I always wonder why the second nuclear bomb in particular isn't much more prevalent in the Zeitgeist as the atrocity that it was.
The first bomb is somewhat understandable, still you could argue that the US might have figured out a way to demonstrate its destructive power to the Japanese without killing over 100,000 mostly innocent people in an instant. Maybe at the trade-off of temporarily risking US soldier lifes and resources of the general public. Still, you can argue the other way and see it as a terrible conclusion to a terrible war.
But the second one? I've seen many docs and historians perspectives on why it was considered necessary, but I can't find the point of view from which it was anything but a total atrocity for which the people who made it happen should be remembered in shame forever. So much of Japan not immediately surrendering after the first bomb dropped was down to the fog of war, to simple and understandable slow speed in government decisionmaking, etc.
Even if you can't be sure that the first bomb would have been enough to have them surrender, just the chance of it should have been enough to pick a different strategy, at the chance of saving a couple of dozen thousand innocent lives.
> I always wonder why the second nuclear bomb in particular isn't much more prevalent in the Zeitgeist as the atrocity that it was.
I think the simple answer is that before the scale of Hiroshima was really understood, everyone though of it as mostly just a more efficient way to perform the atrocity that they were already doing. On this point check out Wellersteins earlier text on the 67:th anniversary: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-at-67-th...
It turns out that if you drop thousands of tons of incendiaries on a city made from wood and paper, you can kill a really large number of people at once.
We can re-litigate these questions, but I'm not sure we'll reach any answers. A more salient one is "how can we prevent this from ever happening again?" including "how can we prevent states from launching wars of aggression?"
One step that may be good is clearly defining where a war stops being a retaliation for something in the past and becomes a war of aggression. Whether or not the current situation in Ukraine is one of aggression depends largely on whether or not you feel that the Western involvement in the Orange and Maidan revolutions were aggressive in the first place, and whether or not the response to their aftermath is warranted.
All sides are probably at least a little wrong here, and ultimately, it probably boils down to a feud between Russia and various aspects of the West going at least back to the Crimean war, if not earlier, and the back and forth animosity that has perpetuated the cycle over that time. Perhaps the question then isn't "how can we prevent launching wars of aggression," but rather "how can we successfully reach an agreement where all sides agree to finally bury the hatchet."
As long as we refuse to consider the longer cycle of revenge and posturing at play we'll likely continue to be confused in the face of it perpetuating itself.
It's worth pointing out that the conventional bombing raid of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 was deadlier than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, depending on whose counts you use...
Their expectation was that if they tried to invade Japan there would be way more casualties on both sides than were killed at Nagasaki [1].
I think you may be underestimating the scope of WWII in the Pacific. The battles to retake islands had often been extremely bloody. The battle for Okinawa for example cost 14k Allied soldiers and 77k Japanese soldiers, and well over 100k civilians. I don't think any other island came close in total numbers, but only because they didn't have high populations.
Any reasonable extrapolation of those invasions to an invasion of mainland Japan would have far more civilian deaths than using both atomic bombs, even if you projected lower casualty rates than there had been in the island campaigns.
A blockade instead of an invasion might have worked, but that too would likely have a very large number of civilian casualties. Blockades work by either making it so bad that the civilians rise up and force a change in policy, or so many civilians die that the government runs out of people to draft into the army. The last to actually personally feel the effects of a blockade are the people in power.
Even after the second bomb there were highly placed military offices who were so determined to continue the war that they attempted a coup to stop the Emperor from surrendering [2].
I mean they didn't surrender for 6 days after Nagasaki. Clearly not in any rush and if you read about the details, there was quite an internal struggle within the Japanese government whether to accept surrender or fight on.
And even if we accept that "Japan was beaten". What the next move? A naval blockade? Starve Japan into submission?
How many tens of thousands of civilian deaths due to famine would make the leadership break? Would that have been better than tens of thousands of civilian deaths due to nuclear bombs?
Firebombing cities was a thing. There is little difference in firebombing Tokyo with 200 planes and dropping one "special" bomb.
Second bomb (Nagasaki) was not authorized in some special way. Air force had two bombs available and planned to drop them a week apart. Due to weather it ended up being 3 days. After Nagasaki Truman ordered them to need explicit approval of the president to drop future bombs (appalled at civilian deaths).
You're looking at it with the deeply ingrained belief that nuclear bombs are a uniquely horrifying thing, something that should automatically warrant special consideration, and where merely threatening its use was obviously something no enemy could ignore.
The people who made the decisions back then did not have, could not have that belief. They had been fighting a brutal war for years, and it was just a bomb. A bigger, more powerful bomb that they hoped would help win the war, but without the hindsight that informs your view, it would not at all have been obvious to them that this bomb could end the war all by itself. Because a weapon that could force a surrender merely through a demonstration of its power had never before existed.
The point of view you can't find is simply this: "We have to hit them what everything we have, as hard as possible, as quickly as possible, until they can't fight back anymore, because that's the only thing that's worked so far."
I mean... it was a time, when even the americans used concentration camps in US to lock up the japanese, and people didn't mind. The war lasted long enough, that the propaganda machine did it's job and noone (inside usa, and many other countries) really cared about 'a few' japanese lives, even if "a few" means tens of thousands... some even rooted for more.
In modern times also plenty of people mind plenty of war related things, but not enough people mind enough to actually stop US messing all around the middle east, south america, africa, etc. Even "before modern times", there was a lot of anti-vietnam-war sentiment, and the war still lasted a long time... even the afghanistan war lasted 20 years, a few people mind, and others wave the flags and use buzzwords like "fighting for freedom" or worse.
