Hiroshima and the Myths of Military Targets and Unconditional Surrender (2020)
lawfaremedia.org
lawfaremedia.org
I mean… they’d already firebombed a lot of cities to similar effect. Japanese and German. We may wish they’d considered the morality or legality more thoughtfully in all cases, but it’s not an aberration that they went with “meh, kill them all” in the case of the A-bombs. The tool was (notably! Especially in hindsight) different, but the effect was similar to what they’d achieved in prior cases.
The way I see the field these days is a lot of hovering around a "middle" position on the bombs, as opposed to the extreme "ends" of the spectrum ("totally justified, best decision ever" vs. "terrible war crime done just to look tough"). The authors you are quoting, like Zinn (and Kuznik, who is also quoted by another response), are I think pretty anomalous in that they still stake out a hard, confident position on one end of the spectrum. (There are a few who stake out the other end, too.) The "middle" position, what the historian J. Samuel Walker calls "the consensus view", basically says that the bombs were seen as a perfectly fine, if not a little unusual, military decision, that they might not have been solely responsible for the surrender of Japan, and that the use of the bombs in the way they were used (on cities, little spacing, early August) was a mixture of vaguely strategic thinking (no "grand plan" on anyone's part, but people did have some ideas about what you might get out of doing it that way) and complete happenstance (the spacing between the bombs, and the fact that they had two ready to go in early August, depended on external factors that had nothing to do with real strategy).
When 75 million people have died across the world and nations destroyed, I don't think it's unfair to demand the unconditional surrender of the belligerents. Even by today's morality.
I don't think that Japan deserved any sort of mercy after what they did in the 30's and 40's to China and the surrounding area, not to mention provoking war with the United States.
Ethics does nothing to protect the innocent.
It has not done anything near the magnitude of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.
If the United States engaged in _true_, genocide, killed millions, or annexed other countries, then I would fully support a war against it.
I don't believe that the United States has done more wrong than good in its existence purely because of the atrocities of the Axis.
As for why, IMO the strong militarism that was part of their culture in that era is probably a large part of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism
That said, there is a difference between you voluntarily signing up to join the military and you being dragged into it.
Maybe not directly.
100s of thousands of people don't commit atrocities just out of the blue.
Their doctrine was pretty hardcore.
If your government engaged in widespread offensive wars that leave millions dead, then I think that your civilians become a valid military target.
If your country isn't respecting the other civilians, then why would you expect another country to respect your civilians?
At a time when we have seen the Israel-Palestine conflict ratchet up to the worst levels of violence in decades, maybe we should be hesitant to accept this position. This kind of thinking on both sides there is part of how and why they are where they are.
To phrase it a little better: if some country is committing atrocities at scale, then I believe any amount of force is justified to bring that to an end.
I would also argue that the crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army can only be remedied through military defeat and tribunals afterward, not terror bombing civilians.
What many seem to have forgotten is that H&N were cities already on a kill list.
Prior to the atomic bombs being dropped the US had already carpet bombed 72 other cities, including Tokyo, and they had a list of future targets to destroy.
H&N were picked off that list as they were essentially untouched at that point and were "clean ground" to test the field use of two different bomb designs after the "lab test" at Trinity.
The argument is whether a policy of total warfare | destruction was neccesary, the carpet bombing of cities to date was much more cost effective (at that point in the war) than the use of limited extremely expensive atomic weapons.
The neccessity to use bombs developed to counter possible German atomic weapons on a rapidly dwindling Japan now that Germany had been defeated was a kind of military necessity .. the window for live field testing was rapidly closing given the approach of Russians from the north and relative lack of untouched targets.
That aside, the bald unpleasant fact of the time is simple; had H&N not been atom bombed they would have been firebombed .. with very similar levels of death and follow on disease.
Then the military usefulness, and the morality, of these fire bombing would deserve to be questioned as much as the atomic bombing (they may even have prolonged the war, by strengthening the Japanese resolve)
Can you support that with a quote from before the bombing of H&N from the senior staff responsible for testing the weapons?
Here's a better than half decent resource to get tarted that points at most of the majr sources and opinions on the matter:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...
Bear in mind that Truman was a late in the day President with no prior knowledge of the Manhatten Project until after he was read in and that many of the driving forces in the later stages came from justifying the single most expensive military R&D project undertaken to date in the face of a German threat that no longer existed.
Rudimentary bureaucracy theories might suggest that the primary driving force was to demostrate vast amounts of money hadn't been pissed up against a wall.
With the end of the war and the transition to a Cold War a great many justifications and motivations for dropping the bomb were created and transmorgified over the decades, few of these seem to have been in active play when making the actual decision in the month before.
Sure. People focus excessively on the nuclear bombs rather than the general practice of bombing civilian cities (very much equally a war crime). Nevertheless, they're a particularly striking example, and criticising them as such is not invalid.
> The neccessity to use bombs developed to counter possible German atomic weapons on a rapidly dwindling Japan now that Germany had been defeated was a kind of military necessity .. the window for live field testing was rapidly closing given the approach of Russians from the north and relative lack of untouched targets.
That can hardly be a justification.
Wrong! Don't be ignorant.
An entire city can't be firebombed by a single plane and that plane can't drop all it's bombs at the same time everywhere. People would run to underground shelters once they hear the first explosions and they would survive. A group of bombers would also trigger an air raid alarm and people would have even more time to run to shelters and survive.
This is a quote from Wikipedia:
> The air raid warning had been cleared at 07:31, and many people were outside, going about their activities.
I'm not even going to mention the difference in after-bombing disease.
The Allies had more than one plane, so that's not a problem.
They used around 300 planes for the 1945-03-10 firebombing of Tokyo, for example. That one raid killed about 100 000 people, destroyed 267 000 buildings, and left over a million people homeless.
The bombs were horrific but also seem likely to have contributed to that outcome.
I still don't really understand how such a large shift could occur in such a small amount of time.
It's hard to think about for much time without coming to the conclusion that America did some important things right. But it's really out of fashion to say so nowadays.
We might also ask whether the false flag(??!!) invasion of the Phillipines was entirely justified, and question the policy approaches that lead to the pre war bunker oil blockading of Japan were the best line to take .. but these are matters for history classes at this point in time.
Would be interested to know if there are any books or articles specifically discussing this. Worth asking r/askhistorians