If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary.
The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister.
To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it?
The Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated. There were peace envoys from the Japanese side towards the end of 1944 onwards exploring a negotiated peace. Peace was already likely without the need of a ground invasion, if it had been explored seriously.
What seems likely is that dropping the bombs was an attempt to end the war on American terms, with no Soviet involvement in a negotiated peace. It likely had little to do with avoiding a ground operation; those plans were never approved, and it's unlikely they would have been needed.
I don't discount that people may really have believed and intended that this would save American lives. I do think there were other reasons behind dropping the bombs, however, things are rarely binary.
Edit: I should also add here that from the Japanese perspective (for example, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa), the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.
>It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it
This sort of emotional hand waving in the direction of uncertainty is always employed in these discussions. What is the path from the status quo of late summer 1945 to peace without atomic bombs and how much death and destruction are the high and low end estimates? The status quo is/was well documented at the time and has been scrutinized with a microscope from all sides with the benefit of hindsight since. You are going to have a hard time charting a path from the status quo to piece that causes less death and destruction than what actually happened without a case where a bunch of exceptional things happen in a row.
You might not like that "basically fire bombing but with extra science to make it cheaper" was employed to end the war because of the 2nd and 3rd order implications of this extra cheapness but it's nearly certain that it was the least bad way to end the war.
>the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.
These sort of statements are always weasel worded so as to avoid comparing the relative size of the factors. They stood to have their entire country bombed into oblivion. The soviet invasion was simply the final straw on the same way someone who's lost everything may choose to go postal over a minor slight.
This sort of emotional hand waving in the direction of what actually happened is always employed in these discussions. "What is the path to the defeat of the Nazis, without the Holocaust? Therefore the Holocaust was necessary?" Please, no it wasn't.
> Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated.
This roughly aligns with some of the island hopping campaign, but still the Japanese just wouldn't surrender. It was not on their culture to do so (at the time).
I'm not saying you're overall wrong, but saying I would not infer too much from your premise.
> To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it?
MacArthur wanted to invade. He wanted to invade with Olympic even though Kyūshū had been built-up extensively by the Japanese so that the initial plans having a 3:1 US troop advantage dropped to a 1:1 ratio:
I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.
> I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary.
I have never been able to credit the idea that, after decades of the very liveliest and most systematically institutional brutality, the Empire of Japan was suddenly seized by a new dovish spirit of peace and cooperation, one second before the initiation of the Hiroshima device killed a quarter million people, or one second before the Nagasaki device killed a hundred thousand or so more.
I have never even understood where in that dream lies its appeal.
Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself). A different way could have left an adversary with grudge just waiting to rebuild, but how things turned out completely took the fighting spirit out of Japan.
Oh, I see. I misread your earlier comment as asking what I thought you advocated, rather than why I thought so. Let me try here to answer your actual question there.
I consider generally that to have left the Imperial flower intact through a negotiated surrender - even if achievable which I seriously doubt - would have led in about a generation to a dangerously resurgent sense of revanchism, as actually occurred in the 1960s, but was a matter largely of fringe comedy because the 1960s in Japan were not really such as to make anyone other than cranks wish for the return of the empire. In a future drawn with the gentler hand you describe, I think that time would not have been funny at all; that would, historically speaking including in my own earlier reference to Versailles, in fact be just the sort of movement to prompt yet another Pacific war - which if prevented would only be so because if not occupied by the United States, Japan would have faced Soviet conquest (remember Tsushima!), which famously left no flowers of any kind intact within its reach: they would surely have had a constant and enormous problem with civilian "misbehavior," no doubt resulting in collective punishment, but would succeed in keeping the victim off the world stage.
The idea of Soviet occupation as preferable is heterodox to say the least, but I'm still also very confused as to what sort of terms you think could have been achieved by either Truman or Hirohito, in the absence of the demonstration strikes whose necessity you discount, when even in their aftermath there was a somewhat credible military coup attempt, the so-called "Kyūjō incident," with the aim of continuing the war. That attempt failed because attack orders, sent under the name of a murdered major general, were ignored. They did not have to be. And you don't seem more interested in considering Stalin's extremely compelling reasons to spoil any multilateral peace negotiations that might occur, and the again potentially war-starting impact of an attempt at unilateral negotiations which it is hard to imagine even (the admittedly somewhat bellicose in comparison with his predecessor) Truman seriously contemplating.
