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The Russians never did Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which I consider to be a underappreciated moral crime, just like the Bengali famine at the hands of Churchill.

I know this is a form of 'whataboutism,' but I don't think laying the blame on the Russians is the right way to go. Neither side should have developed nuclear weapons in the first place.

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I think there is a different argument being made. The Russian nuclear program has suffered a lot of potential and actual nuclear catastrophes due to questionable safety standards and protocol.

I think that nuclear weapons is a different topic. But the safety of ongoing nuclear use worldwide, including by the US, is perhaps the topic here.

You can't un-ring a bell but you can avoid using the bell to cause a planetary catastrophe.

Feel free to find out when the existing nuclear powers intend to disarm under their commitments in the NNTP.

I'm not sure of the relevance. You cannot uninvent the technology.

A nuclear reactor is not a weapon, it's a power source. An incredibly useful one at that.

To be honest it didn't seem like the people who made the decision to drop the bombs really knew they were dealing with something transformative

Thought experiment: if the Russians, Germans or Japanese had the nukes first, would they use them in the same way? I'd probably say Stalin and Hitler were more bloodthirsty than Roosevelt. Given the circumstances at the time, it was the best possible outcome.

that is always the line of thought avoided at all costs by those seeking to vilify the United States using the bombs. The simple fact is, all three nations you mentioned had demonstrated a complete lack for respect of life and rights of others. Considering just how Germany and Japan treated captured civilians and military members should be more than enough to know what they would have done.

Firstly, it was Truman, not Roosevelt.

Secondly, Truman was quite bloodthirsty: "If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible. . . ." [0].

Thirdly, Churchill was even more bloodthirsty and advocated for nuking Moscow in the years following WW2 [1].

[0] http://movies2.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0... [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2826980/Winston-Chu...

Of course, should have included both Truman and Roosevelt.

But the point still stands. We were up against leaders who were much more bloodthirsty and had trumendous disrespect for human life. The entire world decended in to madness - the morals basically went out the window. It was kill or be killed.

You were up against Russians in WW2, really?

Do you know who motivated the US to take on the Manhattan Project? Albert Einstein. Life-long pacifist and, I've heard, reasonably intelligent human who knew something about quantum physics and relativity. Are you certain that you would have made a different decision?

What are you talking about? Einstein's discovery motivated the project, but he was always against the bomb.

"Several weeks before America dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein begged our government to reconsider."

"After he found out about Hiroshima in the news, Einstein was literally horrified. First, because he mourned for the more than 100,000 people killed at Hiroshima. But also, he and other atomic scientists knew that the promise of “benign” uses of atomic energy had been dealt a cruel blow, if not a fatal one. Einstein believed the decision to nuke Hiroshima would be a public perception disaster concerning his discovery"

https://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/before-the-beginning.html

The letter signed by Einstein (1) was literally what motivated FDR to a course of action which became the Manhattan Project, as made clear by FDR himself (2).

As most will not read the links below, despite tremendous historical importance, Einstein specifically recommended 2 things:

* secure a uranium ore supply for the US, and

* speed up this line of research (that leads to a bomb).

Please explain to me how this isn't advocating for the development of a nuclear bomb?

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

Feynman also worked on the Manhattan Project and was so horrified at the outcome he refused to work for the government again, up until the challenger investigation.

Lots of these guys thought they were doing it just to beat the Germans at it; they didn't expect it to actually be used. They thought they were the good guys!

"Lots of these guys thought they were doing it just to beat the Germans at it"

Well, they haven't stopped working on the bomb after Germany had capitulated.

Still nothing to suggest they would be participating in the murder of thousands.

Really? They were working on the bomb and nothing was suggesting that it will be used?

I guess not … scientists you know … they probably just thought they were doing cool stuff. Oppenheimer probably knew how it would all fit together though.

I suggest you read memories of any of the scientists who worked there.

I have done …

Which one?

He was wrong, since the Manhattan project was and is still celebrated as a great achievement. Hiroshima is considered a regrettable necessity. Anyone willing to read about fire bombing of cities before the A-bomb would consider it a reasonable alternative.

> On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people. The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15. It is thought that some 25,000–35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.

>Do you know who motivated the US to take on the Manhattan Project?

Perhaps it was more like an austrian boi looking for mehr lebensraum, but who am I to say.

No, quite specifically, Einstein's letter to FDR is what motivated the Manhattan Project. Hitler (parent's "austrian boi") may well have had a tremendous weapons program in the works, but Einstein's fear was motivated as much by what he knew of his colleagues in Berlin and the German zeitgeist(1) as anything to do with Hitler specifically. What Hitler wanted would have been trivia if it were not for the capabilities of the scientists who elected to stay in Germany during the rise of Nazism.

(1) what an awful yet accurate application of such a nice word, but I digress.

