Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)
ghdi.ghi-dc.org
ghdi.ghi-dc.org
[...]
> WIRTZ: It seems to me that the political situation for STALIN has changed completely now.
> WEIZSÄCKER: I hope so. STALIN certainly has not got it yet. If the Americans and the British were good Imperialists they would attack STALIN with the thing tomorrow, but they won't do that, they will use it as a political weapon. Of course that is good, but the result will be a peace which will last until the Russians have it, and then there is bound to be war.
Sounds like it was this individual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4...
[1] Which was not about the situation in USSR itself (they could not care less, they supported worse attrocities before and after the war), but about losing their colonial and geopolitical influence, and about their own workers being "tempted" into socialism and demanding more rights, unions, and such.
Right?
The "anti-democracy" communists did more to get rid of Nazis and fascism than all of Europe and US combined (the latter, especially, came late to the party, with token gestures like Normandy, and have since used movie after movie to instill in popular culture the idea they "won the war"). And had a much bigger toll.
And if it weren’t for the monumental material support in form of the US-provided lend-lease arrangement, the Nazis would’ve conquered the Soviet Union and carried out a genocide that’d have dwarfed the Holocaust.
Keep in mind that Stalin himself professed and acted on the belief that coexistence with capitalism was impossible and thought that conflict with the West was inevitable within 15 years of WWII. We're all lucky that he died before then and the cooler head of Khrushchev prevailed.
The Soviets produced 157k airplanes, the US only gave them 11k (7%).
US gave 7k tanks, Soviets produced 87,500 (8%).
The main contribution by the US was support vehicles like jeeps and trucks and fuel. Neither the aircraft or tanks were very notable beyond the very early years.
The Soviets largely did it on the own armour/aircraft wise. Which was why Hitler was so obsessed with invading in the first place. He knew unless they rushed to invade Russia could unleash it's massive capacity for production that'd they'd be impossible to invade on their own, or at a minimum be way harder to beat.
Obviously, these are all absolutely critical. As is the aluminum, high-octane avgas, etc that the Soviets obtained via Lend-Lease
The entire history of US foreign relations in South and Central America and the Middle East (at least!) is dominated with compromises similar to this.
It's difficult to know where to start a list!
If you’re swimming in a sea of US-standard media and patriotic narratives, I suppose it’s easier to believe the former rather than the latter.
I'm not sure how you'd get that from my comment (I'm not from the US, so I think you are reading an awful lot into what I said there!).
Either way, both those narratives fit the realpolitik the OP seemed to be calling for.
This is exactly why I'm so sceptical of the eagerness, even enthusiasm, of those who want to launch us straight into the next cold war, again to the mood music of ethical sounding objectives you cannot possibly oppose.
Perceived non-aligned folks were murdered if possible, often with CIA folks standing just behind the corner (Allende, Che etc.). You can't really say that putting into office fascist murderous dictator like Pinochet instead of Allende was a compromise in any way.
If you meant the support and establishment of dictatorships and banana republics there, those aren't compromises in the sense of "working with the devil they hate", like they had to do in WWII with Stalin.
These are working joyly with "our kind of guys".
The main difference being that Stalin was an opponent and against the US interests, whereas those guys like Pinochet were always about the US interests, even groomed and build up especially to support them.
How can you believe this when unsavoury compromise is the relationship of most of the world with the US?
Geopolitical realism has always involved turning on your allies as soon as they become the primary threat to your power; or even better to induce two rival competitors to fight each other[0]
See Mearsheimer and political realism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
The are reasons Operation Unthinkable wasn't launched. But one has to admit, the anti-communist propaganda that united people from Patton, McCarthy all the way to former Wehrmacht Generals, still has long lasting effects even today.
But I'll bite, how exactly were those two individuals right about anything? Can ypu share some specific details?
[John] Von Neumann was, at the time, a strong supporter of "preventive war." Confident even during World War II that the Russian spy network had obtained many of the details of the atom bomb design, Von Neumann knew that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. He predicted that were Russia allowed to build a nuclear arsenal, a war against the U.S. would be inevitable. He therefore recommended that the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, destroying its enemy and becoming a dominant world power, so as to avoid a more destructive nuclear war later on. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when," he would say. An oft-quoted remark of his is, "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
I think he might be on to something ;)
> Yes, Nazi propaganda did often refer to the Allies, particularly the UK and the US, using terms such as “Anglo-American” or “Anglo-Saxon” in a pejorative sense. This language reflected the Nazis’ racist ideology, in which they posited a hierarchy of races with Aryans at the top and viewed others, including Anglo-Saxons, as lesser or enemies. This also served to foster animosity and dehumanize the Allies among the German populace. However, such language was not universally used by all within the Nazi regime, and the terminology often varied depending on the context and specific propaganda objectives at the time.
In general, the Brits were the "Tommys" or "Briten" or "Engländer", the Americans the "Amerikaner" or just "Amis", the Soviets were "Bolschewiken" or just "Russen".
