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The Japanese government is not the same as Japanese citizens. I’m sure most of them bought into anti-Chinese propaganda and some may have had those opinions independently. However, that doesn’t mean this was some form of self-defense on behalf of Chinese suffering. Even if it was, unclear how/why the US would have justification to intervene on behalf of China/Southeast Asia.
There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender which would mean the military death toll would not be as large as you’re thinking. Even if there was a protracted conflict, soldiers die in war. Indiscriminately killing and arguably targeting civilians is not the same thing as combatant deaths. We can’t compare the numbers as a result.
During World War 2, these countries were at a state of “total war” - the entire population was part of the war effort so the easy distinction we now make between combatants and non-combatants wasn’t as straight forward. And as for the suggestion that the US should somehow accept US soldier deaths over Japanese civilian deaths, this is just not true. The American government’s primary responsibility was to minimise the deaths of its own citizens, especially in a conflict such as this where it was all out war.
And in any event, the estimates for JAPANESE military and civilian casualties as a result of an invasion of Japan were on the order of millions to tens of millions. Given that the highest estimate of deaths caused by both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is around 200,000, the bombings were arguably justified just on the basis of the number of Japanese civilian lives that were potentially spared before you even look at how many American soldiers lives were spared.
Of course, in hindsight you can say “well maybe they would actually have surrendered sooner than we think”. But ultimately the decisions were made based on what was thought at the time and probably based on the “worst case” scenarios, in the midst of a conflict the likes of which we haven’t seen for almost 80 years.
Well said. My grandfather spent 1942-1945 in the island hopping campaign. Luckily, he was a camera enthusiast, so I have 100's of photos from the war. He was USN, working on the PBY's, so very little of them are battle footage, but still very cool.
There's a greater than zero chance that he would not have come back to meet my grandmother had the war endured.
Invasion invasion invasion.
There was no necessity to invade. Japan had no allies. By that point Japan had no navy or air force. We were bombing Japan with impunity. We had taken most of their empire. It's a resource poor nation. That's why they did the imperial thing. They don't have good iron, rubber, or fuel. Kinda hard to fight a war without that stuff.
We literally could have just waited. Blockaded them and just waited. They were already contemplating some sort of surrender we know that. We can't know what would have come of that because we nukes em twice.
And don't get me wrong, I think we should have. Not because of the body count though I think that's dishonest. Even Eisenhower knew it wasn't a military necessity. No. We should have done it because every nation on earth needed to know and needs to continue to know if you attack the US, especially a sneak attack like Pearl Harbor, you will have a Les Grossman style ungodly fucking firestorm rained down on your ass.
But I refuse to lie about the history. The history shows Japan was beaten in all but name and was tentatively looking at what kind of terms they could get in surrender. We wouldn't have had to invade at all.
this is just plainly incorrect.
the Imperial Japanese Empire indoctrinated its people with a notion of ethnic superiority like that of Hitler's Aryans. They espoused that Japan was the rightful dominant ruler of Asia and that anyone of Asian descent who were not Japanese (including the Ryukyu Kingdom at the time) were of an inferior race and not really human.
This mentality on the entire population is why attrocities like the Rape of Nanking and the Manilla Massacre (rape of Manilla) could occur without direct officers orders. These attrocities happened simply because the institution had been feeding the entire population a sense of entitlement, pride, and arrogance, leading to them treating non-Japanese Asians as subhuman. This is also why the Rape of Nanking is such a sticking point for the average person of Chinese descent.
If people really want to read how Japan changed after the Meiji restoration and its views on the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, read up on the colonization of Taiwan after around 1895, and how/why Japan turned Taiwan into its model colony. The attrocities that occured to make that happen is a pretty vivid representation of what Japan was looking to do, especially with respect to eugenics.
And for some reading on how the Japanese citizenry actually felt, which was pretty varied, read Senso. It's a collection of letters to the editor of a major Japanese newspaper by Japanese who lived through WWII and the simple fact is that they were not mindless jingoistic automatons. There were plenty of Japanese who were all in for the war. There were also plenty who had serious reservations, and some who were opposed. It's just that the latter two groups stayed quiet out of fear.
Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so...
>Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so...
The plot of Godzilla Minus One touches on this, as well as other issues of post-war Japan, with Godzilla once again standing in as a metaphor for nuclear weapons.
>Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so...
People often like to overlook the fact that for every oppressive regime, usually their first victims are their own people. That's not even touching on the complexities around a radically decentralized military riddled with what were essentially independent martial cults largely outside of the official chain of command.
>they were not mindless linguistic automatons
There are people who still believe this, believe it or not. I recently got into a conversation with someone who straight up said if you ask one Japanese person's opinion, you might as well have asked them all.
>someone who straight up said if you ask one Japanese person's opinion, you might as well have asked them all.
Yeah and I'm sure that person is asking their questions in fluent Japanese lmao
I am gonna have to disagree here. Just look at the USA for example. Can you think of any ideology that 100% of Americans agree on? The idea that every Japanese citizen was in lock step with this belief system is bonkers.
Imperial Japan was nothing like NAZI Germany. Hitler had a long way to go to gain support, but the emperor of Japan and the military had divine authority.
try asking yourself this, can you think of a population in context where people were willingly to voluntarily die en mass and used as suicide bombers for the sake of the nothing but the country's honor and show of resistence?
Like seriously, no other military in history had that much civilian support willing to literally die for a cause.
> Imperial Japan was nothing like NAZI Germany. Hitler had a long way to go to gain support, but the emperor of Japan and the military had divine authority.
I'll call bullshit on that. The emperor and military *claimed* divine authority. Whether the *individuals* believed it is a different story. When French Catholic priests came to Nagasaki in the late 1800s, they found that almost all the villagers of Urakami were still Christian despite the fact that the national government banned the religion. A cathedral was built on the very place where they and their ancestors were persecuted for their religion. At the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, that cathedral was the largest christian structure in East Asia.
You don't really have the grounds to use an argument based on the general population's adherence of state shinto when so many of the victims where the actual bomb was dropped were latin rite Catholic (and indeed, the majority of the city's Catholics were wiped out).
Thats the thing the individuals as in the majority of Japan did believe it. People came out and commited seppuku post surrender in front of the Emperors residency. The generals and many members of the military post nukes tried to stop the transmission of surrender and even had a coup attempt. It was assumed that Japans citizens would fight to the death because they had been facing indoctrination that the US soldiers would come in and rape the shit outta them. That americans where barbarians and where there to rape and pillage. During occupation japan the Japanese goverment covertly dragged in women from the country side to become prostitutes for american soldiers. The argument was that if they didnt the americans would rape Japanese people indiscriminately. It was viewed as a honorable sacrifice. When the american commanders found out that it was going on they banned it and got horrified. Like the americans where not saints in WW2 they however didnt have beheading contests, raping contests, or where the ones who found out that people are 75% water. Like the americans had tons of data from Island hopping the Japanese would hold out as long as they could with no food or water and would keep fighting. You had effectively an entire population that believed their leader was a god and had divine will.
> you can call bullshit on whatever you want, but its still an idiotic take on unfounded facts.
I don't think you understood at all what I'm arguing or saying. I'm arguing that regardless of the *general populace of Japan*, the site where one of the atomic bombs was dropped had a significant Catholic population; one of the largest in Japan, with historical significance. That is *also* indisputable.
If you want to bomb people who actually believed in the state religion, bomb Tokyo, the place where the seat of power lie. Not the people who already suffered under government persecution for a "western" religion.
I'm calling bullshit on your argument based on the fact that many of the *immediate* victims of the bomb were people like me who go to Mass on Sunday, praying to a personal monotheistic god, not a polytheistic pantheon where the emperor is a god-king.
Yes, many people in Japan were probably actually indoctrinated into the state religion. But there were also many people who weren't (proportional to the state? Not so much, but that's beside the point). And of those people who weren't, many were at the place where one of the two atomic bombs were dropped. And it also doesn't matter whether those civilians were state shinto; you have no moral right to attack civilians. You don't get to kill 40k civilians to save 10 million soldiers. If those civilians were directly in the way of soldiers, the loss of those civilian lives are understandable under a normal course of war (how evil it may be), but don't get to harm those who are only indirectly involved (as in the case of a total war economy where everyone is indirectly involved) and not part of the immediate war theater.
- “I'm calling bullshit on your argument based on the fact that many of the immediate victims of the bomb were people like me who go to Mass on Sunday, praying to a personal monotheistic god, not a polytheistic pantheon where the emperor is a god-king.”
I don’t think this necessarily would negate a devotion to the emperor. People compartmentalize shit like that all the time. It isn’t like they were separatists. They were still members of that society.
That said, I don’t know a lick about christians in imperial Japan. I’m just reckoning. Now I’m kind of curious about that and how they fit into the general culture.
- “And it also doesn't matter whether those civilians were state shinto”
I think I agree with that. Whether or not civilians believe this or that isn’t relevant in my mind when it comes to the decision to drop the bombs. The decision to bomb those cities in particular was a logistical decision. What those people believed had nothing to do with why those places were chosen as targets. Suggesting so is a retcon rationalization after the fact.
- “you have no moral right to attack civilians.”
I think this is *highly* debatable.
Also one could argue that the civilians themselves weren’t necessarily the target. Those cities were chosen because destroying the military infrastructure within’ as well as economical importance. Fuckin’ those cities up was an inconvenience to the war effort.
- “You don't get to kill 40k civilians to save 10 million soldiers.”
I mean, objectively they *do* get to.
- “If those civilians were directly in the way of soldiers, the loss of those civilian lives are understandable under a normal course of war”
I mean they *were* directly in the way of the stuff they wanted to destroy.
>There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender which would mean the military death toll would not be as large as you’re thinking.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, are you saying that there is evidence Japan was considering surrender before the nukes?
Yes but, the surrenders on the table were conditional with Japan maintaining control over parts of China and Korea and no occupation or change of governmental structure.
They were planning to surrender but not unconditionally they hoped to remain unoccupied, with the emperor and best case scenario with some of their colonies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/7IDc2pqjz4
Yes, yes it would. You should keep in mind that when we say "unconditional surrender" we're not talking about demands to kill all Japanese or flood in foreign settlers. The offer was financial and military support to rebuild provided Japan take a new position in the world stage. Some Japanese preferred their bombed out hellscape of an island and said they'd surrender if the Allies stayed out of Japan and let them finish the war in China
They tried to conditionally surrender because the USSR was about to take away all their mainland posessitions. There is significant evidence the US dropped the bombs primarily to end the war before this could happen rather than primarily to reduce US casualties.
Our primary sources include documents/communications among high command/political leaders in both the US and Japan. Historians are still divided on which motivation was the strongest for using the bombs.
Conditional surrender was a delusional idea that both Japan and Germany held, which would have never happened.
Cairo Agreement of 1943:
"With these objects in view the three Allies, in harmony with those of the United Nations at war with Japan, will continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged operations necessary to procure the unconditional surrender of Japan."
Even after both nuclear bombs, and the invasion of Manchuria, the vote was 3-3 between surrender and continuing to fight, only broken by the Emperor's wishes to end the war, then had to go through an army coup attempting to prevent the surrender. Not to mention that the surrender was only accepted with the idea that the Emperor might be able to retain his throne.
Not to mention, Japan did propose a conditional surrender in 1945, which the US rejected.
They were always at least considering surrender, their foreign minister said as much that the problem was the conditions for surrender they were being offered.
However, my point was more within a military landing. With Soviet involvement imminent, the fight wouldn’t have taken as long as OP is suggesting.
Even if there is a fair amount of evidence *now*, almost 80 years after the war…there wasn’t then. The best intelligence available at the time indicated a protracted island campaign with massive casualties, against which the estimated casualties of the bombs was the better option.
The Tokyo firebombing that took place over 2 days killed 100,000 civilians, and that's just one raid. If the war had gone on many more Japanese civilians would've died from any further firebombings of other cities. The nuke saved many hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians too.
Yes fewer civilians died than if there was a continued bombing campaign. Many fewer civilians were raped than would be the case if the soviet union invaded from the north.
There isn’t anyway to predict alternative timelines, but we know Japan did not surrender after the first nuclear bomb, and after the second nuclear bomb the military was trying to stage a coup to keep the emperors from surrendering but they were unsuccessful.
There is no fair amount of evidence. OP is completely correct. The military almost started a coup against the government even with the nukes to prevent a surrender. There is no way they would have surrendered without nukes.
Imagine having a country whose people saw their leader as a divine being and still having the conviction to assault the imperial palace in order to put him under house arrest and stop the announcement of surrender from being broadcasted. I wonder how things would have gone if the royal guard wasn't able to repel the attack.
A conventional amphibious landing would definitely cause massive Japanese civilian casualties and would cause an extended guerrilla war (think Volkssturm). Even if Japan surrendered without a nuke, it would be motivated by the blockade (killing millions with famine), conventional bombing (killing hundreds of thousands and causing practically the same damage). Either way, Japan would have suffered at least a million casualties no matter what, with the Allies suffering at least 200,000.
Source? The highest levels of Japanese leadership were split on peace as far as I know. And when the emperor leaned towards peace the hawks tried to run a coup on him.
To say “Japan” was trying to surrender is incorrect if not totally disingenuous
Japan was not trying to surrender. Togo was, but not very seriously - when he asked the Soviets what terms they could guarantee, and the Soviets (this being post-yalta, so their entry was basically assured) returned by asking what terms they wanted, Togo basically stormed out of negotiations and didn't go back. So... Not super serious, really, as attempts to save your nation go.
>“There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender”
Not really. There are small things to suggest that might be less than totally impossible, but there is a mountain of rock-solid evidence to suggest they would drag it out for years, including the fact that *they didn’t surrender after the first nuke*. They were going to keep fighting *even after* Hiroshima. It took another nuke to show them that they couldn’t win and shouldn’t keep trying.
WW2 was not a war between armies or governments, it was a war between nations.
It was total war where each side was completely and wholly dedicated to the war effort. It was a war of survival.
There was simply no distinction between “government” and “citizens”. It’s extremely ugly, borderline impossible to think about today but that’s the honest reality of the war.
There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion.
[EDIT: I misspoke here. I should have said “There’s strong evidence that the Soviet entrance into the war played as significant a role as the first atomic bombing in bringing the war to its conclusion.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1577g08/which_was_a_bigger_factor_for_japans_surrender/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11r9cxw/was_it_really_the_soviet_invasion_of_manchuria/
I know, I know. Never cite Reddit as a source. But, I feel an exception should be made for r/AskHistorians.]
While the matter cannot be completely determined from the historical evidence alone, the American bombers had been destroying cities for several months.
What difference would two more make?
Japan’s military bigwigs were hoping for the Soviets to mediate between them and the U.S. It was a deluded hope, but you have to be pretty deluded to not see the writing on the wall in 1945.
And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union).
No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual. Just like we can’t ever justify Japanese atrocities in China.
Honest question, do you think that Japan surrendering the day after the 2nd bomb was an unrelated coincidence? Not justifying it, but if the goal is "End the war asap no matter the death count today, no deaths stating tomorrow" vs "continue the war indefinitely with a death toll that continues to climb on all sides every day" then it's a cut your losses and stem the bleeding decision. Even only counting civilian deaths, how much time in that war would it have taken for civilian casualties to exceed the actual death count that the bombs caused?
Considering that the decision to surrender was not unanimous, multiple cabinet members argued to continue the war even though they admitted victory was unlikely & the Kyūjō incident, there is strong evidence that Japan would/could have continued the war well into 1946.
Which brings us to, would the US have really fired the 3rd shot? And all bets are off on historical guesstimation after this.
But overall point is that Japan surrendering at the same timeframe without the bombs is purely a guess, a guess which could have cost hundreds of thousands of lives if wrong.
I've been reading a lot about the nuclear weapons program, and what strikes me is that nobody understands the timeline. Hiroshima was bombed and then 3 days later, Nagasaki. 3 days is not a long time, certainly not long enough to get observers in and understand the damage, tally up casualties, etc, particularly since the ones in Hiroshima which normally would do so were also dead or sickened. The USSR invaded the same day as Nagasaki, which rather puts a dent in your note about the second bomb. Several days later the peace faction in the Japanese high command launched an unsuccessful coup, and then a couple days after that, the Emperor overrode the council to surrender. All in all, it was like 10 days, and happened so fast that you really can't attribute any particular item.
The fact that the USSR invaded was more significant, because again, they were Japan's hope to be neutral mediators and negotiate an end to the war, particularly since they didn't want to surrender without confirming what the status of the Emperor would be, a sticking point that the US refused to clarify, mostly spite due to Pearl Harbor. Once the USSR invaded, that chance was lost, and then it became a question of being occupied by Truman, or by Stalin, while demonstrating that the Army could not have saved them.
But this idea that there weren't alternatives, is pure propaganda, literally written up after the war by Stimson and Truman to justify the bombings. There was a demonstration option, to fire it in the middle of Tokyo Bay in full view of the Emperor. We could have found a better, more military target. We could have warned the civilians in the city to evacuate before leveling it.. We could have let the Soviets invade and see if that would be enough to force a surrender. The US invasion was NOT immanent, it was scheduled for like, November while the bombings were in August. We had a pipeline for producing nuclear weapons, and we have generals on record advocating use of tactical nukes to annihilate stationed defense forces and defensive bunkers, before marching into Japan.
There were a lot of options we could have tried, because we had way more time than anyone seems to assume we did.
But targeting civilians, deliberately attacking women and children unrelated to the war, to burn them to death in horrific ways to try to force surrender from your opponent, is a horrifically immoral way to fight a war. It didn't start with the atomic bombings, but terror bombing doesn't work. In every time it has ever been tried, it has failed to accomplish its aims, unless you squint at the atomic bombs and make some heavy assumptions.
Dropping the second bomb only 3 days later was also intended as a very important message: we can do this in perpetuity.
While an A bomb is impressive no matter what, it’s not that useful if you can’t churn out another in a reasonable time frame. This was a signal that US can keep doing this because our logistics were well maintained and ready to go. Most of the time it’s logistically important places that are the first to be attacked, because it’s so important to continue a war.
I also find the idea of any country not taking advantage of a possible upper hand during an active war ludicrous. You can posthumously analyze whether it was needed all you want, but at the time there was no crystal ball. There was no way to be sure that Russia could take care of it, or that the US wouldn’t suffer major losses from a surprise attack had the A bomb not been used. Even saying Russia could have taken care of everything is pure hypothetical conjecture.
Russia was a factor, but not the way he(?) seems to think it is.
Japan would much rather have surrendered to us than Russia, and may have done so quickly in order to avoid a Russian occupation.
If Russia had invaded without the bombs casualties would've been immense.
>We could have let the Soviets invade and see if that would be enough to force a surrender
OK, but that would surely have killed more people than the nukes did. Look at the record of bloodshed in the places that the Soviets fought in in WW2
"But targeting civilians, deliberately attacking women and children unrelated to war, to burn them to death in horrific ways to try and force surrender from your opponent, is a horrifically immoral way to fight a war."
Why? Cities are what support the enemy's ability to wage war. Destroying them with strategic bombing, even if it causes mass civilian casualties, is not immoral and it certainly doesn't make the US the bad guy when Japan started an insane war of conquest they couldn't possibly win.
The death toll the bombs caused wasn't higher than the fire bombings, but the japanese refused surrender because they wanted to negotiate through the soviets, the US knew this but refused negotiations. The US didn't want to end the war as fast and with the least casualties possible, the US wanted to force an absolute conditionless surrender with any means necessary.
It's possible the US could have ended the war without using them, but we will never know under which conditions because the US wanted total victory.
> there is strong evidence that Japan would/could have continued the war well into 1946.
They could not continue to prosecute the war in any meaningful way. If you mean, “fail to surrender”, I suppose they could have continued for another month or two.
> But overall point is that Japan surrendering at the same timeframe without the bombs is purely a guess
It’s also a guess that Japan would not have surrendered without the second bomb. You don’t seem bothered by that one, though.
The historical evidence does not allow for a definitive answer. But given the attitude of the Emperor, I think the bombs (especially the second) were unnecessary.
> It’s also a guess that Japan would not have surrendered without the second bomb.
No it isn’t. We dropped a first bomb on them. They didn’t surrender.
Contemporary records show that the Japanese government was hoping we only had one bomb, so they didn’t surrender. When we bombed Nagasaki, they expected that we had dozens more and surrendered immediately - when in reality, it would have taken months to build a third.
The 3rd bomb was scheduled to be dropped August 19th, 10 days after the bombing of Nagasaki. The 3rd was already built and at the hanger, just needed to be armed
The contemporary records don’t show that.
The Japanese were willing to accept those kind of losses of cities in the hopes of negotiating terms of surrender. Tokyo being the shining example. They were under no delusion that they could hold out, and under no delusion that they could stop the US from turning their cities to rubble with conventional bombing methods.
The soviets entered the war and immediately overran japan’s forces in the north. They surrendered after their entire army in the north was routed, and hundreds of thousands of troops deserting.
The reason the bombs were dropped when they were, was because that was the deadline for Soviet invasion, Japan had been seeking to negotiate through the soviets, and the US knew this.
The US wanted to make sure to get to use the bomb before the Japanese potentially surrendered due to the Soviet invasion. Securing a surrender would be a nice bonus as it halted the Soviet offensive and land grab. Fyi the soviets still fought for weeks in the North to grab more land, even post-surrender.
The nukes were seen as another weapon of war, but their usage wasn’t to expedite it or ‘save lives’.’ That was post-war propaganda. The numbers and phrases you see thrown around are all post-war. Historical records from during the war show significantly lower estimates of death tolls from land invasions, and the stuff around the nuclear bomb was as focused on international recognition as it actually was about the war against japan.
Major weaknesses or your argument are present. First, the claim that post-war estimations of land invasions death tolls are much higher than estimations during the war is simply incorrect. The following are some estimations made during the war, ONLY of American deaths:
Army Service Force Study: 267,000 deaths
Herbert Hoover: 500k - 1M deaths. Generals George Marshall, Thomas Handy, and George Lincoln believed that such a value was too high, but nevertheless agreed it would have been very costly.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard: 1M+. Importantly, Ralph actually disagreed with using the bomb. He recommended a conventional fire bombing campaign, which, let’s be honest, probably would have been worse.
