

Why did Japan surrender?  - yarapavan
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/

======
ck2
If true, it makes the fact of not one but two large cities vaporized and
thousands of civilians including many, many children made to slowly die in
agony from radiation poisoning even more vile of an act, no?

~~~
jessriedel
The only thing that might change the morality of the bombing is if Truman's
objective was actually to intimidate the Soviets (as was suggested but never
convincingly argued in the article) rather than end the war (as is commonly
assumed). Simply changing the reason why Japan surrendered shouldn't much
change the morality of Truman's decision, since you're holding fixed what
Truman believed.

Analogously, most people think it's moral for a SWAT team to shoot and kill a
hostage taker. The fact that the hostage taker was actually going to release
the hostage anyway (unbeknownst to the SWAT team) if he wasn't shot doesn't
really change the morality of the shooting.

But really, 99% of the morality is decided by whether you think strategic
bombing can ever be acceptable (either because you are a pure
consequentialist, or because you subscribe to the Doctrine of Double Effect
and accept that the bomb's actual target was the industrial base of the
Japanese cities rather than their citizens).

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/>

~~~
ck2
Except one important fact - there was a large group of scientists who begged
the US government to drop the bomb offshore Japan instead to demonstrate it's
power. There's even a letter to prove this.

President decided to ignore that and drop it on civilians first anyway. It's
just military bloodlust.

Remember half the US was practically foaming at the mouth to kill any Japanese
at that point (we even had concentration camps for Japanese-Americans) so the
mentality was there would be no repercussions, certainly no-one vocal enough
to protest the morality.

------
jerrya
That was a very interesting read, thank you yarapavan.

(If anyone else gets hit with a registration page, the print article link will
let you read the whole thing.)

~~~
plaes
Ah, cool to know. I used bugmenot.com, though ;)

------
huhtenberg
Here's an interesting if only tangentially related bit of information. Every
year on Hiroshima bombing anniversary Japanese activists (of some faction)
hold a protest next to an embassy. This includes anger tantrums, shouting,
throwing empty bottles into the wall and some such.

Here's the fun part. The embassy is Russian.

Apparently the logic behind their anger is that it was Soviet Union who caused
the bombings by silently agreeing to it when they had a chance to stop them.
Americans however did nothing wrong, they merely showed Japanese how caught up
in the war they were and helped them to see the light. This is clearly not a
widely shared opinion, but it just goes on to show how really contrived the
subjective part of the issue is.

~~~
dicemoose
Actually, the demonstrations are usually held by right wing Japanese
organizations on August 9th, the day of the bombing of Nagasaki.

This was also the day that the Soviet Union broke the neutrality pact with
Imperialist Japan and invaded Manchuria and other parts of the Japanese
Empire. The protests are usually against this invasion and consist of calls to
get the Northern Territories of Japan returned.

Also, there are angry tantrums and shouting, but there are no throwing of
empty bottles at the walls of the embassy because the riot police do quite an
impressive job not letting any of the protestors through. It's a bit of a
charade and an annoyance when you're trying to conduct business in the area,
but the reality is different from the story you're sharing.

~~~
huhtenberg
It _is_ a charade, and you are right about Nagasaki/Hiroshima mixup on my
part. The bottle throwing I witnessed myself though it was in mid-80s, and it
was a part of the same charade. Police let that happen, but things generally
remained under control. People who worked in the embassy not long ago said the
same show was still being put on, but finer details I don't know.

The Soviet Union inaction with the bombings angle -- this also comes from the
embassy people and I have no reason not to believe them. Not that it means it
was/is a central part of these protests.

------
pella
Battles of Khalkhin Gol ( 1939 )

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Afterma...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Aftermath)

\---##---

" Historians rethink key Soviet role in Japan defeat (google.com) "

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1608923>

<http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11402184>

 _The impact of the lightning Soviet advance comes through in the words of
Japan's wartime prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, urging his cabinet to
surrender._

 _He is quoted in Hasegawa's book as saying, "If we miss (the chance) today,
the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea and Sakhalin, but also
Hokkaido. We must end the war while we can deal with the United States."_

 _V-J Day, the day Japan ceased fighting, came on Aug. 15 (Aug. 14 in the
U.S.), and Japan's formal surrender followed on Sept. 2._

 _Dominic Lieven, a professor of Russian government at the London School of
Economics, said anti-Soviet sentiment in the West tended to minimize Soviet
military achievements._

 _Also, "very few Anglo-Americans saw the Soviet offensive in the Far East
with their own eyes, and Soviet archives were not open to Western historians
subsequently," he said._

 _More surprising, even in Russia the campaign was largely ignored. Although
the scale of the Soviet victory was unprecedented, 12,000 dead against Japan
hardly compared with the life-and-death struggle against Nazi Germany, in
which 27 million Soviets died._

 _"The importance of the operation was huge," said retired Gen. Makhmut
Gareyev, president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, who took part
in the 1945 campaign. "By entering the war with militarist Japan ... the
Soviet Union precipitated the end of World War II."_ ''

------
jessriedel
This is a plausible alternative theory, but it seems this is a case where the
media gives too much attention to non-mainstream views in Academia. Is there
any claim that the consensus among historians has shifted?

Also, I find it hard to believe that there aren't some personal accounts or
primary sources that could more or less decide the issue.