Anglo-Saxon ("angelsächsisch") doesn't have a Nazi connotation, wasn't used in an exceptional way and isn't more dehumanizing than using "the brits", "the americans" or "the germans". "Amerikaner", "Briten" and "Russen" are also still in normal use.
Also: Nazi Germany did not see the Brits as "racially inferior". Most were also seen as "aryan".
In case of the US, it even brings it closer to Europe because the term groups Great Britain and the US to compare them to mainland Europe (mostly France + Germany).
This is just a summary from the day the Germans found out about the bomb. The full transcripts are available.[1][2][3] Unfortunately, the recordings were not kept. They were not on magnetic tape; they were recorded on shellac records. Only the interesting parts were transcribed.
The conclusion of the US Alsos mission to investigate the German bomb program: "It was so obvious the whole German uranium set up was on a ludicrously small scale. Here was the central group of laboratories, and all it amounted to was a little cave, a wing of a small textile factory, a few rooms in an old brewery. To be sure, the laboratories were well equipped, but compared to what we were doing in the United States it was still small-time stuff. Sometimes we wondered if our government had not spent more money on our intelligence mission than the Germans had spent on their whole project."
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
[2] https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
[3] https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
There was a Kottke post about this in 2019. One year, four, same thing.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20659607>
This looks to be the same transcript, also from 2019:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19113443>
And from 2016. You have several of the top comments:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250>
And a discussion about the event from July 2022:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32164657>
<https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/5401/The-elusive-tr...>
Thank God the Germans didn't realize the potential there or the world would have looked very differently now. It's not as if they didn't have the technical chops to make something like this work. They even had working jet fighters.
Sometimes I wonder if Heisenberg secretly took them on the scenic route. Because his whole uranium cubes on strings thing looks a bit contrived.
Despite having been mass produced and being ready for use during the entire war, it luckily never was. Had it been, it is likely the war would have lasted much longer and would have been much deadlier, it is also likely the first nuclear bomb would have been dropped on Berlin.
When WWII came to an end most of the supply and manufacturing plants were captured by the soviets and put back into production.
1964 US Army Training Film : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2O5ndVkNKk
NY article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/science/sean-spicer-hitle...
How did Heisenberg know with such an accuracy the budget of the Manhattan project? Wikipedia states that it was $2.2 billion, and the pound/dollar exchange rate during the war was $4.03 for £1, so Heisenberg was less than 10% off.
Edit: I think all these discussions must have happened after they heard Truman's speech [1], where he quoted the pricetag of 2 billion dollars.
[1] https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeche...
What's not appreciated about the Manhattan project is that not only the US made a bomb, it made two, meaning two completely different designs. And they were aware of a third one: Glen Seaborg (the discoverer of plutonium) has investigated the feasibility of making a bomb from Uranium-233 [1]
> Seaborg viewed uranium-233 as a potential backup to plutonium-239
Say what you will about the US, and it certainly has its faults, but the Americans, both the private sector and public sector, have certainly figured out how to coordinate with others towards a goal.
The ability to coordinate with others seems like a more valuable quality than virtually any other in a serious project, in my experience.
Public acceptance of those vaccines is another story, of course…
During Covid I had neighbors who refused to wear masks and spewed nonsense. One of them now can’t go outside because their lungs got rekt, another had to take a LOA for a few months to recover. I wore a mask and never got Covid.
But the ones with the lights on would be the ones getting bombed. Thanks for your service I guess?
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-india-pfi...
* They could not get enough foreign vaccines quickly enough.
* They have lots of biotech, relatively speaking.
> you refuse to allow public trials in other nations, the third world will not trust you
It was about politics, not trust.
If you were in Manhattan the first week after 9/11 you witnessed tremendous solidarity and cooperation.
It was, in some small way, life changing to witness.
Looks like you can now buy it on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Epsilon-Farm-Hall-Transcrip...
wiseacre means "one who feigns knowledge or cleverness; one who is wisecracking; an insolent upstart." If you made a joke somebody might say "oh, a real wiseacre, eh?"
seeing Weizsäcker's name I was struck by the similarity so I thought I'd look it up, and turns out the two words have the same etymology: soothsayer, wise man
wiktionary From Middle Dutch wijssegger (“soothsayer”), from Old High German wīzzago, wīzago (“wise man, prophet, soothsayer”), from Proto-West Germanic *wītagō (“wise one; prophet”). Cognate with Old English wītga (“wise man, prophet”). See also German Weissager (“soothsayer, seer”).
Weizen - wheat Sack - bag
> HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the quickest way of ending the war.”
We're still awarding the Purple Heart medals that were produced in vast quantities in WW2 in expectation of the invasion of Japan. (or so I've heard)
Did the second one end the war?
Did the first and second ones prevent the next war?
I'm not sure of the answer to these questions; they're obviously important and difficult to answer. The timing certainly hints to "no, yes, maybe" but we're not going to get a do-over.
Ok you get many indirect wars e.g. Ukraine, Vietnam, Korea much in Africa but not ones that could escalate to World War levels.
Ukraine does differ as a major power is involved in its own name.