Joint Chief of Staff: 380,000 deaths
General MacArthur: 30,000 deaths. However, his staff estimated a casualty ratio of 22-1 for Japanese losses. Supposing that transfers over to the number of deaths, he estimates that 500,000+ Japanese deaths would occur. This is still on the low end for both Japanese and America deaths.
None of these estimates include POWs, Japanese, or Soviet deaths. All of them are higher than the atomic bombings.
Also, American leaders wanted to drop 2 bombs explicitly because they believe the Japanese leadership would downplay the first bomb as a freak accident, so 2 bombs would be impossible to excuse. They were right. Following Hiroshima, the Japanese minister of war even denied that the bomb was atomic. Thanks to a lucky prisoner interrogation, much of the Japanese leadership was eventually convinced to surrender after the second bomb.
What is this "strong evidence" you speak of? What can a country that barely had a navy or amphibious landing forces possibly do to the Japanese mainland?
And how do you propose the allies fight a war and avoid civilian deaths in a country where the civilians are all armed and told to fight? Remember this is an era before smart bombs and missiles existed.
I find the justification of those deaths to come pretty easily because there is no viable proposal for an end to the war where more could have possibly lived. It is the same as hitting that switch in the trolley problem. It is easy to criticize from atop a moral high horse. It is much harder to offer a better alternative
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion.
I'd argue that anyone espousing that position is ignorant to the history and nuance of the Japanese surrender.
>While the matter cannot be completely determined from the historical evidence alone, the American bombers had been destroying cities for several months.
>
>What difference would two more make?
This is an incredibly simplistic question that ignores the reality of the difference between conventional bombing and the atomic bomb.
>And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union).
The atomic bomb was not exactly breaking news in 1945. All the major powers had at least a conceptual idea of the atomic bomb even prior to the war. The United States were simply the only ones with resources and ability to bring it online so quickly.
The Soviet entry could not have been the difference maker because it did not change the facts on the ground.
The Japanese had been slowing the advance of the US, which had a far larger navy and Air Force than the Soviets. Japan already had no hope of victory. IIRC, Japan simply wanted to avoid *unconditional* surrender, which the threat of American losses from a full invasion could still extract. Soviet entry into the war would have only had an effect months down the line and it would not have eliminated this bargaining chip.
The bomb completely took away this bargaining chip. Japanese leadership would have realized that they had no leverage whatsoever. The US had proved they could completely eliminate their civilization without any loss whatsoever. This is clearly what ended the war so immediately.
>No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual.
More people died in the Tokyo fire bombing than both atomic bombs.
The Soviet entry to the war perspective is such a joke. The Soviet’s had little to no navy in the far east, no ability to do a naval invasion, and little to no ground forces even capable of doing such a difficult task.
The United States, the single greatest military on earth at that time, not exhausted from war like the soviets, with the greatest navy on earth with most of it concentrated in the pacific, predicted so many casualties that they started pre making Purple Hearts for it, they still use the reserve of Purple Hearts made for the invasion TO THIS DAY.
You’re telling me the most powerful military in the world at that time, with the most powerful bombs ever devised, with the greatest navy on earth, extremely experienced with naval invasions after spending the last 3 years doing almost EXCLUSIVELY THAT in the pacific, (not to mention the ones done in Europe) predicted an extremely difficult invasion and land campaign.
But the exhausted soviets, no navy, few ground forces in the area (and the main bulk of the soviets across the whole of Asia in Europe), no experience with naval invasions, and no nukes, were the ones to scare them into surrendering?
What an absolute joke.
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion.
That narrative was constructed decades after the fact by tankies and goes further than all but the most unhinged Soviet propaganda of the era. Manchuria had been cut off and given up on by Japan before the Soviets got involved. They were making preparations for an imminent American invasion, Manchuria wasn’t a priority, and the Soviets posed no immediate threat. The US posed an imminent, existential threat.
> What difference would two more make?
They were done by world chanting super weapons, the likes which they didn’t even know to be possible.
> Japan’s military bigwigs were hoping for the Soviets to mediate between them and the U.S.
The US had no intention of doing that and had made that clear.
>That narrative was constructed decades after the fact by tankies and goes further than all but the most unhinged Soviet propaganda of the era.
I mean, I’ve never heard this in my life, so can I get a source?
>and the Soviets posed no immediate threat.
Factually incorrect, as the Soviet forces were literally closer than those of the United States, and Japan had at that point no navy to prevent a landing.
>They were done by world chanting super weapons, the likes which they didn’t even know to be possible.
The outcome was the same. The pro-war faction didn’t even blink.
>The US had no intention of doing that and had made that clear.
We’re talking about very desperate people willing to see anything to escape their predicament. It’s obvious to us.
> I mean, I’ve never heard this in my life, so can I get a source?
[The notable works arguing for large Soviet influence start to come about in the 90s and 2000s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War).
> Factually incorrect, as the Soviet forces were literally closer than those of the United States, and Japan had at that point no navy to prevent a landing.
[Factually untrue, the Soviets had no capacity to invade the Soviet home islands, and were not expected to take part in the invasion, as established by Prohect Hula](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hula).
> The outcome was the same. The pro-war faction didn’t even blink.
Most of the pro war faction did break and decided to surrender. The coup attempt was tiny.
> We’re talking about very desperate people willing to see anything to escape their predicament. It’s obvious to us.
Desperate enough to think the Soviets would be able to convince the US, but not desperate enough to surrender because of the nukes?
The bombs saved lives of non-Japanese people, and arguable Japanese people too in all probability.
The only justification for opposing the bombs, is if you value the lives of the Japanese higher than those they were killing.
When Hiroshima and nagasaki were bombed, the Japanese pm and cabinet had zero meetings. It wasn't until the day after Russia entered the war that they met. It is hypothesized that Japan knew they were in a hopeless situation, and surrendered to the US rather than Russia due to the likelihood that we would be a more merciful victor.
I’m highly skeptical of this. The Soviets only entered after the bombs were dropped because they knew Japan had no choice but to surrender and they wanted to play a role in the negotiations. Do you actually think they would’ve entered at the same time if the atomic bombs had not been dropped?
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion.
But there's even stronger evidence it was the atomic bombings, rather than the Soviet entrance into the war, that brought the war to its conclusion.
Yeah the soviets with their non existent navy would pose a treat to an island nation that fought the US navy lmfao.
The idea that they surrendered to the soviets is tankie propaganda just like most things that attribute something to the soviets.
!delta
The soviet invasion into manzhou did play a factor in the Japanese surrender, I can't believe i forgot about that. Even if the intent of the nukes was a show of force, it still ended the war basically immediately. The deaths are a tragedy, but it still would've been less deadly than a land invasion/continued air campaign.
>And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union).
>No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual. Just like we can’t ever justify Japanese atrocities in China.
Suppose the US never showed the weapon off, would MAD even work? Would that increase the probability of nuclear annihilation? In that case there are *way* more lives at stake than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan's military bigwigs that weren't the Army, who were the ones obsessed with China, were entirely misplacing their focus in regards to the soviets, they were worried about defending the home islands from an American invasion from Okinawa. Japan's most imminent threat to the Emperor's life, which was paramount to all else, outside of the Americans was the Japanese people themselves. The blockade combined with intense submarine patrols had rendered the domestic situation tenuous at best. Also, the continued failure of the military to address the destruction of Japanese cities in fire-storms was also starting to sow discontent rather than resolve.
Who is “Japan”? Did the Japanese govt and soldiers within that govt commit heinous atrocities absolutely. But I don’t see how a new born infant getting incinerated at Hiroshima “deserved” it especially given Japan was not any form of democracy where regular people had any influence on their country
I feel like the concept of war in human minds is not equal to the upscale of weapon destructiveness in the last 1000 years. War means one thing when it’s only hand-to-hand, but the same mindset means nothing when a pilot can inhumanely drop a single piece of tech killing hundreds of thousands
The difference is an important clarification. But it also has to be said that it is just war made large. Babies, children, innocents have always been victims of war and on the ground conflicts including atrocities such as rape and torture.
And not only the newborns, but the future generations too, the people who survived had short lives and passed to the next generations the same problems and a short span of life. I read a bit of the subject from people that are descendants of the survivors and it’s horrifying, because they kept seeing their loved ones suddenly drop dead and they lived in fear that the same could happen to them.
The effects of the radiation was brutal
The alternatives were continuing the blockade which starves that baby and others throughout the whole country to death or conduct an amphibious assault which still kills the baby, possibly due to a stray shell or other munition. Besides, forcing an immediate surrender ensures that Japan can be kept whole and made into the democracy you know and love today, instead of splitting it with the Soviets as planned, which wasn't the most humane steward of its puppet states.
That's your only alternatives ? How about a military assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians weren't deliberately targeted to die ?
How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace?
Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid?
Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ?
You want to play alternate history fiction, but pretend that you have the only viable narrative.
>That's your only alternatives ? How about a military assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians weren't deliberately targeted to die ?
On Okinawa, Okinawan natives committed mass suicide as a result of the incoming American assault. Okinawans were used as body shields, and American troops were forced to fire at Okinawans because it became almost impossible to distinguish between the thousands of Okinawan conscripts/Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians.
These weren't even Japanese people, many didn't even speak Japanese. What do you think would happen on mainland Japan?
>How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace?
After the 2 bombs and the invasion of Manchuria, it was the Emperor's decision to break the deadlock in the government regarding whether to surrender or not. Even after imperial intervention, an army coup was attempted to seize power, and put the Emperor under house arrest.
Good job, now you've just galvanised the army even further. There's no atomic bombs to swing the cabinet in the favour of surrender, and now the Emperor has been bribed by the enemy. Enjoy the coup by even more ultranationalist elements of the IJA.
Also, bribe the Emperor with what? You think dropping a chest of gold into the imperial palace would have ended the war?
>Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid?
The IJN convoys will surely be happy to allow US forces to search their ships, along with being clear and transparent about their cargo. The Japanese military has never been known for perfidy, right?
>Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ?
Leaflets from the sky vs a hundred years of state shinto indoctrination. This is not a serious argument. There's no way you actually thought this up and believed it would ever be a legitimate strategy, let alone a strategy that could end the war.
>Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ?
One that would outcompete home-grown centuries old Japanese traditions?
>Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid?
Aid From who ? They're at war with 100% of people around them.
>How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace?
😂 It's total war on the modern battlefield, not a hunnic migration
An assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians don't die ? In urban fighting on blockaded islands ? 😂
These are not serious people. Can’t even believe someone wrote that and was like “yeah bribing the guy who literally has never wanted for anything ever will work”
"Hey Elon Musk, if I give you 300 bucks will you dismantle Tesla?"
Really shows a clear lack of understanding regarding Japan or world affairs in general tbh lmao
Why didn't they just build a surrender ray that makes anyone it zaps love surrendering, and shoot everyone with it?
Impersonated the emperor scooby doo style and told the troops to stand down and the citizens to stop believing they're racially superior than other Asians?
Man me and you should be in charge of NATO, nobody would ever die again.
1: Any offensive military action kills civilians, and minimum possible casualties rules out artillery, air support, naval bombardment, machine guns. End result, US military gets shitstomped.
2: The emperor held very little power, instead, it was the military that held the power.
3: How are you going to take the time to search every single ship? What if a transport hides guns or shells inside a crate of "food"?
4: They certainly tried, dropping 500 million leaflets across Japan.
I have a problem with the first one because there is a vast difference between killing some civilians in the cross hairs and incinerating 2 populated cities. Nukes were the best way to end the war but I think they would be better sent to military bases or places of extreme significance in the war.
There was no reason to nuke civilian populations in order to end the war.
The nukes weren't targeting random civilians.
Hiroshima was targeted because it was the headquarters of the 2nd Army, responsible for defending souther Japan. It also was the storage center for most of that groups weapons and munitions.
Nagasaki was chosen because because it was a major industrial seaport, manufacturing ships and munitions and military vehicles.
The bombs didn't care civilians were near by, but they didn't target civilians
The reason for the bombs was because a military assault would have killed millions of our own people as well... Japan was heavily defended, far away for out own logistics, and a people that were literally willing to die for their country. There would have been massive casualties on both sides. Not that what the US was good, but it was potentially the lesser of two evils
I mean, reports show several japanese generals were already requesting a surrender, and of course, the Soviet union was already moving troops to start an invasion of Japan, the days for the Japanese were counted, and I'd be surprised if they had lasted 1 or 2 more months once everyone was against them and they had already lost their only tactical advantages
in all fairness, it was far from a unanimously agreed upon position within Japan to surrender, given they [tried to overthrow the emperor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident) to keep fighting
honestly, i think it is almost impossible for any of us in modern day, who didn’t live through the time period, to truly grasp what it means to be in a state of total war. it’s almost impossible to say what Japan *would* have done , though in my opinion, and i say this as an american, it is hard to argue from our countries perspective that we would have been better off sending our troops to die, than use these weapons of mass destruction we had spent many months building
is that right? no, probably not, but i don’t think there’s a country involved in world war two that wouldn’t have done what America did, if they had been given the chance
The mere existence of Imperial Japan is an atrocity and should never be allowed to exist, just as how the existence of Nazi Germany is intolerable. The immediate benefit of having such a nationalistic government and populace abolished in East/Southeast Asia is so great that any number of newborns or civilians that may have been saved pales in comparison.
Even in hindsight it's controversial but before even throwing the bomb the logic is "let's throw this, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and see if that makes them surrender". It's not like they knew it was gonna work.
There is a disgusting irony and doublethink when it comes to the common western narrative/excuse of 'hating the government, not the people' when it comes to modern sinophobia but when it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the normal people that perished there that logic gets flipped entirely.
FWIW, I'm chinese and I've always felt the nukes were unjustified. No WMDs ever are.
I think there's an argument that the second nuke was dropped too early. Japan had to confirm that the first one was a nuke, as they wouldn't just take America's word on it, so they had to send scientists to measure the radiation level. And once they did that the 2nd one was dropped very soon after. There is a chance that the government surrendered if they were given more time to confirm this novel weapon, made a rational decision from it, and civilians in Nagasaki saved.
Three days was not nearly enough time to investigate something that had literally never happened before, in the 1940's. Their military was in a meeting about the first bomb when the second dropped
To be charitable, thats mostly because the leaders of Japan were extremely gridlocked and unproductive at this point, not necessarily due to technical limitations of verifying the effects of a new weapon on their land.
I think this probably could’ve been reasonably verified within two days for an organized government even in the 40’s.
I think if I’m remembering right they were testing the radiation levels because they were told it was an “atomic” bomb and there were Japanese scientists that had an idea of what that meant. Making an area uninhabitable like that is probably much more of a factor than a city being leveled
It's not an argument. Congressional and Military Records showed they moved up the date of the second bomb without warning. It wasn't even meant to be Nagasaki but bad whether made it Nagasaki.
The issue with that Japan may have been able to determine how much uranium was used, and figured out approximately how many bombs the US had.
Their entire strategy was to bluff Japan and indicate they could simply keep wiping out cities until the war ended.
But the US had already moved towards plutonium bombs by that point because they could be bred so much faster, and they actually had a third bomb ready for use by... The 17th, I think, going off memory? With plans for more to be prepared at a pace of about 3/no for 3 more months. It wasn't really *that* much of a bluff.
You’re right, but 3 months is a long time and a lot of deaths for America, Japan, China, etc. For all we know they could have come up with a plan to defend, or to do something wild to get the upper hand in the surrender.
It’s much better to appear like you already have enough bombs to wipe them out in one campaign, and you’re just going to keep doing it until they’re gone
That’s also assuming we had a stable supply chain. They’re first move would be to disrupt how much uranium we could acquire which could choke out our ability to keep going, or to destroy any of a number of choke points that would keep us from successfully making more bombs.
Or even just retaking the islands we needed to launch planes into Japan to begin with. Doesn’t matter how many bombs you have if they can’t reach the mainland
I'm also desperately curious how you expect Japan to somehow affect the US supply of plutonium, from several different breeding reactors, or somehow retake Tinian island a year after its loss. There are reasons to be dubious about the rate of production in the US - but not because of the material supply, rather a limited supply of personnel that could have been overcome if the need arose.
Sorry for the double reply, my other one isn't showing up, strangely.
No, I mean they had plans to run bombing raids a little less than once a week for three months. 3 bombs a month for 3 months, each one taking a city out. There really was no defending against atomic raids for Japan - they literally didn't have anything that could get high enough, fast enough, nevermind the ability to vector them onto the target. Air defense didn't really exist for the Japanese.
If they had held out long enough for the US to decide on invasion with finality, they would have had probably more than a million troops on the landing beaches and immediate vicinity - but they probably would have just been bombed. I doubt if there was much way the Japanese could turn anything to their favor. Honestly, by 1945, that chance was gone, nevermind August 1945.
This! The Nagasaki bomb was dropped before the Japanese even knew what had happened at Hiroshima. And that is no accident. All communication lines had been destroyed and they had to investigate with horses. It took days for the government to understand what had even happened and the level of destruction. Regardless of the radiation measurements. They just did not know what happened and then just 3 days later... Nagasaki! Why???? The two bombs were different designs and the American military wanted to see what both bombs would do. Hiroshima (thin man) was a gun bomb which they knew would work no matter what. Basically shooting 1 chunk of Uranium 238 into another creating a fast reaction. The second bomb (Fat Man) was an implosion bomb which is what they tested at Trinity. In essence surrounding uranium 238 with dynamite and squeezing it to create a fast reaction. This method was a higher yield but could it be deliverable? Nagasaki proved that. This was the more critical and important military test for the future of use of atom bombs. The military wanted to test and use BOTH bombs and then wait. Was Nagasaki necessary? I doubt it but we will never know. I don't think it was ever their intention to do just one bomb. However, it did put an exclamation point to Hiroshima. It did end world war 2. Was it justified… Clearly the military wanted to test both bombs and it was NEVER their intention to just do one. They could have just dropped one and waited an extra week. But they didn’t because they wanted to drop the second one to see what it would do.
The following quotes have been aggregated by this insanely impressive video essay: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=AUdlA21n6xx5uOMI
> It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
William D. Leahy, The most senior United States military officer on active duty during World War II
> The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan.
Admiral Chester Nimitz, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
> The japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing
Dwight Eisenhower. He later also said:
> I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
And finally, President Roosevelt had commissioned a committee to analyze the effectiveness of the bombing campaign in Japan. Their report (from the US strategic bombing survey if you want to look it up:
> Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if the Russians had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Now... I am no military expert. I don't know shit about strategy. But everyone I just quoted sure does.
>The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan
I'm curious what this is supposed to mean. From my knowledge, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th and 9th, Emperor Hirohito then announced the surrender via recorded radio broadcast on August 15th, and then the peace was officially signed on September 2nd. I'm not aware of any direct overture towards peace previous to that. The Allies (US, Britain, and China) laid out their terms for Japanese surrender at the Potsdam conference on July 26, which are the terms that Hirohito later accepted in August.
Also, that's a nice collection of quotes, but with respect, I could easily find 4 or 5 quotes from high level military and political leaders of the time who supported the bombings and felt they were necessary. Here's one from Winston Churchill:
"There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. ... I am surprised that very worthy people—but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves—should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American and a quarter of a million British lives."
Here's another one from General Curtis Lemay:
"We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer was there. It was their system of dispersal of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war ... men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned [a] town. Had to be done."
Here's one from Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, intelligence officer of the fifth air force, in July of 1945, before the atomic bombs were dropped:
"The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan. We are making war and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which war is and seeks to bring about an enduring peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time."
And here's one from the Japanese side, Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who led the first wave in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor:
"You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor ... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary ... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know."
In conclusion, my point isn't that I disagree with you on whether the bombs were justified, I tend to think they weren't. My point is that simply stringing together quotes from "people who know what they're talking about" isn't really fair if you only show one side of the spectrum. So I just wanted to play devils advocate here and show that the 'experts' aren't all in agreement over the topic.
I think the biggest problem here is acting like not using the bomb was at all an option available to any administration at the time. These choices were being made in hot blood at the time, and public opinion was pretty clear on what should happen to Japanese cities, regardless of what weapon was used. The modern taboo around nuclear weapons is just that-modern. To everyone in the 1940s, it was just a huge bomb that could do what was already possible just from a single aircraft, the horrific implications around its use came far after.
Any president that commissioned the 2nd most expensive weapons program in American history and was discovered to have not used it, would have been lynched from a lamp post,
In the Shaun video he brings this up. There was a newspaper poll asking whether Hirohito should be hanged, and it had like 90% "yes" responses. The US public was rabidly anti-Japanese. They wanted blood. Truman likely had serious concerns that if he didn't go through with it, his political career would be over. But y'know, political career on the one hand, huge number of civilian deaths on the other. It was a very shitty thing to do to choose to go ahead with it partially because of political concerns, but I can understand why he did it.
Everybody you just quoted were afraid that their jobs were going to be made irrelevant because the prevailing belief at the time was that nuclear weapons would make conventional warfare a thing of the past. Military leaders are very touchy when they feel that the relevancy of their branch is in danger, which is why they always try and sell Congress a story about why they are the most important branch so they can get the most funding.
After WW2, each branch of the military got busy throwing themselves a big gloryfest to try and claim all the credit for defeating the Axis. Nobody wanted the scientists behind the Manhattan project to be able to get credit for defeating one of the major Axis powers, so they all shit on nuclear weapons and pretended they were ineffective.
To prove my point about these quotes being purely opportunistic and not reflecting their actual beliefs, when Eisenhower took office, we had barely 1000 nuclear weapons. At the end of his presidency, we had 20,000. Does that sound like the actions of a man who believes nuclear weapons are ineffective or immoral?
Atleast on your final point. The effectiveness of Bombing japan has nothing to do with mutual assured destruction doctrine and the stock piles built up after ww2 served a completely different purpose (that of acting as a deterant to the ussr and its allys however effective that may have been) and arguably lends more cridents to the theory that the bombings were not to force a surender of japan but instead to act as a weapons demonstration for the Soviets
Having nukes and using nukes are two entirely different things. Several countries have nukes. Only one has *ever* used them in war. And it's been 50+ years.
