https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...
It's very interesting how until recently I grew up and believed the bombings should not have happened. Modern ICBMs and hydrogen bombs are much more scary as is nuclear powers going to war but MAD aside there are situations where a single nuke at a strategic location will save many more lives on both sides of a conflict.but it still doesn't feel right saying it.
The declaration of war by the Soviet Union decided the end of the war. Japan wouldn't have had time to build their own bomb and they would have surrendered anyway.
In fact it is not even proven that the bombings had any meaningful impact to the decisions to surrender. If the Japanese didn't surrender after having whole cities firebombed, it is insane to think the atomic bombings would have had any more impact on moral.
The US did not use the atomic bomb for humanitarian reasons, to end the war earlier or other such other lies. They did it a a show of strength, targeted at the Soviets.
It is sad that even after so many years, the same propaganda lies get repeated. Why are people still defending the use of the atomic bomb?
The Soviets invaded territory that the Japanese held; and their actions did remove a possible pathway for Japan to stay in the war, sure.
However -
The US was the main game in the Pacific Theatre and their continuous, rolling campaign of victories - culminating in the bombs - was the primary cause of the end of the war.
This is the general consensus and has been revisited.. and revisited .. and revisited .. mostly by those with a primary motive of discrediting the US for using the bomb.
It’s easier to argue against the use of the bomb when you bluntly reject any positive outcomes; but first one must deal with reality. And the reality is not difficult to discern.
The Soviets invaded Manchuria, meanwhile the US had already taken actual Japanese territory.
While this absolutely made it much more difficult for the Japanese to allocate the resources needed to defend themselves on so many fronts, they were far more interested in defending their homeland than in keeping captured Chinese territory.
If you were to consider two counterfactuals -
- Soviets invade, bombs are not dropped - Soviets don’t invade, bombs are dropped
Only one of these still leads to surrender. Manchuria was a sideshow compared to the real game.
Editing to add -
If you want any further proof, just look at who the Japanese actually surrendered to. There is nothing in their culture (then or now) which would cause them to surrender to anyone besides their actual victor.
Even before the Soviet entry of the war, the situation was hopeless for the Japanese military leadership. Their best case scenario was to somehow avoid unconditional surrender, they would have gladly taken any deal to end the war that avoided that.
So a already devastating situation went from bad to worse when the Soviets entered the war. That was a absolute game changer in terms of strategy and made a conditional surrender pretty unlikely. So clearly were was no point in prolonging the war anymore.
The atomic bombs didn't really enter into the equation.
> If you want any further proof, just look at who the Japanese actually surrendered to. There is nothing in their culture (then or now) which would cause them to surrender to anyone besides their actual victor.
There are obviously good reasons why the leadership preferred to surrender to the US. The Soviets probably would have pushed for bigger societal changes, requiring something like the de-nazification campaign in Germany.
If you look at which shaped fiction the most, there is no doubt that the nuclear bombings had a much greater impact than the fire bombings.
So I don't think it is insane to say that a single bomb with the power of thousands regular bombs can cause a significant impact on morale, compared to the regular bombs.
Did it impact the Japanese military leadership, which obviously did not care much about civilian causality, in their decisions much? No.
As for the rest, I never said the US had humanitarian intent. But the fact is millions more would have died by firebombing just not instantly like with a nuke.
Yes, of course it was a show of strength but also to prevent more US casualties. It just so happened the result of nuking would also mean less japanese casualties as a coincidence. A long protracted campaign would have definetly lead to more casualties. Japan would have never surrendered and allowed an invasion of their land without basically every military aged male fighting to their death.
It is not propaganda at all, nukes save lives in some situations but not in most. There is no morality in war, the moment a decision is made that allows for civilian collateral damage it becomes a immoral but the question is what is the alternative and are you the aggressor. Japan was the aggressor and their people would have fought for and willingly supported their emporer whom they consider their god. Ultimately, whatever the casualty on both sides it is the agressor who is responsible. The decision that led to the nuking of hiroshima and nagasaki was made by japanese military leadership and emperor.