Alright, from his point of view, perhaps this is sensible: Ukraine stands to lose otherwise, so for him the World War might be preferable.
They purposely chose purely civilian targets, in order to inflict maximal civilian casualties. If this is not morally wrong, then nothing is.
By the technology of the time (precision weapons were half a century away), they were absolutely valid targets.
Second, the US did not target any specific industrial areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In each case, it targeted the center of town, with the goal of inflicting maximum destruction on the city as a whole.
Industrial bases, military bases, centers of government: these are all legitimate targets in a time of war and all are built in and around cities. The difference today is we have precision weapons so they can be reasonably targeted accurately, and the side-benefit is that night-vision capability favors night-time strikes which minimizes the number of civilians around.
But don't delude yourself into thinking that there's any such thing as a "clean war". It's a war.
I lean towards it being morally wrong to target civilian areas, but to claim ahistorically that the targets were intentionally purely civilian is false. Being of military importance (military post, arms manufacturing) was a requirement of the choice for both cities. Both had military significance.
But it was a tragedy. Even if you think the decision to drop the bomb was defensible, no one’s conscience should be at ease when making such a terrible decision even if you feel like you’re forced by necessity. Which I don’t think was necessarily the case.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisatio...
Historically, the major reason why the US targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that the US military wanted to test its two bomb designs on large, pristine urban centers. Attacking pristine targets made measuring the effects of the bombs easier. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been significant military targets, they likely would have been bombed much earlier. In a perverse way, they were chosen because they weren't military targets.
As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit’s way of war was to go through and around way the jungle. The Americans simply leveled the jungle.
That’s why the Japanese strategy didn’t work. That decentralization became a liability even before the cities were destroyed and why you can’t divide Japanese cities into civilian and military targets.
Of course we only built two, but the Japanese didn’t know that.
Grim stuff. As horrible as the war was already, glad it didn’t come to that.
Note that there was a third bomb scheduled and in preparation and it was decommissioned and returned to Los Alamos.
Also note that the conventional bombing of Tokyo just a few months prior caused greater destruction and loss of life.
Evaluations have to be made in context, which is very hard. There was a lot of anger and pain on both sides, which lead to irrational "momentum" in prosecution of war. Also there is the logic of industrial warfare: look at Europe: many smaller German cities were bombed for the first time just in the the last month of that war, because a huge machine had been switched on that just kept emitting planeloads of bombs which had to be dropped somewhere.
There is a thoughtful discussion of this topic by Tooze from just a few days ago: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-230-burning-hambu...
The Germans did terrible things, but the allies definitely did not have the moral high ground on all fronts. This is for me the horror of war: that because of one side losing its humanity the other side will too.
Dresden being a purely civilian target is a myth.
Note that I have no love for Nazi Germany, my family suffered tremendously at their hands and the results of that are still felt today. At the same time: I am categorically against indiscriminate firebombing of cities leading to 20K+ civilian deaths and if you feel that those civilians were a legitimate target because they happened to be in the city then you and I are probably not going to have a very productive discussion.
What I'm saying Jacques, is that the issue is nuanced. I encourage you to read Frederick Taylor's excellent book on the subject.
It also informed my stance on how I perceive war and my own possible role in it: I would definitely find myself mobilized (financially, personally) to help defend countries that are overrun by obvious aggressors, including my own but I would under no circumstance allow myself to be roped into a war of aggression up to the point where I would be happy to go to prison or worse if it came to it. This is not trivial stuff and I have so far been fortunate enough not to have seen this put to the test in a practical sense.
I know Dresden was not a purely civilian target, but civilians were fairly explicitly targeted, either that or you'd have to chalk that all up to extreme sloppiness, which is not a case that anybody credible has ever made.
I feel like we're pretty much on the same page, then.
Welcome to the fundamental ethical dilemma underlying the debate around the Total War concept.
I don't claim to have all the answers.
Total war stopped being a thing once it became certain the next one would lead to global nuclear annihilation.
As Mcnamara himself says in the documentary interview Fog of War, proportionality is a concept in warfare.
As many as 1,000 officers and army soldiers raided the Imperial Palace on the evening of 14 August 1945 to destroy the recording. The rebels were confused by the layout of the palace and were unable to find the recordings, which had been hidden in a pile of documents. The two phonographs were labelled original and copy and successfully smuggled out of the palace, the original in a lacquer box and the copy in a lunch bag. Major Kenji Hatanaka attempted to halt the broadcast at the NHK station but was ordered to desist by the Eastern District Army.[2][3]
Even after two were dropped members of the armed forces still wanted the war to continue.
The indisputable fact is that Japan had thoroughly lost the war at that point--it was either losing or had already completely lost in every theater. I tend to think that the atomic bombs played a big role in the decision to surrender in that it showed that the Americans were capable of devastating entire cities with a single bomber: air defenses are unlikely to score any hits against a single bomber unlike a large fleet of bombers carpet bombing cities into oblivion, robbing Japan even of the chance to die in a blaze of glory.
But this also raises a tricky moral question. The decision to end a war is not made by the victor but by the loser. What should you do if the loser refuses to admit the loss?