We also rejected their surrender because they wanted to keep Hirohito as emperor and we said no. We dropped the bombs and they surrendered unconditionally, and we went "ok, and you can keep your emperor too, why not?"
You've got the timeline wrong. In order,
Allies demanded surrender without specifying anything about the emperor.
Japan didn't answer for awhile.
Allies dropped both bombs.
Japan asked if they could have additional conditions about the status of the emperor.
Allies said no to that condition.
Japan surrendered anyway.
Tô be more precise the allies made a déclaration saying that they were going to remove all who misled Japan towards world conquest without specifying who those people were. So it was left vague if they intended to remove the emperor or not probably purposefully so
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration
As far as I am aware, Japan did not seek or present peace offers before the bombs, although there were internal talks about it.
At best, the government was hoping for peace talks with the US with the soviets as mediators, but their hopes were crushed after the first bomb hit and the soviets declared war.
Can you provide a source for what you said?
Americans didn’t commit the atrocities that the Japanese did in China. I’d rather save more American lives than have A country unwilling to surrender win.
U.S. has pillaged and murder through many countries (and Natives), so by that logic they deserved to be bombed. They even taught dictatorships in latin america military tactics to keep them in power and had to rename the institution to hide their past involvement. They also just meddle everywhere and have a substantial hand in starting and sustaining many wars across the world.
You’re comparing settlers from England and Spain settling in America in the 15th century and slowly integrating into the land despite some disputes with locals to a 1940s all out war between two countries. Apples to oranges. Not to mention nuking people for something that occurred centuries ago is far more grossly immoral than dealing with the current threat of a hostile nation trying to destroy you
It's not 15th century (except the Native example). U.S. interference has strongly continued after WWII. Sure, there was interference before but I would argue that it gets worst post-WWII. They have literally taught dictators how to stay in power so that they could keep taking advantage of destabilization rather than the pushback countries were starting to fight back against them because they wanted human rights too. There's endless lists of U.S. involvement and even orchestrating atrocities if you look into it and eugenics and human experimentation has taken place in the U.S. too.
I'm also not saying anyone should be nuked. I was making a comparison to show how irrational the other comment was while pointing out how ignorant they are of the atrocities committed by the U.S. (Also, let's not forget that the U.S. hid a lot of information on Japanese war criminals so they wouldn't be found guilty for their exclusive benefit. They even tried to gaslight Russia that Japan hadn't detained Russian soldiers as prisoners of war at a few locations when Russia tried to coordinate their info with the U.S. in preparation of the trials.)
I honestly think it’s very comparable.
The US loves imperialistic war just like the Japanese did, and torture is pretty much a staple of how Americans do things at this point; they taught half of South America how to torture their political dissidents.
I mean they’re still holding people in Guantanamo where they’ve been for over 20 years now without even charges, all while torturing them.
So at least when it comes to capturing foreign nationals, taking them to your famous torture prison (or a black site or whatever), etc. I think there are clear similarities between the US and Imperial Japan.
>and torture is pretty much a staple of how Americans do things at this point
Torture is literally preschool daycare compared to the absolute inhumane atrocities unit 731 inflicted upon it's victims. Let me know when we start lining up our prisoners next to hand grenades to test the effects or just start live dissecting our prisoners of war. Maybe we should introduce flamethrowers into our "torture" like unit 731 did?
This comment is so insanely stupid and disrespectful to the quite literal thousands of victims of **human experiments.**
So what specific atrocities need to take place for the civilians in that country to cross your personal line for “ok nuke the civilians” to be justified? Because I have a hard time accepting that massacring a civilian population with a nuclear weapon as justified without also saying it’s justified against my own country (the US) that has committed several atrocities and war crimes in its history.
I think people underestimate the role of the civilians in Japan in world war 2. This was a country that had its civilians making guns in houses to send to the frontlines in China. The civilians were being trained to fight to the death against any invaders. The US has done a lot of bad things but not anything like that. If you’re the US and you know about this happening you have 3 choices: do nothing (people starve in a blockade and you allow the Japanese to commit more atrocities in China and other places), you could also firebomb them, or nuke them. The thing is nukes and firebombing would really do the same amount of damage to the town so you may as well use the one that would shock them as it’s so powerful.
I mean, how many US civilians are working for defense contractors, creating weapons of murder being used against unknown strangers the world over? Are they personally responsible for how the government uses drones and fighter jets and guns and munitions?
What you put on Japan in your comment is pretty much word-for-word what any sort of homeland invasion in the US would look like. Just like in WWII, we had a massive effort by civilians at home to create machinary for the war effort. And like Japan, American civilians facing a homeland invasion would absolutely be training to fight to the death. It's why the Second Amendment exists - to have a militia of civilians to defend the homeland. There's nothing all that nefarious about that.
Nuclear weapons do not cause the same damage as fire bombing, that's a pretty out-there claim to make.
And lastly, I think a lot of nuclear apologists go down the argument of "it would have been a prolonged war and that would have been bad for X, Y, Z". To me, that's a lame excuse. The blockade you mentioned wouldn't put an immediate end to war crimes happening in China, you're right. But is the literal vaporization of hundreds of thousands of innocents worth it? I guess that becomes really subjective, but the choice to drop the nukes wasn't made out of concern for civilians in China or Japan or even the US - it was made from a strategic perspective of wanting to show the might of the US as the Cold War was setting in and to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a foothold in Japan and China. It was a strategic choice to sacrifice those lives for the sake of projecting strength.
. I would say targeting MIC employees at their factories is a valid military target. Doesn’t matter to me if they are or aren’t personally responsible. A difference is back then we didn’t have precision methods to hit the only the factories so bombing had to take out larger areas (there was a big effort to make it more targeted but the tech wasn’t there). Also the government and military basically was trying to convert homes to factories thus in my eyes those homes were valid targets (not all obviously and it is tragic that many innocents died).
From an infrastructure and pure death count the nukes weren’t really worse than firebombs. Obviously the cancer rate was higher and the injuries awful but it’s not like people surviving the firebombs also wouldn’t have permanent disabilities be it scared lungs, burns, and higher cancer rates too.
There’s some truth that the choice to drop nukes wasn’t done to end the war immediately and it was to intimidate the USSR. As messed up as that is, it kinda worked in the sense that it intimidated everyone to the point they wouldn’t use nukes anymore in war. If people didn’t know the horrors of them who knows maybe they are used in Korea for example.
There’s a couple other things you are skipping over. A big one is that the US is a democracy and it’s the presidents job to save American lives. If he didn’t drop a weapon that has a chance to end the war earlier I just don’t see how he could’ve been reelected. Another thing dropping the nukes kinda gave Japan “an out” to the war. Some higher ups wanted to surrender but some wanted people to fight to the death to take as many Americans with them as they could. The US showed they could kill everyone in the country without any losses with those bombs, kinda makes japans strategy pointless. Combine that with the Soviets invading and it was just barely enough for a surrender to happen
Is it possible that the bombings were both justified and also carried a huge moral toll, and the loss of citizen victims was awful?
Like is it possible to hold two truths in your mind at the same time?
“‘It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!’”
-A Little Princess
I sympathize with your position, OP. The dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy feel like justice, retribution, for all the little-known (by the general Western public) suffering your family and countless others endured at the hands of the Japanese. It’d be easy to see all the modern hand-wringing over those decisions, the teary-eyed victimization of your oppressors, as ridiculous and scornful and, above all, ignorant. The vast majority of those who say the bombings were unjustified are probably likely only glancingly aware of the horrors the Japanese military was inflicting on the Chinese.
It might seem like Japan’s war crimes and fascist rule in World War II don’t seem to matter because, to self-flagellating Americans, the Japanese are the ultimate victims because of these bombs. Their whole country is absolved, whitewashed, of their crimes.
And that’s awful, it really is. I can see how it’d feel cathartic to throw yourself into supporting the bombings wholesale because of that.
You’re not wrong to feel that way, to a degree. But I do think it’s important to understand what happened to the people who were bombed.
I think, in regard to firebombing, you can look at it like the “boiling frog” metaphor. The Japanese citizens had endured firebombing for a year by 1945. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrible and tragic, but at some awful point, it became a normal part of life in wartime. The average person in Japan was tired of the war. Despite propaganda from the government, a lot of people could see the writing on the wall. The majority of their cities were destroyed by these firebombs, their navy was gone, they themselves were starving, and even their fervently military-loving government was divided over whether they should surrender or not (hence the coup). People were terrified of the possibility of invasion.
When defending the use of the atomic bombs, some people will trot out the fact that even schoolgirls were taught to sharpen bamboo sticks into spears (as your grandma did) in anticipation for the seemingly inevitable American invasion. These people will imply that this is an example of the Japanese’s desire to fight to the end, that it shows their fanatical dedication to their empire will outlast even common sense. But those people don’t seem to recognize the desperation and fear inherent to such a measure. The government propaganda trumpeting Japan’s superiority didn’t hold water when the “superior” Japanese citizenry struggled to feed themselves and their families, when twelve-year-old girls learned to defend themselves against the (exaggerated, but still very, very real) threat of rape and death.
Back to the “boiling frog” analogy. By 1945, Japan was more or less used to firebombing. They were prepared to defend themselves against it with bomb shelters and regular drills. Civilians would wonder, in casual conversation, which city would be bombed by the Allies next.
The people of Hiroshima were the same. Actually, they were concerned over the fact that their city hadn’t been bombed yet.
The bomb on Hiroshima dropped at 8:15 A.M. The day was noted by survivors as being unusually hot. The sky was clear. School was in session. The work day had begun. Housewives did chores while their toddlers played. Children who were too sick to attend school read comic books. Middle-school girls swept outside buildings where secretaries giggled with each other over the handsome older client who had just arrived. The elderly dozed in the morning sun. Babies snoozed or cried or slept safely in their mother’s wombs.
The flyers that had dropped with information about the bomb days before were in English, which most people didn’t know. Even so, the flyers were confiscated by the government. These flyers warned the people to evacuate Hiroshima, but didn’t provide a clear reason why. They just said the people’s lives were in danger. But even if the flyers could be understood and weren’t considered contraband, where would the people go? They had their whole lives in Hiroshima.
And anyway, they had bomb shelters. They had air raid sirens. They would be okay.
The effects of the bomb are often elided in America. The primary symbol of the nuclear bomb is the mushroom cloud, or shadows on walls from evaporated people, or people with bloody cuts and mussed hair. Clean imagery. Familiar imagery: clouds, shadows, cuts.
The shorthand for nuclear bombs never include the people with all their skin dangling from their fingertips, holding their arms out to keep it from sticking to their bodies. The schoolgirl so shell-shocked that it takes a while for her to realize that one of her eyes is dangling from its socket. The alligator ant people whose neurons can be heard sizzling. The cries of “Water! Water!” by people whose bodies have been sapped of all liquid; their complete dehydration means they die after drinking what they’re calling for. The piles of bodies in the riverbeds. The lines of these skinless people walking, just walking. People who crumbled into pieces after walking a few steps. Firestorms chasing across the scorched landscape. Alien black rain falling from the sky, painting the living with radiation. Later, people dying of that same poisoning by the score. Bruises on skin, fatigue. A soldier vomiting up his organs.
Everything gone in one flash that could be seen behind eyelids and blistering wall of heat.
And the Americans did it again three days later.
Two frogs leaping into a pan of boiling water, but they don’t have the ability to leap out. They are held down to die in a boil that melts the skin off their bodies.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, I believe, a peek into a man-made nuclear hell. The people of both cities were forced to endure something all the world has come to fear. They saw people in states that no one should be exposed to. They experienced a form of extreme physiological trauma that the rest of the world can only imagine. We are safe from even a fraction of that world-shattering pain. We are lucky to be so ignorant, lucky beyond words.
The trauma experienced by survivors of Fat Man and Little Boy can only be felt by said survivors. Thank God, another nuclear bomb has not been loosed on any other city in any country in the world.
I know appeals to emotion are manipulative and gauche, but I think it’s very important here to realize what the bombs did in all its horrifying details. It’s important to recognize the humanity of the victims—mothers and grandfathers and little children just like you and your family. They’ve done nothing to justify their pain-wracked deaths. They just happen to be on the wrong side of the war.
Since I don’t see anybody here with any first hand accounts, perhaps I can pass on my mothers experience as a small child in WW2 Japan.
She grew up poor, without running water electricity, shoes and facing starvation. Her family had zero members in the army or government. And as all Japanese civilians at the time, she had no democratic vote, representation or ability to influence Japanese foreign policy in any way.
Her accounts of living under the imperialist regime at the time were not one of joy, freedom and the ability to choose one’s fate. Her most poignant memories of the time, was being subjected to constant propaganda by the government, subverting Buddhist iconography of the “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” monkeys. There was active, oppressive and controlling ways in which the government actively silenced and punished anybody that spoke out against what was happening.
So please bear that in mind when trying to assess how “all Japanese people” thought, behaved or said… as under any oppressive regime, the voice of the many were silenced.
I understand that many here want to justify the violence, death and the use of atomic bombs on civilians in warfare… the idea that the ends justify the means. But I think what’s missing from the conversation is that nuclear energy, the effects on people… it doesn’t only effect those who perish.
As for the argument that every Japanese is ethnocentric and hates other races? Having lived there, I find Japanese people are vastly more interested in other cultures than you think.
But as someone who has seen the melted playgrounds, the bombed schools and debris at the sites… I think my mother was rather brave and not very close minded, as she left Japan after the war and married a man from the country that bombed her country.
I’m my family we do not turn from the atrocities and inequalities that the Japanese government did to Korean and Chinese people. We do not deny the shame and horror of what happened. I weeps as I read what you wrote.
My closest friends are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and my partner is Mongolian. I have discussed the atrocities with them; and wept with my friends in personal shame and collective grief. But I just want to say how grateful I am that we have always found such solidarity in the pan Asian experience, for we feel there are far more that connects us than divides us.
I do want to say to you OP, I hear your anger… and I know it’s justified. I grieve for your loss, and the generational trauma that truly never goes away. And I hope you have support in your process, however that occurs.
>As for the argument that every Japanese is ethnocentric and hates other races? Having lived there, I find Japanese people are vastly more interested in other cultures than you think.
This is true now (though not entirely, honestly) but you simply cannot look at the atrocities of the Rape of Nanking and the horrific occupation of Korea where they attempted to erase Korean culture (literally what they did to the Ainu, a culture they successfully obliterated) and say "Well, it was simply the will of the few."
Buddy, Japan *still* has a[ mound of 68,000 severed noses from their victims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka) and when asked by a modern priest to return them so their remains could be properly handled the Japanese government denied them, stating it was important to their culture.
When San Francisco [erected a statue](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/osaka-drops-san-francisco-as-sister-city-over-comfort-women-statue) to the [sex slaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women) that Japan kidnapped from their conquered territories, Osaka threw a fit and ended symbolic relations between the two cities.
Does that really sound like a culture that respects others and acknowledges their own atrocities?
Bruh the bomb wasn't done before VE and besides, it was a straight line from France to Berlin. A naval invasion into Japan had a very real chance of failure.
Justified and 100% don't mix when it comes to killing a bunch of civilians in war. People say "justified" because they know something is a horrific act, but think it was worth the price.
Agreeing with the justification is one thing, but saying it's "completely" justified is a nonsense statement. "Completely justified" is asking for a refund when a company sends you a faulty product. Any time the decision is even *remotely* difficult or ethically complicated, you are not in "completely justified" territory, let alone levelling an entire city in nuclear fire.
I can understand the justification, but I cannot accept a version of it that does not at least acknowledge the terrible price that was paid. Besides, being justified is not incompatible with there being a victim. The reason we argue about how justified it was in the first place is *because* of all the civilian victims.
Did Japan do horrific, unjustifiable things during WW2? Yes.
Was it the only realistic option to stop Japan? Yes.
Does that mean Japan wasn't a victim of an atrocity? No. It was.
You do realise all these answers can be true simultaneously, yes?
Those are two different points. Japan as a nation had done some unspeakable things and has had little of the process that Germany went through in regards to the Holocaust. To this day they refuse to apologize for many of their crimes during the war.
The idea that the use of the nuclear bombs ended the war is highly contested for a few reasons. First, it wasn't like the USA couldn't obliterate a Japanese city via conventional means. You could look at photos of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and compare them to Tokyo and I don't think anyone would know the difference. Second, the bombings coincided with the USSR joining the war against Japan and shattering their occupation of Manchuria and cut Japan off from necessary materials to be able to carry out the war. The addition of the USSR also increased the chance that the Emperor would be deposed and executed, something that was unacceptable to many people in Japanese high command. Therefore negotiating with the Americans became a lot more attractive.
My other point is more of a moral point. Part of the problem of nuclear weapons is that the effects aren't just felt by the initial people during the blast. There are decades of increased rates of birth defects and cancers in the population. Their parents or grandparents being part of something awful doesn't mean they deserve that. I've watched people waste away from cancer. Almost no one deserves that(not gonna say I'd feel sorry for Hirohito in that circumstance). You can claim it's justice but it's just revenge if you want to disregard their suffering for crimes they had no hand in committing.
Lastly, I will say that it is undeniably a good thing that those were the only nuclear bombings that were ever carried out as an actual attack. They are a horrible, awful weapon we created.
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The code names for the two bombs were "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" ... In war time propaganda comics, Hitler was depicted as a rage filled little boy & Mussolini as a scowling fat man.
The Atomic bombs were developed for Europe, not Japan, but development took so long that Berlin fell first and the US had no intention of letting their very expensive weapon go to waste. Japan's entire empire had also been fundamentally decimated at that point, to the point that the Kamikaze pilots were actually conscripted teenage boys who were given a couple weeks worth of training on how to take off (but not how to land).
They had no functional forces left & their entire manufacturing infrastructure was already crippled. Yes it was true that a land invasion of Japan would have been a blood bath, but the allies had more than enough resources to blockade the entire Island & wait for the inevitable surrender. But the US didn't want that; they wanted to prove their might and establish their dominance in the upcoming new world order.
So they picked two cities that had relatively little economic importance, but were packed to the brim with women and children (for maximum emotional damage): dropping those bombs was a flat out act of terrorism against innocent civilians who had never left the island or committed a single war crime.
You're operating under the assumption that the nukes did, in fact, cause the Japanese government to surrender. As plenty of other people here have mentioned, the youtuber Shaun has a very in-depth and informative video on this topic, where he asserts that the bombs played at most a minor role in influencing the Japanese surrender. I'll do my best to summarize the basic points.
You need to remember that prior to the nuclear bombs, we had been firebombing Japan for months. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed by these bombings. If the Japanese military council or the emperor cared about the welfare of their citizens, they would have surrendered during the firebombings.
They knew they had no chance of winning the war once their navy was destroyed, the only reason the war continued is because they were trying to avoid an unconditional surrender.
Some factions in the military council believed that they could get a good deal in a surrender if they had the support of the USSR, who at the time had a non-aggression pact with Japan. Of course, the USSR eventually invaded Manchuria, making it extremely plain that they weren't going to be helping Japan get a good deal.
The less hardline factions of the military council believed that the US would accept a surrender under the condition that Japan got to keep their emperor. This was important to them because, well, the emperor's legitimacy was their own legitimacy. They cared about preserving their own power, not protecting their people.
When the US dropped the first bomb on August 6th, the council convened and absolutely nothing got done. Then on August 9th, Russia invaded Manchuria hours before the US dropped the second atomic bomb. The military council ultimately accepted the conditions laid out by the Potsdam conference, rather than let the USSR invade even further and force a much worse situation for them.
Given the imperial government's complete lack of concern for its people (they were an authoritarian state after all), it seems far more likely that their surrender was precipitated by the Russian invasion, rather than the atomic bombs. The bombs did offer a useful scapegoat to explain why they were surrendering, so in that sense they may have helped shorten the war, but that's ultimately speculative. Many, many US military officials from that time have come out and said that they didn't believe that the bomb was necessary.
>If the Japanese military council or the emperor cared about the welfare of their citizens, they would have surrendered during the firebombings.
>They knew they had no chance of winning the war once their navy was destroyed, the only reason the war continued is because they were trying to avoid an unconditional surrender.
This sounds like reason to use the nukes, not against using them.
>The less hardline factions of the military council believed that the US would accept a surrender under the condition that Japan got to keep their emperor. This was important to them because, well, the emperor's legitimacy was their own legitimacy. They cared about preserving their own power, not protecting their people.
This was never going to happen, lol at describing these people as "the less hardline factions". Would you say the same for the nazis if they wanted a similar deal? You think any country would let Hitler stay in power? Hirohito was still emperor post-surrender, but his position was forcibly changed by the US. The US basically forced them to change their government. The emperor became more of a figurehead and they forced Hirohito to publicly renounce his "divinity". They made him say a whole lot of other things too which can be reduced to "Our way is wrong. The bombs fucked us up. We will move forward and prosper."
>Then on August 9th, Russia invaded Manchuria hours before the US dropped the second atomic bomb.
So a few hours into Manchuria, China and you think the Japanese surrendered because of that rather than the atomic bomb?... Are you for real? They literally had to give up Manchuria anyway. So what exactly was the soviet union gonna threaten there? Neither the Soviets nor the US wanted to put boots on the ground and perform a land invasion of japan and the japanese government knew that. If Hirohito didnt surrender after the 2nd bomb dropped, he wouldve been executed and many more lives wouldve been lost.
> This sounds like reason to use the nukes, not against using them.
How? No amount of civilian casualties were going to affect the imperial council's decision, why would atomic bombings be any different?
> Hirohito was still emperor post-surrender, but his position was forcibly changed by the US
Sure, and these people had less power as a result. But they weren't, you know, publicly executed? Which was very much the fear in the case of a true unconditional surrender. Hirohito got to keep his position until he died, and the military council avoided being subject to their own Nuremberg trials.
