If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary.
The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister.
To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it?
The Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated. There were peace envoys from the Japanese side towards the end of 1944 onwards exploring a negotiated peace. Peace was already likely without the need of a ground invasion, if it had been explored seriously.
What seems likely is that dropping the bombs was an attempt to end the war on American terms, with no Soviet involvement in a negotiated peace. It likely had little to do with avoiding a ground operation; those plans were never approved, and it's unlikely they would have been needed.
I don't discount that people may really have believed and intended that this would save American lives. I do think there were other reasons behind dropping the bombs, however, things are rarely binary.
Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons.
American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict.
The U.S. had limited understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons before using them. The Manhattan Project scientists estimated 70,000 to 100,000 deaths for a medium-sized Japanese city (depending on weather, geography, and building density). These were very rough estimates, focused mainly on blast and heat, not long-term radiation, which was unknowable.
Why is this discussion always a binary choice between a land invasion of Japan or dropping the bombs exactly how we did? For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
The same result as what? The OP just explained how the bombs being deployed in the manner they were barely led to a surrender.
Anyways, the battle of Okinawa alone killed as many people as both atomic bombs combined and that's the most remote part of (what is today considered) Japan.
I'm sure there could have been other targets that would have led to a surrender but if the goal is to do so with a minimal amount of casualties then i find it extremely difficult to believe that it is possible considering that the two targets which were bombed nearly failed to produce the desired result even after a brutal 8-year war.
You're assuming a linear relationship between civilian casualties and Japanese military leadership's willingness to surrender. Why would e.g. dropping the first bomb on a less-populated shipyard and the second on a city centre have been less effective?
It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.
>They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.
Yes, and millions of people survived those bombings. If the only goal was "maximum concrete, visceral impact", a prior bombing would not have eliminated Tokyo from the list of targets for the nuclear bomb which goes to show that there were other factors in play.
Yes, that was the point I was making. The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority. There was some consideration for civilian casualties which opens up the discussion of whether the right balance was struck.
They did decide to bomb Kyoto, for exactly that reason. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, objected to it, due to cultural significance, and convinced Truman to choose an alternate, which was Nagasaki.
Yes, I know this and it was part of my point. If "cultural significance" was part of determining bombing sites, then we know "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was clearly not the only goal.
Roughly 18 potential cities were considered, which were narrowed down to a shortlist of five, and eventually finalized into four reserved targets (Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as alternate).
Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong".
Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.
My thoughts about this after 50 years of thinking about it is that war results in a relentless normalization of deviance. It's a good reason not to start wars.
Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs?
Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already.
Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated.
International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)?
It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed.
Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
One thing that's rarely considered is that by any metric Japan had already lost the war.
And what's interesting - and definitive - about both Japan and Germany is that the regimes kept fighting when this was obvious.
There was plenty of insanity to go around, but it takes an extra special kind of insanity to ignore defeat when outmatched by a superior force, and when continuing to fight will cause massive casualties for your own population when failure is already guaranteed.
This isn't just irrational, it's compulsively self-harming.
At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII. There were voices in the military in both countries making this point before the fighting started. But the regimes chose irrational violence for irrational ends, with horrific self-destructive consequences.
What killed millions wasn't the weapons, it was the culture of mass delusion that made the weapons necessary.
It's the nature of authoritarianism to deny reality until pushed into collapse.
That's the only real enemy in war, and we're still fighting it today - unsuccessfully.
When the bombed is credibly threatening to essentially suicide its entire citizenry despite no chance of victory, then yes, the rules of war must necessarily be relaxed to achieve the greater good. I would argue that the WW2 Imperial Japanese situation was unique in a way that nations had not yet had to deal with in the modern era (and haven’t had to deal with since).
Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality.
Empty city scenario:
The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects.
Extremis Self-Defense:
The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself.
Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology:
Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm.
But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering.
The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you?
Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified.
Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb.
Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were using the Russians as the negotiators. The US didn't want that so they bombed instead.
I did not read that book, and I had venimently disagreed with it, until I read Hirohito's book. The military and the nationalists wanted to fight to the very last man, and cause as much death as possible. Estimates of that strategy were 22 million japanese dead 1.1M to 1.5M American deaths.
Hirohito fought through 4 cabinets, and finally was able to surrender. He did so simply for the lives of the japanese people. He said so. He saved American lives and he saved a huge amount of japanese lives. ( Keep in mind 'fight to the last man' )
Japan would not have surrendered if we had not dropped the bombs. The second one was essential.
I am anti-war and anti nuke, but there was no other solution.
My father knew Oppy, and I knew he knew, but because of what the US did to him, my father never spoke of him,but spoke of every other physisasist involved. I caught he saying Ed for Edwin Teller, but he would never admit to knowing Oppy. Those were dangerous times.
They had Fat Man and Little Boy, after detonating Trinity, so one down, two ready to go, a few near ready cores, and a production pipeline in place to produce more at one a month or so .. (the exact number is on Alex W's Nuclear Secrecy blog .. my recollection is poor and from five+ years past).
I'm not saying you're right or you're wrong. Only that your opinion isn't fact, so don't act like you're presenting one.
Calling someone brainwashed because you disagree with them only serves to make you look a total fool, not them.
The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb.
Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.
Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:
> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] 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
I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a neighboring graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.
I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.
I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example:
>...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,
The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.
>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.
Maybe? We can go around in circles on this but there were so many other options the Allies could have tried:
- Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response
- Blockade the island, threaten land invasion, and wait for the emperor to call for surrender as they gradually run out of fuel
- Drop a bomb on Hiroshima but give more than 3 days for the government to understand what happened and consider surrendering before dropping a bomb on Nagasaki
- Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines
etc...
But sure, in the fine grained detail, if the US has not dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, we would not today be commenting on Hiroshima (1946) saying "they shouldn't have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan"
> - Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response
Seventy scientists on the Manhattan Project signed a petition [0] to president Truman about doing something like that before actually using the bomb, but the petition was intercepted and Truman didn't even hear about it in time.
Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of east Asia. Blockading Japan and waiting for them to starve might have been the best thing to save American lives. I think it’s unlikely to have been the best thing to save innocent lives overall.
A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.
The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."
That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.
