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Comment by xeornet | Hacker News Reader

It was used on cities full of civilians - and essentially just a show of force. That could have been done elsewhere, without the pure suffering caused. Justifying it as saving lives can be used ad nauseam for most wars, and pure propaganda. Would we justify Russias use of nuclear weapons on a Ukrainian city to stop the war "early"? We'd call it war crimes.

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What's your point? Allied firebombing had leveled nearly every other city in Japan already and those cities were, unsurprisingly, full of civilians too. Much more Japanese were incinerated as a result of firebombing than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

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.

Notably, strategic air power (i.e. mass civilian bombing) is likely rather ineffective [1]. That makes both the nuclear bombs and the firebombings horrible tragedies.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...

There was an article on HN that asked the question "why was a second bomb dropped". The conclusion was that the plan was to drop many nuclear bombs, and it was presidential intervention that limited it to two. Due to miscommunication the president didn't even know about the second bomb until after the fact.

Edit: the article link was https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/08/09/why-nagasaki/

>That could have been done elsewhere, without the pure suffering caused.

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 isn't clear under what other conditions Japan would surrender.

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?

The Emperor didn't really have all the power. The military was on the cusp of mutiny after the second bomb, fearing the Emperor would surrender. It is really unlikely that the emperor would surrender without one nuclear bomb. The generals wouldn't have it. So yes, maybe one bomb might have been enough, and the only reason anything changed after the second bomb was a change in the surrender conditions. Do you know for certain that they didn't discuss allowing the emperor to remain after the first bomb? Do you have any link I could read about this?

The emperor’s power didn’t matter as much as his central importance in their religion. He was like a god, and the Postdam Declaration didn’t make it clear that the emperor would be safe. Hence why it was rejected.

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.

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