You say peace is the goal, and no one disagrees. The problem that remains is to explain how peace is a consequence of the course of action you would prefer had been taken. It isn't so much that I disagree with your historical analysis as that I am asking you to present it.
> I consider generally that to have left the Imperial flower intact through a negotiated surrender - even if achievable which I seriously doubt - would have led in about a generation to a dangerously resurgent sense of revanchism, as actually occurred in the 1960s […]
See also Germany post-World War One: the other side (as a collective/society) not only has to be defeated they have to accept the fact they were defeated.
This was one of the hindsight things that I've heard said about Japan post-WW2: it may have been 'fine' to allow Hirohito to stay on as Emperor in 1945 and for a few years afterwards, but at some point the Japanese leadership should have been tried, and this includes Hirohito: he should have had to abdicate and then be tried.
The instrument concluding Germany's surrender and nominally ending the First World War, and for which my prior use of the name is metonymous, is known to history as the Treaty of Versailles [1]. Its terms were notoriously punitive largely at the insistence of the French, who regarded themselves with some justification as having paid the majority of the victory's cost, and Germany was denied any participation in the negotiations which determined the surrender terms to be imposed.
Combined with the Dolchstosslüge ("'stab in the back' lie") serviceably excusing the military failure and logistical collapse which made further hostilities impractical for Germany to pursue, thus leaving no options but to sign or be occupied, so were the conditions laid for "World War 2: The Sequel," as of course eventuated in practice. The actions taken with respect to the defeated powers thirty years later were designed with enormous and successful care to avoid a second, nuclear-armed, repeat. In this connection and as minimally an example of earnest intent, consider the so-called "Marshall Plan." [2] (Therein also see 'Aid to Asia' within 'Areas excluded'.)
> Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself).
In the novel The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick it is argued that Japan and Germany lost WW2 by winning it. IRL, they won WW2 by losing it.
I agree with you in that decisions like this are always the outcome of multiple forces pushing different ways. But I would lean more to thinking it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.
It would have been electoral suicide because of the extra US casualties.
It would probably have led to the partition of Japan as well as Korea, leading to problems for the US in the post-war world. Although the Iron Curtain didn't descend till a few years later, by 1945, the USSR was already being very possessive about countries in Eastern Europe. Trueman was more aware of the dangers posed by the USSR that Roosevelt had been.
Just because a country had been defeated, it doesn't mean the government will surrender. Nazi Germany was effectively defeated with Bagration and the breakout from Normandy in 1944 but their government fought on to the bitter end. (In a way, the V1 and V2 missile programs did benefit Germany because they drained off resources which would otherwise have prolonged the war and allowed the use of the atom bomb on Berlin.)
And rushing to finish a war to minimise the influence of one party on the peace negotiations did have a precedent. It was what the French and British did at the end of WW1 to prevent the US from dominating the peace process. (But that didn't turn out very well.)
I think things like this would have been in Trueman's mind when he made the descision.
> it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.
He didn't really though, did he?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both on the "to be bombed" list since at least a month before Truman became President, well before he even learned of the existence of the ultra secret atomic bomb program.
The March 1945 Tokyo bombing marked the beginning of a total war aerial bombardment campaign that included civilian residences that might include factory workers.
That campaign had a target list of 100+ cities, 72 of which were destroyed prior to the bombing of Hiroshima.
Truman more or less did no more than agree that the new secret weapons, the Little Boy and Fat Man designs, be tested on targets already slated to be bombed.
He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.
The "extra US casualties" are entirely hypothetical, existing only on the assumption that there would be ground invasion of the mainland which was hypothetical given the program started before Truman became POTUS to flatten Japan to eliminate any resources of resistance and to continue to do so until the country surrendered.
> He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.
He allowed the first two bombings to occur as President, as was intially planned when he was still VP. He knew they would occur and was okay with it.
He could have stopped them. This evidenced by the fact that there were also plans for bombs 3+ but he ordered that any further bombings were to be under his explicit (as opposed to implicit) orders.
To think that somehow the Manhattan Project was "unstopped" is ludicrous. Every order Truman gave was followed, and if want want to argue it was "unstoppable" you would have to produce some kind of evidence that people were willing to disobey Truman's orders. (And object to or think is a bad idea is not the same as disobey.)
Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons.
American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict.
