The Third Atomic Bomb
lflank.wordpress.com
lflank.wordpress.com
Possibly the best book that I have ever read. It deals with many of the issues raised in the comments here, and with politics, industrial development, economics, military capabilities, and the history of modern physics.
Rhodes also wrote "'Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race." Also impeccable
Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Hardcore History 59 – (BLITZ) The Destroyer of Worlds
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-de...
His series on World War I (aka The Great War) called "Blueprint For Armageddon" was one of the most interesting and captivating of any podcasts or audiobooks I've ever listened to.
When I was younger the older folks would talk so highly about the days of theater radio, when actors and storytellers would tell audio-only stories. I used to wonder how that could possibly compete with video. After listening to Hardcore History, I get it now. There's something really powerful about listening to a natural storyteller lay things out, and Dan Carlin is a master of the craft. If you're new to him, the last few years of shows are always freely available through the RSS feed that's in every podcast directory.
If he's not dead-on, all the time, well, I can read more later and be corrected.
I had no idea you could just buy his old episodes. May have to go buy them now.
I recently finished "American Prometheus" the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and it was phenomenal. I recommend it highly. It's a great different perspective on the story of the making of the bomb since it's more focused on the man's life. Really cool.
I always thought the material had to be forced together at high pressure for the chain reaction to start. Crazy that just dropping it had such dire consequences.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_chain_reaction#Prede...
It's also been discussed numerous times on this board.
> Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium ... he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water - which is uranium nitrate solution. He says, “Uh, you're going to handle it like that when it's purified too? Is that what you're going to do?" They said, “Sure -- why not?" "Won't it explode?" he says. Huh! Explode?" ... he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn't notice a lot of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall ... what you would have to do to fix this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense ...
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos....
In the case of Slotin, the thing he dropped onto the core was a neutron reflector so it redirected neutrons back into the core.
https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...
This is an interesting read, it's a story about a more recent near criticality that took place in 2011.. You can see a picture in the article of the dangerous configuration -- it's just a few rods of plutonium near each other. Any closer, if one tips over into the other, and they might go hot and release a huge amount of radiation.
This part is confusingly worded.
Once the dangerous configuration was noticed what was the right thing to do?
Not an argument against your main point but doesn’t geometry actually have quite a bit to do with chemistry?
If you look at the energy per unit mass, e.g., J/kg, of different materials, you'll note that curiously many fuels (hydrogen, methane, petrol) and explosives (gunpowder, TNT, ANFO), you'll find that the former are roughly ten times (or more) greater.
What makes explosives, well, explosive isn't the total energy contained within them, it's the rate at which it's released. Jet fuel contains ten times the energy per unit mass than C4, and can in fact melt (or at least significantly weaken) steel beams, but it does so by burning over time.
What explosives do is to combine oxidiser and fuel in the same package (as with gunpowder and ANFO), or contain chemically-unstable bonds with high potential in a state which can be triggered by a sharp shock (TNT, C-4/RDX). The total energy released is smaller, but the rate of release is far greater.
It may be possible to use more conventional fuels to generate explosions. This happens with hydrogen gas, particularly in a stoichiometric combination with oxygen, with petrol within an internal combustion engine (the fuel burn is explosive), and in a fuel-air bomb (a/k/a thermobaric weapon), in which a fuel is widely dispersed in the atmosphere and then ignited. The blast generated is typically far weaker than of an equivalent conventional explosive, but can still be explosive rather than a deflagration (rapid combustion not generating a shock wave). Incidentally, virtually all cinematic "explosions" are in fact deflagrations, often using either flammable gas or suspended powder. There are also relatively frequent dust explosions involving powdered foodstuffs (grain, flour, sugar, etc.) which are a hazard where large quantities of such materials are stored or processed (grain silos, processing plants).
USCSB investigative video of an explosion at Imperial Sugar: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws>
Raw video of the blast: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=LQZGWjVwN58>
In particular, storage combinations of potential fuels and oxidisers in close proximity can lead to explosions.
There's also the case of spontaneous combustion particularly of oil-soaked rags or compost piles which shares some characteristics with criticality incidents. That's where heat release which in smaller concentrations would be benign reaches the ignition point of the materials involved. Large heaps of freshly-mown grass in particular can spontaneously ignite. I've had the experience of moving a large pile of woodchips which had been left in sub-freezing weather and discovering that the core of that pile was literally steaming hot, and was melting snow and evaporating water which had flowed in toward it. The chips weren't charring, but they were distinctly warm.
nuclear reactors also do not force material together at high pressure, but nevertheless achieve criticality
If you have a small amount of material but enough to be critical and say, generate enough heat to melt itself into a puddle in a minute, it doesn't explode or anything, but before it melts and likely starts itself on fire, everybody nearby is going to get a lethal dose every few seconds.