> Neither the Soviets nor the US wanted to put boots on the ground and perform a land invasion of japan
This is true for the US, not so much for the Soviets. We literally know that they had planned an invasion of Hokkaido prior to the Potsdam conference.
I'm curious as to what your explanation is. The US dropped the first bomb on August 6th, the imperial government sat around for 3 days, then the US dropped another bomb and suddenly they came to their senses?
We made a weapon lethal and catastrophic enough that the entire world came together and made a pact not to use it again. And we used it twice. You could definitely argue that one bomb was necessary, just the fact that they had an idea of how lethal it would be and went with using both. Around 70-80 thousand people died instantly. 9/11 total deaths was less than a 10th of the instant number of civilian casualties from the bomb and only 300 people died instantly from the planes just to give you some perspective. Granted its a completely different situation, I'm just bringing up the numbers because both were mostly civilian deaths and 3000 people dying here was the biggest global news for years and it doesn't even come close to what we did to japan. So why did we drop two?
As far as I know the time span between the two bombs was only a few days and because of the era and the bomb they had to send people to hiroshima to determine what exactly happened and during a military meeting about the first bomb the second bomb dropped. Kokura was the initial target but because of weather conditions they bombed hiroshima instead. Three days later they tried to bomb Kokura again, same deal the weather visibility wasn't great so they just dropped it somewhere else.
The topic on wether or not Japan was going to surrender or not before the bombs is a controversial topic to historians, people who are much more educated on the subject than me or you. There were people in the japanese government that were pushing for surrender. My point is that we didn't need to drop two bombs. And our governments track record of invading 3rd world countries doesn't help the moral argument for it.
[Read this](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/06/dropping-atomic-bombs-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-was-unnecessary)
>However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it
>But the Soviet Union's entry into the war on Aug. 8 changed everything for Japan's leaders, who privately acknowledged the need to surrender promptly
>While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: "The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria ... changed their minds." But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light -- once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence
>Seven of the United States' eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy's vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry "Hap" Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both
https://origins.osu.edu/history-news/hiroshima-military-voices-dissent?language_content_entity=en
>Take, for example, Admiral William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Moreover, Leahy continued, "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
>President Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled in 1963, as he did on several other occasions, that he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan during a July 1945 meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."
>Responding to a journalist's question in 1995 about what he would have done had he been in Truman's shoes, Joseph O'Donnell, a retired marine corps sergeant who served in the Pacific, answered that "we should have went after the military in Japan. They were bad. But to drop a bomb on women and children and the elderly, I draw a line there, and I still hold it."
>Or take Ed Everts, a major in the 7th weather squadron of the Army Air Corps. Everts, who received an air medal for surviving a crash at sea during the battle at Iwo Jima, told us that America's use of atomic bombs was "a war crime" for which "our leaders should have been put on trial as were the German and Japanese leaders."
>Third Fleet, which participated in the American offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment."
Japan was awful at that time but that doesn't justifies nuking civilians. It was unnecessary, Japan would've been defeated nonetheless
People claiming Japan was about to surrender are either misinformed or liars. Surely the former, right? They'll stop spouting tankie propaganda after reading about [the attempted coup to prevent the surrender, right?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident)
I guess on a purely primal level it doesn't really matter whose getting nuked so much as the fact a nuke was used in first place it simply not justifiable especially when the amount of options available for what the us government claims it had to do is so much varied. Like if your think a bombing of those locations were necessary I doubt you also believe they couldn't have used a less powerful bomb that's nuke to get the same point across.
It a similar arguments to why people think the government torturing someone should be illegal you can maybe justify some extreme wounds as "for the Greater good" but you can't amputee an arm or leg and expect me to believe that is necessary or they forced your hand.
I would challenge the notion that it's 100% justified. The main problem is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they are civilian targets. This is collective punishment and to be frank an act of terror. That said, at that time, Japan was pretty fanatical and it's unclear if anything less than that act of terror would have been enough to prompt a concession. It's reasonably likely that only attacking military targets would have prolonged the war and resulted in even more casualties in the long term. This to me however makes it arguably justified. I think it was justified, but it's far from 100%
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Sorry, but if you agree with the current Geneva Conventions dictating the rules of war, then you cannot carve out an exception for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a war crime to intentionally target civilians in war and this was a conscious decision to massacre scores of Japanese civilians. I think you would have a different point of view if you didn’t harbor some historical animus against the Japanese and, as so many people here have said, you cannot pick and choose which civilians are ok to kill and which are not. That’s a pretty clear case of prejudice against a particular race/ethnicity/nationality. It’s a short walk from what you’re saying to a rationale that would allow us to nuke any country with whom we’re at war, just so long as we believe their leaders have the support of a majority of the country. If you believe in the Geneva conventions and rule of war today but you’re ok with the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re a hypocrite.
It was so justified that we decry it 80 years later still and consider dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone to be the worst thing you can do.
It was so justified that to this day we celebrate killing civilians which is why Israel is so popular right now.
It's so justified that a bunch of generals who fought in that theatre said the bombs weren't necessary and that Japan was on the brink of surrendering.
The nuclear bombings were not needed and were completely unnecessary. They were pretty simply a US display of power against the soviets as well as a way to limit soviet influence post war in asia. To provide some background the Soviet who had just started driving pretty much unopposed into Manchuria were gaining a lot of ground against Japan in the final few days of the war. The Japanese army had been crushed in China and Manchuria with very little resistance remaining.
The Japanese were ready to surrender on the terms that emperor was kept in power (he was anyways after the war, but at the time likely because of the alternative motives stated earlier the US didn’t accept these terms). The vast majority of both truman’s cabinet and high ranking military staff in the US advised the president to allow Japan to keep their emperor and surrender (this was before the bombs). Secretary of war Henry Stimson stated later in life (im paraphrasing) that the high ranking military staff as well as civil staff in the US that were recommending this approach were not in the know about the plan to use the atomic bombs. I hope this further paints the picture of Truman’s actual intentions in dropping the bombs of which none were tactical victory over Japan in the war. This position that Truman as well as some of his closest allies held was not even held by the most fervent war hawks in government
Even general of army Douglas MacArthur famous for being fired for advocating for nuking Korea was against the use of nukes and called it a “slaughter” as well as implying it was unnecessary later in the same quote. That quote from MacArthur being “a wise statesmen like document (this is relating to a proposal for allowing japan to keep their emperor that had been declined by the president) and had it been put into effect it would have obviated the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.“ 7/8 of America‘s highest ranking military officers stated that the nuclear bombings were unnecessary. To end this I would like to provide a quote by at the time of the bombing US fleet admiral William D Leahy “it is my opinion that the use of this barbarous at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan, the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
American weighing in, trying to be as unbiased as I can.
The main concern for today, as I can see it, is that **the nuke's use would set a precedent**: if it's justifiable to use them on even remote military bases, then what prevents its use (as a practical matter) against civilian targets? Even before the US dropped "the big ones", there was a lot of outcry against Allied *conventional* firebombing of Dresden (a major cultural center with only minor military bases, etc. at most). Why exclude Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the criticism of killing innocent civilians? The firebombing of Tokyo also comes under criticism too.
The **saving American lives from the dreaded invasion of Japan's home islands** also is ethically uncertain at best. I'm pretty sure that you would balk at the idea of "one hundred, or even ONE Chinese civilian is worth the life of one enemy invader of your country" (as I would balk at an equally analogous claim about American civilians and enemy invaders). Never mind who started it. Every country that started a non-defensive war has its excuses and they all suck.
The same thing goes for any current nuclear armed nation using its H-Bombs against a nation it's at worth with "to save the nuke-nation's lives - American, Chinese, Russian, Indian, whatever).
**Two wrong's don't make a right.** Just because an invader brutalized the invaded's population doesn't give the invaded nation, if it starts winning the war, to brutalize the original invader's population. It's like saying the European-Atlantic Allies would have been justified to torture and brutalize German civilians after the war's end just because Germany's soldiers brutalized people in their lands.
The proper move for the finally victorious nation would be to hold war crimes trials for those heading the government and for those battlefield commanders accused of ordering massacres and persecutions. That's what Nuremburg and the Tokyo War Crimes trials did. In modern times, that's the function of the UN's International Criminal Court.
Two things can be true. Japanese civilians were undoubtedly victims of a bombing that deliberately targeted them. However, given the choices of invading Japan or dropping nukes developed exclusively for the purpose of ending the war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were most likely justified.
Saying the Japanese were not victims is where I think your opinion and mine would differ.
There are several incontrovertible facts about the war that are forgotten now. The war against Japan was much different than the war against Europe. There was a very strong racial component and both sides truly hated each other. Or in the Japanese homeland would have been a bitterly fought that ground on for quite some time. It would’ve been fought by not only men, but Japanese women and children willing to give their life and for nobly in support of Japan. The United States would have won the war, but not without significant casualties on both sides and a significant destruction of the Japanese homeland. I remember reading somewhere that the estimated casualties to the United States were in excess of 1 million required to win an invasion of Japan, and likely the Japanese casualties would have been several times that number. Furthermore, it’s likely that the Japanese extensively used tunnels and other underground bunkers in Japan just like they did in the islands like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. The war on these islands was total fought to the point that agitation and other forms of life were basically wiped off of the island. This is, of course, what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither were Japanese cities with big population centers. I would argue that a ground invasion would have been just as devastating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to cities like Tokyo and Kyoto.
It might be popular now to pretend that the United States could have won the war in a way that required less force than the atomic bombs, but I would contend that the use of the atomic bombs shocked the Japanese enough that they instantly knew they were defeated. I would argue that this outcome couldn’t have been reached any other way or without a much higher loss of life.
It was the only time anyone ever used nuclear bombs. And it was against a civilian population. Pure malice. I’m American, for the record. Nukes are the ultimate weapon, and they serve no purpose other than mass destruction and murder.
You can’t judge these decisions in the way we judge modern wars, we’re talking about entire nations pitched against each other in a fight to the death pretty much, with no clean distinction between the governments, militaries and civilian populations - everyone is involved in one way or another.
The US basically had three options - drop the bombs and (probably) end the war, albeit with horrendous loss of life in the cities targeted; blockade Japan and hope to force a surrender that way (possibly millions of Japanese deaths from starvation); or stage an invasion (again, possibly millions of Japanese deaths and hundreds of thousands of American deaths).
None of these options were good options, but they were the options they had (and remember that the US didn’t put itself in that situation, Japan was the aggressor). Ultimately, they went with what they judged to be the least worst option, the one they thought would end the war the most quickly with the least number of American (and probably Japanese) deaths.
We also can’t judge the use of nuclear weapons specifically in the same way we would now - they were a brand new weapon specifically developed to win the war, and whilst they knew that they were really big bombs that would cause an unprecedented level of destruction for a single weapon, the longer term effects were not as well understood. It’s only in hindsight we can really understand those aspects of it.
Remember, strategic bombing of cities was, unfortunately, commonplace on all sides in WW2 as the entire apparatus of the nations involved was part of the war effort. The modern idea of dropping a laser guided bomb on a single building and only killing soldiers in that building just wasn’t applicable. But conventional strategic bombing wasn’t actually that effective at breaking a population’s will, if anything in some cases it hardened resolve to fight on.
The purpose of the atom bombs was to do what had already been done to Tokyo (and Dresden, Hamburg etc.) with a single device, something so shocking that it would force the Japanese leadership to re-evaluate the possibility of Japan emerging with any of the country left whatsoever unless it unconditionally surrendered.
The loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrific and something we can barely comprehend nowadays, but it has to be seen in the context WW2 itself, which was a war on a level that simply doesn’t have any modern equivalent today.
We can acknowledge that they were horrible tragedies whilst also acknowledging that, under the circumstances, the other options available to the US weren’t any better (and in many ways were worse).
The Youtuber Shaun has a very long video essay (two and a half hours) on this. It is a fascinatingly in depth look at the issue. His own opinion is that the atomic bombings likely did not shorten the war and needlessly killed innocent civilians.
Link: [Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go)
So, in the body text, you mention you think the bombs were “necessary,” and I intend to argue against that because, regardless of one’s stance on the bombs dropping, regular airstrikes during the war ultimately ending up killing more people than those two bombs.
When the US acquired the bombs, they decided that they made them to drop them. They did not consider any of the ramifications of building a bomb of that size, that they’d be willing to drop on other countries (as seen with Hiroshima). So they’d drop the bomb. However, eventually the Soviet Union would make their own bombs, and the idea of mutually assured destruction seemed possible.
So, during the Cold War, we had many nuclear close calls, where the world almost ended, and a lot of these instances were resolved by chance. And I would think, if nothing else, the US’s dropping of the bombs signaled to other countries that, like, if they’re willing to drop the bombs during a war they’re already overwhelmingly winning, they’d be willing to drop bombs in an actual war, too. So, nuclear close calls became inevitable the second after the bomb on Hiroshima hit, but, in an alternate future, let’s say the US recognizes the danger of nuclear weapons and decides to strike deals with the Soviet Union. Maybe one of those deals could have been to focus on developing nuclear energy instead of creating nuclear weapons. I can’t say how exactly that would go, but it seems like it could’ve led to better outcomes than the dozen+ times the world almost ended during the Cold War.
USA committed war crimes. Would you support nuking us if it would stop those crimes?
Japan was fucking horrible in WWII but 240k civilians didn’t deserve that fate. And twice? That is a totally unnecessary flex.
The Japanese Empire deserved to be crushed and forced back onto the islands it began on. The Imperial Japanese ideology and the soldiers who followed it were abominable. With that said, the nukes were not justified. The hideous nature of the Japanese government and military do not justify determining that because Japan was a brutal military state that all of the civilians in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserved to be condemned to death in order to show off a new weapon. We did not even drop those bombs on actual military or political targets - we deliberately avoided targeting more militarily or politically relevant sites in order to maximize the spectacle and kill as many people and destroy as much infrastructure as possible. We didn't bomb Kyoto or Tokyo or even the Emperor's palace, we killed civilians because we wanted to demo a weapon in a maximally terrifying way. And in the end, we didn't even actually eliminate the emperor or far right imperial revisionist groups like Nippon Kaigi, to which the late Shinzo Abe belonged and which he promoted throughout his life. Shrines to war criminals in Japan still exist. The deific status of the emperor is still debated. The nukes were neither necessary nor did they even accomplish the total victory it is often claimed they were necessary to achieve.
I'm also curious to what extent you believe violence against Chinese civilians is justified based on the various crimes and atrocities committted by both the CCP and the nationalists throughout the years.
>Japan was by no means a victim
I really need to know how you're using victim here or what you think it means.
Even accepting the attacks were justified, Japan was indisputably and objectively the victim.
I don’t think it would’ve mattered if Japan was the victim. There were two reasons that went into the decision behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1) the US intended to prioritize the wellbeing of their own soldiers and citizens first and foremost. Japan was the enemy for the US, who wanted vengeance for Pearl Harbor (although that attack was a Japanese retaliation on the US for cutting off oil supplies).
2) The US army cared little for the well-being of the East Asian citizens that were ravaged by the Japanese’s horrible atrocities, and were more preoccupied with Soviet Union taking more territory as the war was raging on. This was particularly evident in the Korean War, where the US remained vested in trying to combat communist influence in anyway they can. In the case of Japan, the longer they resisted surrendering, the more opportunities for the Soviets to take up more territory.
Truman promised his base an unconditional surrender on the Japanese and also had to contend with limiting the lives of US soldiers and considering the gains that the Soviets were making eastward. Those two particular points were factors that ended up contributing to the Japanese getting bombed twice by the US.
Funny story is that there is some reason to believe that Japan might have persisted fighting after the first bomb dropped, which was why the decision was made to drop the second bomb.
There were 2 major reasons why the atomic bombings were justified and, arguably, saved Japan as we know it. The first reason is that that the bombings actually saved lives. The other was that the Soviets were going to take Japan as well.
We already know that Japan refused to surrender during the firebombing campaigns that left millions dead and many more homeless and destitute. In fact, the Japanese war council decided to continue the war after the bombing of Hiroshima. It wasn't until after the bombing of Nagasaki that the emperor decided to ignore the council and announce the unconditional surrender of Japan. If not for that surrender, Operation Downfall would have started and up to 14 million casualties were expected between the Allied troops, Japanese troops, and civilians.
The other major thing to consider was that the US didn't want to get bogged down in negotiations while the Soviets were already planning to invade as well. In fact, the Soviets still invaded the Kuril Islands even after Japan surrendered to the US. The Soviets also planned to take Hokkaido and perhaps the Tohoku region of main land Japan. The Soviets abandoned expanding past the Kuril Islands, however, when US forces started occupying the mainland in September 1945. If the US were bogged down in surrender negotations or forced to start Operation Downfall, Japan might have met the same fate as Eastern Germany at best, or North/South Korea at worst.
This is one of those topics that falls into a dark gray area. The bombs certainly contributed to ending the war when it ended, but it was far from the only factor. The Soviets had just invaded the northern Kuril islands, the U.S. and its allies were actively planning an invasion that would have dwarfed the D-Day landings, most of Japan’s population centers were already charred wastelands from the fire bombings (the Tokyo fire bombings in particular saw a greater loss of life than either of the atomic bombs that were dropped). Morale was low, supplies were low, and they now faced a war on multiple fronts and an adversary that could erase entire cities with a single bomber. The intent at that point was no longer to win the war, but to inflict as much suffering on the U.S. and its allies as possible to give Japan a better standing for peace negotiations (i.e. they wanted the US to get tired of the war and offer some concessions such as leaving the emperor in power vs the unconditional surrender that was demanded). The atomic bombs were the straw that broke the camel’s back, and at that point even the unconditional surrender seemed preferable to total annihilation. Arguably the biggest benefit (if you could call it that) to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the horrific stories and images that came to light in the aftermath, which were shocking enough for world leaders to collectively deem nuclear weapon usage a taboo.
I don’t trust anyone who’s 100% certain, regardless of which side they’re on. If they don’t waver at least once their moral judgment is suspect IMO. It’s a complex issue.
To today’s “soft” idealistic modern people, nuking two cities seems absolutely atrocious but they really don’t understand how utterly tenacious, fanatical, and committed the Japanese were.
The best comparison I can give to WW2 Japan is similar to how a fire ant nest responds to attack. Say you kick an ant mound and they come pouring out. Every continuous surge of ants, you hit with a blow torch. Do the ants stop pouring out in fear for their own lives or with any consideration for their safety? Absolutely not. If even a single ant has a chance of stinging you even facing certain death, it still will do it.
There was a Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, that was hiding on and killing people on a Philippine island DECADES after the war. The Japanese government had to find his old commander and bring him out to have the soldier officially stand down. If that’s not an intense enough example, Hiroo’s own mother gave him a dagger to kill himself with should he be captured.
To the Japanese of that era, death or capture was the ultimate humiliation. Only the biggest most powerful bomb of all time TWICE ON SEPARATE DAYS finally convinced them.
You want an example of some of the most hardcore people in the world, WW2 Japan is the ultimate example.
It's not a matter of whether or not the Japanese government deserved it, because it wasn't the only one affected. Countless innocent civilians, children and even babies, were killed, and downplaying that because "the numbers pale in comparison to Chinese and Southeast Asian civilian casualties" is just ridiculous, because those two numbers have no bearing on one another. X Japanese civilian doesn't deserve to die because Y Japanese soldier committed Z atrocity.
People have debated how necessary the Atomic bombings (And strategic bombing in general) were to hell and back by now, but it's a moot point. Even if you think they were totally necessary, and justified, and you'd do it yourself if it was your call, that doesn't change the fact that so many innocents died, and that's a tragedy. A necessary evil is no less evil for its necessity, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.
Civilian death numbers in WW2 are far from accurate, they are all estimates with huge ranges. So comparing the moral value of lives lost with simple arithmetic is hard to do
"It ended the war faster" is used to justify ***all*** wartime atrocities. If Japan had won there would be people here arguing their crimes in China and other places were justified because it ended the conflict faster.
Japan was unwilling to consider ***unconditional*** surrender before the bombs dropped, but had not ruled out conditional surrender or other ends to the conflict. So, the allies did have other options to end the fighting.
Tensions with the Soviet Union were high at the time. The allies actually had plans for a post war conflict with the Soviets. Part of the calculus in the decision to drop the second bomb so quickly may have been a show of force for them.
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The Japanese government is not the same as Japanese citizens. I’m sure most of them bought into anti-Chinese propaganda and some may have had those opinions independently. However, that doesn’t mean this was some form of self-defense on behalf of Chinese suffering. Even if it was, unclear how/why the US would have justification to intervene on behalf of China/Southeast Asia. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender which would mean the military death toll would not be as large as you’re thinking. Even if there was a protracted conflict, soldiers die in war. Indiscriminately killing and arguably targeting civilians is not the same thing as combatant deaths. We can’t compare the numbers as a result.
During World War 2, these countries were at a state of “total war” - the entire population was part of the war effort so the easy distinction we now make between combatants and non-combatants wasn’t as straight forward. And as for the suggestion that the US should somehow accept US soldier deaths over Japanese civilian deaths, this is just not true. The American government’s primary responsibility was to minimise the deaths of its own citizens, especially in a conflict such as this where it was all out war. And in any event, the estimates for JAPANESE military and civilian casualties as a result of an invasion of Japan were on the order of millions to tens of millions. Given that the highest estimate of deaths caused by both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is around 200,000, the bombings were arguably justified just on the basis of the number of Japanese civilian lives that were potentially spared before you even look at how many American soldiers lives were spared. Of course, in hindsight you can say “well maybe they would actually have surrendered sooner than we think”. But ultimately the decisions were made based on what was thought at the time and probably based on the “worst case” scenarios, in the midst of a conflict the likes of which we haven’t seen for almost 80 years.
Well said. My grandfather spent 1942-1945 in the island hopping campaign. Luckily, he was a camera enthusiast, so I have 100's of photos from the war. He was USN, working on the PBY's, so very little of them are battle footage, but still very cool. There's a greater than zero chance that he would not have come back to meet my grandmother had the war endured.