The U.S. had limited understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons before using them. The Manhattan Project scientists estimated 70,000 to 100,000 deaths for a medium-sized Japanese city (depending on weather, geography, and building density). These were very rough estimates, focused mainly on blast and heat, not long-term radiation, which was unknowable.
Why is this discussion always a binary choice between a land invasion of Japan or dropping the bombs exactly how we did? For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
The same result as what? The OP just explained how the bombs being deployed in the manner they were barely led to a surrender.
Anyways, the battle of Okinawa alone killed as many people as both atomic bombs combined and that's the most remote part of (what is today considered) Japan.
I'm sure there could have been other targets that would have led to a surrender but if the goal is to do so with a minimal amount of casualties then i find it extremely difficult to believe that it is possible considering that the two targets which were bombed nearly failed to produce the desired result even after a brutal 8-year war.
You're assuming a linear relationship between civilian casualties and Japanese military leadership's willingness to surrender. Why would e.g. dropping the first bomb on a less-populated shipyard and the second on a city centre have been less effective?
That was Hiroshima. Although there was a high number of civilian casualties it was actually chosen on the basis of its importance to the Japanese imperial army, both as a base and an industrialized city.
>Hiroshima was a supply and logistics base for the Japanese military.[117] The city was a communications center, a key port for shipping, and an assembly area for troops.[78] It supported a large war industry, manufacturing parts for planes and boats, for bombs, rifles, and handguns.[118]
It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.
>They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan.
And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.
Yes, and millions of people survived those bombings. If the only goal was "maximum concrete, visceral impact", a prior bombing would not have eliminated Tokyo from the list of targets for the nuclear bomb which goes to show that there were other factors in play.
They did decide to bomb Kyoto, for exactly that reason. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, objected to it, due to cultural significance, and convinced Truman to choose an alternate, which was Nagasaki.
Yes, I know this and it was part of my point. If "cultural significance" was part of determining bombing sites, then we know "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was clearly not the only goal.
Yes, that was the point I was making. The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority. There was some consideration for civilian casualties which opens up the discussion of whether the right balance was struck.
> The bombs were not dropped on the largest cities which shows the argument that "maximum concrete, visceral impact" was not the only priority.
The atomic bombs were not dropped on the largest cities because the largest cities were already levelled. Nothing would be demonstrable on an already-destroyed city.
> For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
There weren't many targets left. The US had been fire bombing Japan for months—which did nothing to lead the Japanese leadership to surrender.
The leadership didn't seem to care about losses—or rather the honour of Japan as a country/collective was more important than the losses (?). Some internal Japanese estimates had up to 20M dead from defending against a US landing and the Japanese leadership was fine with that.
This is the type of argument that immediately folds in on itself. If they didn’t care about civilian losses, why do people believe the civilian losses in these bombings were necessary? Why is it assumed that the US needed to kill civilians and ended up killing just the right amount of civilians to force surrender?
> If they didn’t care about civilian losses, why do people believe the civilian losses in these bombings were necessary? Why is it assumed that the US needed to kill civilians and ended up killing just the right amount of civilians to force surrender?
The number of people killed (civilian and military) was irrelevant. The fire bombings killed as much, if not more, people. The Japanese leadership didn't care about numbers: after the first bomb dropped the War Cabinet ignored it thinking it was a bluff on the US part, and they didn't have any more bombs.
It was only after the second bomb that they started re-considering. Even then, after two bombings, the War Cabinet was still deadlocked at 3-3. The Emperor had to be called in to break the stalemate.
The difference was in the psychological effect of a new type of weapon. From Hirohito's statement:
> Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
I would recommend reading the book, which goes over the Japanese government deliberations using internal Japanese minutes/documents and interviews of those involved:
You are not engaging with the heart of the question. If "The number of people killed (civilian and military) was irrelevant", why do you think it was necessary that they were killed? If "The difference was in the psychological effect of a new type of weapon", why could the goal of forcing surrender not be accomplished by demonstrating that new weapon in a way that wouldn't kill hundreds of thousands? Why are options like dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, further off the coast, or in less populated areas not treated as serious alternatives? Why did the bombs have to be dropped on cities?
> Why are options like dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, further off the coast, or in less populated areas not treated as serious alternatives? Why did the bombs have to be dropped on cities?
To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds.
What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo) show? There is no shock value to dropping an atomic bomb on a non-target.