In other words, there's a lot of room between "self-sustaining nuclear reaction" and "bomb".
Even storage of materials in warehouses has to be done carefully because too much too close can cause dangerous amounts of reactions.
Geometry and mass matters here because the "default" thing a neutron does is "misses all the nucleii and exits the device", unless the device is fairly big, simply because as electrically neutral particles neutrons do no interact with electrons and only interact with nucleii when very close, so most material looks mostly like empty space to them.
So in principle if you just form a large enough ball of Pu-239, it would go critical. The reason you need explosives is that in order to form that ball, you need to go from a state where there is not enough material together to go critical to a state where there is, and the criticality will immediately start releasing very large amounts of energy. This energy then heats things and drives them apart, preventing a chain reaction where the entire core goes up.
In the criticality accidents listed above, that is precisely what happened. In Slotin's case, the upper half of the core kept falling on the lower half and then pushed apart.
If you kept criticality to a stable level and let energy of fuel release over e.g. 20 years, it's called a nuclear power plant. If you let it run away and let the material melt itself, it's called a meltdown situation. If you instead take highly purified fissile material and compressed it instantly into size of a peanut or however small you could, the material compressed experience nuclear chain reaction everywhere inside that peanut, and spontaneous release of that insane amount of energy resemble behaviors observed with conventional chemical explosive material exploding, and such a contraption that do this is somewhat metaphorically called an atomic "bomb".
Don't neutrons lose some energy as they transit through the material? That would make this bounded in some respect anyway.
Neutrons lose energy by colliding with things of similar mass, such as hydrogen nuclei (often in water). If they collide with a heavy nucleus, such as plutonium, they just bounce off without losing speed. (Or fission or capture.)
Think of billiards. The cue ball may slow or stop after hitting another ball, since they have similar masses. But hit the rail and it just bounces off, at the same speed, because the table is so much heavier.
If there are no light nuclei in the environment, then the neutrons won’t slow down.
The scenario was that the size of the material can increase until you guarantee a sufficiently high rate of collision, and I'm asking whether neutrons really do not lose energy as they travel prior to collision (as the scenario seems to assume).
I suppose it does eventually, as the number of undecayed nuclei falls, but that wouldn’t be a significant effect until the criticality reaction had very significantly progressed. In other words the reaction can’t go on forever.
Because if the problem is that neutrons are escaping the object before hitting a nucleus, and we are adding more nuclei so the likelihood that they hit something increases, the new collision candidates will be further away than the old ones.
In other words, adding material to the edge of the object does not affect the per distance probability of collision. It only affects the overall probability of collision. Since the per distance probability does not change while the overall probability does, the probability increase must lie outside of the average path length of a neutron through the original object.
Consider that the wavelength of the neutron is a function of its energy, and that the cross sections for interaction between nuclei and neutrons are strong and complex functions of energy.
If the cross section for the interaction of interest gets smaller with decreasing energy, then it would be the case that the neutrons mean free path length would increase as energy decreased.
Sorry, I said something subtle and easy to miss and also made a confusing typo, writing too fast.
"average distance a [nucleus-hitting neutron]"
As in, as more material is added, the percent of neutrons that successfully collide and don't just fly out increases. But, for the class of nucleus-hitting neutrons, the average distance prior to collision increases.
If the neutron loses energy as it travels, then as the average distance increases I suppose the probability of splitting the collidee nucleus decreases. So as the class increases in size, its rate of nucleus splitting may fall below the threshold, which bounds the useful size increase.
Perhaps this doesn't occur until the object has grown in size way past the point of basically guaranteed criticality, I haven't done the math, just curious since GP's statement sounded as if neutrons do not lose energy across any distance and the object could therefore could be increased to an arbitrary size while maintaining the same qualitative per-iteration behavior, and I find that surprising.
Excluding collisions, it does not. As far as the neutron is considered, it's traveling through empty space, just as if it was in vacuum.
> I suppose the probability of splitting the collidee nucleus decreases.
In this regime, probability of splitting a nucleus goes up as energy decreases.