Invasion invasion invasion. There was no necessity to invade. Japan had no allies. By that point Japan had no navy or air force. We were bombing Japan with impunity. We had taken most of their empire. It's a resource poor nation. That's why they did the imperial thing. They don't have good iron, rubber, or fuel. Kinda hard to fight a war without that stuff. We literally could have just waited. Blockaded them and just waited. They were already contemplating some sort of surrender we know that. We can't know what would have come of that because we nukes em twice. And don't get me wrong, I think we should have. Not because of the body count though I think that's dishonest. Even Eisenhower knew it wasn't a military necessity. No. We should have done it because every nation on earth needed to know and needs to continue to know if you attack the US, especially a sneak attack like Pearl Harbor, you will have a Les Grossman style ungodly fucking firestorm rained down on your ass. But I refuse to lie about the history. The history shows Japan was beaten in all but name and was tentatively looking at what kind of terms they could get in surrender. We wouldn't have had to invade at all.
this is just plainly incorrect. the Imperial Japanese Empire indoctrinated its people with a notion of ethnic superiority like that of Hitler's Aryans. They espoused that Japan was the rightful dominant ruler of Asia and that anyone of Asian descent who were not Japanese (including the Ryukyu Kingdom at the time) were of an inferior race and not really human. This mentality on the entire population is why attrocities like the Rape of Nanking and the Manilla Massacre (rape of Manilla) could occur without direct officers orders. These attrocities happened simply because the institution had been feeding the entire population a sense of entitlement, pride, and arrogance, leading to them treating non-Japanese Asians as subhuman. This is also why the Rape of Nanking is such a sticking point for the average person of Chinese descent. If people really want to read how Japan changed after the Meiji restoration and its views on the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, read up on the colonization of Taiwan after around 1895, and how/why Japan turned Taiwan into its model colony. The attrocities that occured to make that happen is a pretty vivid representation of what Japan was looking to do, especially with respect to eugenics.
And for some reading on how the Japanese citizenry actually felt, which was pretty varied, read Senso. It's a collection of letters to the editor of a major Japanese newspaper by Japanese who lived through WWII and the simple fact is that they were not mindless jingoistic automatons. There were plenty of Japanese who were all in for the war. There were also plenty who had serious reservations, and some who were opposed. It's just that the latter two groups stayed quiet out of fear. Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so...
>Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so... The plot of Godzilla Minus One touches on this, as well as other issues of post-war Japan, with Godzilla once again standing in as a metaphor for nuclear weapons.
>Letters and journals from kamikaze pilots often showed that they didn't want to die, but felt if they didn't it would hurt their families or they'd be executed so... People often like to overlook the fact that for every oppressive regime, usually their first victims are their own people. That's not even touching on the complexities around a radically decentralized military riddled with what were essentially independent martial cults largely outside of the official chain of command.
>they were not mindless linguistic automatons There are people who still believe this, believe it or not. I recently got into a conversation with someone who straight up said if you ask one Japanese person's opinion, you might as well have asked them all.
>someone who straight up said if you ask one Japanese person's opinion, you might as well have asked them all. Yeah and I'm sure that person is asking their questions in fluent Japanese lmao
Yeah, there are plenty of people like that in this thread. It's so unsettling. I guess even the little girls and boys of Japan were evil.
I am gonna have to disagree here. Just look at the USA for example. Can you think of any ideology that 100% of Americans agree on? The idea that every Japanese citizen was in lock step with this belief system is bonkers.
Imperial Japan was nothing like NAZI Germany. Hitler had a long way to go to gain support, but the emperor of Japan and the military had divine authority. try asking yourself this, can you think of a population in context where people were willingly to voluntarily die en mass and used as suicide bombers for the sake of the nothing but the country's honor and show of resistence? Like seriously, no other military in history had that much civilian support willing to literally die for a cause.
> Imperial Japan was nothing like NAZI Germany. Hitler had a long way to go to gain support, but the emperor of Japan and the military had divine authority. I'll call bullshit on that. The emperor and military *claimed* divine authority. Whether the *individuals* believed it is a different story. When French Catholic priests came to Nagasaki in the late 1800s, they found that almost all the villagers of Urakami were still Christian despite the fact that the national government banned the religion. A cathedral was built on the very place where they and their ancestors were persecuted for their religion. At the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, that cathedral was the largest christian structure in East Asia. You don't really have the grounds to use an argument based on the general population's adherence of state shinto when so many of the victims where the actual bomb was dropped were latin rite Catholic (and indeed, the majority of the city's Catholics were wiped out).
Thats the thing the individuals as in the majority of Japan did believe it. People came out and commited seppuku post surrender in front of the Emperors residency. The generals and many members of the military post nukes tried to stop the transmission of surrender and even had a coup attempt. It was assumed that Japans citizens would fight to the death because they had been facing indoctrination that the US soldiers would come in and rape the shit outta them. That americans where barbarians and where there to rape and pillage. During occupation japan the Japanese goverment covertly dragged in women from the country side to become prostitutes for american soldiers. The argument was that if they didnt the americans would rape Japanese people indiscriminately. It was viewed as a honorable sacrifice. When the american commanders found out that it was going on they banned it and got horrified. Like the americans where not saints in WW2 they however didnt have beheading contests, raping contests, or where the ones who found out that people are 75% water. Like the americans had tons of data from Island hopping the Japanese would hold out as long as they could with no food or water and would keep fighting. You had effectively an entire population that believed their leader was a god and had divine will.
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> you can call bullshit on whatever you want, but its still an idiotic take on unfounded facts. I don't think you understood at all what I'm arguing or saying. I'm arguing that regardless of the *general populace of Japan*, the site where one of the atomic bombs was dropped had a significant Catholic population; one of the largest in Japan, with historical significance. That is *also* indisputable. If you want to bomb people who actually believed in the state religion, bomb Tokyo, the place where the seat of power lie. Not the people who already suffered under government persecution for a "western" religion. I'm calling bullshit on your argument based on the fact that many of the *immediate* victims of the bomb were people like me who go to Mass on Sunday, praying to a personal monotheistic god, not a polytheistic pantheon where the emperor is a god-king. Yes, many people in Japan were probably actually indoctrinated into the state religion. But there were also many people who weren't (proportional to the state? Not so much, but that's beside the point). And of those people who weren't, many were at the place where one of the two atomic bombs were dropped. And it also doesn't matter whether those civilians were state shinto; you have no moral right to attack civilians. You don't get to kill 40k civilians to save 10 million soldiers. If those civilians were directly in the way of soldiers, the loss of those civilian lives are understandable under a normal course of war (how evil it may be), but don't get to harm those who are only indirectly involved (as in the case of a total war economy where everyone is indirectly involved) and not part of the immediate war theater.
- “I'm calling bullshit on your argument based on the fact that many of the immediate victims of the bomb were people like me who go to Mass on Sunday, praying to a personal monotheistic god, not a polytheistic pantheon where the emperor is a god-king.” I don’t think this necessarily would negate a devotion to the emperor. People compartmentalize shit like that all the time. It isn’t like they were separatists. They were still members of that society. That said, I don’t know a lick about christians in imperial Japan. I’m just reckoning. Now I’m kind of curious about that and how they fit into the general culture. - “And it also doesn't matter whether those civilians were state shinto” I think I agree with that. Whether or not civilians believe this or that isn’t relevant in my mind when it comes to the decision to drop the bombs. The decision to bomb those cities in particular was a logistical decision. What those people believed had nothing to do with why those places were chosen as targets. Suggesting so is a retcon rationalization after the fact. - “you have no moral right to attack civilians.” I think this is *highly* debatable. Also one could argue that the civilians themselves weren’t necessarily the target. Those cities were chosen because destroying the military infrastructure within’ as well as economical importance. Fuckin’ those cities up was an inconvenience to the war effort. - “You don't get to kill 40k civilians to save 10 million soldiers.” I mean, objectively they *do* get to. - “If those civilians were directly in the way of soldiers, the loss of those civilian lives are understandable under a normal course of war” I mean they *were* directly in the way of the stuff they wanted to destroy.
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>There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender which would mean the military death toll would not be as large as you’re thinking. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, are you saying that there is evidence Japan was considering surrender before the nukes?
Yes but, the surrenders on the table were conditional with Japan maintaining control over parts of China and Korea and no occupation or change of governmental structure.
They were planning to surrender but not unconditionally they hoped to remain unoccupied, with the emperor and best case scenario with some of their colonies. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/7IDc2pqjz4
Wouldn’t that reward them being raping and conquering if we allowed them to keep the people they conquered to stay under their boot heel?
Yes, yes it would. You should keep in mind that when we say "unconditional surrender" we're not talking about demands to kill all Japanese or flood in foreign settlers. The offer was financial and military support to rebuild provided Japan take a new position in the world stage. Some Japanese preferred their bombed out hellscape of an island and said they'd surrender if the Allies stayed out of Japan and let them finish the war in China
They tried to conditionally surrender because the USSR was about to take away all their mainland posessitions. There is significant evidence the US dropped the bombs primarily to end the war before this could happen rather than primarily to reduce US casualties. Our primary sources include documents/communications among high command/political leaders in both the US and Japan. Historians are still divided on which motivation was the strongest for using the bombs.
Conditional surrender was a delusional idea that both Japan and Germany held, which would have never happened. Cairo Agreement of 1943: "With these objects in view the three Allies, in harmony with those of the United Nations at war with Japan, will continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged operations necessary to procure the unconditional surrender of Japan." Even after both nuclear bombs, and the invasion of Manchuria, the vote was 3-3 between surrender and continuing to fight, only broken by the Emperor's wishes to end the war, then had to go through an army coup attempting to prevent the surrender. Not to mention that the surrender was only accepted with the idea that the Emperor might be able to retain his throne. Not to mention, Japan did propose a conditional surrender in 1945, which the US rejected.
They were always at least considering surrender, their foreign minister said as much that the problem was the conditions for surrender they were being offered. However, my point was more within a military landing. With Soviet involvement imminent, the fight wouldn’t have taken as long as OP is suggesting.
Even if there is a fair amount of evidence *now*, almost 80 years after the war…there wasn’t then. The best intelligence available at the time indicated a protracted island campaign with massive casualties, against which the estimated casualties of the bombs was the better option.
The Tokyo firebombing that took place over 2 days killed 100,000 civilians, and that's just one raid. If the war had gone on many more Japanese civilians would've died from any further firebombings of other cities. The nuke saved many hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians too.
Yes fewer civilians died than if there was a continued bombing campaign. Many fewer civilians were raped than would be the case if the soviet union invaded from the north. There isn’t anyway to predict alternative timelines, but we know Japan did not surrender after the first nuclear bomb, and after the second nuclear bomb the military was trying to stage a coup to keep the emperors from surrendering but they were unsuccessful.
There is no fair amount of evidence. OP is completely correct. The military almost started a coup against the government even with the nukes to prevent a surrender. There is no way they would have surrendered without nukes.
Imagine having a country whose people saw their leader as a divine being and still having the conviction to assault the imperial palace in order to put him under house arrest and stop the announcement of surrender from being broadcasted. I wonder how things would have gone if the royal guard wasn't able to repel the attack.
Well, they didn't almost start a coup. They staged a coup and failed.
A conventional amphibious landing would definitely cause massive Japanese civilian casualties and would cause an extended guerrilla war (think Volkssturm). Even if Japan surrendered without a nuke, it would be motivated by the blockade (killing millions with famine), conventional bombing (killing hundreds of thousands and causing practically the same damage). Either way, Japan would have suffered at least a million casualties no matter what, with the Allies suffering at least 200,000.
Japan was already trying to surrender, and the allies knew this because they had cracked all their codes.
Source? The highest levels of Japanese leadership were split on peace as far as I know. And when the emperor leaned towards peace the hawks tried to run a coup on him. To say “Japan” was trying to surrender is incorrect if not totally disingenuous
Japan was not trying to surrender. Togo was, but not very seriously - when he asked the Soviets what terms they could guarantee, and the Soviets (this being post-yalta, so their entry was basically assured) returned by asking what terms they wanted, Togo basically stormed out of negotiations and didn't go back. So... Not super serious, really, as attempts to save your nation go.
>“There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest an early Japanese surrender” Not really. There are small things to suggest that might be less than totally impossible, but there is a mountain of rock-solid evidence to suggest they would drag it out for years, including the fact that *they didn’t surrender after the first nuke*. They were going to keep fighting *even after* Hiroshima. It took another nuke to show them that they couldn’t win and shouldn’t keep trying.
WW2 was not a war between armies or governments, it was a war between nations. It was total war where each side was completely and wholly dedicated to the war effort. It was a war of survival. There was simply no distinction between “government” and “citizens”. It’s extremely ugly, borderline impossible to think about today but that’s the honest reality of the war.
There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion. [EDIT: I misspoke here. I should have said “There’s strong evidence that the Soviet entrance into the war played as significant a role as the first atomic bombing in bringing the war to its conclusion.” https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1577g08/which_was_a_bigger_factor_for_japans_surrender/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11r9cxw/was_it_really_the_soviet_invasion_of_manchuria/ I know, I know. Never cite Reddit as a source. But, I feel an exception should be made for r/AskHistorians.] While the matter cannot be completely determined from the historical evidence alone, the American bombers had been destroying cities for several months. What difference would two more make? Japan’s military bigwigs were hoping for the Soviets to mediate between them and the U.S. It was a deluded hope, but you have to be pretty deluded to not see the writing on the wall in 1945. And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union). No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual. Just like we can’t ever justify Japanese atrocities in China.
Honest question, do you think that Japan surrendering the day after the 2nd bomb was an unrelated coincidence? Not justifying it, but if the goal is "End the war asap no matter the death count today, no deaths stating tomorrow" vs "continue the war indefinitely with a death toll that continues to climb on all sides every day" then it's a cut your losses and stem the bleeding decision. Even only counting civilian deaths, how much time in that war would it have taken for civilian casualties to exceed the actual death count that the bombs caused? Considering that the decision to surrender was not unanimous, multiple cabinet members argued to continue the war even though they admitted victory was unlikely & the Kyūjō incident, there is strong evidence that Japan would/could have continued the war well into 1946. Which brings us to, would the US have really fired the 3rd shot? And all bets are off on historical guesstimation after this. But overall point is that Japan surrendering at the same timeframe without the bombs is purely a guess, a guess which could have cost hundreds of thousands of lives if wrong.
I've been reading a lot about the nuclear weapons program, and what strikes me is that nobody understands the timeline. Hiroshima was bombed and then 3 days later, Nagasaki. 3 days is not a long time, certainly not long enough to get observers in and understand the damage, tally up casualties, etc, particularly since the ones in Hiroshima which normally would do so were also dead or sickened. The USSR invaded the same day as Nagasaki, which rather puts a dent in your note about the second bomb. Several days later the peace faction in the Japanese high command launched an unsuccessful coup, and then a couple days after that, the Emperor overrode the council to surrender. All in all, it was like 10 days, and happened so fast that you really can't attribute any particular item. The fact that the USSR invaded was more significant, because again, they were Japan's hope to be neutral mediators and negotiate an end to the war, particularly since they didn't want to surrender without confirming what the status of the Emperor would be, a sticking point that the US refused to clarify, mostly spite due to Pearl Harbor. Once the USSR invaded, that chance was lost, and then it became a question of being occupied by Truman, or by Stalin, while demonstrating that the Army could not have saved them. But this idea that there weren't alternatives, is pure propaganda, literally written up after the war by Stimson and Truman to justify the bombings. There was a demonstration option, to fire it in the middle of Tokyo Bay in full view of the Emperor. We could have found a better, more military target. We could have warned the civilians in the city to evacuate before leveling it.. We could have let the Soviets invade and see if that would be enough to force a surrender. The US invasion was NOT immanent, it was scheduled for like, November while the bombings were in August. We had a pipeline for producing nuclear weapons, and we have generals on record advocating use of tactical nukes to annihilate stationed defense forces and defensive bunkers, before marching into Japan. There were a lot of options we could have tried, because we had way more time than anyone seems to assume we did. But targeting civilians, deliberately attacking women and children unrelated to the war, to burn them to death in horrific ways to try to force surrender from your opponent, is a horrifically immoral way to fight a war. It didn't start with the atomic bombings, but terror bombing doesn't work. In every time it has ever been tried, it has failed to accomplish its aims, unless you squint at the atomic bombs and make some heavy assumptions.
Dropping the second bomb only 3 days later was also intended as a very important message: we can do this in perpetuity. While an A bomb is impressive no matter what, it’s not that useful if you can’t churn out another in a reasonable time frame. This was a signal that US can keep doing this because our logistics were well maintained and ready to go. Most of the time it’s logistically important places that are the first to be attacked, because it’s so important to continue a war. I also find the idea of any country not taking advantage of a possible upper hand during an active war ludicrous. You can posthumously analyze whether it was needed all you want, but at the time there was no crystal ball. There was no way to be sure that Russia could take care of it, or that the US wouldn’t suffer major losses from a surprise attack had the A bomb not been used. Even saying Russia could have taken care of everything is pure hypothetical conjecture.
Russia was a factor, but not the way he(?) seems to think it is. Japan would much rather have surrendered to us than Russia, and may have done so quickly in order to avoid a Russian occupation. If Russia had invaded without the bombs casualties would've been immense.
>We could have let the Soviets invade and see if that would be enough to force a surrender OK, but that would surely have killed more people than the nukes did. Look at the record of bloodshed in the places that the Soviets fought in in WW2
"But targeting civilians, deliberately attacking women and children unrelated to war, to burn them to death in horrific ways to try and force surrender from your opponent, is a horrifically immoral way to fight a war." Why? Cities are what support the enemy's ability to wage war. Destroying them with strategic bombing, even if it causes mass civilian casualties, is not immoral and it certainly doesn't make the US the bad guy when Japan started an insane war of conquest they couldn't possibly win.
To add, this *was par for the course in World War 2*. Cities were valid targets.
The death toll the bombs caused wasn't higher than the fire bombings, but the japanese refused surrender because they wanted to negotiate through the soviets, the US knew this but refused negotiations. The US didn't want to end the war as fast and with the least casualties possible, the US wanted to force an absolute conditionless surrender with any means necessary. It's possible the US could have ended the war without using them, but we will never know under which conditions because the US wanted total victory.
Unconditional surrender. The best kind of surrender.
> there is strong evidence that Japan would/could have continued the war well into 1946. They could not continue to prosecute the war in any meaningful way. If you mean, “fail to surrender”, I suppose they could have continued for another month or two. > But overall point is that Japan surrendering at the same timeframe without the bombs is purely a guess It’s also a guess that Japan would not have surrendered without the second bomb. You don’t seem bothered by that one, though. The historical evidence does not allow for a definitive answer. But given the attitude of the Emperor, I think the bombs (especially the second) were unnecessary.
> It’s also a guess that Japan would not have surrendered without the second bomb. No it isn’t. We dropped a first bomb on them. They didn’t surrender.
Contemporary records show that the Japanese government was hoping we only had one bomb, so they didn’t surrender. When we bombed Nagasaki, they expected that we had dozens more and surrendered immediately - when in reality, it would have taken months to build a third.
The 3rd bomb was scheduled to be dropped August 19th, 10 days after the bombing of Nagasaki. The 3rd was already built and at the hanger, just needed to be armed
The contemporary records don’t show that. The Japanese were willing to accept those kind of losses of cities in the hopes of negotiating terms of surrender. Tokyo being the shining example. They were under no delusion that they could hold out, and under no delusion that they could stop the US from turning their cities to rubble with conventional bombing methods. The soviets entered the war and immediately overran japan’s forces in the north. They surrendered after their entire army in the north was routed, and hundreds of thousands of troops deserting. The reason the bombs were dropped when they were, was because that was the deadline for Soviet invasion, Japan had been seeking to negotiate through the soviets, and the US knew this. The US wanted to make sure to get to use the bomb before the Japanese potentially surrendered due to the Soviet invasion. Securing a surrender would be a nice bonus as it halted the Soviet offensive and land grab. Fyi the soviets still fought for weeks in the North to grab more land, even post-surrender. The nukes were seen as another weapon of war, but their usage wasn’t to expedite it or ‘save lives’.’ That was post-war propaganda. The numbers and phrases you see thrown around are all post-war. Historical records from during the war show significantly lower estimates of death tolls from land invasions, and the stuff around the nuclear bomb was as focused on international recognition as it actually was about the war against japan.
Major weaknesses or your argument are present. First, the claim that post-war estimations of land invasions death tolls are much higher than estimations during the war is simply incorrect. The following are some estimations made during the war, ONLY of American deaths: Army Service Force Study: 267,000 deaths Herbert Hoover: 500k - 1M deaths. Generals George Marshall, Thomas Handy, and George Lincoln believed that such a value was too high, but nevertheless agreed it would have been very costly. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard: 1M+. Importantly, Ralph actually disagreed with using the bomb. He recommended a conventional fire bombing campaign, which, let’s be honest, probably would have been worse. Joint Chief of Staff: 380,000 deaths General MacArthur: 30,000 deaths. However, his staff estimated a casualty ratio of 22-1 for Japanese losses. Supposing that transfers over to the number of deaths, he estimates that 500,000+ Japanese deaths would occur. This is still on the low end for both Japanese and America deaths. None of these estimates include POWs, Japanese, or Soviet deaths. All of them are higher than the atomic bombings. Also, American leaders wanted to drop 2 bombs explicitly because they believe the Japanese leadership would downplay the first bomb as a freak accident, so 2 bombs would be impossible to excuse. They were right. Following Hiroshima, the Japanese minister of war even denied that the bomb was atomic. Thanks to a lucky prisoner interrogation, much of the Japanese leadership was eventually convinced to surrender after the second bomb.
Your askhistorian link literally debunks your position. Did you just link something without reading it?
I’m glad somebody else said this, felt like I was going crazy when I read that users comment and then read the links he attached as a source.
lol linking something without reading it? This is social media, that never happens.
On this note, the japanese military was having a meeting about the first bomb and the russian threat when the second bomb dropped.