Arthur Compton, the scientist who led the plutonium side of the Manhattan Project recalled that:
> It was evident that everyone would suspect trickery. If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used we should have only one of them available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud. If the test were made on some neutral territory, it was hard to believe that Japan's determined and fanatical military men would be impressed. If such an open test were made first and failed to bring surrender, the chance would be gone to give the shock of surprise that proved so effective. On the contrary, it would make the Japanese ready to interfere with an atomic attack if they could. Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.
Even with dropping the first bomb the Japanese War Cabinet wasn't willing to consider surrendering. It took two bombings for the message to sink in (and even then it was a 3-3 tie, and the Emperor had to be called in to break the stalemate): that is the fact any counterfactual has to contend with, that the two bombings barely got the ball over the line.
And even after the Emperor and Cabinet had made the decision there were still people willing to fight on and overthrow the government:
>To show their destructive power. That one plane could do as much damage as dozens / hundreds.
>What would blowing up water show? What would blowing up an empty field show? What would blowing up an already-flatten city (like Tokyo) show? There is no shock value to dropping an atomic bomb on a non-target.
Is knocking down buildings the only way people can perceive the power of a bomb? Would a huge mushroom cloud over Tokyo Bay not be shocking? Could that "psychological effect of a new type of weapon" you mentioned in the previous post have been intensified if the Japanese War Cabinet saw that mushroom cloud with their own eyes?
>Arthur Compton, the scientist who led the plutonium side of the Manhattan Project recalled that...
That is an argument against "an advertised demonstration". It is not an argument for killing a hundred thousand civilians. Why wouldn't "the shock of surprise" apply to a demonstration that happened without notice? Why are you presenting this as a binary choice between "an advertised demonstration" and dropping the bomb on a city?
>Even with dropping the first bomb the Japanese War Cabinet wasn't willing to consider surrendering. It took two bombings for the message to sink in (and even then it was a 3-3 tie, and the Emperor had to be called in to break the stalemate): that is the fact any counterfactual has to contend with, that the two bombings barely got the ball over the line.
You keep on repeating this as if the decision being close means that any deviation from the history would have caused them to reach a different conclusion. You have no way of knowing that. I don't know why you seem to believe that the only path to surrender was the exact events that transpired.
>I don't know why you seem to believe that the only path to surrender was the exact events that transpired.
Maybe dropping the bombs in Tokyo Bay would have changed things. Maybe writing the emperor a love song would have changed things. We don't know. There are two aspects that get mixed together with this.
>Given the situation and knowledge at the time, was this or that military action reasonable and necessary?
>Knowing things unknowable at the time, can we now say this or that military action was unnecessary?
I think it is clear that the first question is yes, it was a reasonable and necessary decision at the time.
The second question is interesting to think about, but I think you are getting so much pushback because you are mixing both questions, using after the fact "what ifs" to say what people should have done at the time, as if they could just try different things and get a do over if it didn't work.
>I think you are getting so much pushback because you are mixing both questions, using after the fact "what ifs" to say what people should have done at the time
What have I mentioned here that couldn't have been considered before the bombings? If anything, that other person's insistence on focusing on the exact votes of Japanese leadership is more reliant on hindsight than anything I have said.
> What have I mentioned here that couldn't have been considered before the bombings?
Of course they could, and they did consider many options. But they only had a couple of bombs and any additional ones were weeks away. We know now that the bombs helped to end the war but they didn’t know then that they would. Detonating the bombs with no result could be looked at similar to firring your limited ammunition over your enemy’s head to hope it makes them surrender, but if it doesn’t, you have less ammo to fight them.
Firebombing leveled over 60 Japanese cities and killed between 330,000 and 900,000 people (though we will never know for sure because the very records needed were obliterated in the conflagrations). Yet leading up to the atomic bombings, Japan was well underway preparing Operation Ketsu-Go, the Japanese defense of the home islands, meant to inflict immense casualties on the American troops and undermine the American publics’ will to continue fighting [1]. Japan planned to lose a million men in this operation, and enlisted every male age 15 to 60 and every female age 17 to 40 in and around Kyushu [2]. There is no reason to believe this wouldn’t happen, given what we saw in Okinawa, where children were mobilized, civilians died by the tens of thousands in the crossfire (since Japan would not evacuate them intentionally to increase casualties), and civilians killed themselves by the hundreds rather than be captured [3].