The argument against wmds you and many make naively is that regular people should not be targeted enmasse only as collateral damage. But in war, regardless of the type of government regular people have the responsibility to resist their government that is agressing against a foreign nation. They did not resist the emperor in japan, quite the opposite. As for children it was their parents that made decisinons or indecisions that endangered them. Yes, military targets should be the only targets but the exception is when that means killing a massive portion of your own military who are defending against an agressor. The US government had the responsibility to prioritize US military and civilian lives over any japanese lives because of both countries are sovreign and each is responsible for the safety and security of their people not people of other nations. This works both ways, when you support the US bombing syria or tolerated iraq invasion the US was the agressor and should their people become powerful enough to attack US civilians they are fully justified because it was civiliand that supported the killing of their civilians.
You do not get to expect for your own children to go off and die in a war to avoid civilian casualties of a foreign sovreign state that is the agressor in a war and targeted your civilians to begin with. There is no question that had the Japanese or German obtained a nuke they would not hesitate before using it on america cities. It was a means to an end, it is not justifiable nor does it need to be in a war.
Killing civilians as an act of agression or genocide is intolerable of course. But avoiding an enemy's civilian casualty is not a priority for a defending military. A large majority of americans thought so after 9/11 and the invasion of afghanistan as well. The Iraq war had popular support as well because americand were afraid they would be targeted by wmds.
Here is an analogy that might help reason: If you get in a fight and in defending yourself you kill the other person. The only question is if you had any choice but to fight to defend your life and well being such as running away. If the other person dies you are not a murderer,they killed themselves by acting in agression even though your hand was the cause of death. You have no responsibility to limit your force because your own life is at risk. You don't have to consider what wi happen to that persons family as a result as well (although the law might wrongly sometimes).
Nukes aren't special, firebombing and cluster bombs targeted civilians without discriminating. Both sides of WW2 used indiscriminant attacks like that. Nukes just happen to have an immediate and larger scale. It is not mote wrong to kill millions as opposed to hundreds of civilians to acheive a military goal. They are both just as wrong. My argument is, it is a correct decision to prioritize american military and civilian lives because each sovreign state is responsible only for their own people.
So if it came down to a war with China for example, using nukes is justified if it means avoiding millions of dead americans, although the US is not a first use nation but i believe China is (could be wrong on this).
Both China and the US officially have a "launch on warning" posture, with China only very recently switching from a "no first use" (NFU) policy which they had tried to get the US to adopt.
Formally the US calls its posture "launch on attack", which means they will launch a strike if they get a "tactical warning" of a nuclear strike.
I explicitly do NOT subscribe to the fact that the bombing had any meaningful effect on whether and when Japan would surrender. That is the main point we should be arguing about.
You completely ignore any actual points I was making in instead make up stuff like "Japan would have never surrendered". No, they would and they did.
> “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.”
Source: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...
Now, you might maybe argue that the atomic bombs helped a bit pushing for unconditional surrender and keeping the Soviets out but that would be a vastly different point.
As for the rest of you points, I don't get why you are trying to justify civilian causalities so much. Japan was not a democracy. It had no free press. The average Japanese person did not have much choice or influence. They were victims of the regime as well, regardless whether they were brainwashed to adore the emperor or not. Not to mention obviously there were Japanese people that were against the war, maybe not a relevant amount but it is silly to paint the Japanese people as an hive mind and imply collective guilt.
Yes, civilian casualties are a fact of war but please don't try to justify them or imply civilians would ever deserve it. War is simply horrible and there is no justification.
Yes, sometimes horrible things need to be done and yes nuclear threat can actually serve to keep peace but the atomic bombings of Japan have no justifications.
Let me start here, the first part of course. But there is a justification: self-defense. That is the primary reason any military force exists.