~~~
nhebb
I read the article wondering the same thing. It didn't spell out whether the
historian had formed his opinions based on personal accounts and comments, or
whether he accumulated evidence to support a theory.

------
1010011010
Years ago, a cab driver in Japan told me that MacArthur was a hero to the
Japanese because he saved them from Russia.

------
Mz
_But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in
fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for
strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict,
but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials,
and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy
casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still
neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans.
Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for
territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense._

This piece sounds very plausible to me and helps make this new theory sound
fairly solid as far as the ultimate conclusion that Russia's declaration of
war was the final straw. The article really doesn't convince me that the
nuclear bombs played no role. It indicates that after the first one was
dropped, Japan sent a message to their ambassador in Moscow asking him to
press for a reply from the Russians. The article says: _The bombing added a
“sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same._ So there
was concern, there was a reaction, but apparently not what we have been
historically taught that the bombs simply caused the Japanese to cave in
horror and surrender unconditionally. No, they opted to surrender to the US in
preference to a Russian invasion as the lesser evil. It sounds like a savvy
decision making process when faced with sucky options.

------
ajpatel
Oh my...I had no idea! Fascinating...but yeah, you're right...it'll never
catch on. Just cool to know something that only the relative minority of
people will ever know...

------
sliverstorm
Two thoughts:

1) Why do we continue playing the blame game with something that happened 65
years ago? I for one, no matter how bad I feel about what happened then, am
not going to apologize. Seeing as my _parents_ had not yet been born, I don't
think I'm especially responsible, and I think it's pretty much the same across
the board.

2) What is with this postulating about how "maybe nuclear weapons are not as
good of a deterrent as we thought"!? They were certainly a good deterrent
for... I don't know... the entire Cold War!? It doesn't really matter if they
deliver the destruction we fear. As a deterrent, the only thing that matters
is how much we fear them, which we obviously do! (Just look at the folks
wringing their hands over Fukushima)

P.S. As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man
look like toys. The US had a bomb of 25 megatons in 1961. Little Boy was 15
kilotons. May be wise to consider this when claiming nuclear weapons are no
more consequential than some firebombing- leaving aside the part where one can
be delivered from a submarine hundreds of miles away, and the other requires
an entire squadron of bombers to do a flyover.

~~~
masklinn
> As I understand it, modern nuclear warheads make Little Boy and Fat Man look
> like toys.

They mostly look oversized: high-yield systems were all the rage when bomber
was the only means of delivery (culminating with the Tsar Bomba test at 50MT),
because it was expected most bombers would fail to deliver and the aim would
likely be off, so each and every hit had to "count".

With the rise of ICBMs, yields went way down and systems deliver multiple
warheads instead (per-head yield got down to 50~100kT e.g. W62, W76, W80)
although it went up again following SALT and SORT agreements (which reduce the
number of warheads the US and Russia "can" own, and thus makes it interesting
to push yields back into higher range and use less warheads per missiles)

~~~
sliverstorm
I didn't mean in terms of size, but destructive potential.

Do you not agree that a salvo of 100kT devices would make 1x 15kT look pretty
tame?

~~~
masklinn
> Do you not agree that a salvo of 100kT devices would make 1x 15kT look
> pretty tame?

There are still 15kT warheads out there, and a 100kT device does not make a
15kT device "look like a toy".

So no.

------
majmun
TL; DR; ?