Americans and Japanese were dying every second the war went on. Wasting your most powerful weapon, that you have almost none of, with your fingers crossed that this will make the country, where not one military unit has surrendered during the entire course of the war, just give up. This is naiveté and hindsight bias at its finest.
[1] “We will prepare 10,000 planes to meet the landing of the enemy. We will mobilize every aircraft possible, both training and "special attack" planes. We will smash one third of the enemy's war potential with this air force at sea. Another third will also be smashed at sea by our warships, human torpedoes and other special weapons. Furthermore, when the enemy actually lands, if we are ready to sacrifice a million men we will be able to inflict an equal number of casualties upon them. If the enemy loses a million men, then the public opinion in America will become inclined towards peace, and Japan will be able to gain peace with comparatively advantageous conditions”- IGHQ army staff officer in July 1945, from “The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945” by Stanley Weintraub
What happened to those two distinct questions? What point were you trying to make in your previous comment? I specifically asked for clarification on your comment and instead of answering that direct question, you went right back to debating the original issue, even merging the two questions in the exact way that you complained about me doing it.
It is also bizarre how much of this discussion is had purely from a US-Japanese perspective as if the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan wasn't even worthy of a footnote.
>What have I mentioned here that couldn't have been considered before the bombings?
That is what you asked and I answered that those things you mentioned were considered and address multiple things you mentioned in your other comments.
Roughly 18 potential cities were considered, which were narrowed down to a shortlist of five, and eventually finalized into four reserved targets (Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as alternate).
> American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict.
Per Barrett, some Japan leadership said that as many as 20M Japanese (civilians) would die in a defence of an invasion (but also because of starvation and such), and the leadership was fine with that.
Many of the top US generals at the time thought that the blockade and imminent Soviet invasion would have been enough to force the Japanese into surrender. The land invasion comparison was propped up as a good "justification" for dropping the bomb, though.
The firebombing of Tokyo[0] on 10 March 1945 is often considered even more destructive and lethal than either of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or at the very least in the same ballpark. However, popular discourse never treats it as a crime against humanity.
What is the qualitative difference between the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one morning using an atomic bomb and the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night using explosive and incendiary devices?
Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong".
Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.
The point of the concept of war crimes is that it applies to you regardless of whether you think you’re in the right. Even if the other side is committing them, it still applies. That’s why the definitions take pains to not make them a winning strategy or unilaterally avoiding them a losing one: why we talk about (deliberately) targeting civilians, not (incidentally) killing them; why putting munitions in a Red Cross-marked hospital annuls all protections for it; etc.
My thoughts about this after 50 years of thinking about it is that war results in a relentless normalization of deviance. It's a good reason not to start wars.
The notion of "crimes against humanity" is a very modern construct. The Japanese civilian society paid a price for its militaristic adventures. Armies don't operate in vacuum, they're an extension of their society.
I did not read that book, and I had venimently disagreed with it, until I read Hirohito's book. The military and the nationalists wanted to fight to the very last man, and cause as much death as possible. Estimates of that strategy were 22 million japanese dead 1.1M to 1.5M American deaths.
Hirohito fought through 4 cabinets, and finally was able to surrender. He did so simply for the lives of the japanese people. He said so. He saved American lives and he saved a huge amount of japanese lives. ( Keep in mind 'fight to the last man' )
Japan would not have surrendered if we had not dropped the bombs. The second one was essential.
I am anti-war and anti nuke, but there was no other solution.
My father knew Oppy, and I knew he knew, but because of what the US did to him, my father never spoke of him,but spoke of every other physisasist involved. I caught he saying Ed for Edwin Teller, but he would never admit to knowing Oppy. Those were dangerous times.
Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs?
Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already.
Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated.
International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)?
It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. No excuse for that.
Targeting civilians in places like Tokyo or Dresden didn't even help the war cause much. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
Yes war is the supreme crime and what we should avoid in the first place. Still there are different ways you can conduct war.
A nuclear exchange would necessarily target civilians and be unlike anything before in history. It's a nightmare scenario that has to be opposed at all cost.
Unfortunately in total war situations the line between civilian and not is blurred and not just blurred by the aggressor (as a sibling comment has pointed out). That doesn't really justify anything though, I agree, and something like a nuclear war targeting civilians is just terminal for civilisation.