Blockading Japan would have probably killed countless Japanese civilians via starvation, right? At least, I don’t think the island could sustain itself at that population level, particularly without fuel…
The aerial mining operation was literally called Operation Starvation, so, yeah. The big question is how quickly it makes them surrender. If they decide they’re cooked and give up fast, it might not have been too bad. If they hold out a long time then it would have been terrible.
I mean, yeah. The act is one of many countably infinite quantum events that contribute to the reality that I experience. My point is that there's a strong argument to be made that the US not dropping the bomb would have resulted in largely the same state of the universe with significantly less suffering in it.
Not really. The war was practically over, and we could just have blockaded Japan until it surrendered without invading. And the Soviets' entrance in the war did as much, if not more to push the surrender as the atomic bombs.
You say “blockade” without thinking about the consequences.
The US blockades Japan causing food shortages. The military prioritizes what little food is available for themselves. The know the population will starve, but it’s necessary to defend Japan against the foreign Invaders. As long as there is enough food for the military, the war can continue.
Now you have a mass famine where millions of women and children slowly starve to death. Japan uses it for propaganda showing how cruel the West is and how if the West would just sign an armistice leaving the military junta in charge, all these people could be saved.
> I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
They were concerned about Japanese lives. They were more concerned about American lives, but they concluded the shorter the war was the more lives of everyone involved could be saved.
The Japanese food situation was also very dire: there was a very real risk of famine during Winter 1945-46, and so if the war could be ended before that many millions of Japanese civilians could be saved.
I agree. With the information they had at the time it made total sense to drop the bomb. After seeing how tough the Japanese military fought during the invasion of the various islands it was reasonable to assume that the invasion of the mainland would be extremely bloody.
I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available.
If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.
My favorite terrifying fact about the WW2 Pacific theater: The US expected that invading the Japanese home islands would be so bloody that they manufactured tons of Purple Heart medals, and they’re still giving them out today because they haven’t run out.
"Japan was ready to surrender." It was not. The military, was ready to fight to the last man,and that was the resistance that Hirohito had to over come. And why there were 4 cabinets that the Emperor had to go though. A thuough understanding about what was actually occuring would help you understand. Read Hirohito's book.
Hirohito surendered, and insisted on doing so, that he would spare the lives and culture of the japanese people, and TO SPARE LIVES IN GENERAL.
The generals went scorched earth and they plan would have killed 20~22 million japanese people, that is what it means to fight to the last man.
Clearly, you need to read Hirohito's book.
Hirohito surendered his divinity, and instead of his people calling him a coward, they continued to worship him, in a way very few non-japanese can understand. Two of my best friends in school were japanese, and when I got to Jr high, my counselor had the internment order on his wall. I hated that the US dropped the bomb for decades, until I read Hirohito's book. Then it mostly fell into place, and I had to check with a bunch of historians, and with the senior members of the peace organization. I belonged to for decades.
The problem is that the Americans saw no difference between soldiers committing atrocities and old people and children living in a city (fight aged men were out fighting).
They were targeting old people and children because it was easier to kill them than the soldiers.
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb.
Unsurprising for the time given the context.
While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time.
The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
Yes, I understand that Japan gave up, not so much because of the bomb, but mostly because of the Soviet invasion and capture of Manchuria (and the implied threat of an invasion of the mainland), after the war in Europe had been won.
But I still struggle to understand the Japanese mentality. Were they OK with the prospect of city after city being atom- or fire-bombed, so long as no ground invasion occurred?
Additionally, the Japanese leadership was welcoming a land invasion. They believed that a land invasion would result in unacceptable casualties, forcing the United States into a peace that would allow Japan to continue occupying China and many of the sized territories. That's how disconnected from reality the leadership was.
The sad thing is that there is a non-zero chance they where right. There was considerable concern about that from the war leadership at this point. The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good. The alternative that the Navy was pushing was a starvation blockade of Japan. This probably would have been succesful but led to millions more lives lost in Japan, and a almost inevitable civil war in Japan.
> The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good.
They did not underestimate the Japanese forces.
They did an assessment in early 1945 and did calculations and the needed invasion force. But the Japanese could read a map just as well as the Americans, and could guess where Olympic would happen and redeployed, which the Americans detected:
This is mostly untrue. Most of this narrative comes from Soviet propaganda that was later propagated by anti-Western and anti-war groups in the United States. More recently, it's gotten more attention as Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov use it as a useful tool to build their narrative that only Russia was responsible for World War II's victory and to justify their constant threats of nuclear warfare.
The historical record is very clear, as is Hirohito's own statement at the time:
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
How, then, are We to protect the millions of Our subjects and atone before the spirits of my Imperial ancestors?
This is why We have ordered the Empire to accept the terms of the Joint Declaration. "
The other thing that gets glossed over in the "it was the soviets, not the bomb that caused the surrender" is that the USSR knew the US had the atomic bomb and realized it might end the war. They had territorial objectives of their own and wanted to join the conflict with (understandably) minimal casualties. If they had thought the war was going to last another year they might waited a bit longer to join.
I really strongly recommend Ian Toll's histories of the Pacific war, because there is information that is not in the early histories (at least the ones I read a while back) that is because things in the US and former USSR are more declassified. In particular, the US had a pretty good understanding of what is going on in the Japanese government. They knew a lot of civilian leaders wanted to surrender before Hiroshima, but were afraid they would be associated by a coup, as had happened in the 1930s. That's also what the Japanese leaders who wanted to surrender were worried about as well.
Hirohito's surrender speech to the army pointed to the entry of the Soviet Union into the war as the main reason for surrender:
"Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue the war under the present internal and external conditions would be only to increase needlessly the ravages of war finally to the point of endangering the very foundation of the Empire's existence."
Hirohito said different things to different audiences.
But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people — the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
Hirohito spoke in a very very rare way that very few humans speak. It took years of a friend who got a masters in 'Peace and conflict studies' to get me to understand, and in the decade since, and after reading Hirohito's book it still takes a significant intellectual effort to distinguish the listening.
The Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. They had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan.
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts.
The question I addressed was about the specific ethics of the specific case of "using the (atomic) bomb".
For survivors of a city destroyed overnight, with a great many friends and relatives dead, others injured or suffering the follow on results of malnutrition, disease, etc. there's little to separate the ethics of the use of an atomic weapon from the ethics of the use of tonnes of HE and incendiary weapons.
The most famous comparison, Tokyo Vs Hiroshima, has little to distinguish them from the PoV of a survivor.
Again, for context, 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were each leveled in single bombing raids before Hiroshima.