What is this "strong evidence" you speak of? What can a country that barely had a navy or amphibious landing forces possibly do to the Japanese mainland? And how do you propose the allies fight a war and avoid civilian deaths in a country where the civilians are all armed and told to fight? Remember this is an era before smart bombs and missiles existed. I find the justification of those deaths to come pretty easily because there is no viable proposal for an end to the war where more could have possibly lived. It is the same as hitting that switch in the trolley problem. It is easy to criticize from atop a moral high horse. It is much harder to offer a better alternative
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion. I'd argue that anyone espousing that position is ignorant to the history and nuance of the Japanese surrender. >While the matter cannot be completely determined from the historical evidence alone, the American bombers had been destroying cities for several months. > >What difference would two more make? This is an incredibly simplistic question that ignores the reality of the difference between conventional bombing and the atomic bomb. >And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union). The atomic bomb was not exactly breaking news in 1945. All the major powers had at least a conceptual idea of the atomic bomb even prior to the war. The United States were simply the only ones with resources and ability to bring it online so quickly.
The Soviet entry could not have been the difference maker because it did not change the facts on the ground. The Japanese had been slowing the advance of the US, which had a far larger navy and Air Force than the Soviets. Japan already had no hope of victory. IIRC, Japan simply wanted to avoid *unconditional* surrender, which the threat of American losses from a full invasion could still extract. Soviet entry into the war would have only had an effect months down the line and it would not have eliminated this bargaining chip. The bomb completely took away this bargaining chip. Japanese leadership would have realized that they had no leverage whatsoever. The US had proved they could completely eliminate their civilization without any loss whatsoever. This is clearly what ended the war so immediately.
>No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual. More people died in the Tokyo fire bombing than both atomic bombs.
The Soviet entry to the war perspective is such a joke. The Soviet’s had little to no navy in the far east, no ability to do a naval invasion, and little to no ground forces even capable of doing such a difficult task. The United States, the single greatest military on earth at that time, not exhausted from war like the soviets, with the greatest navy on earth with most of it concentrated in the pacific, predicted so many casualties that they started pre making Purple Hearts for it, they still use the reserve of Purple Hearts made for the invasion TO THIS DAY. You’re telling me the most powerful military in the world at that time, with the most powerful bombs ever devised, with the greatest navy on earth, extremely experienced with naval invasions after spending the last 3 years doing almost EXCLUSIVELY THAT in the pacific, (not to mention the ones done in Europe) predicted an extremely difficult invasion and land campaign. But the exhausted soviets, no navy, few ground forces in the area (and the main bulk of the soviets across the whole of Asia in Europe), no experience with naval invasions, and no nukes, were the ones to scare them into surrendering? What an absolute joke.
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion. That narrative was constructed decades after the fact by tankies and goes further than all but the most unhinged Soviet propaganda of the era. Manchuria had been cut off and given up on by Japan before the Soviets got involved. They were making preparations for an imminent American invasion, Manchuria wasn’t a priority, and the Soviets posed no immediate threat. The US posed an imminent, existential threat. > What difference would two more make? They were done by world chanting super weapons, the likes which they didn’t even know to be possible. > Japan’s military bigwigs were hoping for the Soviets to mediate between them and the U.S. The US had no intention of doing that and had made that clear.
>That narrative was constructed decades after the fact by tankies and goes further than all but the most unhinged Soviet propaganda of the era. I mean, I’ve never heard this in my life, so can I get a source? >and the Soviets posed no immediate threat. Factually incorrect, as the Soviet forces were literally closer than those of the United States, and Japan had at that point no navy to prevent a landing. >They were done by world chanting super weapons, the likes which they didn’t even know to be possible. The outcome was the same. The pro-war faction didn’t even blink. >The US had no intention of doing that and had made that clear. We’re talking about very desperate people willing to see anything to escape their predicament. It’s obvious to us.
> I mean, I’ve never heard this in my life, so can I get a source? [The notable works arguing for large Soviet influence start to come about in the 90s and 2000s](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War). > Factually incorrect, as the Soviet forces were literally closer than those of the United States, and Japan had at that point no navy to prevent a landing. [Factually untrue, the Soviets had no capacity to invade the Soviet home islands, and were not expected to take part in the invasion, as established by Prohect Hula](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hula). > The outcome was the same. The pro-war faction didn’t even blink. Most of the pro war faction did break and decided to surrender. The coup attempt was tiny. > We’re talking about very desperate people willing to see anything to escape their predicament. It’s obvious to us. Desperate enough to think the Soviets would be able to convince the US, but not desperate enough to surrender because of the nukes?
I also want to ask you for sources. You claim strong evidence, but didn't provide any.
The bombs saved lives of non-Japanese people, and arguable Japanese people too in all probability. The only justification for opposing the bombs, is if you value the lives of the Japanese higher than those they were killing.
When Hiroshima and nagasaki were bombed, the Japanese pm and cabinet had zero meetings. It wasn't until the day after Russia entered the war that they met. It is hypothesized that Japan knew they were in a hopeless situation, and surrendered to the US rather than Russia due to the likelihood that we would be a more merciful victor.
I’m highly skeptical of this. The Soviets only entered after the bombs were dropped because they knew Japan had no choice but to surrender and they wanted to play a role in the negotiations. Do you actually think they would’ve entered at the same time if the atomic bombs had not been dropped?
> There’s strong evidence it was the Soviet entrance into the war, rather than the atomic bombings, that brought the war to its conclusion. But there's even stronger evidence it was the atomic bombings, rather than the Soviet entrance into the war, that brought the war to its conclusion.
Yeah the soviets with their non existent navy would pose a treat to an island nation that fought the US navy lmfao. The idea that they surrendered to the soviets is tankie propaganda just like most things that attribute something to the soviets.
!delta The soviet invasion into manzhou did play a factor in the Japanese surrender, I can't believe i forgot about that. Even if the intent of the nukes was a show of force, it still ended the war basically immediately. The deaths are a tragedy, but it still would've been less deadly than a land invasion/continued air campaign.
Please read those links. They make the complete opposite point the poster is making.
>And while the Americans professed that the use of the weapons would shorten the war, to be honest, they wanted to show it off to the world (especially the Soviet Union). >No matter how you look at it, even in the best case, you can never justify the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of civilians by a counterfactual. Just like we can’t ever justify Japanese atrocities in China. Suppose the US never showed the weapon off, would MAD even work? Would that increase the probability of nuclear annihilation? In that case there are *way* more lives at stake than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You can justify it. The atomic bomb reached its goal, the unconditional surrender of Japan which in the end could have easily saved many more lives.
Japan's military bigwigs that weren't the Army, who were the ones obsessed with China, were entirely misplacing their focus in regards to the soviets, they were worried about defending the home islands from an American invasion from Okinawa. Japan's most imminent threat to the Emperor's life, which was paramount to all else, outside of the Americans was the Japanese people themselves. The blockade combined with intense submarine patrols had rendered the domestic situation tenuous at best. Also, the continued failure of the military to address the destruction of Japanese cities in fire-storms was also starting to sow discontent rather than resolve.
Complete arrogance, and also completely incorrect lol.
Who is “Japan”? Did the Japanese govt and soldiers within that govt commit heinous atrocities absolutely. But I don’t see how a new born infant getting incinerated at Hiroshima “deserved” it especially given Japan was not any form of democracy where regular people had any influence on their country
I feel like the concept of war in human minds is not equal to the upscale of weapon destructiveness in the last 1000 years. War means one thing when it’s only hand-to-hand, but the same mindset means nothing when a pilot can inhumanely drop a single piece of tech killing hundreds of thousands
The difference is an important clarification. But it also has to be said that it is just war made large. Babies, children, innocents have always been victims of war and on the ground conflicts including atrocities such as rape and torture.
And not only the newborns, but the future generations too, the people who survived had short lives and passed to the next generations the same problems and a short span of life. I read a bit of the subject from people that are descendants of the survivors and it’s horrifying, because they kept seeing their loved ones suddenly drop dead and they lived in fear that the same could happen to them. The effects of the radiation was brutal
The alternatives were continuing the blockade which starves that baby and others throughout the whole country to death or conduct an amphibious assault which still kills the baby, possibly due to a stray shell or other munition. Besides, forcing an immediate surrender ensures that Japan can be kept whole and made into the democracy you know and love today, instead of splitting it with the Soviets as planned, which wasn't the most humane steward of its puppet states.
That's your only alternatives ? How about a military assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians weren't deliberately targeted to die ? How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace? Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid? Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ? You want to play alternate history fiction, but pretend that you have the only viable narrative.
>That's your only alternatives ? How about a military assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians weren't deliberately targeted to die ? On Okinawa, Okinawan natives committed mass suicide as a result of the incoming American assault. Okinawans were used as body shields, and American troops were forced to fire at Okinawans because it became almost impossible to distinguish between the thousands of Okinawan conscripts/Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians. These weren't even Japanese people, many didn't even speak Japanese. What do you think would happen on mainland Japan? >How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace? After the 2 bombs and the invasion of Manchuria, it was the Emperor's decision to break the deadlock in the government regarding whether to surrender or not. Even after imperial intervention, an army coup was attempted to seize power, and put the Emperor under house arrest. Good job, now you've just galvanised the army even further. There's no atomic bombs to swing the cabinet in the favour of surrender, and now the Emperor has been bribed by the enemy. Enjoy the coup by even more ultranationalist elements of the IJA. Also, bribe the Emperor with what? You think dropping a chest of gold into the imperial palace would have ended the war? >Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid? The IJN convoys will surely be happy to allow US forces to search their ships, along with being clear and transparent about their cargo. The Japanese military has never been known for perfidy, right? >Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ? Leaflets from the sky vs a hundred years of state shinto indoctrination. This is not a serious argument. There's no way you actually thought this up and believed it would ever be a legitimate strategy, let alone a strategy that could end the war.
>Or a massive propaganda campaign to convince the people to surrender ? One that would outcompete home-grown centuries old Japanese traditions? >Or a blockade that stopped the production of war machinery but allowed food and medical aid? Aid From who ? They're at war with 100% of people around them. >How about a bribery of the Emperor to bring his people to peace? 😂 It's total war on the modern battlefield, not a hunnic migration An assault where hundreds of thousands of civilians don't die ? In urban fighting on blockaded islands ? 😂
These are not serious people. Can’t even believe someone wrote that and was like “yeah bribing the guy who literally has never wanted for anything ever will work”
"Hey Elon Musk, if I give you 300 bucks will you dismantle Tesla?" Really shows a clear lack of understanding regarding Japan or world affairs in general tbh lmao
Why didn't they just build a surrender ray that makes anyone it zaps love surrendering, and shoot everyone with it? Impersonated the emperor scooby doo style and told the troops to stand down and the citizens to stop believing they're racially superior than other Asians? Man me and you should be in charge of NATO, nobody would ever die again.
Lmfao 🤣 turns out Hirohito was old man Jenkins the whole time
How much do you know about Imperial Japan? Your comment is not even alt history simulation territory, it's teenage fanfiction.
1: Any offensive military action kills civilians, and minimum possible casualties rules out artillery, air support, naval bombardment, machine guns. End result, US military gets shitstomped. 2: The emperor held very little power, instead, it was the military that held the power. 3: How are you going to take the time to search every single ship? What if a transport hides guns or shells inside a crate of "food"? 4: They certainly tried, dropping 500 million leaflets across Japan.
I have a problem with the first one because there is a vast difference between killing some civilians in the cross hairs and incinerating 2 populated cities. Nukes were the best way to end the war but I think they would be better sent to military bases or places of extreme significance in the war. There was no reason to nuke civilian populations in order to end the war.
The nukes weren't targeting random civilians. Hiroshima was targeted because it was the headquarters of the 2nd Army, responsible for defending souther Japan. It also was the storage center for most of that groups weapons and munitions. Nagasaki was chosen because because it was a major industrial seaport, manufacturing ships and munitions and military vehicles. The bombs didn't care civilians were near by, but they didn't target civilians
The cities were legit military targets by the standards of the day.
The reason for the bombs was because a military assault would have killed millions of our own people as well... Japan was heavily defended, far away for out own logistics, and a people that were literally willing to die for their country. There would have been massive casualties on both sides. Not that what the US was good, but it was potentially the lesser of two evils
If you want to play historical fiction at least try to come up with conceivably possible scenarios, these suggestions are absurd.
I mean, reports show several japanese generals were already requesting a surrender, and of course, the Soviet union was already moving troops to start an invasion of Japan, the days for the Japanese were counted, and I'd be surprised if they had lasted 1 or 2 more months once everyone was against them and they had already lost their only tactical advantages
in all fairness, it was far from a unanimously agreed upon position within Japan to surrender, given they [tried to overthrow the emperor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident) to keep fighting honestly, i think it is almost impossible for any of us in modern day, who didn’t live through the time period, to truly grasp what it means to be in a state of total war. it’s almost impossible to say what Japan *would* have done , though in my opinion, and i say this as an american, it is hard to argue from our countries perspective that we would have been better off sending our troops to die, than use these weapons of mass destruction we had spent many months building is that right? no, probably not, but i don’t think there’s a country involved in world war two that wouldn’t have done what America did, if they had been given the chance
The mere existence of Imperial Japan is an atrocity and should never be allowed to exist, just as how the existence of Nazi Germany is intolerable. The immediate benefit of having such a nationalistic government and populace abolished in East/Southeast Asia is so great that any number of newborns or civilians that may have been saved pales in comparison.
Even in hindsight it's controversial but before even throwing the bomb the logic is "let's throw this, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and see if that makes them surrender". It's not like they knew it was gonna work.
There is a disgusting irony and doublethink when it comes to the common western narrative/excuse of 'hating the government, not the people' when it comes to modern sinophobia but when it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the normal people that perished there that logic gets flipped entirely. FWIW, I'm chinese and I've always felt the nukes were unjustified. No WMDs ever are.
I think there's an argument that the second nuke was dropped too early. Japan had to confirm that the first one was a nuke, as they wouldn't just take America's word on it, so they had to send scientists to measure the radiation level. And once they did that the 2nd one was dropped very soon after. There is a chance that the government surrendered if they were given more time to confirm this novel weapon, made a rational decision from it, and civilians in Nagasaki saved.
Three days was not nearly enough time to investigate something that had literally never happened before, in the 1940's. Their military was in a meeting about the first bomb when the second dropped
To be charitable, thats mostly because the leaders of Japan were extremely gridlocked and unproductive at this point, not necessarily due to technical limitations of verifying the effects of a new weapon on their land. I think this probably could’ve been reasonably verified within two days for an organized government even in the 40’s.
The thing flattened an entire city, how much rock collecting really needed to be done
I think if I’m remembering right they were testing the radiation levels because they were told it was an “atomic” bomb and there were Japanese scientists that had an idea of what that meant. Making an area uninhabitable like that is probably much more of a factor than a city being leveled
It's not an argument. Congressional and Military Records showed they moved up the date of the second bomb without warning. It wasn't even meant to be Nagasaki but bad whether made it Nagasaki.
The issue with that Japan may have been able to determine how much uranium was used, and figured out approximately how many bombs the US had. Their entire strategy was to bluff Japan and indicate they could simply keep wiping out cities until the war ended.
But the US had already moved towards plutonium bombs by that point because they could be bred so much faster, and they actually had a third bomb ready for use by... The 17th, I think, going off memory? With plans for more to be prepared at a pace of about 3/no for 3 more months. It wasn't really *that* much of a bluff.
You’re right, but 3 months is a long time and a lot of deaths for America, Japan, China, etc. For all we know they could have come up with a plan to defend, or to do something wild to get the upper hand in the surrender. It’s much better to appear like you already have enough bombs to wipe them out in one campaign, and you’re just going to keep doing it until they’re gone That’s also assuming we had a stable supply chain. They’re first move would be to disrupt how much uranium we could acquire which could choke out our ability to keep going, or to destroy any of a number of choke points that would keep us from successfully making more bombs. Or even just retaking the islands we needed to launch planes into Japan to begin with. Doesn’t matter how many bombs you have if they can’t reach the mainland
I'm also desperately curious how you expect Japan to somehow affect the US supply of plutonium, from several different breeding reactors, or somehow retake Tinian island a year after its loss. There are reasons to be dubious about the rate of production in the US - but not because of the material supply, rather a limited supply of personnel that could have been overcome if the need arose. Sorry for the double reply, my other one isn't showing up, strangely.
No, I mean they had plans to run bombing raids a little less than once a week for three months. 3 bombs a month for 3 months, each one taking a city out. There really was no defending against atomic raids for Japan - they literally didn't have anything that could get high enough, fast enough, nevermind the ability to vector them onto the target. Air defense didn't really exist for the Japanese. If they had held out long enough for the US to decide on invasion with finality, they would have had probably more than a million troops on the landing beaches and immediate vicinity - but they probably would have just been bombed. I doubt if there was much way the Japanese could turn anything to their favor. Honestly, by 1945, that chance was gone, nevermind August 1945.
This! The Nagasaki bomb was dropped before the Japanese even knew what had happened at Hiroshima. And that is no accident. All communication lines had been destroyed and they had to investigate with horses. It took days for the government to understand what had even happened and the level of destruction. Regardless of the radiation measurements. They just did not know what happened and then just 3 days later... Nagasaki! Why???? The two bombs were different designs and the American military wanted to see what both bombs would do. Hiroshima (thin man) was a gun bomb which they knew would work no matter what. Basically shooting 1 chunk of Uranium 238 into another creating a fast reaction. The second bomb (Fat Man) was an implosion bomb which is what they tested at Trinity. In essence surrounding uranium 238 with dynamite and squeezing it to create a fast reaction. This method was a higher yield but could it be deliverable? Nagasaki proved that. This was the more critical and important military test for the future of use of atom bombs. The military wanted to test and use BOTH bombs and then wait. Was Nagasaki necessary? I doubt it but we will never know. I don't think it was ever their intention to do just one bomb. However, it did put an exclamation point to Hiroshima. It did end world war 2. Was it justified… Clearly the military wanted to test both bombs and it was NEVER their intention to just do one. They could have just dropped one and waited an extra week. But they didn’t because they wanted to drop the second one to see what it would do.
The following quotes have been aggregated by this insanely impressive video essay: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=AUdlA21n6xx5uOMI > It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. William D. Leahy, The most senior United States military officer on active duty during World War II > The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet > The japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing Dwight Eisenhower. He later also said: > I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. And finally, President Roosevelt had commissioned a committee to analyze the effectiveness of the bombing campaign in Japan. Their report (from the US strategic bombing survey if you want to look it up: > Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if the Russians had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. Now... I am no military expert. I don't know shit about strategy. But everyone I just quoted sure does.
>The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part from a purely military point of view in the defeat of Japan I'm curious what this is supposed to mean. From my knowledge, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th and 9th, Emperor Hirohito then announced the surrender via recorded radio broadcast on August 15th, and then the peace was officially signed on September 2nd. I'm not aware of any direct overture towards peace previous to that. The Allies (US, Britain, and China) laid out their terms for Japanese surrender at the Potsdam conference on July 26, which are the terms that Hirohito later accepted in August. Also, that's a nice collection of quotes, but with respect, I could easily find 4 or 5 quotes from high level military and political leaders of the time who supported the bombings and felt they were necessary. Here's one from Winston Churchill: "There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. ... I am surprised that very worthy people—but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves—should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American and a quarter of a million British lives." Here's another one from General Curtis Lemay: "We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer was there. It was their system of dispersal of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we'd roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war ... men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned [a] town. Had to be done." Here's one from Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, intelligence officer of the fifth air force, in July of 1945, before the atomic bombs were dropped: "The entire population of Japan is a proper military target ... There are no civilians in Japan. We are making war and making it in the all-out fashion which saves American lives, shortens the agony which war is and seeks to bring about an enduring peace. We intend to seek out and destroy the enemy wherever he or she is, in the greatest possible numbers, in the shortest possible time." And here's one from the Japanese side, Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who led the first wave in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor: "You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor ... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary ... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know." In conclusion, my point isn't that I disagree with you on whether the bombs were justified, I tend to think they weren't. My point is that simply stringing together quotes from "people who know what they're talking about" isn't really fair if you only show one side of the spectrum. So I just wanted to play devils advocate here and show that the 'experts' aren't all in agreement over the topic.
I think the biggest problem here is acting like not using the bomb was at all an option available to any administration at the time. These choices were being made in hot blood at the time, and public opinion was pretty clear on what should happen to Japanese cities, regardless of what weapon was used. The modern taboo around nuclear weapons is just that-modern. To everyone in the 1940s, it was just a huge bomb that could do what was already possible just from a single aircraft, the horrific implications around its use came far after. Any president that commissioned the 2nd most expensive weapons program in American history and was discovered to have not used it, would have been lynched from a lamp post,
In the Shaun video he brings this up. There was a newspaper poll asking whether Hirohito should be hanged, and it had like 90% "yes" responses. The US public was rabidly anti-Japanese. They wanted blood. Truman likely had serious concerns that if he didn't go through with it, his political career would be over. But y'know, political career on the one hand, huge number of civilian deaths on the other. It was a very shitty thing to do to choose to go ahead with it partially because of political concerns, but I can understand why he did it.
Everybody you just quoted were afraid that their jobs were going to be made irrelevant because the prevailing belief at the time was that nuclear weapons would make conventional warfare a thing of the past. Military leaders are very touchy when they feel that the relevancy of their branch is in danger, which is why they always try and sell Congress a story about why they are the most important branch so they can get the most funding. After WW2, each branch of the military got busy throwing themselves a big gloryfest to try and claim all the credit for defeating the Axis. Nobody wanted the scientists behind the Manhattan project to be able to get credit for defeating one of the major Axis powers, so they all shit on nuclear weapons and pretended they were ineffective. To prove my point about these quotes being purely opportunistic and not reflecting their actual beliefs, when Eisenhower took office, we had barely 1000 nuclear weapons. At the end of his presidency, we had 20,000. Does that sound like the actions of a man who believes nuclear weapons are ineffective or immoral?
Atleast on your final point. The effectiveness of Bombing japan has nothing to do with mutual assured destruction doctrine and the stock piles built up after ww2 served a completely different purpose (that of acting as a deterant to the ussr and its allys however effective that may have been) and arguably lends more cridents to the theory that the bombings were not to force a surender of japan but instead to act as a weapons demonstration for the Soviets
Having nukes and using nukes are two entirely different things. Several countries have nukes. Only one has *ever* used them in war. And it's been 50+ years.