You might be conflating that condition with prompt criticality.
A nuclear chain reaction occurs where more neutrons enter into a fissible mass than leave it, where those neutrons trigger additional fission events.
"Criticality" is the point at which that neutron emission is just balanced: the same number are added as are consumed. This is often fairly stable, and can be further controlled with moderating systems (e.g., control rods, circulating water, or neutron reflectors which increase neutron flow). There's also the matter of "prompt" vs. "delayed" neutrons. The first, prompt neutrons, are emitted immediately following a fission event, the latter occur after some delay, from milliseconds to minutes or longer. The ratio of prompt to delayed neutrons also matters in controlling a nuclear reaction.
A nuclear reaction at criticality is not a bomb, at least not necessarily. What it is however is sustained, which is to say that the nuclear reaction will continue unless circumstances change.
A nuclear bomb, and specifically a fission bomb, requires not only a critical mass but a supercritical one, with a large amount of the material going critical at once. The challenge for the engineer is that nuclear reactions release so much energy that the explosive material itself can be blown apart before enough of it has time to react. So the trick is to transition between subcritical and supercritical masses quickly.
For Uranium-235, the reaction is slow enough that a "bullet-style" design is sufficient. A supercritical mass is arranged in two pieces, which are separated until detonation is desired, at which point one (usually smaller) mass is shot into the other, like a bullet down a gun-barrel. Plutonium-239 is so fissile that this would result in premature criticality and only a small fraction of the material would fission before being blown apart. Instead, an implosion design is used, in which a subcritical mass of plutonium is surrounded by explosive charges which, when detonated, compress the core sufficiently that it does achieve criticality, and the much larger nuclear explosion follows.
The Uranium bullet-style device was considered sufficiently reliable that it was not tested. The Hiroshima bombing was the first detonation of this style of weapon. The Trinity test was to confirm the theory of a plutonium implosion-style design, and Nagasaki saw the second explosion of such a weapon.
In the case of the Hiroshima (uranium) bomb, about 1 g of matter was converted to energy, and about 660 g of a total fissile mass of ~51 kg actually reacted, or about 1.3% of the total mass. Essentially the bomb was already coming apart before any more material could engage in fission. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1546rcv/why_did...>
I believe values are about the same for the Nagasaki weapon.
More on fission weapon designs: <https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html>
FWIW. You can see the fourth gadget at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque.
Kinda offtopic:
> Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.
The phrasing is odd, "only to ..." is a colloquialism to indicate bad luck, as in to escape one bad event only to immediately fall to another bad event.
But living 33 more years is a good amount of life! (and long enough interval to start doubting a direct causality between the irradiation and the cancer)
A report from Los Alamos Scientific Lab (1979) draws the same conclusion:
For example, a brother of [Hemmerly] also died of leukemia (and three other siblings are believed to have had cancer). This makes it likely there is a familial component to the development of the disease.
That success in Japan and Europe probably emboldened the B team, who went on to handle regime change in Central/South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
That's the difference between reading the book and reading the cliff notes, presumably.
I can't find the reference right but I remember reading average adult calorie intake to drop to ~1200 kcals in 1947/1948 in "embracing defeat" by John Dower. That period has a huge influence on Japan to this day, including architecture of Tokyo through black market.
Both Japan and Germany had strong military govt culture, and became reliably democratic at the end of the allies occupation.
Thus, Ramen
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%A9%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A1%E3...
West Germany's economic boom was in part due to the German government expecting to have to pay the loans back in full and thus setting up a public fund that provided credit to businesses and the rebuilding effort rather than paying them out as direct subisidies to industry. When the loans were eventually forgiven this created a massive windfall. The successor program to the Marshall Plan was explicitly tied to "defeating communism" and focused on military development, which resulted in West Germany rearming despite earlier decisions that the country should be demilitarized. This change of plan was extremely controversial within West Germany and debates around the military involvement of Germany continues to this day.
In East Germany on the other hand, the rebuilding effort happened despite the Soviet Union not with the help of it. Reparations continued even after a lot of the industry had been dismantled and shipped to Eastern Europe while the isolation from Western Europe provided limited opportunities for export and the scarcity of resources meant a lot of early industry was built to provide for the population rather than trade.
Given the conditions, East Germany performed remarkably well, although of course it had a despotic government that would literally shoot its own citizens rather than allow them to leave for greener pastures. The US was also extremely hands-off on West German politics after the immediate occupation era. Presumably a major factor was that the US didn't have as much skin in the game as its European allies whereas e.g. France literally had been occupied by Germans during the war, resulting in much stronger resentment.