>The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
You're reading from a curiously misinformed understanding of history. The USSR defeated the Nazis by killing millions of them while also burning, bombarding and destroying their cities and anything else in its way en masse during a ferociously bloody campaign of revenge mixed with genuine military imperatives. Soviet soldiers also committed what are probably some of the biggest mass rape epidemics in modern history against their German enemy's women once they entered their territory. This in particular was immaterial to Soviet victory and not an official Soviet policy, but I mention it to underscore that there was absolutely no shortage of war crime-worthy targeting of civilians in many ways, and on a colossal scale by the Soviets too.
Read about the invasion and ethnic cleansing of East Prussia if you like. At least couple hundred thousand German civilians died as a result of that alone. None of this at all compares to what the Nazis did during their eastern conquests of course, but while a war crime is a war crime, degrees exist. Thus, it's not surprising if allied moral and military conduct was on a very long leash given such extremely savage enemies as Germany and Imperial Japan.
> The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
In our shared reality(?) the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi's in parallel with the mass bombing of industrial areas, factories, ports, dams, and general war making infrastructure, much of which was within German cities.
The Soviet Union defeated an increasingly under supplied resource starved German military.
There is a paradox called “logical insanity.” The novel Catch 22 deals with this irony: basically, the idea was that the war was killing thousands daily, so in order to end it as fast as possible, they planned to be as brutal as possible. But what were alternatives?
Drop the bomb somewhere 'harmless': how would that convince the War Cabinet of anything? The point of all weapons is to harm to convince the enemy to stop and re-evaluate their costs.
Blockade and starve the Japanese out? Possibly millions dead. Invasion? The Japanese leadership thought that up to 20M of their own people would perish trying to repel the US landings.
And that's just the Japanese numbers: what about all the peoples that were still living under Japanese rule in Manchuria, Korea, etc?
And what about the American lives, which were Truman et al's first responsibility?
If you're going to rip off one of Dan Carlin's show titles this way, be so courteous as to provide the reference. It's pretty good, as so is a lot of his stuff, him hailing from back when podcasts were still delivered synchronously via terrestrial broadcast.
No, but interestingly at least one case of Allies doing a 'war crime' was used as a defense in the Nuremberg Trials; Karl Dönitz was convicted of unrestricted Submarine warfare, however since both Britain and the US were doing the same, they more or less let it slide.
When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
One thing that's rarely considered is that by any metric Japan had already lost the war.
And what's interesting - and definitive - about both Japan and Germany is that the regimes kept fighting when this was obvious.
There was plenty of insanity to go around, but it takes an extra special kind of insanity to ignore defeat when outmatched by a superior force, and when continuing to fight will cause massive casualties for your own population when failure is already guaranteed.
This isn't just irrational, it's compulsively self-harming.
At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII. There were voices in the military in both countries making this point before the fighting started. But the regimes chose irrational violence for irrational ends, with horrific self-destructive consequences.
What killed millions wasn't the weapons, it was the culture of mass delusion that made the weapons necessary.
It's the nature of authoritarianism to deny reality until pushed into collapse.
That's the only real enemy in war, and we're still fighting it today - unsuccessfully.
>At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII.
I'd beg to differ about this being widely recognized. For Japan perhaps, but even they could have considerably forestalled their eventual defeat if they'd done a few logical things better, or won the battle of Midway (which they should have won numerically and tactically, if they'd been a bit more careful with their encryption and estimation of U.S naval force disposition), or prioritized their targets at Pearl Harbour more carefully, or maybe better, not even bothered to attack it in the first place while performing the rest of their conquest of Asia.
As for Germany, it could have outright won the war. No debate at this point has settled that this isn't so. Indeed, at several key points Germany emphatically had both means and opportunity to secure its total hegemony at least over Europe and its surroundings in a way that would have resulted in a Nazi-version alternative to the dual superpower bipolar world that instead existed between the USSR and USA after 1945.
Fortunately this didn't happen, since as bad as the USSR was (especially under Stalin) I'd hate to imagine an alternative in which the other hegemonic nuclear power is one built on the even more murderously fanatical legacy of Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich and the rest.
> You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
The Japanese leadership knew they could not win the war for about a year before the bombings. Yet they chose to continue the war regardless of the suffering it caused their own people.
Was the US supposed to give up?
Would it been okay if Germany was allowed to surrender on the following conditions:
* Hitler stayed in power
* the Nazis stayed in power
* all land conquered by Germany was kept by Germany
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Germans themselves
Because those were the terms Japan was waiting for:
* Emporer stayed in power
* the government stayed in power
* all land conquered by Japan was kept by Japan
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Japanese themselves
Would you have been okay with WW2 ending against either party on those terms?
