I suggest the first two books of Richard Rhode's book "Making of the Atomic Bomb", which goes into this.
(3) then you drop one demo and have two real ones if they don't surrender to the demo within a few days.
(4) that sucks but that's how it goes, you can't seriously be saying it's justified to kill 200k Japanese civilians to save a small handful of allied lives in the intervening days while we wait for their response to the demo bomb.
I absolutely would argue in favor of this. In fact, I would argue that it would have been morally just to kill every last Japanese person, military or not, if Japan refused surrender (which was part of the Emperor’s plan for self preservation). Remember the context: 1) Japan attacked the U.S. to initiate hostilities and 2) Japanese resistance became more fierce, fanatical, and deadly (ex: suicide bombings by both military and civilians) as the U.S. approached mainland Japan.
If you are arguing that a 200:1 ratio is acceptable, I believe this is a morally bankrupt perspective, given that the consequence of this is a genocide of a people who are otherwise perfectly normal without the broken software that was running in their minds and their society at the time, and given that it is a collectivistic perspective that assigns moral guilt to an entire civilian population (including children) instead of the specific individual bad actors that caused the situation.
Regarding the latter point - on this premise that every single Japanese person shared moral culpability for what Japan was doing - it can't be squared with an understanding of what actually happened. I mean, the existence of children is a QED against it. But even just talking adults - At that stage the country was a fascist dictatorship, with multiple democratically elected leaders assassinated by the military (which was taken over by a fanatical fascist contingent in the 1930s) and a tremendous propaganda effort by the military to control all information and brainwash the general public into thinking they were doing good and just work overseas. Combine this with a poor, ignorant farmer population, and I don't think the simple moral prism that you're applying works.
It's easy to act morally superior decades later. We're not the ones who were forced to make a hard decision in extreme circumstances. How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?
If it's 10:1, then that's basically saying that Japanese adult civilian lives are worth absolutely nothing and can be killed without any moral concern, but Japanese children are worth the same as allied lives.
Going any further (e.g 200:1) is unjustifible unless we adopt the collectivistic moral guilt framework where one has moral guilt (including children) simply for existing in that country at that time, irrespective of individual culpability.
"How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?"
I also don't like the language of calling them enemy civilians. They are civilians who live in a country that's currently an enemy.
Are you asking a question?
> Going any further (e.g 200:1)
You're engaging in pseudo-intellectual quantification that is meaningless and unbound by anything objective. But that's besides the point.
The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict. And yet the calculus was clear: the loss of life by the U.S. was going to significantly increase per unit of effort/victory as it approached mainland Japan.
> doesn't make those lives worthless
No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight.
It is also not meaningless, you simply totally ignored the rationale I provided for the 10:1 figure. It's the ratio that roughly equalizes the moral worth of allied troops with Japanese children.
Admittedly this is all subjective, but that also applies to your opinions.
"The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict."
"No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight"
This is a war crime.
Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare. In other words, this is a 20th century neologism and not some kind of timeless truth.
How many people would you kill to stay alive? Or to keep your loved ones alive? The truth is, you can't know as it is impossible to simulate that scenario unless you're actually in it. But if I had to guess, for the average person, the number would be much greater than 1.
The concept of universal laws of war to which all participants are bound and in principal accountable long predates the Nuremberg trials.
> Further, for much of human history, genocide (or the attempt thereof) was standard practice in warfare
For most of human history, slavery was a standard practice, both in and out of warfare, that doesn't make it right.
Rather, war crimes will always occur in war. And the primitive instinct to stay alive, at almost any price, is programmed into us. When faced with existential threats to our loved ones, these ivory tower questions about the relative worths of lives (100:1? 10:1?) are exposed for the nonsense they always were. Our biological programming kicks in: "survive at any cost - protect your own – eradicate the threat". It is only subsequent generations, from upon high in their ivory towers and far removed from the threat, who are able to condemn the savagery of the survivors.
In other words, it is always best to not enter a war. Perhaps even if attacked. 9/11 and the U.S.'s insane and disastrous responses in Afghanistan and Iraq being the latest demonstrations.
> In addition, the Japanese had organized the Volunteer Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training and uniforms were generally lacking: many were armed with nothing better than antiquated firearms, molotov cocktails, longbows, swords, knives, bamboo or wooden spears, and even clubs and truncheons: they were expected to make do with what they had.[63][64] One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[65] They were expected to serve as a "second defense line" during the Allied invasion, and to conduct guerrilla warfare in urban areas and mountains.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Ground_forc...
At the very least it would be a form of self-defence.
And yes - That's exactly the frame of reference that war planners used. The axis powers went further, not only was all of the Jewish, Slav, British, China, and American lives not worth any of their own, their own peoples lives were not worth it.
Not a pleasant thought to think of - but go look at the ideologies that the Axis powers actually embraced, instead of cartoon nazis and modern day revisionisms.
In this, they were absolutely correct.
Yeah. a) they made the assumption that the nukes would not be enough, and b) planned for US soldiers to walk on post-bombing irradiated landings.
Look for The Atomic Cafe on the 'Net to see what the training films from back then had to say.
I think there was also pushback against those facts becoming more public after the war both due to the fact that the US used the atomic bomb, and also due to industrial uses of radioactive materials that no one wanted to pay for (a la the Radium Girls).
Sacrificing your own soldiers lives to save enemy lives isn't usually a great or even winning military strategy.
I've read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb."
After the bombing of Hiroshima, Suzuki stated to the press that Japan would not surrender, which suggests to me that bombing the middle of nowhere as a demonstration would probably not have persuaded the Japanese government to surrender. Why would a non military demonstration have been more impactful than bombing a city?