It's also worth noting that one of the plans for post-war Germany by the Western allies was full deindustrialization to a greater extent than what the Soviet Union ended up implementing with the explicit goal of turning Germany into an agrarian state incapable of forming a military for the forseeable future. This became less interesting as the divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies became clearer but it wasn't entirely unlikely.
‘The Marshall Plan made it possible for West Germany to return quickly to its traditional pattern of industrial production with a strong export sector. Without the plan, agriculture would have played a larger role in the recovery period, which itself would have been longer. With respect to Austria, Günter Bischof has noted that "the Austrian economy, injected with an overabundance of European Recovery Program funds, produced "miracle" growth figures that matched and at times surpassed the German ones."’
Aid to Japan was similarly crucial and amounted to billions of dollars. These payments were separate from the Marshall Plan, which focused on Europe. Pre-war Japan was not a free market economy and subsequently underwent massive reform.
Honestly, I get that it’s cool to bash on the US (I am not American) but give credit where it’s due. US-led post-war reconstruction was of enormous and lasting significance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Germany was also flattened far more.
A better explanation for the "German Miracle" was they turned to free markets.
As for Japan, the US occupation was advised by leftist professors, who deemed that big business was bad and small business was good. Japan remained prostrate under that policy. When it was changed to allow big business to operate again, Japan became a huge economic success story.
West Germany formally has a "social market economy" and while there have been pushes towards a "free market" economy those were largely the result of reforms from the 1980s onwards. I don't think "free markets" is a good explanation when looking at Germany vs Britain or France in the 1950s to 1970s.
> I don't think "free markets" is a good explanation when looking at Germany vs Britain or France in the 1950s to 1970s.
It's the only explanation that fits when compared with the other economies at the time.
What are your sources on this? The US occupation was led by Douglas MacArthur, who was about as far from a "leftist professor" as possible.
> When it was changed to allow big business to operate again, Japan became a huge economic success story.
I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
My father, who was part of the military occupation force in Japan. He also was a professional historian and economist. The economy remained flat until big business was allowed to resume operation.
> I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
People can't stand the idea that the free market works. :-/
https://www.cfr.org/japan-constitution/japans-postwar-consti...
Not arguing against you but the logic needs to be filled out some.
Turns out humans can do a lot if they work together- ofcourse it usually takes a near apocalyptic event. And it never lasts.
For purposes of rebuilding, civilian deaths (from all causes, including Germany's national suicide cult insanity shit) are at least as damaging. Similar for all the millions who lived, but were badly damaged themselves - mentally and/or physically.
Yes, and those are the younger, fit men. The people who work in industry.
A bigger difference between the two Germanies is that East German industry was mostly stripped for parts as part of reparations to the Soviet Union which continued for a long time whereas West Germany received active funding as part of the Marshall Plan. West Germany also had access to a lucrative market for exports whereas East Germany had to focus on reparations first, self-sustainability second and trade at a distant third with very bad returns.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/keynes-the-economic-conse...
For example while especially in the build-up to 1933 a lot of the political violence and murders came from the political right and especially the NSDAP, German courts would repeatedly rule the attackers "not guilty" if the victims were on the political left because they did it "out of the love for their country" (i.e. the monarchy). Even the "rise to power" of the NSDAP was a de-facto legal process following the passing of the Enabling Act, co-signed by the conservative Christian "center party" which saw the NSDAP as a tool to defeat communism, believing that Adolf Hitler would use his power to restore the Emperor to the throne and transfer his power to him.
It's difficult to tell how things would have played out without the crippling reparations but given Germany's actual history I don't think it's plausible that Weimar Germany would have been stable without it even if it was something that fueled the political right's narrative of betrayal. Germany simply did not have a history of democracy to build on.
I think one of the most genius moves following WW2 was to fully dismantle Prussia by restructuring Germany. This was more than a cession of territories, even the parts of Prussia that remained part of Germany were dissolved and integrated into new subdivisions without a clear one-to-one mapping. In modern Germany the strongest remaining notion of Prussia is a general idea of "everything north of Bavaria" mostly present in Bavaria (notably one of the states that remained unchanged after the restructuring - a mistake in my opinion). Prussian identity was inseparable from militarism and a sense of supremacy, even without the formal monarchy.