> the atomic bombings of Japan have no justifications.
They require no justification, it is war not a democratic or civil discourse. The only objective is to win not to be moral or just. That is why the military exists, to win wars not to appease the public. And this is precisely why afghanistan and vietnam were lost, because the US military tries to be moral and do right by civilians. It's their country, their problem period and it curs both ways. You and most others living ina democracy under the protection of a superpower are not grasping the concept of sovreignity and what it means to be at war. Sovreignity is not an idea on paper and it does not mean merely "independent". It means the safety, security and prosperity of all under a sovreign as well as the consequence of any action made by that sovreign are their own and no one else. You do not get to tell them what to do in their internal affairs and in return any action made by a sovreign good or bad are for all under the sovreign to bear. You can dislike the outcome as do I but you don't get to pretend sovreignity is nullified when it suits you.
> Japan was not a democracy. It had no free press. The average Japanese person did not have much choice or influence
This is what I mean! I don't care one bit about democracy in this context. We do not live in a golbal sovreign nation where countries are provinces. At the individual level it is very unfortunate what the outcome was, whether or not the people had power to resist is irrelevant, neither is their "brainwashing" (an arrogant dismissal of their beliefs by you) what matters is they are sovreign nation and their agression was as a nation not by rogue individuals. This means every man,woman and child bears the responsibility of the outcome. What if their own government bombed their own people? Stopping their government, refusing to fight in their military or support it with logistical needs is their own choice whether their government killed them directly or by attacking a foreign power and dooming them as a result, it ultimately bears reponsibility. Democracy works for the west and if they want it they will just have to figure it out on their own as a sovreign. Their ability to exist without interference from outsiders or having to answer to an outside power comes with the responsibility that acting in agression means the whole sovreign is responsible. There is no precedent or norm that a country must be democractic in order for it to be a sovreign or for the people to accept the consequence of whatever their government is (which is none of your business because sovreignity means self-determination among other things).
To your firsr paragraphs, I was not avoiding your points but adressing them.
Japan would not have surrendered:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
> Faced with the prospect of an invasion of the Home Islands, starting with Kyūshū, and the prospect of a Soviet invasion of Manchuria—Japan's last source of natural resources—the War Journal of the Imperial Headquarters concluded in 1944:
We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight.[9] As a final attempt to stop the Allied advances, the Japanese Imperial High Command planned an all-out defense of Kyūshū codenamed Operation Ketsugō.[10]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation...
> While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of invading and occupying the Home Islands too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.[48] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived".[48] While this was not realistic, both American and Japanese officers at the time predicted a Japanese death toll in the millions
While of course they won't succeed in killing all of their own civilians they were comitted to killing a whole lot more than a few million people.
Military planners and intel on both sides concluded millions would die on both sides. If we can agree that you and I do not now know better than they did then, what is our disagreement here? Both outcomes would have been horrible. Less people died with nukes.
I don't believe this thought crossed the mind of military planners, even the most pessimistic ones. Japan by mid 1945 was reduced to rubble, with nearly zero serious industrial capacity and under a maritime blockade. I think the best they could do is to continue as a semi-destroyed agrarian society with just enough guns and cold weapons to impose unacceptable casualties on would-be occupants - and in that state they would probably be able to last for quite a while. But obtaining a nuclear weapon of their own was out of the question for Japan.
Edit: Both cities were, comparatively, intact at the point the nukes were dropped. e.g. Tokio wouldn't have done any good as it was already completely fire bombed. So Hiroshima and Nagasaki allowed to actually get real live data on the effect of two different nukes on actual cities.
Each time I dig into this, both sides at the time believed millions more would die in resistance of a US invasion. The only way less people will die from not nuking them is if the US was to accept an armistice and avoid invading mainland and hope ina few decades the japanese empire will not go at it again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#
> While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of invading and occupying the Home Islands too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.[48] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived".[48] While this was not realistic, both American and Japanese officers at the time predicted a Japanese death toll in the millions
Don't try to justify civilian death, strategic bombing was considered even by the RAF and UAAF a war crime in 1942, with some made up thing based in a fantasy understanding of the enemy.
