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My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better than a land invasion, but I find the arguments against at least giving the Japanese a demonstration of the bomb - even just the footage of the Trinty test - beforehand fairly weak.

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.

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> My feeling is that dropping the bomb was overall better than a land invasion.

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.

How about "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." https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/united-...

Ah yes, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, how could they ever be unbiased in concluding that bombing people to smithereens inevitably leads to surrender. No, I'm disinclined to trust their opinion.

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.

People also underestimate how much death came from our firebombing which would have continued, and would have come from blockade-induced starvation, relative to the nuclear bomb deaths.

It's not like the numbers would have been lower...

This is a fair criticism (although the generally accepted story is precisely that 'bombing people to smithereens' with atomic weapons led to surrender), but the evidence they based that opinion on is generally available. Having looked at it myself, I wouldn't have said everything they did with quite the same level of confidence, but I agree with their broad strokes opinion that it was most likely possible to achieve a Japanese surrender in a reasonable time-frame without dropping the atomic bombs or invading.

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.

Well, Bomber Harris is on record saying his strategy of terror bombing civilians in Germany was driven by revenge for the Blitz.

One of my relatives was in Korea staging to invade when the bomb dropped. It is very likely a whole branch of my family would not exist without the bomb.

It is also certain that many branches of Japanese families do not exist because of the bomb.

It is also certain that many branches of many families do not exist because of the war.

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.

> Defenders can use anything, including weapons of mass destruction, to defend themselves.

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.

Yes, wars are not simple. Fog of war may make it blurry, or enemy may fool each other. For example, soviets shelled their own territory in Finnish war, to pretend that they were attacked first, so they are defending. Russians are using same thing too: they blown up their own buildings to blame Chechen and then started second Chechen war, or, in case of Russo-Ukrainian war, they pretend that Ukraine will be swallowed by NATO and then European and American homosexuals will freely fuck Russian-speaking Ukrainian children, so Russians are invaded to protect Ukrainians!

However, this should not alter your moral compass. Those, who defend themselves, have moral rights to wipe the attackers or invaders.

I don't think there was much in the Geneva Conventions about targeting civilians until 1949 and the 4th Geneva convention. Maybe there was something about bombarding civilians from ships at sea.

I’m pretty sure morality and moral compass predate the Geneva Conventions, though. Just because it was not “sanctioned” doesn’t mean it was necessarily moral, and WEIZSÄCKER’s comment indeed shows it.

In the end all that matters is power. Words on a treaty mean nothing when it comes down to it, only their enforcement does.

Yeah no, I can condemn the usage of the bomb and calling the US a “defender” in the Pacific theatre stretches the truth considerably.

More probably exist because of the bomb. A land invasion would've killed an order of magnitude more Japanese, and of course plenty of Americans as well.

There is compelling evidence that they were gearing up to surrender.

Do you think Japanese civilians wouldn't have died in droves if the US military were forced to take the whole of Nippon street by street?

And now contrast that to all the families in Japan that do not exist because them.

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.

Hiroshima still was a war crime.

As was Nanking and all the other cities the Japanese military destroyed.

Yes.

Uh huh, by which standard that Imperial Japan recognized and adhered to?

Why does this affect whether it is a war crime or not?

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.

> Uh huh

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.

Two wrongs don't make a right?

Why can't we admit that the Allies committed their own war crimes and move on?

I have admitted that the Allies committed war crimes, so why aren't you satisfied? Why are you upset that I insist on pointing out that the Japanese did so as well?

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.

Ego mostly, I guess its harder to be righteous and above others if you have some dark spot in your history. Also, some folks don't like complexity of real world so black and white is what they want, and obviously being on good side.

>> Truman made the right call

Hiroshima still was a war crime.

In context though the allies didn't see the difference. Missing from this account is that Japanese civilians were being continuously bombed. More died in the Tokyo firebombings then Hiroshima.

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.

As I suggested already: whether the Japanese believed them or took it seriously is moot. Giving them the opportunity to surrender in response to the bomb helps shift moral blame onto them.

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.

> North Korea isn't an alliance of the most powerful nations in the world with leading scientific and military capability.

> 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...

You're misunderstanding a few things about those leaflets (which isn't entirely your fault, that page is very poorly written).

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...

If the Tokyo firebombings were more deadly, doesn’t that mean that was less moral than dropping the bomb?

I'm not sure what in my comment you're specifically referring to, but...sure, I'll bite.

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...

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

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.’

But the US had already destroyed multiple Japanese cities through firebombing and killed ~900k civilians. How would the threat to destroy one of the few surviving cities left have any creditability at that point?

What do you mean by "credibility"? By the definition as I understand it, "believability"...I don't see how the current war situation would affect that. If the US had destroyed many cities already, why wouldn't the Japanese believe that they'd be willing to destroy more?

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.

In principle, this makes sense.

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.

but I find the arguments against at least giving the Japanese a demonstration of the bomb - even just the footage of the Trinty test - beforehand fairly weak.

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.

The US only had enough material for 3 bombs. It would have been a big gamble to drop one on empty land.

Maybe in short order, but wasn’t the US well on its way to industrializing the entire pipeline?

Consider how many people were dying EVERY DAY during World War 2. Sure, they may have been able to industrialize, but the world was in the midst of experiencing death on a scale we can't even really imagine today. The pressure to end the war must have been enormous. Which isn't to say that it was an easy, or even correct, decision, but we can't really do a simple calculation of "well they could have waited a few more weeks/months" and get a feel for the gravity of the situation.

Paul Fussel had something to say on that topic in the essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb":

https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/unde...

Something that I've wondered - a kind of weakly held theory that, from various references, seems plausible - is:

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.

They knew what they were doing, or should have but were lying to themselves. Even if some of them got verbal contract pinky promises when they signed on, all of them knew they were building a bomb which would be given not just to the current government but to future governments as well. It would take profound willful naivety to believe they had any meaningful assurances whatsoever.

What moral obligation? The same that the Japanese gave the Chinese at Nanking?

The brutality of the Japanese military didn't mean innocent Japanese civilians deserved to suffer or die.

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?

This is not a throw-away comment. It is exactly why the US did not want to face the Japanese on the main island.

There was already horror among the civilians, with the firebombing of Tokyo alone causing 100K casualties.

Ah, so we already killed hundred of thousands of innocent civilians, so of course it is ok for us to kill a some more? Not sure that this is a solid argument...

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