Well, agreed, in last instance, the letter was responsible, but it wouldn't have been written if the authors were not concerned about the autrian boi misdemeanors.

>> Life-long pacifist and, I've heard, reasonably intelligent human

He was also a misogynist and a xenophobe.

I am not trying to whitewash his accomplishments in terms of physics, but frankly he's a questionable character in terms of morals or ethics.

I wouldn't trust that guy writing the laws for me, for example.

Source.

A far smaller moral crime than a land invasion of the home islands would've been. There's a reason five hundred thousand Purple Hearts were manufactured in anticipation of it.

D. M. Giangreco agrees with this assessment. His book "Hell to Pay" examines many complex issues involved in the strategic and tactical planning of both the U.S. and Japan using documents from both sides, including postwar reports that the Japanese wrote for General MacArthur. The U.S. planned to use as many as nine A-bombs as tactical weapons in the invasion of Kyushu. He feels such an invasion would have been worse for both Americans and Japanese.

There was no plan to deal with japan that wouldn't have involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict losing their lives. The trade instead was 250k Japanese civilians.

The planning for Operation Downfall expected a minimum of 5 million Japanese civilian deaths. The Japanese plan for defending the home islands, ketsugō sakusen, involved conscripting the entire population into a militia. The propaganda term was literally "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million." If you don't think that would've killed more than 250 thousand civilians you're a fool.

The target choices, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are a good topic for debate. There's ample argument to be made that there were better, more militarized targets that would have shaved significant fractions off the ultimate civilian death toll. There is no sane argument, however, that the bombings themselves didn't kill an order of magnitude fewer people than any other method of defeating the Japanese Empire.

Russians did enough

Is the Churchill the new thing to divert from Holodomor they promote in Petrograd? Been seeing it mentioned by Russian trolls/bots/“patriots” a lot recently

No you're right. The UK was also an evil empire.

Er, what? Japan was the aggressor, their allies started the war. If Americans wouldn't drop the bombs, even more civilians would lose their lives.

From the utilitarian perspective, the bombs and quick end of the war actually saved lives, so it was the right thing to do.

If you want to argue against the morality from the deontological perspective, I wonder about your argument. Japan initiated the fight, and unless Americans planned to surrender, they would end up killing even more people. Are you arguing that it matters that they did it all at once, compared to doing it bit by bit?

Also, to shine some perspective - Japan's losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 250k. Their allies killed 400k Jews in Warsaw Ghetto alone.

> From the utilitarian perspective, the bombs and quick end of the war actually saved lives, so it was the right thing to do

No, it was very mixed opinions even among high militaries about the decision. Some people saying that the war was in fact over, and the losses would have been less just waiting out the Japanese. You can have different opinions about this, but it is not a fact that it is the utilitarian perspective to nuke.

Even without an invasion they still probably saved lives.

Had the same cities been bombed using conventional bombs, similar numbers of civilians would have died as the fires caused most civilian casualties. The reality is the nukes caused about 1% of the just civilian casualties (50 to 55 million) in WWII, making them a rounding error in the overall war.

Sources please.

I’ve asked a family member who was on a boat on the way to invade Japan until the bombs fell. They also stayed half of the occupation working in General McArthurs office. The sentiment was the bombs would cause much less casualties on at least one of the sides (US would drop more if they didn’t surrender). The surrender saved lives on both sides.

I’m sure some officers didn’t agree.

"Whether it was the use of nuclear weapons or Soviet invasion that more forcefully led to surrender has been hotly debated between historians. Hasegawa places greater emphasis on the Soviet invasion, suggesting that Japan would likely have stood steadfast under multiple atomic bombings as it had done in the face of firebombing. Asada directly references and disputes his account, claiming that nuclear weapons and the threat they posed to the homeland reflected a much more "direct" impetus to end the war rather than the invasion of Manchuria, and offered an easier way out for the leadership. Further, they came as a complete surprise to Japanese leadership, whereas eventual conflict with the USSR was expected. Frank's account, and most other anti-revisionist historians support this thesis." [1]

I think it can be fair to say that the perception of the Allies/America was the bombs would lead to surrender, but from the Japanese perspective that isn't so cut-and-dry.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15kb3w/why_d...

Your source is a reddit post without a clear overall source and only a few anchor tags in some of the paragraphs.

I’d like to know what the Japanese thought at the time not what certain historians think after the fact.

The Soviets invaded a part of Japan and a few hours later the second bomb dropped. It’s inconclusive. From the American perspective it still worked.

I am not sure I understand your criticism here. Your original assertion was "The sentiment was the bombs would cause much less casualties on at least one of the sides", which you quoted a family member. That is fine, but I am confused what you want to know.