On the Japanese side there were multiple factions. Everyone in leadership understood the war was lost, but a large fraction still had hope of making things costly enough for the US to negotiate a conditional surrender that preserved the Emperor.
This is what all of the constant debates on hacker news failed to take into regard. If you look at the correspondence and the commentary of the people making decisions, it is quite clear that prior to the atomic bombing, the only side that was trying to minimize casualties was in fact, the United States. In fact, even on the allied side, neither Russia nor the United Kingdom, were particularly concerned with minimizing casualties. Since Stalin felt that he would gladly trade Soviet lives in favor of land that he could hold after the war, and the United Kingdom government was determined to make an example to justify their occupation of Asia .
It’s also worth noting that Nimitz and King, were proposing a path that would’ve led to an order of magnitude more death than either an invasion or the atomic bombs. A fleet blockade of Japan would’ve starved everyone in Japan.
Because you know democracies are weak and monarchies are strong kinda thing.
There was a real feel of “we’ll be a 110M martyrs, before japan surrenders its land”. And as vietnam war later showed us, a strategy like this can potentially work.
The bombs I think showed that the US appears to have the ability kill those 110M people without setting foot on the island.
Nobody can predict what would have happened without the bombs, it was a very complex situation, but after listening to dan carlin’s Hardcore History account of the pacific war, I’d say I’m convinced they played a major role for sure.
Yes, it's likely - given the Imperial Japanese military's overall disposition - that it wouldn't have been enough to cause them to surrender, in which case using the bomb on a target would be the next step. And yes, advance notice might have made those operations more difficult. But given the horror it unleashed on innocent civilians, I think the Allies had a moral obligation to try it.
Years ago I asked my buddy what was his take on dropping the bomb. He answered that when the bombs dropped, his dad was in Florida training for the invasion of Japan.
There's no snappy reply to that particular argument.
Imperial Japan committed numerous war crimes, whether or not they agreed that they were war crimes at the time. By the same token anything that was done to them should not be judged by what their own standard was.
Acknowledgement that it was a warcrime.
> by which standard that Imperial Japan recognized and adhered to?
Admonishment to get some damn perspective. What was done to Japan must be evaluated in the context of what Japan would have been doing to American soldiers and POWs had America been forced to invaded Japan proper. That war was non-stop war crimes from Japan. Particularly perfidy, false surrender, which would have gotten huge numbers of Japanese civilians killed in any case. Truman made the right call, for America and for Japan.
Why can't we admit that the Allies committed their own war crimes and move on?
If American war crimes are worth mentioning, then so are Japanese war crimes. Wanting to discuss one without the other isn't reasonable. What you are asking for is the erasure of context, and to that I say No.
Hiroshima still was a war crime.
Blame those, who started the war, instead of those, who ended it.
Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass destruction, to defend themselves. Attacking to with intent to kill even one person is crime.
Not according to the Geneva convention. Targeting civilians is a war crime, regardless of who does it.
In many wars, both sides claim to only defend themselves, often both sides even claim to have been attacked first. Just look at the last few wars fought by the US for example. Under such a simplistic moral compass as you gave, they'd both feel justified to do anything.
> Attacking to with intent to kill even one person is crime.
Dropping an atomic bomb on a civilian center is attacking with intent to kill.
It is just not so simple.
However, this should not alter your moral compass. Those, who defend themselves, have moral rights to wipe the attackers or invaders.
War is ugly, strategic bombing never worked, proponents knew that (they saidnsouch in their own contemporary reports and statements, going as far as knowing strategic bombing of civilians was in deed a war crime). Nuclear bombs are a contiuation of of strategic bombing, and as strategic bombing goes, they were an unnecessary war crime.
We in the modern day have the benefit of being able to pull examples from more than just WW2. Before WW2, the predictions of air power theorists were that strategic bombing would end wars before the powers could properly start mobilizing (look up Giulio Douhet, this was seriously argued). Japan in WW2 is the closest any example of strategic bombing has ever come to compelling a surrender, out of a dozen or so attempts. Its exceptionality is itself a suggestion that maybe bombing's role in Japanese surrender is perhaps inflated.
It's not like the numbers would have been lower...
My sense of it is that there was a strong feeling of the need to punish the Japanese, quite apart from any military necessity. I think that, combined with the need to demonstrate the power of the new weapons lead to a reluctance to seriously engage with the Japanese diplomatically. I take as evidence of that the fact that a key sticking point in the surrender decision was the status of the Emperor, who ultimately wasn't removed by the US anyway. The allies could have made their terms much clearer much earlier, and they could have engaged with the Japanese attempts to seek peace much more. And of course there was the ongoing worry that the Soviet Union might gain too much if things weren't sorted out quickly.
From Truman's diaries at the time:
> Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time.
There's also the practical problems: how would you do it? How would you give the demonstration? How would you deliver the tape? And why would Japan believe an enemy claiming to have a superweapon? It'd be kind of like North Korea sending a film of why the US should now surrender because of their new space laser.