Any debate about the killing of civilians to "save US soldiers" from invaders predated the use of atomic weapons by a number of months when the policy to flatten all of Japan from the air first started.
Atomic weapons were developed for use against Germany, with the German surrender prior to a field testable weapon being built, with the imminent collapse of Japan on the horizon, it was a race by those military at the head of the Manhattan project to have clean field targets before the conventional bombers worked through their list.
Hiroshima was to be destroyed by US forces either way.
The question should be less about the ethics of spending an ungodly amount of money to destroy a city with a single bomb, and more about the ethics of destroying a city for considerably less cost with multiple bombs in a mass raid.
I very much suspect a great many regular people in Japan were very much not okay with seeing their fellow citizens destroyed in a war being pursued by other elements of Japanese society.
It's not useful to paint Hirohito as a religious leader. Yes, he was technically the head of State Shinto, but he was not the one issuing orders.
Depending on how you look at it (and reams of paper have been expended on this topic), he was somewhere between a puppet and a symbol. Certainly not innocent, but also not the instigator.
I'm not arguing about how much blame he should get as a person, I'm stressing out that the country's god was in favor of the war, which puts the population in a completely different mindset than otherwise.
Which religious leader? Hirohito? Hirohito rarely took any direction of the war - at best he enthusiastically endorsed what the ruling militarists wanted. As critical as one could (and should) be about this support, there is plenty of documentation that he tried to tap the brakes on the militarists, but didn't try all that hard. It wasn't until the very end of the war that he directly made a decision, and that was only enabled by a literal tie in the cabinet that allowed him to cast the deciding vote (sorta - more or less, gave him cover to break his role).
He was a war criminal, but not the leader of the war by any means. That was reserved for the militarists - Tojo and Suzuki and others.
I think we were very lucky with the timing such that atomic bombs could be used in warfare just twice.
Imagine if development had been delayed a little while and the war ended without any atomic bombs. The bomb would still be built and improved. The falling out of the USSR with the other Allies would still happen. The Soviets would still get the bomb and there would still be an arms race. But would the Cold War have stayed cold without an object lesson in what nuclear warfare actually looks like? I suspect not. Even with those object lessons, it took a while for the consensus to emerge that nuclear war must be averted no matter what. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general said we’d only “get our hair mussed” in a war with just 10-20 million dead was pretty much the real attitude of the Air Force leadership at the time.
people seem to forget that LeMay was advocating many times for a decapitating nuke strike against to soviets before they can have their own bomb. thats how hawkish they were.
This piece made a big impact on me when I read it like five years ago, and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. He did like 48 hours in the hospital as thousands upon thousands of burned and dying walked from afar to the completely overrun clinic.
> […] and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime.
Was the dropping of the bombs any worse than the fire bombings that had been taking places for months? LeMay didn't seem to think so.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is the cultural differences in how the West vs East think about government and the individual.
After living in Asia for a while, having political discussions with the people who live there, and exploring the differences in governance there, it’s not surprising there was indifference. You see this spectrum of though across many Asian countries from the authoritarian ones like China to the more democratic like Singapore.
Unlike the West which has a history of the relationship of the individual with the government and its leadership, Asia is much more influenced by Confucianism.
While people like to describe it as “what is good for the group versus what is good for the individual” I think that’s not an accurate description. It’s much more of a belief that governance happens “up there” and isn’t relevant to a commoners life.
The Eastern view of government is much more hierarchical and detached from the individual than in the West. There is strong sense that any one individual is not that important overall and that governance is a realm of the upper class, with the lower class on the receiving end rather than where power originates.
So for someone in Japan, the decisions during the war and the consequences thereafter are not theirs to judge or influence, only theirs to endure. There is a sense of fate and inability to change what happens, so it’s not really worth spending time thinking about.
It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.
"The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article"
TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?
Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed.
the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.
Interesting to see the difference in writing style back then. Lots of long sentences. Kind of the opposite to the LinkedIn-style writing we see today, spitting out as many sentences and paragraphs as possible. Like you can see the generations' attention spans in their form of writing.
Long sentences are fine if your value form over communication.
Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
Been watching some old movies lately and its amazing to watch simple scenes stretch on for five minutes or more. Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
At first I'm irritated by this, but once I adapt I actually like the time it gives me as a viewer to appreciate the subtleties of what's the characters and what they're up to.
Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians.
It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union.
As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender.
None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely.
IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.
The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Any global consensus on avoiding repeating this low point in human history needs to acknowledge the prime movers behind birthing the bomb into existence in the first place. Much ink has been spilt debating morality, but on the raw mechanics the historians are in alignment with each other - doesn't matter if you ask Richard Rhodes, Robert S Norris, or Alex Wellerstein:
Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction.
(compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history)
If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC).
edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
In any moral framework that does not include perfect knowledge of the future, the nuclear bomb is morally defensible at worst, and morally required at best. Sheer number of lives saved? The Nuclear Bomb ended the war. Number of Japanese lives saved? Nuclear bomb wins. The "non-violent" option of a blockade? It would have resulted in millions dead. The Japanese farming system completely collapsed in 1944. Many still starved even after the surrender, as the allies rushed to get food and aid to Japan.
What about a pure Soviet entry into the war? You have to look at what happened to Poland and Eastern Europe when the Soviet army invaded. Once again, by any metric, this was the best possible outcome at the time.
But it was unquestionably a local maximum - the best solution at the time, with horrific consequences afterward.
That's the pitfall these discussions invariably fall into - debating the morality of deploying rather than the wisdom of developing a capacity in the first place. The primary justification for secretly studying the feasibility of the fission chain reaction was the fear that Germany (not Japan) might be developing an atomic bomb of their own (an early form of the subsequent Cold War's 'can't prove a negative' about what weapons the Soviets might be developing).
While the debate on the bomb is not and never will be settled, I'm not sure I'd call the bloodshed caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be unnecessary: it ended up a war that had caused so far millions of death.
Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.
>And what social epistemology, actually?
Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar would later make the case that the physicists would have done these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.
The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.
Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:
"The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was. With the pace of science in this present century it was inevitable that means of mass destruction should appear. Since the concept of one world under law is far in the future, it was also inevitable that great states should face one another thus armed. If there were no A-bombs the confrontation would still have occurred, and the means might well have been to spread among a a people a disease for a chemical that would kill or render impotent the whole population. History may well conclude, if history is written a century from now, that it was well that the inevitable confrontation came in a spectacular way that all could recognize, rather than in a subtle form which might tempt aggression through ignorance. At least we all know, we and the rest of the world, that there are A-bombs and what they can do."