When the bombed is credibly threatening to essentially suicide its entire citizenry despite no chance of victory, then yes, the rules of war must necessarily be relaxed to achieve the greater good. I would argue that the WW2 Imperial Japanese situation was unique in a way that nations had not yet had to deal with in the modern era (and haven’t had to deal with since).
Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you?
Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified.
Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb.
The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality.
Empty city scenario:
The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects.
Extremis Self-Defense:
The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself.
Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology:
Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm.
But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering.
The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
Burning entire cities to the ground and immolating their inhabitants was common practice at the time. Doing that with a single bomb simply made the process more efficient. They had not yet had time to start thinking of atomic power as something fundamentally different from what had come before: there were only three weeks between the Trinity test and the bombing of Hiroshima.
> How could detonating a nuke over a city not violate humanitarian law … ?
Would you rather have millions of Japanese die—either from trying to repel a US landing or through starvation if a blockade was enact—or 'just' a few hundred thousand?
The atomic bomb was strangely the most humane way, that probably saved the most Japanese lives, of ending the war.
It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed.
Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
The Soviets would almost certainly have taken Berlin either way, given they were fighting 80% of the Nazi Army, while all of the Western Front was concerned only with the "minor" side. Thinking America saved Europe in WWII is one of the many misconceptions perpetuated to this day about the War.
Well if all that counts is who's fighting >= 51% of the Axis, then you have to take into consideration that the USSR didn't even join the Asian theater until the day after Hiroshima happened despite sharing a border with Imperial Japan and having struggled through a brutal war of attrition with the Japanese just a couple decades earlier.
This idea you and many other armchair historians have that the USSR can solo 1v1 the axis powers and win isn't any less naive than saying America saved Europe, because it ignores the significant amounts of foreign aid that the US donated to other allied nations. This includes the USSR, who would not have been able to carry out a successful war of attrition against the Germans without a consistent pipeline of supplies and weapons. It certainly would not have been able to win a war on two fronts if the Japanese felt free to invade the soviet far east. I will concede that the Chinese deserve way more credit than they generally get for waging their own war of attrition against the Japanese which prevented them from going to war in the soviet far east, but that was also made possible with significant American logistical support.
But more importantly, you seem to have an oddly eurocentric view of history in which the european theater is the only one of any import. Japan's eventual defeat was never a foregone conclusion, and they were just as cruel to their conquered foes as the Germans were. They were also the only Axis that posed a credible threat to the United States, having successfully established a foothold in the Aleutian Islands with an aim towards invading Canada and the United States. Realistically I don't think it ever would have worked (again, they were pre-occupied with China) but they certainly have a better track record of attacking the North American continent than the krauts ever did.
AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were using the Russians as the negotiators. The US didn't want that so they bombed instead.
They had Fat Man and Little Boy, after detonating Trinity, so one down, two ready to go, a few near ready cores, and a production pipeline in place to produce more at one a month or so .. (the exact number is on Alex W's Nuclear Secrecy blog .. my recollection is poor and from five+ years past).
The production rate of 3 bombs per month in August was expected to rise to 5 bombs per month in November, and 7 bombs per month in December. In 1946, it could rise much higher.
The Americans had already bombed Tokyo into ruins five months prior, killing at least 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless. It was the most violent air raid in history, doing more damage than either of the atomic bombings. The Japanese did not surrender.
The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon.
The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.
One important thing the US could have done to get the Japanese to surrender without dropping the bomb would have been to promise that Japan would not be turned into a republic after the war but allowed to keep its imperial family as ceremonial heads of state. As, you know, actually happened after they surrendered.
Promising to do what we actually did would have been more than enough to save a huge number of lives, and honestly we should have had Hirohito "go into seclusion" in favor of a successor.
But you don't know that promising that wouldn't have emoldened the Japanese leadership. That they wouldn't have seen that as a weakening of Allied resolve and a willingness to end the war on Japan's terms. Japan was already using Iwo Jima and Okinawa to fight to the last man while exacting high American causalities, in an attempt to make the US reassess the cost of taking mainland Japan.
Much of what you state is basically true, but bear in mind that other options, that didn't involve nuclear terror, would still have worked, and weren't used for reasons a bit more cynical than exasperation at Japanese truculence, or mere ignorance of radiation's insidious effects (which wasn't as deep as one might think, even in 1945)..