Whether the Allies cared much or not is also moot in terms of what they should've done, morally speaking. Clearly my opinion is they didn't care enough. Clearly I find the firebombings morally disgraceful as well. Clearly, at least some people involved in the decision cared a little, as several people did lobby for a demonstration. The US also was known to airdrop pamphlets encouraging civilian evacuation of cities; civilians weren't a total non-concern.
It's not anything like North Korea threatening the US with a space laser. For a multitude of reasons: US spy capability means they would know well in advance the details of any North Korean space laser. North Korea isn't an alliance of the most powerful nations in the world with leading scientific and military capability. And if North Korea did indeed demonstrate a space laser that could obliterate a city in a fraction of a second, you'd better believe the US would stand up and take notice, for that matter.
Moreover, at the time an atomic bomb wasn't science fiction. Everyone at that point had known that an atomic bomb was possible for decades; both the Germans and the Japanese were trying to develop one. Given that, if the Americans said, "we've succeeded in developing one and intend to use it to destroy your cities unless you surrender", along with a demonstration of in action, it wouldn't be unthinkable that the Japanese would take it seriously - nor would it be particularly different from the Potsdam Declaration, which demanded surrender lest they face "utter destruction" without any specifics, which the Allies did indeed think was worth saying.
Delivering a reel of film would have been straightforward; even in total war all communication channels aren't cut off. If you want to do a real-world demonstration that can be observed, find a place to detonate it where it will be observed but will do minimal damage. The Manhattan Project involved solving many, many problems; this is just another one, and a relatively small one at that. When confronted with a problem, you figure it out.
> Moreover, at the time an atomic bomb wasn't science fiction.
After the original Hiroshima bombing the principle reaction of the Japanese government was surprise. The Japanese were well aware of the idea of nuclear weapons, but believed they would be impractically large like the Germans did - i.e. on the order of 10 tons of uranium needed for one bomb, and were surprised the US had that much.
> And if North Korea did indeed demonstrate a space laser that could obliterate a city in a fraction of a second, you'd better believe the US would stand up and take notice, for that matter.
But again: what would make the US believe it? Footage of the thing? Camera trickery was known in 1945. Firing it at field? You can fake that by pre-planting explosives/incendiaries. With modern technology the US might be able to observe the satellite, the laser, and the damage altogether but with the technology of 1945 how would any of this have been communicated?
> The US also was known to airdrop pamphlets encouraging civilian evacuation of cities; civilians weren't a total non-concern.
> if the Americans said, "we've succeeded in developing one and intend to use it to destroy your cities unless you surrender"
The Potsdam declaration[1] said what was coming, just not the scale.
The US also dropped pamphlets on Hiroshima telling civilians to leave[2] and showing pictures of the first detonation. They were ignored.
[1] https://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html
[2] https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/warning-leaf...
My understanding is that the "LeMay leaflets" were dropped on Hiroshima - and many other cities - but they didn't say anything specific about the bomb; just that America was bombing cities and encouraging civilians to flee. But, as we know (and they knew), America was already bombing Japanese cities - there wasn't any indication anything "special" was coming. The pamphlets actually excluded Hiroshima from the list of cities that might be bombed (with the caveat that the list was incomplete). Civilians were on edge, but often couldn't leave for various reasons, trusted things like air raid sirens, believed that their distance from military targets kept them relatively free from danger, and so on. This is documented in the essential "Hiroshima" article by John Hersey.
And these warnings weren't entirely ignored - Hiroshima's population before the bombing was substantially smaller than it was before the war, in large part because many Japanese civilians who could had fled cities.
The "Hiroshima pamphlet" - the one depicted - was not dropped on Hiroshima. This is apparent if you read the text, which describes Hiroshima as already destroyed; or the fact that it shows an image of the explosion over Hiroshima, not the Trinity test.
This [0] Reddit link - which I found by googling about the LeMay pamphlets - goes further to claim (and support, in the links) that even those weren't dropped over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. IIRC this contradicts Hersey's reporting, FWIW.
(Incidentally, based on the username, that Reddit comment was probably written by someone cited in your link. Either that or it's an eerie coincidence.)
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8rgyky/comme...
Let's split hairs. The Tokyo firebombings killed, per Wikipedia, 80K-130K civilians, depending on your estimate. Again per Wikipedia, Little Boy killed 70K-126K civilians, as well as an additional 7K-20K soldiers and 12 American POWs. Given those numbers, rather than "more deadly" I'd prefer to say "just as deadly".
You're far from the only one in this comment thread to do this, but...I don't understand why the fact that the firebombing of Tokyo was approximately just as deadly as Hiroshima is supposed to somehow absolve Hiroshima. Most people who think Hiroshima was a war crime also think Tokyo was a war crime. The way I prefer to approach moral analysis, personally, isn't especially utilitarian - once we start splitting hairs about which war crime was more or less moral I can't help but feel like we might've lost the plot.