The onus was on Japan to surrender immediately, not for the US to be patient. You don’t punch your aggressor once and wait to see what he’s going to do next. You beat him with overwhelming force until he’s incapacitated or he waves the white flag.
While i understand the rationale, ive come to question if "fighting fire with napalm" is such a good idea, from ethics perspective.
Is it not a duty to not fall prey to indulge in mass killing even if it may seem justified by the barbarity of the opposing side?
It’s easy to question the decision when you’re not responsible for making it. When you’re not responsible for your soldiers’ lives it’s easy to talk about ethics. Invading Japan would have killed tens of thousands of US soldiers, easily. When it comes right down to it, you’ll always prefer the option that’s spares more of your countrymen than the enemy (who started the war against the US.) That’s perfectly ethical as far as I’m concerned - as ethical as anything can be in war.
That is true. I was not there and im of a completely different world.
Well, to be honest i ended up agreeing atleast partly too.
For context im from europe, and a small country arrayed against a historically and currently aggressive and strong neighbor, aaand i was conscript officer in charge of a few hundred men total.
Believe me that im not that detached from this question, however my concience about bombing civilians is also quite conflicted but heavily leaning towards the Geneva Conventions.
In conclusion; no, i dont agree that it was be "perfectly ethical" or even simply ethical, but rather a neccesity born of the lack of efficacy in the firebombing campaing. And yes, a top-down hierarchical militant society like imperial japan of the time would not have surrendered without significant show of power, of imminent destruction, demonstrated.
Im personally more convinced that Hirohito only issued the decree to surrender unconditionally due to the fear of imminent destruction of the capital, since a military society would always expect an attack on the command structure.
It is a duty to make mass murder stop in the most efficient way possible. The Japanese would not have surrendered for anything less than what happened to them, so this was proportionate and reasonable violence.
They were ready for a conditional surrender before even the first bomb was dropped; the bombs facilitated an unconditional surrender.
At the end of the day, they seem to have had more to do with letting the Soviets know the time of day more than anything pertaining to Japan. The whole event is a reminder of why having a figurehead president with all the real decisions made by military leadership is rarely a good way to run the country.
>At the end of the day, they seem to have had more to do with letting the Soviets know the time of day more than anything pertaining to Japan.
This is a very popular historical revisionist argument which seems to have little if any credible evidence to back it up[0]. It's just something that feels true to people when they consider the evil of the American military industrial complex, can't accept any Western historical narrative at face value, and require a conspiracy behind everything.
But what documentary evidence does exist, as far as I can tell, supports the status quo version of events[1].
At the same time I visit Japan semi-regularly, as I have friends (almost family) there, I know and hate Japanese crimes of war, during and before WWII, and I'm conscious of the far right imperialist hands in their government (LDP, Nippon Kaigi and friends), but, please, I would avoid the 'jap' term.
In the second world war the japanese acted unequivocally as absolute monsters. It is not an atrocity that they were nuked and it is not an atrocity that they were nuked twice. If anything, it should have happened far earlier.
I'd phrase it differently, but I think it's basically what happened.
Japanese atrocities against civilians in China and Korea were enormous. Japanese treatment of US PoWs was horrendous. Japanese troops continued to fight literally to the last man, just to try and kill as many Americans as they could. I think when fighting an all-out war against an opponent like this, it's hard to self-limit.
Further, the Japanese approach of never surrendering produced some gargantuan casualties. The Battle of Iwo Jima [1] was apparently the turning point in American thinking. After breaking the back of Japanese Imperial Fleet, Americans figured they need to start taking territory, which meant mostly invading islands. Iwo Jima had notable, but not extreme importance. And again, the Japanese would just not surrender. Quoting Wikipedia, of the 21,000 Japanese troops, only 216 were taken prisoner, and these were mostly unconscious or disabled soldiers who could physically not fight. The rest fought tooth, nail and bayonet against each and every American, and died eventually.
Add 6k American soldiers who died in that one battle, and suddenly dropping an extra nuke on a city of 100,000 looks, weirdly, like a life-saving manoeuvre. And Iwo Jima wasn't even that important, or particularly close to Japan proper, you could expect casualties to only get significantly worse. This doesn't even count the wounded, which in a military context doesn't usually mean a bloody nose.
I'll never forget the day a friend told me: "the Japanese were absolutely ruthless. I mean, these guys made the _nazis_ say 'what the hell is wrong with the Japanese?'"
In an alternate ending, Japan would not have surrendered, and, like in Berlin, fought till the end. Every large city would have been bombed, one after another. Only the military would have been far enough from cities to live.
The first bomb is somewhat understandable, still you could argue that the US might have figured out a way to demonstrate its destructive power to the Japanese without killing over 100,000 mostly innocent people in an instant. Maybe at the trade-off of temporarily risking US soldier lifes and resources of the general public. Still, you can argue the other way and see it as a terrible conclusion to a terrible war.
But the second one? I've seen many docs and historians perspectives on why it was considered necessary, but I can't find the point of view from which it was anything but a total atrocity for which the people who made it happen should be remembered in shame forever. So much of Japan not immediately surrendering after the first bomb dropped was down to the fog of war, to simple and understandable slow speed in government decisionmaking, etc.
Even if you can't be sure that the first bomb would have been enough to have them surrender, just the chance of it should have been enough to pick a different strategy, at the chance of saving a couple of dozen thousand innocent lives.