The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash.
The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc.
The Allies did various fire-bombings.
The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
I totally disagree about the difficulty of describing horror, since the linked article is one of many to have received critical acclaim for providing quality descriptions of WW2 experiences (my recommendation is 1952's The Naked Island).
Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
Well, op may be making the point that even the best description of horror is little compared to experiencing it. Watching a video of the horror itself (e.g. combat footage, a beheading, open-heart surgery) pales in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.
Why is this special? The Japanese killed ~7 million Chinese, 0.5 to 1 million Filipinos, 500k in Korea, you can keep adding them up. Then Japan loses 0.2% of all their atrocities and it's the worst thing ever? No, it's not the worst thing ever, not even close. Sure, we'd all like it to never happen again. But if I had to pick one thing not happening again I'd pick saving all others that died in WW2 over this one incident.
The reason this is special is because no one else used a nuclear bomb, before this event or after. That's basically the definition of "special" and the number of Chinese that the Japanese killed has nothing to do with it.
Picking anything other than the nuclear bomb to never happen again is moronic because the planet can survive the other things, but if nukes were to start flying again, it would most likely not end with just two. Other countries have those weapons now too and such a war has the potential to be last one ever fought.
> The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?
The fault of this event lies on Japan, not the US. Japan was the aggressor who started the war. Japan was "fighting to the end" and gave no indications it would surrender. It is estimated that the war would go on to 1947 had the bombs not been dropped. That would have caused the deaths of millions or tens oof million more people. It is a tragedy that people died, but the blame lies in Japan's actions, not the US'.
Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP.
Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough.
The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use.
With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction.
Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.
Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon.
They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.
Honestly, I think the Japanese deserved it. If you see the war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II, you will know that the atomic bomb was right.
By standards of the day, absolutely. Today, probably not.
From the military and strategic standpoint of 1945, using nuclear weapons to rapidly end the war was considered justified, necessary, and effective, especially given the precedent of widespread strategic bombing and the anticipated cost of a full-scale invasion.
While moral dissent existed, it was overridden by the dominant goal of ending the war quickly and decisively. A goal that, in the minds of U.S. leaders, justified the use of overwhelming force.
Saying that the Japanese people deserved it comes off as hateful. Not every Japanese person was complicit. Like I think it was pretty clear Japanese children were innocent casualties.
It's a tough question, it was total war, all the civilians were working to support the military goals. Japanese supposedly had a very militarized society (1). The concept of total war adopted by the expansionist axis powers meant that the allies had to fight back in the same way, namely use strategic bombing (2) to lower their morale and destroy civilian infrastructure and industrial targets which aided the war effort.
I want to give my thoughts to answer a few comments in this thread. If the atomic bomb was first developed by the Japanese, they wouldn't have hesitated to use it just like the USA did. Does it make it more right? Absolutely not, but as a Japanese friend put it: "it's war".
If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later.
And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.
If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...
* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary.
The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister.
To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it?
The Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated. There were peace envoys from the Japanese side towards the end of 1944 onwards exploring a negotiated peace. Peace was already likely without the need of a ground invasion, if it had been explored seriously.
What seems likely is that dropping the bombs was an attempt to end the war on American terms, with no Soviet involvement in a negotiated peace. It likely had little to do with avoiding a ground operation; those plans were never approved, and it's unlikely they would have been needed.
I don't discount that people may really have believed and intended that this would save American lives. I do think there were other reasons behind dropping the bombs, however, things are rarely binary.
Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons. American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict. The U.S. had limited understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons before using them. The Manhattan Project scientists estimated 70,000 to 100,000 deaths for a medium-sized Japanese city (depending on weather, geography, and building density). These were very rough estimates, focused mainly on blast and heat, not long-term radiation, which was unknowable.
Why is this discussion always a binary choice between a land invasion of Japan or dropping the bombs exactly how we did? For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
The same result as what? The OP just explained how the bombs being deployed in the manner they were barely led to a surrender.
Anyways, the battle of Okinawa alone killed as many people as both atomic bombs combined and that's the most remote part of (what is today considered) Japan.
>The same result as what? The OP just explained how the bombs being deployed in the manner they were barely led to a surrender.
The result of surrendering. What makes you think they wouldn't have surrendered if other targets were bombed?
I'm sure there could have been other targets that would have led to a surrender but if the goal is to do so with a minimal amount of casualties then i find it extremely difficult to believe that it is possible considering that the two targets which were bombed nearly failed to produce the desired result even after a brutal 8-year war.
You're assuming a linear relationship between civilian casualties and Japanese military leadership's willingness to surrender. Why would e.g. dropping the first bomb on a less-populated shipyard and the second on a city centre have been less effective?
It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.
>They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.
Tokyo was (fire) bombed a few months earlier causing ~100k deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...
Yes, and millions of people survived those bombings. If the only goal was "maximum concrete, visceral impact", a prior bombing would not have eliminated Tokyo from the list of targets for the nuclear bomb which goes to show that there were other factors in play.
NTA but Tokyo is the worst place you could possibly drop an atom bomb if your goal is to minimize civilian casualties.
Yes, that was the point I was making. The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority. There was some consideration for civilian casualties which opens up the discussion of whether the right balance was struck.
They did decide to bomb Kyoto, for exactly that reason. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, objected to it, due to cultural significance, and convinced Truman to choose an alternate, which was Nagasaki.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33755182
Yes, I know this and it was part of my point. If "cultural significance" was part of determining bombing sites, then we know "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was clearly not the only goal.
Because purpose of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t to inflict as many casualties as possible? They were two major military hubs.
Roughly 18 potential cities were considered, which were narrowed down to a shortlist of five, and eventually finalized into four reserved targets (Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as alternate).
Where goes the line?
I don't know exactly, but at least they could have dropped one bomb instead of two.
Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians?
The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?
Of course it is, much more humane is to mount amphibious assault and kill millions.
Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong".
Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.
My thoughts about this after 50 years of thinking about it is that war results in a relentless normalization of deviance. It's a good reason not to start wars.
Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime?