Another possible move would have been to strip German royalty and nobility of its titles and claims like in France but this would have never been supported by the European monarchies like Britain, which often had strong dynastic ties to these families.
what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.
Of course we did [1]. The ACC was far more intrusive than the American occupation of Japan; we formally stripped Germany of its sovereignty.
EDIT: the lesson from Versailles was that we had to rebuild Germany. To rebuild required occupation. Occupying Germany after WWII was one of the lessons learned from Versailles.
> Germany would have resumed the war
Germany was in no position to keep fighting.
in the past no occupation led war again a generation later, so the second time around occupation was opted for.
OP said we learned from Versailles. That’s why we occupied Germany after WWII: to rebuild it.
> Germany was in no position to keep fighting.
No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted, but "defending the homeland" is a more powerful motivator than anything the Allies had. Germany asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" which did not include occupation.
The US had just entered the war after the Zimmerman telegram, and so Allied powers had more man power and more industrial strength. The Central powers were the ones that were exhausted, especially after the Hundred Days Offensive.
The British and French were equally exhausted. Their casualties combined were about the same as Germany's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
You're right that Germany was whipped, but the persistence of the "stab in the back" theory in the 20's and 30's demonstrated that they hadn't quite internalized that. After all, they hadn't been invaded, and "news" back then was so heavily censored that the Germans didn't all know the real situation.
France lost 4.3% of its population. The USA lost 0.1% of its population. I wouldn't call that equally exhausted.
Even so, the UK lost 3/4 million from 45 million whereas France lost 1.1 million from 39 million .. so that's kind of order of magnitude roughly ballpark from a distance, but France got hit harder.
The "lessons of Versailles" is a dumb phrase. Germany only asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" although Wilson didn't manage to pull that off over England and France's objections.
So we have two counterfactuals, neither of which can be settled:
1) Wilson doesn't propound his 14 Points. Perhaps he loses the election of 1912.
2) He does and the Armistice happens as it actually did, but the Paris Peace Conference declares that the Allies are going to occupy Germany and reshape its government, or maybe Germany is to be dismembered.
It's #2 that this phrase seems to imply. I'd claim that if that happens, no peace treaty is signed at all, similar to the way that the Korean War is technically still going on. The Allies would not have invaded Germany. Russia was already out of the war.
Occupy while you rebuild?
You are correct that the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles made for good grist for the mill when those same agitators to point at the "unfair" consequences of the betrayal.
After WWII there was no one who could possibly say that Germany had not been completely and utterly defeated (and the Allies, at least the western ones with respect to western Germany) did invest in rebuilding the country.
The lesson for WWII was that as shameful it could be for Japan to surrender inconditionally, it was needed to shut those sectors of the society that would think they could had won the war if only...
This was more a problem with Japan than Germany in the WWII: Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace, and specially the soviets didn't want any of that. It's know that Hitler and friends wanted either victory or the complete annihilation of Germany. But Japan actively tried in the last couple of months of the war to achieve a conditional surrender.
Hitler knew that he'd be hung when the war was over. He knew what happened to Mussolini. He was never going to allow a negotiated peace.
The idea behind the officers' plot to kill him was that then Germany could sue for peace. Failing to kill Hitler meant the war was going to continue to the bitter end.
Also, everything in this article has been well known for ages. No need to hold back your trust. It's a nice writeup though!
Russian Empire died and buried in a grave in 1917. Don't dig it up, please.
The main concerns were that the Japanese government was simply not in a place where it could surrender, which meant a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland was seen as mandatory. Given the prior experiences of how dedicated Japanese defenders could be (eg Mount Suribachi), it was assumed that any actual attempt to take the Japanese mainland would result in untold deaths, to the point where the US has enough Purple Heart medals created (in anticipation of the casualties am invasion would involve) that they didn't have to restart production until 2008. As horrifying as it is, the first atomic bomb was considered the lesser evil. That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific things enacted again.
The Nagasaki muesum is very good, too. And it's a nicer town to visit today. (We were just there last month.)
The first bomb was dropped August 6.
The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the resources for more, so they concluded to not surrender. Even after the first bomb was dropped.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb which was dropped that morning.
After the second bomb the War Cabinet was split 3-3. They called in the full cabinet and that was split as well.
Two bombs weren't enough to decisively convince them to surrender, and so the Emperor had to be called in to break the deadlock.