If you want to know what people thought, who weren't leaders, then assuredly most people thought the bombs would stop the war, but probably the same way they thought the fire-bombing would stop the war, and all other actions before that like basically wiping out the Japanese fleet. So, your family member's perspective is fine, but it doesn't tell us why the war did actually finally stop. Just what random people thought caused it to end.

If you wanted to know what leaders, who were making decisions about the war and trying to decide what to do, you could see from the Historian's report that many Japanese leaders were in conflict over whether to surrender and how to surrender before the bombs dropped, after the bombs, and after the Russian invasion. Even after the Emperor agreed to surrender there were still factions vying to prevent such a surrender for different reasons.

On r/AskHistorians, sources are not required to be given when composing a post, however they must be given upon request. If you are really interested in the sources and not my blase summary, I recommend just pinging the Historian directly for the kinds of sources you are interested in. Even if their post wasn't to your liking, they surely know where to find the sources you would want given their expertise.

For that matter, you could even open a question on r/AskHistorians itself!

I don't have the sources now, but I've read that Japan had earlier made peace overtures which were ignored.

Also, the US was intent on getting an unconditional surrender from Japan, whereas Japan was hoping for a conditional surrender.

If Japan's peace overtures were accepted, even if at the cost of some conditions, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved and Japan need not have been the world's first nuclear casualty.

This is not to mention that there were some high ranking US military men who tried hard to get the first nukes used against even larger population centers than Hiroshima or Nagasaki (Kyoto was their desired target, if I remember correctly) so that they could get better data on the nuke's effectiveness. And not to mention the widespread anti-Japanese racism in the US, which viewed Japanese people as subhuman.

It's far from clear that nukes were used against Japan merely to save lives on both sides, nor (even if we disregard the intent) is it clear that they did so.

I toured the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima. It was awful, but one thing that I took from it (which I don't think I was supposed to take from it) was just how small the bomb really was overall. I really thought it had leveled the city, but when you see the size of it over a map of the city, it wasn't as big as one might have thought.

Hiroshima "Little Boy" was the first to land at only 15kt, but Nagasaki had the H bomb.

> Japan's losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 250k. Their allies killed 400k Jews in Warsaw Ghetto alone

Judging them based what their allies did makes it a bit of an unfair comparison, especially when those allies were half a world away with little actual input [0]. I'm sure the Japanese were responsible for their own share of carnage caused without "consolidating" numbers. Russia was on the Allied side and received active support even after committing massacres, mass arrests, executions, and deportations [1]. So consider that if you want to tally "by team".

Also killing 250.000 civilians "because they also did it" kind of puts them all in the same bucket. There's no moral high ground to claim in this situation unless you're always willing to justify anything as long as it fits your personal views. Would it be justified or moral for you to kill some random Russians as payback for Katyn?

[0] You wouldn't be judged based on what your grandparents did, and there might be a stronger connection between you. Or for what your fellow countrymen do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#World_War_II

Then we can look at the Japanese occupation of China and the killing of 10-25 Million civilians.. The west does not learn much about that part of WW2.

China sure hasn't forgotten, though.

On top of this, there’s fairly well established historical record showing that the dropping the bombs was unnecessary, even for attaining Japan’s Surrender. You can find this in sources as mainstream as Oliver Stone’s _Untold History of the United States_

There was an attempted military coup by the ministry of war when the emperor decided to surrender. That was after the second bomb had been dropped. Part of the terms of surrender was the emperor admitting he was not a god. They were not close to surrender pre-bomb in my opinion, most of my info is from podcasts though so who knows.

Wasn't it [as much or more] about demoralizing the enemies on the Western front? Oliver Stone... I hesitate to rely on him as a sole source for such information. No slight on him—but it's as editorialized an outlet for information as there ever was.

Fair enough

A honest question, is it (and was it then) legal to destroy an entire city full of civilians?

Or only the ones that lose the war are accused of war crimes?

A different question, what happened with the guys that droned(or was an helicopter I do not remember) those civilians. I am referring at the incident where the video tape was leaked, was anybody found guilty?

There's no such thing as international law. It's just a set of treaties. With no one to enforce it, it's not real law, so things like war crimes and the like are decided by the victors, there is no legitimate objective body.

The Nazis were already developing nuclear bombs, Hitler just didn't really put a priority on it. Even if the US had never developed it, when the Soviets and Americans took the Nazi scientists in they would have eventually developed them anyways.

Is it really 'whataboutism' if its very clear that there is just a bigoted prejudice against Russia? The post you replied to has not facts, no real information, no true data - just prejudice, really. And worse, its prejudice that is currently propagated and encouraged by an insidious collective groupthink currently infecting us all at mass scale.

We may as well just assume that the Russians discovered an alien base and the real incident involved them fighting an alien intruder. This is just as valid a perspective as "Russia sucks at submarines, lol."

Both perspectives are fictional. Russia is very good at submarines. Also, there are no alien bases.

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