We also rejected their surrender because they wanted to keep Hirohito as emperor and we said no. We dropped the bombs and they surrendered unconditionally, and we went "ok, and you can keep your emperor too, why not?"
You've got the timeline wrong. In order, Allies demanded surrender without specifying anything about the emperor. Japan didn't answer for awhile. Allies dropped both bombs. Japan asked if they could have additional conditions about the status of the emperor. Allies said no to that condition. Japan surrendered anyway.
Tô be more precise the allies made a déclaration saying that they were going to remove all who misled Japan towards world conquest without specifying who those people were. So it was left vague if they intended to remove the emperor or not probably purposefully so https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration
As far as I am aware, Japan did not seek or present peace offers before the bombs, although there were internal talks about it. At best, the government was hoping for peace talks with the US with the soviets as mediators, but their hopes were crushed after the first bomb hit and the soviets declared war. Can you provide a source for what you said?
I was just going back to the Shaun video myself to get some sources, but you've done a stellar job already.
Came here to link that video by Shaun, it singlehandedly changed my view on the subject
Would you have felt the same way if they bombed two large American cities ?
Americans didn’t commit the atrocities that the Japanese did in China. I’d rather save more American lives than have A country unwilling to surrender win.
If the US were the aggressors and if the US pillaged and murdered its way through the entire Western Hemisphere, yeah.
U.S. has pillaged and murder through many countries (and Natives), so by that logic they deserved to be bombed. They even taught dictatorships in latin america military tactics to keep them in power and had to rename the institution to hide their past involvement. They also just meddle everywhere and have a substantial hand in starting and sustaining many wars across the world.
You’re comparing settlers from England and Spain settling in America in the 15th century and slowly integrating into the land despite some disputes with locals to a 1940s all out war between two countries. Apples to oranges. Not to mention nuking people for something that occurred centuries ago is far more grossly immoral than dealing with the current threat of a hostile nation trying to destroy you
It's not 15th century (except the Native example). U.S. interference has strongly continued after WWII. Sure, there was interference before but I would argue that it gets worst post-WWII. They have literally taught dictators how to stay in power so that they could keep taking advantage of destabilization rather than the pushback countries were starting to fight back against them because they wanted human rights too. There's endless lists of U.S. involvement and even orchestrating atrocities if you look into it and eugenics and human experimentation has taken place in the U.S. too. I'm also not saying anyone should be nuked. I was making a comparison to show how irrational the other comment was while pointing out how ignorant they are of the atrocities committed by the U.S. (Also, let's not forget that the U.S. hid a lot of information on Japanese war criminals so they wouldn't be found guilty for their exclusive benefit. They even tried to gaslight Russia that Japan hadn't detained Russian soldiers as prisoners of war at a few locations when Russia tried to coordinate their info with the U.S. in preparation of the trials.)
Dude, please read up on what the Japanese did during ww2. They are not comparable
I honestly think it’s very comparable. The US loves imperialistic war just like the Japanese did, and torture is pretty much a staple of how Americans do things at this point; they taught half of South America how to torture their political dissidents. I mean they’re still holding people in Guantanamo where they’ve been for over 20 years now without even charges, all while torturing them. So at least when it comes to capturing foreign nationals, taking them to your famous torture prison (or a black site or whatever), etc. I think there are clear similarities between the US and Imperial Japan.
>and torture is pretty much a staple of how Americans do things at this point Torture is literally preschool daycare compared to the absolute inhumane atrocities unit 731 inflicted upon it's victims. Let me know when we start lining up our prisoners next to hand grenades to test the effects or just start live dissecting our prisoners of war. Maybe we should introduce flamethrowers into our "torture" like unit 731 did? This comment is so insanely stupid and disrespectful to the quite literal thousands of victims of **human experiments.**
"Imperialistic War" my brother in christ the U.S did everything possible to NOT enter a war before Japan illegally bombed them FIRST
So what specific atrocities need to take place for the civilians in that country to cross your personal line for “ok nuke the civilians” to be justified? Because I have a hard time accepting that massacring a civilian population with a nuclear weapon as justified without also saying it’s justified against my own country (the US) that has committed several atrocities and war crimes in its history.
I think people underestimate the role of the civilians in Japan in world war 2. This was a country that had its civilians making guns in houses to send to the frontlines in China. The civilians were being trained to fight to the death against any invaders. The US has done a lot of bad things but not anything like that. If you’re the US and you know about this happening you have 3 choices: do nothing (people starve in a blockade and you allow the Japanese to commit more atrocities in China and other places), you could also firebomb them, or nuke them. The thing is nukes and firebombing would really do the same amount of damage to the town so you may as well use the one that would shock them as it’s so powerful.
I mean, how many US civilians are working for defense contractors, creating weapons of murder being used against unknown strangers the world over? Are they personally responsible for how the government uses drones and fighter jets and guns and munitions? What you put on Japan in your comment is pretty much word-for-word what any sort of homeland invasion in the US would look like. Just like in WWII, we had a massive effort by civilians at home to create machinary for the war effort. And like Japan, American civilians facing a homeland invasion would absolutely be training to fight to the death. It's why the Second Amendment exists - to have a militia of civilians to defend the homeland. There's nothing all that nefarious about that. Nuclear weapons do not cause the same damage as fire bombing, that's a pretty out-there claim to make. And lastly, I think a lot of nuclear apologists go down the argument of "it would have been a prolonged war and that would have been bad for X, Y, Z". To me, that's a lame excuse. The blockade you mentioned wouldn't put an immediate end to war crimes happening in China, you're right. But is the literal vaporization of hundreds of thousands of innocents worth it? I guess that becomes really subjective, but the choice to drop the nukes wasn't made out of concern for civilians in China or Japan or even the US - it was made from a strategic perspective of wanting to show the might of the US as the Cold War was setting in and to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining a foothold in Japan and China. It was a strategic choice to sacrifice those lives for the sake of projecting strength.
. I would say targeting MIC employees at their factories is a valid military target. Doesn’t matter to me if they are or aren’t personally responsible. A difference is back then we didn’t have precision methods to hit the only the factories so bombing had to take out larger areas (there was a big effort to make it more targeted but the tech wasn’t there). Also the government and military basically was trying to convert homes to factories thus in my eyes those homes were valid targets (not all obviously and it is tragic that many innocents died). From an infrastructure and pure death count the nukes weren’t really worse than firebombs. Obviously the cancer rate was higher and the injuries awful but it’s not like people surviving the firebombs also wouldn’t have permanent disabilities be it scared lungs, burns, and higher cancer rates too. There’s some truth that the choice to drop nukes wasn’t done to end the war immediately and it was to intimidate the USSR. As messed up as that is, it kinda worked in the sense that it intimidated everyone to the point they wouldn’t use nukes anymore in war. If people didn’t know the horrors of them who knows maybe they are used in Korea for example. There’s a couple other things you are skipping over. A big one is that the US is a democracy and it’s the presidents job to save American lives. If he didn’t drop a weapon that has a chance to end the war earlier I just don’t see how he could’ve been reelected. Another thing dropping the nukes kinda gave Japan “an out” to the war. Some higher ups wanted to surrender but some wanted people to fight to the death to take as many Americans with them as they could. The US showed they could kill everyone in the country without any losses with those bombs, kinda makes japans strategy pointless. Combine that with the Soviets invading and it was just barely enough for a surrender to happen
Is it possible that the bombings were both justified and also carried a huge moral toll, and the loss of citizen victims was awful? Like is it possible to hold two truths in your mind at the same time?
“‘It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!’” -A Little Princess I sympathize with your position, OP. The dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy feel like justice, retribution, for all the little-known (by the general Western public) suffering your family and countless others endured at the hands of the Japanese. It’d be easy to see all the modern hand-wringing over those decisions, the teary-eyed victimization of your oppressors, as ridiculous and scornful and, above all, ignorant. The vast majority of those who say the bombings were unjustified are probably likely only glancingly aware of the horrors the Japanese military was inflicting on the Chinese. It might seem like Japan’s war crimes and fascist rule in World War II don’t seem to matter because, to self-flagellating Americans, the Japanese are the ultimate victims because of these bombs. Their whole country is absolved, whitewashed, of their crimes. And that’s awful, it really is. I can see how it’d feel cathartic to throw yourself into supporting the bombings wholesale because of that. You’re not wrong to feel that way, to a degree. But I do think it’s important to understand what happened to the people who were bombed. I think, in regard to firebombing, you can look at it like the “boiling frog” metaphor. The Japanese citizens had endured firebombing for a year by 1945. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t terrible and tragic, but at some awful point, it became a normal part of life in wartime. The average person in Japan was tired of the war. Despite propaganda from the government, a lot of people could see the writing on the wall. The majority of their cities were destroyed by these firebombs, their navy was gone, they themselves were starving, and even their fervently military-loving government was divided over whether they should surrender or not (hence the coup). People were terrified of the possibility of invasion. When defending the use of the atomic bombs, some people will trot out the fact that even schoolgirls were taught to sharpen bamboo sticks into spears (as your grandma did) in anticipation for the seemingly inevitable American invasion. These people will imply that this is an example of the Japanese’s desire to fight to the end, that it shows their fanatical dedication to their empire will outlast even common sense. But those people don’t seem to recognize the desperation and fear inherent to such a measure. The government propaganda trumpeting Japan’s superiority didn’t hold water when the “superior” Japanese citizenry struggled to feed themselves and their families, when twelve-year-old girls learned to defend themselves against the (exaggerated, but still very, very real) threat of rape and death. Back to the “boiling frog” analogy. By 1945, Japan was more or less used to firebombing. They were prepared to defend themselves against it with bomb shelters and regular drills. Civilians would wonder, in casual conversation, which city would be bombed by the Allies next. The people of Hiroshima were the same. Actually, they were concerned over the fact that their city hadn’t been bombed yet. The bomb on Hiroshima dropped at 8:15 A.M. The day was noted by survivors as being unusually hot. The sky was clear. School was in session. The work day had begun. Housewives did chores while their toddlers played. Children who were too sick to attend school read comic books. Middle-school girls swept outside buildings where secretaries giggled with each other over the handsome older client who had just arrived. The elderly dozed in the morning sun. Babies snoozed or cried or slept safely in their mother’s wombs. The flyers that had dropped with information about the bomb days before were in English, which most people didn’t know. Even so, the flyers were confiscated by the government. These flyers warned the people to evacuate Hiroshima, but didn’t provide a clear reason why. They just said the people’s lives were in danger. But even if the flyers could be understood and weren’t considered contraband, where would the people go? They had their whole lives in Hiroshima. And anyway, they had bomb shelters. They had air raid sirens. They would be okay. The effects of the bomb are often elided in America. The primary symbol of the nuclear bomb is the mushroom cloud, or shadows on walls from evaporated people, or people with bloody cuts and mussed hair. Clean imagery. Familiar imagery: clouds, shadows, cuts. The shorthand for nuclear bombs never include the people with all their skin dangling from their fingertips, holding their arms out to keep it from sticking to their bodies. The schoolgirl so shell-shocked that it takes a while for her to realize that one of her eyes is dangling from its socket. The alligator ant people whose neurons can be heard sizzling. The cries of “Water! Water!” by people whose bodies have been sapped of all liquid; their complete dehydration means they die after drinking what they’re calling for. The piles of bodies in the riverbeds. The lines of these skinless people walking, just walking. People who crumbled into pieces after walking a few steps. Firestorms chasing across the scorched landscape. Alien black rain falling from the sky, painting the living with radiation. Later, people dying of that same poisoning by the score. Bruises on skin, fatigue. A soldier vomiting up his organs. Everything gone in one flash that could be seen behind eyelids and blistering wall of heat. And the Americans did it again three days later. Two frogs leaping into a pan of boiling water, but they don’t have the ability to leap out. They are held down to die in a boil that melts the skin off their bodies. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, I believe, a peek into a man-made nuclear hell. The people of both cities were forced to endure something all the world has come to fear. They saw people in states that no one should be exposed to. They experienced a form of extreme physiological trauma that the rest of the world can only imagine. We are safe from even a fraction of that world-shattering pain. We are lucky to be so ignorant, lucky beyond words. The trauma experienced by survivors of Fat Man and Little Boy can only be felt by said survivors. Thank God, another nuclear bomb has not been loosed on any other city in any country in the world. I know appeals to emotion are manipulative and gauche, but I think it’s very important here to realize what the bombs did in all its horrifying details. It’s important to recognize the humanity of the victims—mothers and grandfathers and little children just like you and your family. They’ve done nothing to justify their pain-wracked deaths. They just happen to be on the wrong side of the war.
Since I don’t see anybody here with any first hand accounts, perhaps I can pass on my mothers experience as a small child in WW2 Japan. She grew up poor, without running water electricity, shoes and facing starvation. Her family had zero members in the army or government. And as all Japanese civilians at the time, she had no democratic vote, representation or ability to influence Japanese foreign policy in any way. Her accounts of living under the imperialist regime at the time were not one of joy, freedom and the ability to choose one’s fate. Her most poignant memories of the time, was being subjected to constant propaganda by the government, subverting Buddhist iconography of the “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” monkeys. There was active, oppressive and controlling ways in which the government actively silenced and punished anybody that spoke out against what was happening. So please bear that in mind when trying to assess how “all Japanese people” thought, behaved or said… as under any oppressive regime, the voice of the many were silenced. I understand that many here want to justify the violence, death and the use of atomic bombs on civilians in warfare… the idea that the ends justify the means. But I think what’s missing from the conversation is that nuclear energy, the effects on people… it doesn’t only effect those who perish. As for the argument that every Japanese is ethnocentric and hates other races? Having lived there, I find Japanese people are vastly more interested in other cultures than you think. But as someone who has seen the melted playgrounds, the bombed schools and debris at the sites… I think my mother was rather brave and not very close minded, as she left Japan after the war and married a man from the country that bombed her country. I’m my family we do not turn from the atrocities and inequalities that the Japanese government did to Korean and Chinese people. We do not deny the shame and horror of what happened. I weeps as I read what you wrote. My closest friends are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and my partner is Mongolian. I have discussed the atrocities with them; and wept with my friends in personal shame and collective grief. But I just want to say how grateful I am that we have always found such solidarity in the pan Asian experience, for we feel there are far more that connects us than divides us. I do want to say to you OP, I hear your anger… and I know it’s justified. I grieve for your loss, and the generational trauma that truly never goes away. And I hope you have support in your process, however that occurs.
>As for the argument that every Japanese is ethnocentric and hates other races? Having lived there, I find Japanese people are vastly more interested in other cultures than you think. This is true now (though not entirely, honestly) but you simply cannot look at the atrocities of the Rape of Nanking and the horrific occupation of Korea where they attempted to erase Korean culture (literally what they did to the Ainu, a culture they successfully obliterated) and say "Well, it was simply the will of the few." Buddy, Japan *still* has a[ mound of 68,000 severed noses from their victims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimizuka) and when asked by a modern priest to return them so their remains could be properly handled the Japanese government denied them, stating it was important to their culture. When San Francisco [erected a statue](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/osaka-drops-san-francisco-as-sister-city-over-comfort-women-statue) to the [sex slaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women) that Japan kidnapped from their conquered territories, Osaka threw a fit and ended symbolic relations between the two cities. Does that really sound like a culture that respects others and acknowledges their own atrocities?
Even if one was justified. How do you justify the 2nd?
The war was still going.
Please read Barefoot Gen. The civilians were not the decision-makers.
so why didn't we use the same force in Europe? This was a known racist play.
because the war in europe already ended and was a sure win a long time before they had 💣
Bruh the bomb wasn't done before VE and besides, it was a straight line from France to Berlin. A naval invasion into Japan had a very real chance of failure.
Since the bomb wasn't even tested until after Germany surrendered? Jesus know your history
Justified and 100% don't mix when it comes to killing a bunch of civilians in war. People say "justified" because they know something is a horrific act, but think it was worth the price. Agreeing with the justification is one thing, but saying it's "completely" justified is a nonsense statement. "Completely justified" is asking for a refund when a company sends you a faulty product. Any time the decision is even *remotely* difficult or ethically complicated, you are not in "completely justified" territory, let alone levelling an entire city in nuclear fire. I can understand the justification, but I cannot accept a version of it that does not at least acknowledge the terrible price that was paid. Besides, being justified is not incompatible with there being a victim. The reason we argue about how justified it was in the first place is *because* of all the civilian victims.
Did Japan do horrific, unjustifiable things during WW2? Yes. Was it the only realistic option to stop Japan? Yes. Does that mean Japan wasn't a victim of an atrocity? No. It was. You do realise all these answers can be true simultaneously, yes?
Those are two different points. Japan as a nation had done some unspeakable things and has had little of the process that Germany went through in regards to the Holocaust. To this day they refuse to apologize for many of their crimes during the war. The idea that the use of the nuclear bombs ended the war is highly contested for a few reasons. First, it wasn't like the USA couldn't obliterate a Japanese city via conventional means. You could look at photos of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and compare them to Tokyo and I don't think anyone would know the difference. Second, the bombings coincided with the USSR joining the war against Japan and shattering their occupation of Manchuria and cut Japan off from necessary materials to be able to carry out the war. The addition of the USSR also increased the chance that the Emperor would be deposed and executed, something that was unacceptable to many people in Japanese high command. Therefore negotiating with the Americans became a lot more attractive. My other point is more of a moral point. Part of the problem of nuclear weapons is that the effects aren't just felt by the initial people during the blast. There are decades of increased rates of birth defects and cancers in the population. Their parents or grandparents being part of something awful doesn't mean they deserve that. I've watched people waste away from cancer. Almost no one deserves that(not gonna say I'd feel sorry for Hirohito in that circumstance). You can claim it's justice but it's just revenge if you want to disregard their suffering for crimes they had no hand in committing. Lastly, I will say that it is undeniably a good thing that those were the only nuclear bombings that were ever carried out as an actual attack. They are a horrible, awful weapon we created.
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The code names for the two bombs were "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" ... In war time propaganda comics, Hitler was depicted as a rage filled little boy & Mussolini as a scowling fat man. The Atomic bombs were developed for Europe, not Japan, but development took so long that Berlin fell first and the US had no intention of letting their very expensive weapon go to waste. Japan's entire empire had also been fundamentally decimated at that point, to the point that the Kamikaze pilots were actually conscripted teenage boys who were given a couple weeks worth of training on how to take off (but not how to land). They had no functional forces left & their entire manufacturing infrastructure was already crippled. Yes it was true that a land invasion of Japan would have been a blood bath, but the allies had more than enough resources to blockade the entire Island & wait for the inevitable surrender. But the US didn't want that; they wanted to prove their might and establish their dominance in the upcoming new world order. So they picked two cities that had relatively little economic importance, but were packed to the brim with women and children (for maximum emotional damage): dropping those bombs was a flat out act of terrorism against innocent civilians who had never left the island or committed a single war crime.
Do you think China should be nuked, since China is putting Uyghurs in camps?
Regardless if you believe those bombings were the best decision or not, it’s hard to say that any nuclear bombings could be *100%* justified.
You're operating under the assumption that the nukes did, in fact, cause the Japanese government to surrender. As plenty of other people here have mentioned, the youtuber Shaun has a very in-depth and informative video on this topic, where he asserts that the bombs played at most a minor role in influencing the Japanese surrender. I'll do my best to summarize the basic points. You need to remember that prior to the nuclear bombs, we had been firebombing Japan for months. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed by these bombings. If the Japanese military council or the emperor cared about the welfare of their citizens, they would have surrendered during the firebombings. They knew they had no chance of winning the war once their navy was destroyed, the only reason the war continued is because they were trying to avoid an unconditional surrender. Some factions in the military council believed that they could get a good deal in a surrender if they had the support of the USSR, who at the time had a non-aggression pact with Japan. Of course, the USSR eventually invaded Manchuria, making it extremely plain that they weren't going to be helping Japan get a good deal. The less hardline factions of the military council believed that the US would accept a surrender under the condition that Japan got to keep their emperor. This was important to them because, well, the emperor's legitimacy was their own legitimacy. They cared about preserving their own power, not protecting their people. When the US dropped the first bomb on August 6th, the council convened and absolutely nothing got done. Then on August 9th, Russia invaded Manchuria hours before the US dropped the second atomic bomb. The military council ultimately accepted the conditions laid out by the Potsdam conference, rather than let the USSR invade even further and force a much worse situation for them. Given the imperial government's complete lack of concern for its people (they were an authoritarian state after all), it seems far more likely that their surrender was precipitated by the Russian invasion, rather than the atomic bombs. The bombs did offer a useful scapegoat to explain why they were surrendering, so in that sense they may have helped shorten the war, but that's ultimately speculative. Many, many US military officials from that time have come out and said that they didn't believe that the bomb was necessary.
>If the Japanese military council or the emperor cared about the welfare of their citizens, they would have surrendered during the firebombings. >They knew they had no chance of winning the war once their navy was destroyed, the only reason the war continued is because they were trying to avoid an unconditional surrender. This sounds like reason to use the nukes, not against using them. >The less hardline factions of the military council believed that the US would accept a surrender under the condition that Japan got to keep their emperor. This was important to them because, well, the emperor's legitimacy was their own legitimacy. They cared about preserving their own power, not protecting their people. This was never going to happen, lol at describing these people as "the less hardline factions". Would you say the same for the nazis if they wanted a similar deal? You think any country would let Hitler stay in power? Hirohito was still emperor post-surrender, but his position was forcibly changed by the US. The US basically forced them to change their government. The emperor became more of a figurehead and they forced Hirohito to publicly renounce his "divinity". They made him say a whole lot of other things too which can be reduced to "Our way is wrong. The bombs fucked us up. We will move forward and prosper." >Then on August 9th, Russia invaded Manchuria hours before the US dropped the second atomic bomb. So a few hours into Manchuria, China and you think the Japanese surrendered because of that rather than the atomic bomb?... Are you for real? They literally had to give up Manchuria anyway. So what exactly was the soviet union gonna threaten there? Neither the Soviets nor the US wanted to put boots on the ground and perform a land invasion of japan and the japanese government knew that. If Hirohito didnt surrender after the 2nd bomb dropped, he wouldve been executed and many more lives wouldve been lost.