Now, with that aside, we can play some games here. Tokyo was (and is) a city an order of magnitude bigger than Hiroshima; 100,000 dead in Tokyo vs. 100,000 dead in Hiroshima means, in a sense, the attack on Tokyo was an order of magnitude less vicious. Maybe "viciousness" of an attack isn't especially meaningful on its own - if the US bombed the middle of nowhere to make a point and only a handful of people died it definitely wouldn't be as evil, even if the strength of the attack was the same. But this did have practical consequences - the infrastructure of Hiroshima to deal with the situation was demolished utterly. This meant no health care or support for any survivors - supposedly exactly one doctor was left uninjured. People were just left to suffer for days. In Tokyo there was still some health care available, there were still some support networks; because the destruction - awful as it was - was so much less complete, there was a much better chance that survivors could lean on friends or family for support. So the suffering of the survivors in Hiroshima was much greater. In this awful utilitarian Olympics of evil, the atom bomb takes a point.
There is, of course, the issue of radiation sickness. We do intuitively feel that, regardless of the particular numbers involved, chemical or biological warfare is a red line that musn't be crossed. It's one thing to blow people up, it's another thing to poison them - or give children cancer, as the case may be. Truman himself felt that way - although the scientists at Los Alamos had some idea about radiation Truman didn't, and some believe he might not have approved using the atom bomb if he'd known [0]. In that light, Hiroshima was definitively less moral than the firebombings.
And I guess it's worth stating that the truly deadly firebombing of Tokyo, Operation Meetinghouse, didn't come out of nowhere. The US had been bombing Japanese cities for three years. Operation Meetinghouse wasn't a surprise; it wasn't the first bombing of a Japanese city, it wasn't the first firebombing (that was in Kobe), it wasn't even the first firebombing of Tokyo (which happened a month prior). Since my argument here has been primarily "the US should have given the Japanese an understanding of their capabilities and given them an opportunity to surrender in light of them", I think you can make the case that they had with Tokyo in a way that they hadn't with Hiroshima, and that - at least by my own standards - that makes Hiroshima far more morally problematic.
[0] https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/10/18/who-knew-about-ra...
I’m more wondering aloud whether the option to surrender is just tacitly always on the table during war.
If the allies had said ‘we will firebomb Hiroshima unless you surrender’ it might almost seem like a meaningless endeavor since it’s hard to draw the line when you should alert your enemy of your next military action since ‘surrender’ is (probably) always tacitly assumed an option.
In this sense, giving an enemy an option to surrender (again) seems moot on the moral framework of ‘we are at war and will continue to bomb until the enemy officially surrenders, since we both know it is always an option.’
If you mean something like, "why would the threat to wipe out a city have an impact?"...I mean, clearly it did, because it led very quickly to surrender.
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...
I don't know what nationality you are, but I have no doubt that members of your country's military - very possibly within your lifetime - have committed atrocities, even if not at the same scale as in Nanjing. Do you feel personally responsible or deserving of retribution?
The US military betrayed the trust of many of the scientists and engineers who worked on the atomic bomb, by not doing a demonstration of the bomb first for its enemies, before dropping the bomb on civilians.
I watched "Adventures of a Mathematician" yesterday which really, really dwells on Ulam's reluctance to work on a weapon of death. There is a dramatized scene there of how upset many of the scientists were, that the bomb was dropped without a demonstration. The movie is based on his memoir, and based on that, it really seems that the 'deal' that many of those scientists took, was something like a) we'll work on an atomic bomb so Germany won't get it b) but we won't use it recklessly, it'll be demonstrated first.
Now of course the military didn't promise that in so many words, but that seems to have been very strongly understood, and the fact that the bomb went directly to killing people seems like a violation of what so many of the people who made that bomb possible, expected.
An enemy that doesn't surrender until you drop two atomic bombs on them was probably not going to surrender if you set one off in an unpopulated area as a demo.
I mean, I'd run up the white flag after being nuked once. You wouldn't have to tell me twice.
But if you look at Japanese leadership at the time, even after two bombs were dropped, the military leadership still didn't want to surrender. So a demonstration likely would not have achieved anything.
Japanese leadership was zealous in the extreme, at a level that is difficult to understand from a modern perspective. The difference between Japan then and Japan now is an order of magnitude larger than the difference between America then and America now.
Just ask what if a country that did it lost the war. People would probably be put to death just for this in Nuremberg.
That's not even a counterfactual. That's nonsense.
That doesn't prove that it should have been used. It was also not a given even a year earlier. If Henry A. Wallace had remained Vice President, it's likely his lack of antagonism towards the Soviets would have led him to avoid the show-of-force that the bombings were. The moment separating 150,000 Japanese civilians from life and death is the one where the DNC went behind the backs of the American people and chose Truman, chip-on-his-shoulder and all, to be FDR's last running mate. We're still paying for that bit of hubris.
If the threat stayed in the small-kiloton range, I think we'd very likely have seen them used again -- especially if one nation had a monopoly on such weapons.
But that's just a supposition; in the real world, we went from "there are two bombs, and we used 'em on Japan" to massive proliferation of weapons orders of magnitude stronger by opposing superpowers in a really really short period of time.
