I wonder what percentage of humanity given the details surrounding these bombings, the destruction and aftermath, would see it as justified or necessary. I personally don't accept that. Nuclear weapons should never be used by humans on humans.
Civilian casualties were not a huge concern when waging war for anyone (and certainly not for the Japanese military!) in that particular era so bringing that up is anachronistic thinking.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
Edit: the article link was https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/09/why-nagasaki/
This is certainly wrong because the first bomb wasn't enough for them to surrender. In fact, the general didn't want to surrender at all and commited suicide after the emperor forced them to stop. It isn't clear under what other conditions Japan would surrender. In my view Japan would probably still control Manchukuo today if not for the bomb.
We can debate after the fact whether using a nuclear bomb was correct but the brutal Japanese regime had to be stopped immediately. We don't have the privilege of knowing the future when making difficult decisions.
It’s potentially very important to know that the terms of surrender changed after the dropping of the second bomb. The new terms allowed the emperor to remain. Which is a huge deal. Maybe the Allies could have offered that before dropping two nukes?
https://homework.study.com/explanation/why-did-japan-reject-...
I may have misremembered reading about this years ago. I don’t think the terms changed, but there’s an argument that if the US was more clear about the emperor’s position post-surrender, the Japanese would have surrendered much sooner.
I've only seen the contrarian opinion coming from westerners. Perhaps because there's barely any media from Hollywood about the pacific theater, and if there was (eg. HBO's The Pacific), it does not show the horrors of it.
If one is more interested in an objective take on history, especially those using the argument that the Japanese were already "defeated" before the bombs came, then the book Downfall by Richard B Frank is a good book to start with for those who hold a firm anti-nuke stance.
>I've only seen the contrarian opinion coming from westerners.
Not even Japanese believe otherwise. When John Hersey (discussed elsewhere) revisited Japan in the 1960s, the Japanese he met with were amazed by the notion that the US should apologize for the atomic bombs. They viewed it as an understandable thing to do in wartime.
Most would prefer not think about it, of course. Amongst those that sometimes do, the majority are opposed to nuclear weapons' possession and use.
In contemporary Japan it would be hard to find either a dove or a hawk or anything between who'd say bombing those two cities was justified. Hawks are more likely to say Japan was minding its own imperialistic business, just as Europeans had been doing for centuries prior. So Japan didn't deserve those bombings. Doves will be opposed to any kind of nuclear weapon and tend to showcase their compatriots' suffering in order to help prevent further proliferation and destruction.
Some Japanese Buddhists believe that their constant prayers for peace have been directly responsible for averting annihilation of the world since 1945. I'd guess that's 15% of the population.
I haven't read Hersey, but I could easily believe that in the 1960's he was told what people thought he wanted to hear. Not deceptively, but non-confrontationally.
"If one is more interested in an objective take on history,"
There is no such thing.
I think it's a close book. The book details the decision process from both sides. Japan's plans to continue the war. The way the high command coped with the first atomic bomb, etc. It does not sway you into thinking any side was justified, but it expands one's perspective to help you understand the other's side.
I personally don't see the world in terms of revenge and murder, so it's hard for me to understand how such specifically personal behaviors factor into the first Atomic attack.
The handwringing tends to be more of a white westerner thing.
The common justification that I have read is that the bombings shortened what would have otherwise been a protracted defeat, potentially saving many more lives than were taken. A Utilitarian argument. However, if we were to take a Kantian point of view, the bombed civilians were used as an “ends” to achieve victory. Or more simply, an immoral act can never be justified, whatever the outcome.
So which is right? I enjoyed a recent Star Trek episode that examined the Utilitarian philosophy taken to an extreme (spoilers follow). In it an advanced utopian society is powered by the suffering of one child, chosen before birth. The joy and happiness of millions, at the expense of one innocent. Utilitarian philosophy (and modern economic theory), would call this an obviously acceptable trade-off, but Kant would argue that it is immoral as a person can never be used as an ends.
In the real world, we saw this argument play out in regards to whether the torture of terrorists was acceptable if it meant the extraction of information that would save lives.
Personally, I am of the Kantian view point, and I think the nuclear bombing of the two Japanese cities can never, and should never, be justified as moral acts.
Kant never had to choose between 225,000 dead (Hiroshima + Nagasaki) or 70,000,000 (the rest of the population who showed every sign of willingness to fight to the last child).
Japan was routinely fighting all the way to 80-90% casualties in battles, which is AFAIK completely unheard of in modern warfare. That number was going up as they got closer to the homeland, not down like when most militaries are clearly losing.
It’s not my point though. Regardless of the actual trade in lives and human suffering between the two alternatives, a deontological viewpoint judges the rightness of an action by the action itself - no matter the outcome.
So that’s my point. The bombing of civilians (whatever the prevailing norms, and no matter the consequences), is always wrong, and can never be justified on the grounds of “it shortened the war“ or “it would have saved millions of lives”.
However, it’s not a simple and clear cut argument, and perhaps it can be justified in other ways. I reject the utilitarian arguments, but I’m open to considering other justifications.
The real world has many more real variables and tradeoffs than any ethical system could reasonably account for even abstractly. The systems provide a surface to bounce new cases off of, but IMO if an ethical system says it's preferable to pick near-certain death of say 1 million people (a mere 1.4% hypothetical casualty rate) over the certain death of 250,000 people, it should very obviously be discarded for that case.
No ethical system, including Kantian, says it’s better to pick a million dead over 250k. Kant says “you can’t kill 250000 people to save a million, and call yourself righteous”. A man can sell his soul to save his family but the price must be paid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_...
The best response to all criticism of the bombings is "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" by Paul Fussell, The New Republic, August 1981.
<https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...>
However… 70-80 million people died in WWII, or about 3% of the population of the world.
I don’t agree with using nuclear weapons. But… how many Japanese lives were spared with a quick end to the war? That’s not a justification, it’s the counterpoint to “we can never do x”.
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...
They had been firebombing and eradicating whole Japanese cities for days/weeks. (Another topic to discuss -- that the pressure was applied to the civilian non-fighting population, regardless of the method.)
The late Japanese surrender is a failure of diplomacy -- the two sides could not communicate and neither side could swallow the whole "emperor question."
When the Russians started moving and declared war to Japan, both sides gave up something: "unconditional" surrender and emperor got to stay and not implicated in anything related to the war.
See the whole background behind the following trials, where a lot of people either did not get prosecuted or chose to die instead of implicating the emperor in any way.
I see an argument that nuclear bombs are 'too easy to use', making their existence horrible. But I don't see why the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki get a special place (other than symbolic) when compared to other mass bombings of population centers. All such bombings are horrifying and evil.
Yes, they are. Aside from a few scientists and engineers who witnessed Trinity, the entire world changed after 8/6/45. It wasn't just the immediate impact of those two bombs, but recognising the potential of all the to-be constructed bombs that would surely (and did) follow.
The bombings were justified for revenge?
* It was a formality, the Soviets were about to invade Manchuria, we should have just blockaded the Japanese mainland and let events play out, not evaporate 100k civilians.
(There is nothing particularly special about the use of nuclear weapons here, the bombing of Dresden is just as indefensible).
EDIT: Deleted a segment which is probably untrue. Here is what I said:
~However, I don’t think the people that decided to use the nuclear bomb on cities cared that much about justice for the crimes of the Japanese army. If they had, they probably wouldn’t have given the war criminals high positions at the US army after the war.~
I don't.