It was total war (1), all civilian infrastructure was there to facilitate the war, all bets were off.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
This is a fallacy, not that you're not right, but what is the alternative? The alternative is never "just do nothing and everyone lives"
Life isn't about choosing the best option but choosing the lesser evil imo
Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs?
Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/
Outside of Japan many other cities received the same treatment, famously but not only Dresden.
those are all war crimes but the victors never get prosecuted.
Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated.
International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors.
The conduct of the allies in WW2 was atrocious.
What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)?
It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
Best not to lose a war. Having started it, doubly so. Signed, a Mississippi son.
It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed.
Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
One thing that's rarely considered is that by any metric Japan had already lost the war.
And what's interesting - and definitive - about both Japan and Germany is that the regimes kept fighting when this was obvious.
There was plenty of insanity to go around, but it takes an extra special kind of insanity to ignore defeat when outmatched by a superior force, and when continuing to fight will cause massive casualties for your own population when failure is already guaranteed.
This isn't just irrational, it's compulsively self-harming.
At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII. There were voices in the military in both countries making this point before the fighting started. But the regimes chose irrational violence for irrational ends, with horrific self-destructive consequences.
What killed millions wasn't the weapons, it was the culture of mass delusion that made the weapons necessary.
It's the nature of authoritarianism to deny reality until pushed into collapse.
That's the only real enemy in war, and we're still fighting it today - unsuccessfully.
When the bombed is credibly threatening to essentially suicide its entire citizenry despite no chance of victory, then yes, the rules of war must necessarily be relaxed to achieve the greater good. I would argue that the WW2 Imperial Japanese situation was unique in a way that nations had not yet had to deal with in the modern era (and haven’t had to deal with since).
With your logic, it would be ok for Isreal to nuke Gaza now ond for Russia to nuke the Ukraine.
Both Israel and Russia are aggressors in the wars. It’s really not comparable.
Would Ukraine have every right to use atom bomb if it had one? Absolutely.
If UKR was fascist and on the path to genocide everywhere, it's acceptable to nuke them.
Again, no, not necessarily a war crime.
Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
How could detonating a nuke over a city not violate humanitarian law … ?
The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality.
Empty city scenario:
The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects.
Extremis Self-Defense:
The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself.
Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology:
Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm.
But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering.
The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you?
Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified.
Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
> They could have negotiated with the Russians
And got second Korea in the long run? No, thanks.
America also could've just ditched Europe and let the Nazis rebuild their empire if that's what you want.
AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were using the Russians as the negotiators. The US didn't want that so they bombed instead.
I did not read that book, and I had venimently disagreed with it, until I read Hirohito's book. The military and the nationalists wanted to fight to the very last man, and cause as much death as possible. Estimates of that strategy were 22 million japanese dead 1.1M to 1.5M American deaths.
Hirohito fought through 4 cabinets, and finally was able to surrender. He did so simply for the lives of the japanese people. He said so. He saved American lives and he saved a huge amount of japanese lives. ( Keep in mind 'fight to the last man' )
Japan would not have surrendered if we had not dropped the bombs. The second one was essential.
I am anti-war and anti nuke, but there was no other solution.
My father knew Oppy, and I knew he knew, but because of what the US did to him, my father never spoke of him,but spoke of every other physisasist involved. I caught he saying Ed for Edwin Teller, but he would never admit to knowing Oppy. Those were dangerous times.
The US had no other bomb ready to be dropped actually. preparing the fissile material took a lot of time.
Is that true? I thought they had a core at Los Alamos.
This was the third core: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
They had Fat Man and Little Boy, after detonating Trinity, so one down, two ready to go, a few near ready cores, and a production pipeline in place to produce more at one a month or so .. (the exact number is on Alex W's Nuclear Secrecy blog .. my recollection is poor and from five+ years past).
Brainwashed. The bombing is unjust, no matter what you say
I'm not saying you're right or you're wrong. Only that your opinion isn't fact, so don't act like you're presenting one. Calling someone brainwashed because you disagree with them only serves to make you look a total fool, not them.
Broke: countless of arguments arguing that nukes were justified, citing contemporaries from both sides of the time
Woke: you’re all brainwashed, because I said so
So should Russia nuke Dallas and Chicago to end the US proxy war in Ukraine?
The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb.
Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.
Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:
> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] 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
I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a neighboring graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.
I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shima_Hospital
I find it is important to be skeptical of people's descriptions of what they were supposedly thinking years earlier. Much better is to find contemporaneous accounts. For example:
>...my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,
The last major battle before the dropping of the atomic bombs was the battle for Okinawa and it was the bloodiest and fiercest battle fought against the Japanese. Absolutely no one who knew about that battle would have claimed that Japan was already defeated.
>...When the guns fell silent, more than 240,000 people had lost their lives in the campaign for Okinawa. The American loss rate was 35 percent of the force, totaling 49,151 casualties.
>...So close to the home islands, most Japanese soldiers refused to surrender and fought to the death. Their fanaticism contributed to a dreadful toll. Some 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders were killed in action.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/okinawa-costs...
> the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives
FYI it is estimated that the war would go on until 1947 if the bombs were not dropped. There would be millions of American lives lost in that case.
but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did.
It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.
Maybe? We can go around in circles on this but there were so many other options the Allies could have tried:
- Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response
- Blockade the island, threaten land invasion, and wait for the emperor to call for surrender as they gradually run out of fuel
- Drop a bomb on Hiroshima but give more than 3 days for the government to understand what happened and consider surrendering before dropping a bomb on Nagasaki
- Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines
etc...
But sure, in the fine grained detail, if the US has not dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, we would not today be commenting on Hiroshima (1946) saying "they shouldn't have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan"
> - Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response
Seventy scientists on the Manhattan Project signed a petition [0] to president Truman about doing something like that before actually using the bomb, but the petition was intercepted and Truman didn't even hear about it in time.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition
> Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines
Geopolitics 101 from HN.
Keep in mind that every day the war continued meant thousands of innocent lives being lost under the brutal Japanese occupation that still covered vast areas of east Asia. Blockading Japan and waiting for them to starve might have been the best thing to save American lives. I think it’s unlikely to have been the best thing to save innocent lives overall.
A blockade would mean a slow death for thousands or potentially millions of Japanese, as well at the cost and risk of tens of thousands of American troops, as well as a stupid amount of resources and infrastructure.
The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."
That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.