Even without concretely knowing just how long the Japanese government would attempt to hold out in the face of conventionally inevitable defeat, political and military planners in the U.S. could have -and knew they could have- simply sealed off the Japanese Home Islands and starved them into submission while continuing to bomb their cities to ashes with ordinary bombs.
Well before July of 1945, Japan was essentially defenseless against aerial bombardment and its cities aside from the famous cases of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had already been absolutely devastated by repeat massive bomber raids that the feeble Japanese air defense systems at the time could do next to nothing against. Many, many more people had already died in these firestorm raids than were eventually killed by Little Boy and Fat Man.
What's more, the Japanese Navy was by that point basically in scattered, useless tatters while U.S. naval and aerial might was so total, so all-encompassing, that the severely import-dependent Japanese homeland could have been brought completely to its knees in misery, to the point of eventually just succumbing, without having to send so much as a single American soldier onto the the main islands.
It would have been a longer and less "glorious" way of leveraging a surrender than one big military invasion by all those shiny war tools and soldiers you now have geared up in such abundance to fight and finish the whole mess, but it indisputably would have worked; even nationalist fanaticism short circuits when literal mass starvation becomes completely inescapable, ravages every corner of society, and the most basic essentials of modern civilization are gone, while every single one of your cities is now ashes and rubble. All of these horrors could have been achieved without invasion.
The United States knew all this. However, as mentioned above, its Marine Corps and vast navy were already at maximum deployment, so the political sacrifice of a decisive invasion was the alternative to which the atomic bombs were compared. Secondly, the U.S leadership now had the bomb, after all that cost and effort, and felt a pressing need to showcase its live military use to themselves, to the world, and very crucially, to Stalin. By that point, in July and August, he was no longer quite the friendly "Uncle Joe" that American wartime propaganda had painted him as for the sake of political convenience, while the Nazis were still in the picture.
Personally, i'm glad the bombs were used then, in that context, while their destructive power was still s relatively weak. It showed the world the monstrosity of atomic bombing used against an actual society, while the consequences for using it live were much less than they would have been if delayed to just a decade later. If at that future date, someone had decided to finally get an itchy trigger finger for the first time, they'd have been doing it with many more, far more powerful bombs, claiming many more lives..
>the U.S. could have -and knew they could have- simply sealed off the Japanese Home Islands and starved them into submission while continuing to bomb their cities to ashes with ordinary bombs.
A blockade was estimated to kill multiple millions of Japanese. The reason to avoid this was not because it was less glorious, but because it was far more horrific for the Japanese.
I'm not saying you're right or you're wrong. Only that your opinion isn't fact, so don't act like you're presenting one.
Calling someone brainwashed because you disagree with them only serves to make you look a total fool, not them.
Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
> Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost.
That's the problem.
Japan not surrendering even when they knew.
Per Japanese documents even after one bomb was dropped they still would not surrender. It took the second bomb, and even then the war cabinet was split on 3-3 on whether to surrender.
Two bombs dropping only got them to the point of a tie. The Emperor had to be called in to break the tie after two bombings.
And the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to enter the war. That was already in their calculations and they still were for fighting.
But you do realize that in cabinet meetings after the atomic bombings, the bombings themselves were only scarcely discussed? It is unknown how much impact the atomic bomb had on their decision to surrender, but it is certainly only one of many factors.
> Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb".
"definitive"? What does that even mean in a field of study like history? You're telling me there has been zero new analysis on the subject since 1995? No new insights?
And even that assumes that Alperovitz's initial premises were valid, that he did not miss any evidence,or exclude or discount any because his own biases and such, and so that is conclusions followed logically from all of that.
There is nothing comparable to this particular book or study, that I know of. The entire book is dedicated to that question, and investigates all the key players and decision makers deeply.
fair enough to notice though that while the Soviet Union may have had agreed to enter the war with Japan (at the Potsdam conference ?), it had not done so by the time the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was dropped. It did declare war on Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing. In a way ... Stalin chose the "let's go to war with Japan" date opportunistically. When it was clear there could be much gain without too much pain.
Which is not a dissimilar thing to the US "wavering" over the commitment to an invasion of Japan. The nuclear bombs "resolved" that. We'll never know what would have happened otherwise.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...
* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident