will have multiple motives.
But, at least in that era, you didn't have many people high up in the US government that had stupid motives. They were aware of overtures of surrender well before it was dropped. They were aware that it was unnecessary to force surrender, or at the very least that it wasn't their only option to force surrender without a ground invasion.
The Soviets were already the real problem. Indispensable while Germany was curb-stomping its way through Europe, but disgusting enough that there were elements in the government and military that wanted to fight them next.
It was necessary for the Soviets to see the bomb and what it could do. This was more necessary than it was to force the Japanese to surrender.
> but all of the actual documentary evidence from the time says otherwise.
What documentary evidence is that? Most of this shit wasn't written down. Sure, someone wrote down a narrative for the history books, after the fact. One that preserved the "we're the good guys" theme... can't exactly go murdering the unconscious bad guy that had already stopped fighting just to impress the other bad guys. Or rather, you can't admit that's what you were doing.
I don't see how it was any more immoral than anything else in WW2 that caused mass death and mayhem. Certainly if you are simply talking about casualties.
What was more immoral about dropping the a-bomb than firebombing Tokyo?
Both were war crimes, and as such unacceptable. Or rather should have been.
I like when people say "but the enemy did this and that, so us doing something similar is totally fine", because it is just false. But going to "we already did it once, so no biggy if we do it again right?" is even better. It acknowledges, and defends, the evilness of killing civilians at large scale at the same time. Kind of like wanting to be a big, badass and still feeling the need to morally justify all the shit one does.
I used to believe the American feel-good propaganda that "we just had to nuke the Japanese, OK? We saved more lives.".
Then I gained perspective, and learned that Japan's navy had been entirely wiped out (EDIT: and the air force) the Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender, but the US wouldn't budge on something as minor as allowing to keep Hirohito as figurehead emperor (which they eventually did after they surrendered after the nukes).
It was racism, plain and simple. Actually, it's more than racism, I'm not sure that word explains it. This isn't the relatively mild white-on-black racism of 1940s America. This is a much different level of racism, where Americans saw the Japanese as complete subhumans not even worth morally debating over. The Americans spent years building those bombs, so they must have thought it was anti-climactic not to try them. They didn't want to use them near the white people in Europe, so who best than a remote island of people you don't even view as humans, to the point where you put your own citizens in internment camps for sharing an ethnicity with them?
But I see so many Americans clinging to the myth that the nukes were a utilitarian moral choice. Admitting the truth to themselves would raise some questions about their country which clash with the perception they have.
I'm part Japanese and still think dropping the bombs was the moral choice.
Even after dropping two bombs, Japanese military leadership still didn't want to surrender, and attempted a coup because the Emperor surrendered.
Plus, the firebombings of Tokyo killed more civilians, so aren't those worse?
While there was plenty of racism to go around at the time, I don't see how racism played into it. Germany was firebombed just like Japan. It didn't get nuked because the war there ended before nukes were ready, that's it.
> HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the quickest way of ending the war.”