Civilian deaths are justified when war is justified. There is no such thing as a clean war or a "genteleman's war" as the brits call it. The idea of rules in war is a western european invention. Outside of that war historically meant murder, rape and pillaging by the victor. Are you familiar with the nanjing massacare by the Japnese? That's their idea of war, ripping out babies with a bayonet from pregnant women and making people beg for death as they force them to rape their own family members and hunt them like animals. The very fact that you think actions can be unjust or just after you started waging war shows you are only looking at it from a western/modern perspective. This is why afghanistan and vietnam were lost by the US. As a democracy the people's naive opinion of war was the ultimate cause of defeat. Even genocide is a modern post worldwar2 invention. Trough most of human history if the other guys won there is a chance they will kill all your people if they don't keep them for raping and enslavement. That is why when your guys get a chance they won't even consider the concept of rules only victory. War itself is a horrible and unjustifiable thing, it does not suddenly become just and fair because a you are killing a conscripted child with a uniform. Soldiers are human and civilians are participants in war by the mere fact that their economic output us being used to support the military by way of taxation. What is justifiable is avoiding war to begin with and changing your own governmenr even at the cost of a civil war so that it never becomes the agressor in war (coughiraq*cough).
The fact is you need one side to declare war before the other and regardless of who wins it is that first side that is responsible for the entire unjust and cruel outcome of a war. And as a sovreign nation, the people are responsible for the government they pay taxes to and tolerate when it declares war first on another country.
Civilian deaths are never justified in war, they are, unfortunately, inevitable so. What the strategic bombing did was explicitly targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Which is a war crime. That it was never tried, not even for the Blitz, was because the Allies did it themselves. Same for unrestricted u-boat warefare by the way.
Genocides are no post WW2 invention, plenty of examples throughout history, e.g. the one on the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire or the one on the Native Americans.
One last thing regarding strategic bombing of civilians and cities. It was clear to everyone that it sinoly doesn't work, morale isn't reduced, industrial output of Nazi Germany didn't drop. And still it was carried out. Partially as a revenge thing, partially to appease Stalin for the lack of Western Front in Europe. But mostly because people like Harris pushed and lobbied like crazy for it. Never mind that long range bombers would have been better used by coastal command for u-boat hunting and patrol duty.
Worth noting, the Nazis never had a clear majority during the last free election. They got one in a totally unfree election. Punishing a whole population for that, including children, elderly and other non-combatants, is wrong. Regardles of which side is doing it.
When I said genocide is a modern invention I meant it being a specially clasiffied crime. Of course it happened plenty? Natives in the americas and australia can tell you so as well but it was just war at the time. As recently as the 1800s it was not a crime to go hunting for indians without provocation.
> Punishing a whole population for that, including children, elderly and other non-combatants, is wrong. Regardles of which side is doing it.
Again, I find myself explaining that right and wrong are out of the window at that point. You have such views because in the west it is rare to be afraid that you as a civilian and your family will be killed by the other side. When your whole country is in the fear and terror of war, killing civilians becomes very popular. The US has not fought a single war of self-defense since WW2 so I see why this sentiment is popular. Nuking japan did have popular support and was a celebrated thing afterwards as well by the majority.
Your hindsight judgement is irrelevant and for future wars you should understand that when it is a war of self defense and survival there are no rules similar to how when a person is fighting for their lives they will not and cannot be expected to follow any rules.
In general, I agree with you that killing unarmed people is wrong, even as collateral damage. My point on this thread is that such opinions of morality are vain and even damaging against the ultimate goal of victory and survival in war. The unclean way I would put it is: polishing turd won't make it clean.
And Japan still didn’t.