Blockading Japan would have probably killed countless Japanese civilians via starvation, right? At least, I don’t think the island could sustain itself at that population level, particularly without fuel…
The aerial mining operation was literally called Operation Starvation, so, yeah. The big question is how quickly it makes them surrender. If they decide they’re cooked and give up fast, it might not have been too bad. If they hold out a long time then it would have been terrible.
Given how ideological they were? It would take 5 mil dead at least.
> you might not have the life you do now.
I mean, yeah. The act is one of many countably infinite quantum events that contribute to the reality that I experience. My point is that there's a strong argument to be made that the US not dropping the bomb would have resulted in largely the same state of the universe with significantly less suffering in it.
If you go sufficiently far back in history, this is true for every event.
Not really. The war was practically over, and we could just have blockaded Japan until it surrendered without invading. And the Soviets' entrance in the war did as much, if not more to push the surrender as the atomic bombs.
You say “blockade” without thinking about the consequences.
The US blockades Japan causing food shortages. The military prioritizes what little food is available for themselves. The know the population will starve, but it’s necessary to defend Japan against the foreign Invaders. As long as there is enough food for the military, the war can continue.
Now you have a mass famine where millions of women and children slowly starve to death. Japan uses it for propaganda showing how cruel the West is and how if the West would just sign an armistice leaving the military junta in charge, all these people could be saved.
Is that better?
Sadly we've all seen this unfold in current times.
Maybe, but it's a very uncomfortable precedent to say that sometimes burning a lot of civilians alive is acceptable.
Hell, if America breaks out in civil war...
I don't think a lot of the other things the Japanese did during WW2 were acceptable either.
Nor was attacking Pearl Harbor.
> I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
They were concerned about Japanese lives. They were more concerned about American lives, but they concluded the shorter the war was the more lives of everyone involved could be saved.
The Japanese food situation was also very dire: there was a very real risk of famine during Winter 1945-46, and so if the war could be ended before that many millions of Japanese civilians could be saved.
I agree. With the information they had at the time it made total sense to drop the bomb. After seeing how tough the Japanese military fought during the invasion of the various islands it was reasonable to assume that the invasion of the mainland would be extremely bloody.
I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available.
If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.
My favorite terrifying fact about the WW2 Pacific theater: The US expected that invading the Japanese home islands would be so bloody that they manufactured tons of Purple Heart medals, and they’re still giving them out today because they haven’t run out.
That is the terrifying fact, and I can confirm it. It was mentioned in a large volume on World war II.
"Japan was ready to surrender." It was not. The military, was ready to fight to the last man,and that was the resistance that Hirohito had to over come. And why there were 4 cabinets that the Emperor had to go though. A thuough understanding about what was actually occuring would help you understand. Read Hirohito's book.
Hirohito surendered, and insisted on doing so, that he would spare the lives and culture of the japanese people, and TO SPARE LIVES IN GENERAL.
The generals went scorched earth and they plan would have killed 20~22 million japanese people, that is what it means to fight to the last man.
Clearly, you need to read Hirohito's book.
Hirohito surendered his divinity, and instead of his people calling him a coward, they continued to worship him, in a way very few non-japanese can understand. Two of my best friends in school were japanese, and when I got to Jr high, my counselor had the internment order on his wall. I hated that the US dropped the bomb for decades, until I read Hirohito's book. Then it mostly fell into place, and I had to check with a bunch of historians, and with the senior members of the peace organization. I belonged to for decades.
The problem is that the Americans saw no difference between soldiers committing atrocities and old people and children living in a city (fight aged men were out fighting).
They were targeting old people and children because it was easier to kill them than the soldiers.
Sorry they didn’t invent HIMARS and satellite precision strikes yet.
The please explain why Kyoto was taken off the lists of targets?
Because the secretary of war spent his honeymoon there and didn't want to tarnish his memory.
I sometimes feel many Americans are relatively unconcerned about lives of foreign civilians. Still.
While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time.
The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
Yes, I understand that Japan gave up, not so much because of the bomb, but mostly because of the Soviet invasion and capture of Manchuria (and the implied threat of an invasion of the mainland), after the war in Europe had been won.
But I still struggle to understand the Japanese mentality. Were they OK with the prospect of city after city being atom- or fire-bombed, so long as no ground invasion occurred?
Additionally, the Japanese leadership was welcoming a land invasion. They believed that a land invasion would result in unacceptable casualties, forcing the United States into a peace that would allow Japan to continue occupying China and many of the sized territories. That's how disconnected from reality the leadership was.
The sad thing is that there is a non-zero chance they where right. There was considerable concern about that from the war leadership at this point. The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good. The alternative that the Navy was pushing was a starvation blockade of Japan. This probably would have been succesful but led to millions more lives lost in Japan, and a almost inevitable civil war in Japan.
> The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good.
They did not underestimate the Japanese forces.
They did an assessment in early 1945 and did calculations and the needed invasion force. But the Japanese could read a map just as well as the Americans, and could guess where Olympic would happen and redeployed, which the Americans detected:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Ground_thre...
This is mostly untrue. Most of this narrative comes from Soviet propaganda that was later propagated by anti-Western and anti-war groups in the United States. More recently, it's gotten more attention as Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Rudolfovich Solovyov use it as a useful tool to build their narrative that only Russia was responsible for World War II's victory and to justify their constant threats of nuclear warfare.
The historical record is very clear, as is Hirohito's own statement at the time:
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
How, then, are We to protect the millions of Our subjects and atone before the spirits of my Imperial ancestors?
This is why We have ordered the Empire to accept the terms of the Joint Declaration. "
The other thing that gets glossed over in the "it was the soviets, not the bomb that caused the surrender" is that the USSR knew the US had the atomic bomb and realized it might end the war. They had territorial objectives of their own and wanted to join the conflict with (understandably) minimal casualties. If they had thought the war was going to last another year they might waited a bit longer to join.
I really strongly recommend Ian Toll's histories of the Pacific war, because there is information that is not in the early histories (at least the ones I read a while back) that is because things in the US and former USSR are more declassified. In particular, the US had a pretty good understanding of what is going on in the Japanese government. They knew a lot of civilian leaders wanted to surrender before Hiroshima, but were afraid they would be associated by a coup, as had happened in the 1930s. That's also what the Japanese leaders who wanted to surrender were worried about as well.
The USSR entered the war against Japan precisely 3 months after the defeat of Nazi Germany, exactly as they promised to the Western Allies at Yalta.
