But they used two bombs. Wouldn't one have been enough to end the war?
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.
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.