The Nagasaki bomb was ~ 22kt.
We (the US) built a 500kt fission-only bomb (the Mk. 18), so 20x that power; that was thought of as the functional ceiling for a simple atomic bomb.
But then came Teller-Ulam and the mk 17 thermonuclear bomb (no, I don't know why it's a lower number; maybe they started over with the thermonuclear devices?), which came in at 15,000 kt. A linear-scale graph showing Trinity, the Mk 18, and this bomb is hilariously inadequate; it's an object lesson in how warping it is to consider enormous numbers.
But with more precise delivery, and a large shift to multi-warhead ICBMs, the actual individual device yield shifted downward. There wasn't a need to fudge your margins with huge bombs if you could be reasonably certain of hitting a given target. Further, hitting anything with 15,000 kt would be absurd overkill unless your whole point was to wipe out an entire population center.
The biggest active US bomb is the B83, at about 1250 kt, or an order of magnitude less than the Mk 17. It's a gravity bomb, ie, requires a bomber. The bulk of the arsenal is, I believe, still tied to ICBM delivery, and hover under 500 kt per warhead (W88 in the Trident II; W78 and W87 in the Minuteman).
At first blush, the idea that we aren't arming ourselves with 15,000 kt weapons anymore SOUNDS good -- except analysts worry that less terrifying yields makes them more likely to use.
I'm paraphrasing from an excellent Twitter thread from nuclear weapons policy & history analyst Andrew Facini at
I think the argument was that the reason for the atomic bombing was not really a military necessity (fleet admirals Leahy and Nimitz at least seemed to think so). The Japanese were already signaling they were willing to surrender well before the bomb dropped -- but not yet _unconditionally_. The one condition they had was that the emperor had to stay in place and should not be punished for the war. The US could have chosen to accept this condition and end the war, but didn't for a variety of reasons (none of them military).
The War Council would not approve surrender.
After the Emperor made his decision, there was a serious coup attempt to prevent surrender: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident#:~:text=The%2....
But all in all, based on historical evidence and testimony, I find the case that, even without the bomb, Japan would have eventually surrendered on terms acceptable to the Allies the more convincing one.
> The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons — Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy
> The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan. — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz
> In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
> Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. - 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey report
The US occupation did leave the Emporer in place.
[0] https://catholicherald.co.uk/ch/weigels-terrible-arguments/
What was more immoral about dropping the a-bomb than firebombing Tokyo?
I like when people say "but the enemy did this and that, so us doing something similar is totally fine", because it is just false. But going to "we already did it once, so no biggy if we do it again right?" is even better. It acknowledges, and defends, the evilness of killing civilians at large scale at the same time. Kind of like wanting to be a big, badass and still feeling the need to morally justify all the shit one does.
They needed to show the Soviets what they could do. It was 100% a demonstration. The Soviets knew about it of course, but no one had really seen what it could do.
And if it helped end things early enough that the Soviets didn't invade themselves and partition Japan as they were already starting to do in Germany, then that was a bonus.
Whether it was morally sound to use it to intimidate Stalin is another question entirely, and I don't know what the answer is. But let's not pretend that it was some balance sheet calculation about how many lives would be lost... it was never that.
In what sense? It required no conspiracy at all. You might call it a political science theory... but only in the sense that the theory explains much more than others and is easily corroborated.
Just because you find an explanation distasteful, it doesn't make it a "conspiracy theory", and jumping to that label shows how poorly you argue.
> or because they just can't comprehend the US not having an ulterior motiv
The United States isn't a person. It can't have a "motive". It's a large group of people, a group with ever-changing membership. Each of those people can actually have their own motive, and many of them will have multiple motives.
But, at least in that era, you didn't have many people high up in the US government that had stupid motives. They were aware of overtures of surrender well before it was dropped. They were aware that it was unnecessary to force surrender, or at the very least that it wasn't their only option to force surrender without a ground invasion.
The Soviets were already the real problem. Indispensable while Germany was curb-stomping its way through Europe, but disgusting enough that there were elements in the government and military that wanted to fight them next.
It was necessary for the Soviets to see the bomb and what it could do. This was more necessary than it was to force the Japanese to surrender.
> but all of the actual documentary evidence from the time says otherwise.
What documentary evidence is that? Most of this shit wasn't written down. Sure, someone wrote down a narrative for the history books, after the fact. One that preserved the "we're the good guys" theme... can't exactly go murdering the unconscious bad guy that had already stopped fighting just to impress the other bad guys. Or rather, you can't admit that's what you were doing.
Then I gained perspective, and learned that Japan's navy had been entirely wiped out (EDIT: and the air force) the Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender, but the US wouldn't budge on something as minor as allowing to keep Hirohito as figurehead emperor (which they eventually did after they surrendered after the nukes).
It was racism, plain and simple. Actually, it's more than racism, I'm not sure that word explains it. This isn't the relatively mild white-on-black racism of 1940s America. This is a much different level of racism, where Americans saw the Japanese as complete subhumans not even worth morally debating over. The Americans spent years building those bombs, so they must have thought it was anti-climactic not to try them. They didn't want to use them near the white people in Europe, so who best than a remote island of people you don't even view as humans, to the point where you put your own citizens in internment camps for sharing an ethnicity with them?