The historical record is very clear, and I have read those words too.
Hirohito's surrender speech to the army pointed to the entry of the Soviet Union into the war as the main reason for surrender:
"Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue the war under the present internal and external conditions would be only to increase needlessly the ravages of war finally to the point of endangering the very foundation of the Empire's existence."
Hirohito said different things to different audiences.
What came before the "Furthermore, ..."?
But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people — the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
That may be the greatest understatement ever written!
the English translation is. In Japanese its not surprising to talk in this way.
Hirohito spoke in a very very rare way that very few humans speak. It took years of a friend who got a masters in 'Peace and conflict studies' to get me to understand, and in the decade since, and after reading Hirohito's book it still takes a significant intellectual effort to distinguish the listening.
Beat me to it. That's exactly what I was going to say
> The historical record is very clear, as is Hirohito's own statement at the time
thats just the official word. The coming Soviet invasion was definitely a factor.
The Soviets could never have done a large invasion of Japan. They had a few ships that the USA had given them as part of Project Hula, but that is nothing compared to what would be needed for a full scale invasion of Japan.
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts.
The question I addressed was about the specific ethics of the specific case of "using the (atomic) bomb".
For survivors of a city destroyed overnight, with a great many friends and relatives dead, others injured or suffering the follow on results of malnutrition, disease, etc. there's little to separate the ethics of the use of an atomic weapon from the ethics of the use of tonnes of HE and incendiary weapons.
The most famous comparison, Tokyo Vs Hiroshima, has little to distinguish them from the PoV of a survivor.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/
Again, for context, 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were each leveled in single bombing raids before Hiroshima.
Any debate about the killing of civilians to "save US soldiers" from invaders predated the use of atomic weapons by a number of months when the policy to flatten all of Japan from the air first started.
Atomic weapons were developed for use against Germany, with the German surrender prior to a field testable weapon being built, with the imminent collapse of Japan on the horizon, it was a race by those military at the head of the Manhattan project to have clean field targets before the conventional bombers worked through their list.
Hiroshima was to be destroyed by US forces either way.
The question should be less about the ethics of spending an ungodly amount of money to destroy a city with a single bomb, and more about the ethics of destroying a city for considerably less cost with multiple bombs in a mass raid.
I very much suspect a great many regular people in Japan were very much not okay with seeing their fellow citizens destroyed in a war being pursued by other elements of Japanese society.
The war was dictated by a religious leader, to some (most?) there was just no stopping it until it tells them to.
It's not useful to paint Hirohito as a religious leader. Yes, he was technically the head of State Shinto, but he was not the one issuing orders.
Depending on how you look at it (and reams of paper have been expended on this topic), he was somewhere between a puppet and a symbol. Certainly not innocent, but also not the instigator.
I'm not arguing about how much blame he should get as a person, I'm stressing out that the country's god was in favor of the war, which puts the population in a completely different mindset than otherwise.
Which religious leader? Hirohito? Hirohito rarely took any direction of the war - at best he enthusiastically endorsed what the ruling militarists wanted. As critical as one could (and should) be about this support, there is plenty of documentation that he tried to tap the brakes on the militarists, but didn't try all that hard. It wasn't until the very end of the war that he directly made a decision, and that was only enabled by a literal tie in the cabinet that allowed him to cast the deciding vote (sorta - more or less, gave him cover to break his role).
He was a war criminal, but not the leader of the war by any means. That was reserved for the militarists - Tojo and Suzuki and others.
> he enthusiastically endorsed what the ruling militarists wanted.
That's definitely enough when you are a living god. From the point he gave his approval, he was the only one that could fully stop it.
You're right that he was a puppet for the military, exactly because of that god position he was born into.
There was no nuclear taboo in 1945. Looking back, people forget that.
I think we were very lucky with the timing such that atomic bombs could be used in warfare just twice.
Imagine if development had been delayed a little while and the war ended without any atomic bombs. The bomb would still be built and improved. The falling out of the USSR with the other Allies would still happen. The Soviets would still get the bomb and there would still be an arms race. But would the Cold War have stayed cold without an object lesson in what nuclear warfare actually looks like? I suspect not. Even with those object lessons, it took a while for the consensus to emerge that nuclear war must be averted no matter what. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general said we’d only “get our hair mussed” in a war with just 10-20 million dead was pretty much the real attitude of the Air Force leadership at the time.
people seem to forget that LeMay was advocating many times for a decapitating nuke strike against to soviets before they can have their own bomb. thats how hawkish they were.
This piece made a big impact on me when I read it like five years ago, and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. He did like 48 hours in the hospital as thousands upon thousands of burned and dying walked from afar to the completely overrun clinic.
> […] and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime.
Was the dropping of the bombs any worse than the fire bombings that had been taking places for months? LeMay didn't seem to think so.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is the cultural differences in how the West vs East think about government and the individual.
After living in Asia for a while, having political discussions with the people who live there, and exploring the differences in governance there, it’s not surprising there was indifference. You see this spectrum of though across many Asian countries from the authoritarian ones like China to the more democratic like Singapore.
Unlike the West which has a history of the relationship of the individual with the government and its leadership, Asia is much more influenced by Confucianism.
While people like to describe it as “what is good for the group versus what is good for the individual” I think that’s not an accurate description. It’s much more of a belief that governance happens “up there” and isn’t relevant to a commoners life.
The Eastern view of government is much more hierarchical and detached from the individual than in the West. There is strong sense that any one individual is not that important overall and that governance is a realm of the upper class, with the lower class on the receiving end rather than where power originates.
So for someone in Japan, the decisions during the war and the consequences thereafter are not theirs to judge or influence, only theirs to endure. There is a sense of fate and inability to change what happens, so it’s not really worth spending time thinking about.
It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.
"The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article"
TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
The Editors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?
Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
Would the atom bomb have been used on Germany ?
Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed.
the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.
Interesting to see the difference in writing style back then. Lots of long sentences. Kind of the opposite to the LinkedIn-style writing we see today, spitting out as many sentences and paragraphs as possible. Like you can see the generations' attention spans in their form of writing.
A whole generation reared on cigarettes and black coffee with no tech addiction. Yeah, these were pretty focused times.
Long sentences are fine if your value form over communication.
Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
Been watching some old movies lately and its amazing to watch simple scenes stretch on for five minutes or more. Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
At first I'm irritated by this, but once I adapt I actually like the time it gives me as a viewer to appreciate the subtleties of what's the characters and what they're up to.
Agreed, though I feel they went overboard during the seventies. On the other hand, modern movies make me desperate for a breather.
> Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
Until now I forgot that people saw theaters as social venues, would eat buckets of popcorn, go the toilet etc.
From that lens, viewers fully focused and digesting every second of the movie was definitely not the average target.
I will likely be downvoted.
Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians. It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union.
As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender.
None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely.
IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.
I find it fascinatig the Little Boy (uranium) technology hadn't been fully tested by the Americans before the bombings.
The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Any global consensus on avoiding repeating this low point in human history needs to acknowledge the prime movers behind birthing the bomb into existence in the first place. Much ink has been spilt debating morality, but on the raw mechanics the historians are in alignment with each other - doesn't matter if you ask Richard Rhodes, Robert S Norris, or Alex Wellerstein:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/233904(compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history)
If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC).
edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
In any moral framework that does not include perfect knowledge of the future, the nuclear bomb is morally defensible at worst, and morally required at best. Sheer number of lives saved? The Nuclear Bomb ended the war. Number of Japanese lives saved? Nuclear bomb wins. The "non-violent" option of a blockade? It would have resulted in millions dead. The Japanese farming system completely collapsed in 1944. Many still starved even after the surrender, as the allies rushed to get food and aid to Japan.
What about a pure Soviet entry into the war? You have to look at what happened to Poland and Eastern Europe when the Soviet army invaded. Once again, by any metric, this was the best possible outcome at the time.
But it was unquestionably a local maximum - the best solution at the time, with horrific consequences afterward.
That's the pitfall these discussions invariably fall into - debating the morality of deploying rather than the wisdom of developing a capacity in the first place. The primary justification for secretly studying the feasibility of the fission chain reaction was the fear that Germany (not Japan) might be developing an atomic bomb of their own (an early form of the subsequent Cold War's 'can't prove a negative' about what weapons the Soviets might be developing).
> unnecessary blood on his hands
While the debate on the bomb is not and never will be settled, I'm not sure I'd call the bloodshed caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be unnecessary: it ended up a war that had caused so far millions of death.
And what social epistemology, actually?
>I'm not sure I'd call ...
Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.
>And what social epistemology, actually?
Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar would later make the case that the physicists would have done these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.
The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.
Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:
The bomb would have been developed one way or the other, no matter what. The time was ripe for it.
Man, the whole war was horrific.
The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash.
The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc.
The Allies did various fire-bombings.
The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
I totally disagree about the difficulty of describing horror, since the linked article is one of many to have received critical acclaim for providing quality descriptions of WW2 experiences (my recommendation is 1952's The Naked Island).
Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
Well, op may be making the point that even the best description of horror is little compared to experiencing it. Watching a video of the horror itself (e.g. combat footage, a beheading, open-heart surgery) pales in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.
Why is this special? The Japanese killed ~7 million Chinese, 0.5 to 1 million Filipinos, 500k in Korea, you can keep adding them up. Then Japan loses 0.2% of all their atrocities and it's the worst thing ever? No, it's not the worst thing ever, not even close. Sure, we'd all like it to never happen again. But if I had to pick one thing not happening again I'd pick saving all others that died in WW2 over this one incident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
There's also the argument that it saved more lives than the deaths it caused. The same can not be said for Japan's atrocities.
The reason this is special is because no one else used a nuclear bomb, before this event or after. That's basically the definition of "special" and the number of Chinese that the Japanese killed has nothing to do with it.
Picking anything other than the nuclear bomb to never happen again is moronic because the planet can survive the other things, but if nukes were to start flying again, it would most likely not end with just two. Other countries have those weapons now too and such a war has the potential to be last one ever fought.
Now do Iraq numbers and self reflect.
> The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?
It's the single worst moment in human history. Yes, those crimes were larger, but in terms of the worst instant of time, this has to take the cake.
Indeed! I can add "lower than the butchery and sadism of the Japanese forces in SE Asia?"
Yeah I'm pretty sure Stalingrad was far, far worse.
The fault of this event lies on Japan, not the US. Japan was the aggressor who started the war. Japan was "fighting to the end" and gave no indications it would surrender. It is estimated that the war would go on to 1947 had the bombs not been dropped. That would have caused the deaths of millions or tens oof million more people. It is a tragedy that people died, but the blame lies in Japan's actions, not the US'.
"Look what you made me do!"
By the way: that same argument is used by Netanyahu and Putin today!
Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP.
Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough.
The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use.
With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction.
Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.
This came up recently on my feed (Hiroshima - the unknown images): https://youtu.be/QrqjADwzDm0
Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon.
They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.
https://archive.ph/N672J
The European theatre of war has long shadowed the brutality and loss of the Pacific theatre. And even the Eastern front.
From what I have read, relatively speaking, the Western European front was easier than the Eastern one and the Pacific theatre.
>A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died.
People will say the same thing about Gaza one day.
I just bought this paperback.
Verg good read
Linked there is also a related article from 1985
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-...
Honestly, I think the Japanese deserved it. If you see the war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II, you will know that the atomic bomb was right.
By standards of the day, absolutely. Today, probably not.
From the military and strategic standpoint of 1945, using nuclear weapons to rapidly end the war was considered justified, necessary, and effective, especially given the precedent of widespread strategic bombing and the anticipated cost of a full-scale invasion.
While moral dissent existed, it was overridden by the dominant goal of ending the war quickly and decisively. A goal that, in the minds of U.S. leaders, justified the use of overwhelming force.
Saying that the Japanese people deserved it comes off as hateful. Not every Japanese person was complicit. Like I think it was pretty clear Japanese children were innocent casualties.
Civilians though?
It's a tough question, it was total war, all the civilians were working to support the military goals. Japanese supposedly had a very militarized society (1). The concept of total war adopted by the expansionist axis powers meant that the allies had to fight back in the same way, namely use strategic bombing (2) to lower their morale and destroy civilian infrastructure and industrial targets which aided the war effort.
(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism
(2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
I want to give my thoughts to answer a few comments in this thread. If the atomic bomb was first developed by the Japanese, they wouldn't have hesitated to use it just like the USA did. Does it make it more right? Absolutely not, but as a Japanese friend put it: "it's war".
If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later.
And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.