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Comment by scottjad | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy is that they planned to continue using them as they became available. So 3, 4, 5 ..., 20, etc. 100? It's hard to know at what point they would have stopped had the regime not surrendered (which they were already planning to do).

So it's not really "it's better that 200k Japanese civilians die than x US soldiers" (which is a despicable view and is based on the false views that massacring civilians is OK and that unconditional surrender was necessary), because they didn't know two bombs was the magic number. It could have been 10, or 50. Basically they were probably willing to kill a whole lot more civilians than they did.

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They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. No time for philosophy.

> They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. No time for philosophy.

Where "fight" means massacre civilians by the hundreds of thousands or millions. Where "won" means received unconditional surrender when they could already have a very favorable conditional surrender. Where "fight to survive" means they (the US in general and the US military, not individual soldiers) at this point (when they dropped the bomb) were in no danger of not surviving. Where "no time for philosophy" means no time for a conscience or morality.

And plenty of US military leaders at the highest levels did have a conscience and opposed using the atomic bomb against civilians at that point in the war. See my link in other comments.

A favorable condition of surrender is debatable (who knew what when). Otherwise you seem to have a very good grasp on the situation. Surviving means wiping out the country that had every intention of conquering the world. Stopping meant trusting them to be nice; we didn't even do that after winning. So stopping was not an option, because survival.

Is soldier versus civilian really such a different thing? It seems more like a gradient, to me -- you support your country by building bombs / planes / etc., that's very different than just living peacefully on your own farm.

It's important to recall that every nation's entire economy was subsumed in the war effort. American "civilians" wanted to kill Japanese; Japanese "civlians" probably hated Americans (there was a lot of racial prejudice in that era, on both sides).

Civilians may not have been combatants, but they were very much a part of the war machinery, and as such became a strategic target.

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