But I see so many Americans clinging to the myth that the nukes were a utilitarian moral choice. Admitting the truth to themselves would raise some questions about their country which clash with the perception they have.
Even after dropping two bombs, Japanese military leadership still didn't want to surrender, and attempted a coup because the Emperor surrendered.
Plus, the firebombings of Tokyo killed more civilians, so aren't those worse?
While there was plenty of racism to go around at the time, I don't see how racism played into it. Germany was firebombed just like Japan. It didn't get nuked because the war there ended before nukes were ready, that's it.
> Every layman can see that these ideas are exceedingly important. Hence there won't be any money in it. You only make money on ideas which have escaped the general public. If you invent something like artificial rubies for the watch-making industry, you'll make more money than with the Uranium-Engine
After hearing news of the bomb
> That shows at any rate that the Americans are capable of real cooperation on a tremendous scale. That would have been impossible in Germany. Each one said that the other was unimportant.
As I read this thread, I guess that it has more and better thinking about the issues of morality, ethics, various steps that could have been attempted with Japan, atomic weapons stopping wars, etc. than Truman considered when he decided to drop the bombs and conclude that Truman saw just two cases: (1) Drop atomic bombs, end the war within not many hours, and save lives of US soldiers. (2) Delay, attempt, look for alternatives and possibilities, negotiate, demonstrate, ..., and lose more US lives. So, he picked (1), and maybe he did it in less than 10 minutes.
Note that more people were killed by firebombing Tokyo than either nuke, Japan was completely at the mercy of US bombing raids before the atomic bombs and they still refused to surrender.
This is the difference between Nationalism and Patriotism
WEIZSÄCKER: How many people were working on V 1 and V 2?
DIEBNER: Thousands worked on that.
---- Diebner is omitting HOW they got that workforce up into the thousands. Many who worked on V-1 and V-2 rockets were prisoners who were literally worked to death.
I've never seen any hint of this before or since. Has anyone else?
Looks like they never got sufficient quantities of U-235 to attempt a detonation.
Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_pro...
I have seen references about a US FBI file on him (Bomke, Hans 424771), also that he did do some co-research with Otto Hahn.
Paul Lawrence Rose's book "Heisenberg and the Nazi Atomic Bomb Project" say that the others at Farm Hall considered him a Nazi plant.
1. While much has been made of the theoretical physical effort at Los Alamos, without the Oak Ridge, TN and Hanford, WA chemical-physical production lines for uranium-235 and plutonium, bomb production would not have been possible.
2. These efforts required vast inputs of energy, mostly provided by hydroelectric projects such as TVA for the Oak Ridge uranium effort. It's highly implausible that such efforts would have succeeded in wartime Germany no matter how many resources were diverted to them. One bombing run would have wiped out the whole enterprise - and of course, neither Oak Ridge nor Hanford were subjected to aerial bombardment.
3. The Germans apparently were more interested in a nuclear rocket engine or some such than a nuclear bomb, by most accounts I've read. Also, their heavy water project in Norway was effectively sabotaged.
Note also, many scientists involved with the bomb project quit as soon as they learned Germany was defeated and so the rationale of beating the Germans to the bomb no longer made any sense.
FDR, if he hadn't died early, would almost certainly have rejected the use of the bomb against Japan, for the same reasons that he rejected the use of poison gas against the Japanese holdouts on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. If the Japanese had simply been given the option to retain their figurehead Emperor, they'd have certainly surrendered rather than accept the occupation of northern Japan by Russian forces in a replay of East Germany.
Isn't history fun?
Joseph Rotblat did. There weren't any others, let alone "many".
>FDR, if he hadn't died early, would almost certainly have rejected the use of the bomb against Japan, for the same reasons that he rejected the use of poison gas against the Japanese holdouts on Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
I think most historians would strongly disagree with this.
Do you have a source for a historian arguing this point? If so, I'd be curious to read it. My own (albeit, purely hobbyist level) understanding on this is that this would almost certainly not have been the case.
Which is exactly what happened to the small nuclear program Japan was attempting.
There was a barely averted coup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident) to overturn Hirohito's decision surrender so that is clearly incorrect. The military, who was in control of the Japanese government, wanted to continue the war even after the use of both atomic weapons.
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/DocumentLibrary/files/publishers/pto/co...
Edit: I've read some more of the transcript and what really is interesting is that they are so aloof from the realities of the situation they are in. Almost conceited.
Of course there are also layers of intrigue going on; they are all colleagues but they must know that they’ll ultimately be interviewed to determine who was really loyal to the Nazi party, so to some extent they are probably trying to convince each other. Meanwhile the guy writing the transcript seems generally to have opinions about their personalities, and a genuine concern for their well-being to some extent, so I’m sure that colors his analysis too.
I guess it's an institute dependant on grants, where they can't just blow money on a website redesign...