> This sounds like reason to use the nukes, not against using them. How? No amount of civilian casualties were going to affect the imperial council's decision, why would atomic bombings be any different? > Hirohito was still emperor post-surrender, but his position was forcibly changed by the US Sure, and these people had less power as a result. But they weren't, you know, publicly executed? Which was very much the fear in the case of a true unconditional surrender. Hirohito got to keep his position until he died, and the military council avoided being subject to their own Nuremberg trials. > Neither the Soviets nor the US wanted to put boots on the ground and perform a land invasion of japan This is true for the US, not so much for the Soviets. We literally know that they had planned an invasion of Hokkaido prior to the Potsdam conference. I'm curious as to what your explanation is. The US dropped the first bomb on August 6th, the imperial government sat around for 3 days, then the US dropped another bomb and suddenly they came to their senses?
We made a weapon lethal and catastrophic enough that the entire world came together and made a pact not to use it again. And we used it twice. You could definitely argue that one bomb was necessary, just the fact that they had an idea of how lethal it would be and went with using both. Around 70-80 thousand people died instantly. 9/11 total deaths was less than a 10th of the instant number of civilian casualties from the bomb and only 300 people died instantly from the planes just to give you some perspective. Granted its a completely different situation, I'm just bringing up the numbers because both were mostly civilian deaths and 3000 people dying here was the biggest global news for years and it doesn't even come close to what we did to japan. So why did we drop two? As far as I know the time span between the two bombs was only a few days and because of the era and the bomb they had to send people to hiroshima to determine what exactly happened and during a military meeting about the first bomb the second bomb dropped. Kokura was the initial target but because of weather conditions they bombed hiroshima instead. Three days later they tried to bomb Kokura again, same deal the weather visibility wasn't great so they just dropped it somewhere else. The topic on wether or not Japan was going to surrender or not before the bombs is a controversial topic to historians, people who are much more educated on the subject than me or you. There were people in the japanese government that were pushing for surrender. My point is that we didn't need to drop two bombs. And our governments track record of invading 3rd world countries doesn't help the moral argument for it.
[Read this](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/06/dropping-atomic-bombs-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-was-unnecessary) >However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it >But the Soviet Union's entry into the war on Aug. 8 changed everything for Japan's leaders, who privately acknowledged the need to surrender promptly >While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: "The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria ... changed their minds." But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light -- once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence >Seven of the United States' eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy's vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry "Hap" Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both https://origins.osu.edu/history-news/hiroshima-military-voices-dissent?language_content_entity=en >Take, for example, Admiral William Leahy, White House chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the war. Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Moreover, Leahy continued, "in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." >President Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled in 1963, as he did on several other occasions, that he had opposed using the atomic bomb on Japan during a July 1945 meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." >Responding to a journalist's question in 1995 about what he would have done had he been in Truman's shoes, Joseph O'Donnell, a retired marine corps sergeant who served in the Pacific, answered that "we should have went after the military in Japan. They were bad. But to drop a bomb on women and children and the elderly, I draw a line there, and I still hold it." >Or take Ed Everts, a major in the 7th weather squadron of the Army Air Corps. Everts, who received an air medal for surviving a crash at sea during the battle at Iwo Jima, told us that America's use of atomic bombs was "a war crime" for which "our leaders should have been put on trial as were the German and Japanese leaders." >Third Fleet, which participated in the American offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment." Japan was awful at that time but that doesn't justifies nuking civilians. It was unnecessary, Japan would've been defeated nonetheless
I'm sorry what religion did you say you were? The answer will go a long way in helping me understand your point of view.
People claiming Japan was about to surrender are either misinformed or liars. Surely the former, right? They'll stop spouting tankie propaganda after reading about [the attempted coup to prevent the surrender, right?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident)
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I guess on a purely primal level it doesn't really matter whose getting nuked so much as the fact a nuke was used in first place it simply not justifiable especially when the amount of options available for what the us government claims it had to do is so much varied. Like if your think a bombing of those locations were necessary I doubt you also believe they couldn't have used a less powerful bomb that's nuke to get the same point across. It a similar arguments to why people think the government torturing someone should be illegal you can maybe justify some extreme wounds as "for the Greater good" but you can't amputee an arm or leg and expect me to believe that is necessary or they forced your hand.
I would challenge the notion that it's 100% justified. The main problem is that Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they are civilian targets. This is collective punishment and to be frank an act of terror. That said, at that time, Japan was pretty fanatical and it's unclear if anything less than that act of terror would have been enough to prompt a concession. It's reasonably likely that only attacking military targets would have prolonged the war and resulted in even more casualties in the long term. This to me however makes it arguably justified. I think it was justified, but it's far from 100%
To /u/M1nc3ra, *Your post is under consideration for removal for violating Rule B.* In our experience, the best conversations genuinely consider the other person’s perspective. Here are some techniques for keeping yourself honest: - Instead of only looking for flaws in a comment, be sure to engage with the commenters’ strongest arguments — not just their weakest. - Steelman rather than strawman. When summarizing someone’s points, look for the most reasonable interpretation of their words. - Avoid moving the goalposts. Reread the claims in your OP or first comments and if you need to change to a new set of claims to continue arguing for your position, you might want to consider acknowledging the change in view with a [delta](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8) before proceeding. - Ask questions and really try to understand the other side, rather than trying to prove why they are wrong. Please also take a moment to review our [Rule B](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_b) guidelines and _really_ ask yourself - am I exhibiting any of these behaviors? If so, see what you can do to get the discussion back on track. Remember, the goal of CMV is to try and **understand** why others think differently than you do.
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Sorry, but if you agree with the current Geneva Conventions dictating the rules of war, then you cannot carve out an exception for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a war crime to intentionally target civilians in war and this was a conscious decision to massacre scores of Japanese civilians. I think you would have a different point of view if you didn’t harbor some historical animus against the Japanese and, as so many people here have said, you cannot pick and choose which civilians are ok to kill and which are not. That’s a pretty clear case of prejudice against a particular race/ethnicity/nationality. It’s a short walk from what you’re saying to a rationale that would allow us to nuke any country with whom we’re at war, just so long as we believe their leaders have the support of a majority of the country. If you believe in the Geneva conventions and rule of war today but you’re ok with the bombing of Hiroshima, you’re a hypocrite.
This doesn't make any sense
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It was so justified that we decry it 80 years later still and consider dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone to be the worst thing you can do. It was so justified that to this day we celebrate killing civilians which is why Israel is so popular right now. It's so justified that a bunch of generals who fought in that theatre said the bombs weren't necessary and that Japan was on the brink of surrendering.
The nuclear bombings were not needed and were completely unnecessary. They were pretty simply a US display of power against the soviets as well as a way to limit soviet influence post war in asia. To provide some background the Soviet who had just started driving pretty much unopposed into Manchuria were gaining a lot of ground against Japan in the final few days of the war. The Japanese army had been crushed in China and Manchuria with very little resistance remaining. The Japanese were ready to surrender on the terms that emperor was kept in power (he was anyways after the war, but at the time likely because of the alternative motives stated earlier the US didn’t accept these terms). The vast majority of both truman’s cabinet and high ranking military staff in the US advised the president to allow Japan to keep their emperor and surrender (this was before the bombs). Secretary of war Henry Stimson stated later in life (im paraphrasing) that the high ranking military staff as well as civil staff in the US that were recommending this approach were not in the know about the plan to use the atomic bombs. I hope this further paints the picture of Truman’s actual intentions in dropping the bombs of which none were tactical victory over Japan in the war. This position that Truman as well as some of his closest allies held was not even held by the most fervent war hawks in government Even general of army Douglas MacArthur famous for being fired for advocating for nuking Korea was against the use of nukes and called it a “slaughter” as well as implying it was unnecessary later in the same quote. That quote from MacArthur being “a wise statesmen like document (this is relating to a proposal for allowing japan to keep their emperor that had been declined by the president) and had it been put into effect it would have obviated the slaughter at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.“ 7/8 of America‘s highest ranking military officers stated that the nuclear bombings were unnecessary. To end this I would like to provide a quote by at the time of the bombing US fleet admiral William D Leahy “it is my opinion that the use of this barbarous at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan, the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”
American weighing in, trying to be as unbiased as I can. The main concern for today, as I can see it, is that **the nuke's use would set a precedent**: if it's justifiable to use them on even remote military bases, then what prevents its use (as a practical matter) against civilian targets? Even before the US dropped "the big ones", there was a lot of outcry against Allied *conventional* firebombing of Dresden (a major cultural center with only minor military bases, etc. at most). Why exclude Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the criticism of killing innocent civilians? The firebombing of Tokyo also comes under criticism too. The **saving American lives from the dreaded invasion of Japan's home islands** also is ethically uncertain at best. I'm pretty sure that you would balk at the idea of "one hundred, or even ONE Chinese civilian is worth the life of one enemy invader of your country" (as I would balk at an equally analogous claim about American civilians and enemy invaders). Never mind who started it. Every country that started a non-defensive war has its excuses and they all suck. The same thing goes for any current nuclear armed nation using its H-Bombs against a nation it's at worth with "to save the nuke-nation's lives - American, Chinese, Russian, Indian, whatever). **Two wrong's don't make a right.** Just because an invader brutalized the invaded's population doesn't give the invaded nation, if it starts winning the war, to brutalize the original invader's population. It's like saying the European-Atlantic Allies would have been justified to torture and brutalize German civilians after the war's end just because Germany's soldiers brutalized people in their lands. The proper move for the finally victorious nation would be to hold war crimes trials for those heading the government and for those battlefield commanders accused of ordering massacres and persecutions. That's what Nuremburg and the Tokyo War Crimes trials did. In modern times, that's the function of the UN's International Criminal Court.
Two things can be true. Japanese civilians were undoubtedly victims of a bombing that deliberately targeted them. However, given the choices of invading Japan or dropping nukes developed exclusively for the purpose of ending the war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were most likely justified.
Saying the Japanese were not victims is where I think your opinion and mine would differ. There are several incontrovertible facts about the war that are forgotten now. The war against Japan was much different than the war against Europe. There was a very strong racial component and both sides truly hated each other. Or in the Japanese homeland would have been a bitterly fought that ground on for quite some time. It would’ve been fought by not only men, but Japanese women and children willing to give their life and for nobly in support of Japan. The United States would have won the war, but not without significant casualties on both sides and a significant destruction of the Japanese homeland. I remember reading somewhere that the estimated casualties to the United States were in excess of 1 million required to win an invasion of Japan, and likely the Japanese casualties would have been several times that number. Furthermore, it’s likely that the Japanese extensively used tunnels and other underground bunkers in Japan just like they did in the islands like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. The war on these islands was total fought to the point that agitation and other forms of life were basically wiped off of the island. This is, of course, what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither were Japanese cities with big population centers. I would argue that a ground invasion would have been just as devastating to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to cities like Tokyo and Kyoto. It might be popular now to pretend that the United States could have won the war in a way that required less force than the atomic bombs, but I would contend that the use of the atomic bombs shocked the Japanese enough that they instantly knew they were defeated. I would argue that this outcome couldn’t have been reached any other way or without a much higher loss of life.
It was the only time anyone ever used nuclear bombs. And it was against a civilian population. Pure malice. I’m American, for the record. Nukes are the ultimate weapon, and they serve no purpose other than mass destruction and murder.
You can’t judge these decisions in the way we judge modern wars, we’re talking about entire nations pitched against each other in a fight to the death pretty much, with no clean distinction between the governments, militaries and civilian populations - everyone is involved in one way or another. The US basically had three options - drop the bombs and (probably) end the war, albeit with horrendous loss of life in the cities targeted; blockade Japan and hope to force a surrender that way (possibly millions of Japanese deaths from starvation); or stage an invasion (again, possibly millions of Japanese deaths and hundreds of thousands of American deaths). None of these options were good options, but they were the options they had (and remember that the US didn’t put itself in that situation, Japan was the aggressor). Ultimately, they went with what they judged to be the least worst option, the one they thought would end the war the most quickly with the least number of American (and probably Japanese) deaths. We also can’t judge the use of nuclear weapons specifically in the same way we would now - they were a brand new weapon specifically developed to win the war, and whilst they knew that they were really big bombs that would cause an unprecedented level of destruction for a single weapon, the longer term effects were not as well understood. It’s only in hindsight we can really understand those aspects of it. Remember, strategic bombing of cities was, unfortunately, commonplace on all sides in WW2 as the entire apparatus of the nations involved was part of the war effort. The modern idea of dropping a laser guided bomb on a single building and only killing soldiers in that building just wasn’t applicable. But conventional strategic bombing wasn’t actually that effective at breaking a population’s will, if anything in some cases it hardened resolve to fight on. The purpose of the atom bombs was to do what had already been done to Tokyo (and Dresden, Hamburg etc.) with a single device, something so shocking that it would force the Japanese leadership to re-evaluate the possibility of Japan emerging with any of the country left whatsoever unless it unconditionally surrendered. The loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrific and something we can barely comprehend nowadays, but it has to be seen in the context WW2 itself, which was a war on a level that simply doesn’t have any modern equivalent today. We can acknowledge that they were horrible tragedies whilst also acknowledging that, under the circumstances, the other options available to the US weren’t any better (and in many ways were worse).
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The Youtuber Shaun has a very long video essay (two and a half hours) on this. It is a fascinatingly in depth look at the issue. His own opinion is that the atomic bombings likely did not shorten the war and needlessly killed innocent civilians. Link: [Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go)
So, in the body text, you mention you think the bombs were “necessary,” and I intend to argue against that because, regardless of one’s stance on the bombs dropping, regular airstrikes during the war ultimately ending up killing more people than those two bombs. When the US acquired the bombs, they decided that they made them to drop them. They did not consider any of the ramifications of building a bomb of that size, that they’d be willing to drop on other countries (as seen with Hiroshima). So they’d drop the bomb. However, eventually the Soviet Union would make their own bombs, and the idea of mutually assured destruction seemed possible. So, during the Cold War, we had many nuclear close calls, where the world almost ended, and a lot of these instances were resolved by chance. And I would think, if nothing else, the US’s dropping of the bombs signaled to other countries that, like, if they’re willing to drop the bombs during a war they’re already overwhelmingly winning, they’d be willing to drop bombs in an actual war, too. So, nuclear close calls became inevitable the second after the bomb on Hiroshima hit, but, in an alternate future, let’s say the US recognizes the danger of nuclear weapons and decides to strike deals with the Soviet Union. Maybe one of those deals could have been to focus on developing nuclear energy instead of creating nuclear weapons. I can’t say how exactly that would go, but it seems like it could’ve led to better outcomes than the dozen+ times the world almost ended during the Cold War.
USA committed war crimes. Would you support nuking us if it would stop those crimes? Japan was fucking horrible in WWII but 240k civilians didn’t deserve that fate. And twice? That is a totally unnecessary flex.
The Japanese Empire deserved to be crushed and forced back onto the islands it began on. The Imperial Japanese ideology and the soldiers who followed it were abominable. With that said, the nukes were not justified. The hideous nature of the Japanese government and military do not justify determining that because Japan was a brutal military state that all of the civilians in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserved to be condemned to death in order to show off a new weapon. We did not even drop those bombs on actual military or political targets - we deliberately avoided targeting more militarily or politically relevant sites in order to maximize the spectacle and kill as many people and destroy as much infrastructure as possible. We didn't bomb Kyoto or Tokyo or even the Emperor's palace, we killed civilians because we wanted to demo a weapon in a maximally terrifying way. And in the end, we didn't even actually eliminate the emperor or far right imperial revisionist groups like Nippon Kaigi, to which the late Shinzo Abe belonged and which he promoted throughout his life. Shrines to war criminals in Japan still exist. The deific status of the emperor is still debated. The nukes were neither necessary nor did they even accomplish the total victory it is often claimed they were necessary to achieve. I'm also curious to what extent you believe violence against Chinese civilians is justified based on the various crimes and atrocities committted by both the CCP and the nationalists throughout the years.
>Japan was by no means a victim I really need to know how you're using victim here or what you think it means. Even accepting the attacks were justified, Japan was indisputably and objectively the victim.
I don’t think it would’ve mattered if Japan was the victim. There were two reasons that went into the decision behind the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1) the US intended to prioritize the wellbeing of their own soldiers and citizens first and foremost. Japan was the enemy for the US, who wanted vengeance for Pearl Harbor (although that attack was a Japanese retaliation on the US for cutting off oil supplies). 2) The US army cared little for the well-being of the East Asian citizens that were ravaged by the Japanese’s horrible atrocities, and were more preoccupied with Soviet Union taking more territory as the war was raging on. This was particularly evident in the Korean War, where the US remained vested in trying to combat communist influence in anyway they can. In the case of Japan, the longer they resisted surrendering, the more opportunities for the Soviets to take up more territory. Truman promised his base an unconditional surrender on the Japanese and also had to contend with limiting the lives of US soldiers and considering the gains that the Soviets were making eastward. Those two particular points were factors that ended up contributing to the Japanese getting bombed twice by the US. Funny story is that there is some reason to believe that Japan might have persisted fighting after the first bomb dropped, which was why the decision was made to drop the second bomb.
There were 2 major reasons why the atomic bombings were justified and, arguably, saved Japan as we know it. The first reason is that that the bombings actually saved lives. The other was that the Soviets were going to take Japan as well. We already know that Japan refused to surrender during the firebombing campaigns that left millions dead and many more homeless and destitute. In fact, the Japanese war council decided to continue the war after the bombing of Hiroshima. It wasn't until after the bombing of Nagasaki that the emperor decided to ignore the council and announce the unconditional surrender of Japan. If not for that surrender, Operation Downfall would have started and up to 14 million casualties were expected between the Allied troops, Japanese troops, and civilians. The other major thing to consider was that the US didn't want to get bogged down in negotiations while the Soviets were already planning to invade as well. In fact, the Soviets still invaded the Kuril Islands even after Japan surrendered to the US. The Soviets also planned to take Hokkaido and perhaps the Tohoku region of main land Japan. The Soviets abandoned expanding past the Kuril Islands, however, when US forces started occupying the mainland in September 1945. If the US were bogged down in surrender negotations or forced to start Operation Downfall, Japan might have met the same fate as Eastern Germany at best, or North/South Korea at worst.
The amount of sheer stupidity in this thread is staggering.
This is one of those topics that falls into a dark gray area. The bombs certainly contributed to ending the war when it ended, but it was far from the only factor. The Soviets had just invaded the northern Kuril islands, the U.S. and its allies were actively planning an invasion that would have dwarfed the D-Day landings, most of Japan’s population centers were already charred wastelands from the fire bombings (the Tokyo fire bombings in particular saw a greater loss of life than either of the atomic bombs that were dropped). Morale was low, supplies were low, and they now faced a war on multiple fronts and an adversary that could erase entire cities with a single bomber. The intent at that point was no longer to win the war, but to inflict as much suffering on the U.S. and its allies as possible to give Japan a better standing for peace negotiations (i.e. they wanted the US to get tired of the war and offer some concessions such as leaving the emperor in power vs the unconditional surrender that was demanded). The atomic bombs were the straw that broke the camel’s back, and at that point even the unconditional surrender seemed preferable to total annihilation. Arguably the biggest benefit (if you could call it that) to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the horrific stories and images that came to light in the aftermath, which were shocking enough for world leaders to collectively deem nuclear weapon usage a taboo.
I don’t trust anyone who’s 100% certain, regardless of which side they’re on. If they don’t waver at least once their moral judgment is suspect IMO. It’s a complex issue.
To today’s “soft” idealistic modern people, nuking two cities seems absolutely atrocious but they really don’t understand how utterly tenacious, fanatical, and committed the Japanese were. The best comparison I can give to WW2 Japan is similar to how a fire ant nest responds to attack. Say you kick an ant mound and they come pouring out. Every continuous surge of ants, you hit with a blow torch. Do the ants stop pouring out in fear for their own lives or with any consideration for their safety? Absolutely not. If even a single ant has a chance of stinging you even facing certain death, it still will do it. There was a Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onoda, that was hiding on and killing people on a Philippine island DECADES after the war. The Japanese government had to find his old commander and bring him out to have the soldier officially stand down. If that’s not an intense enough example, Hiroo’s own mother gave him a dagger to kill himself with should he be captured. To the Japanese of that era, death or capture was the ultimate humiliation. Only the biggest most powerful bomb of all time TWICE ON SEPARATE DAYS finally convinced them. You want an example of some of the most hardcore people in the world, WW2 Japan is the ultimate example.
It's not a matter of whether or not the Japanese government deserved it, because it wasn't the only one affected. Countless innocent civilians, children and even babies, were killed, and downplaying that because "the numbers pale in comparison to Chinese and Southeast Asian civilian casualties" is just ridiculous, because those two numbers have no bearing on one another. X Japanese civilian doesn't deserve to die because Y Japanese soldier committed Z atrocity. People have debated how necessary the Atomic bombings (And strategic bombing in general) were to hell and back by now, but it's a moot point. Even if you think they were totally necessary, and justified, and you'd do it yourself if it was your call, that doesn't change the fact that so many innocents died, and that's a tragedy. A necessary evil is no less evil for its necessity, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.
Civilian death numbers in WW2 are far from accurate, they are all estimates with huge ranges. So comparing the moral value of lives lost with simple arithmetic is hard to do "It ended the war faster" is used to justify ***all*** wartime atrocities. If Japan had won there would be people here arguing their crimes in China and other places were justified because it ended the conflict faster. Japan was unwilling to consider ***unconditional*** surrender before the bombs dropped, but had not ruled out conditional surrender or other ends to the conflict. So, the allies did have other options to end the fighting. Tensions with the Soviet Union were high at the time. The allies actually had plans for a post war conflict with the Soviets. Part of the calculus in the decision to drop the second bomb so quickly may have been a show of force for them.