And yet we are to believe that even though two bombs were barely enough to force a surrender, zero bombs would have sufficed?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
This is covered by Walker in his book Prompt and Utter Destruction:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/829496
And he still concludes that dropping the bombs was a necessary element in their surrender.
The Japanese were expecting the Russians/Soviets to enter the war: the only surprise was that it was sooner than they expected (Spring 1946). Fighting them was already taken into account in their 'calculations'.
From a 1946 article:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-the-...
I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been willing to pull out of Manchuria, lose that territory, and use those troops for home island defence.
Given the success of Soviet's new combined arm doctrine (later called “deep battle”), I don't think “pull out of Manchuria” would have been a possibility, as the Japanese force there would very likely have collapsed to a point where getting back to Japan would have been impossible (think Dunkirk but with much more land to leave behind you and with an enemy moving even faster and where you don't have neither air or sea superiority).
Youtube video by Shaun goes in detail as well https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=XY6Yr_nhzNlejBHK
It's a very strange story of decision-making under extreme pressure. No one was in charge. The Navy was barely talking to the Army. The civilian government had been sidelined from control of military matters years before. The Emperor was supposed to be a figurehead. And, as pointed out above, there was an attempted coup to stop the surrender.
Of course not. Startegic calculations for warfare should not be conflated with a moral justifications for military actions. We have to come to terms with the fact that it was a morally unjustifiable decision, regardless of the effects it had on the war. This is something that too many people forget today.
> Why even have laws of war then
I think laws of war (the ones that work) are only an attempt to change the incentives that are presented to the belligerents during warfare, in such a way that the confilct is less damaging. They are not much about making the belligerents more morally virtuous in any sense other than a consequentialist / utlitarian one.
They didn't by our standards. A lot of what we think of as the laws of war today were clarified after WWII. Bombing civilians was illegal, but not in retaliation; so the US could bomb Hiroshima because the Axis had bombed Coventry. The fact that that was the Germans and probably an accident didn't matter.
If this seems extremely sketchy that's because it was, but so was Nuremberg. The Holocaust wasn't illegal for the Nazis to do to their own population - the prosecutors at the trials had to make up a standard of "behavior that shocks the conscience" that previously didn't exist in international law.
None of this reflects on morality, only legality, of course. But the legalities then were pretty primitive.
Later on of course both sides were hitting civilian targets deliberately, and using incendiaries and high explosives. But it's possible the British were the first to do it deliberately, in retaliation for the Germans doing it accidentally (which they naturally did not believe).
One bomb could have been all that America had. Two bombs meant more were coming.
That's not logic bud.
Zero bombs could mean that was all America had. If you can make one then you can make two.
The bomb was even more expensive to develop, and the Japanese (with their own bomb program) surely knew that.
Of course if you omit the second most important factor then things start becoming obvious, but in reality the answer to this question is far from obvious (in neither direction, needless to say, the tankies who claim with certainty that the bombing was not needed are equally wrong)
But overlooking the Soviet invasion is clearly missing half the picture here.
We cannot categorically rule out any of the three hypothesis:
- the Manchuria invasion was sufficient
- the nuclear bombing was sufficient
- they were both necessary for the immediate surrender of Japan
does that sound believable to you? The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon? And confident about it to the point they are willing to bet their entire country on it, in a war that's already ending?
Or does that sound like manufactured consent?
Yes. They did. The Mexico branch of the Japanese espionage service knew about the Trinity test in advance and sent agents to collect fallout to analyze. They already knew before Hiroshima that we had a working atomic bomb. They underestimated our isotope separation production capacity because their own U-235 isotope separation plant was behind schedule. There have been books written about the Japanese atomic bomb project. The day after Hiroshima, the Japanese government announced "We also have atomic bombs and we will use them against the invasion forces." They were expecting the war to last another year. The head of the Japanese atomic bomb project said that his military boss expected the war to last another year.
They were correct that the US didn't have the resources for a second uranium bomb.
> They were correct that the US didn't have the resources for a second uranium bomb.
Because the difference between a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb is meaningful when you're the target…
Edit since I can't reply: The difference is meaningful when you're deciding whether to surrender. If you know that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for another uranium bomb, and you have no evidence that the US can build plutonium bombs, then you have grounds to believe the bombing of Hiroshima was not repeatable.
There was no way for the Japanese to know what the US was capable of. It was wishful thinking with zero evidence on the part of the Japanese leadership.
The Japanese had their own bomb program underway.
If the Japanese projected their own capacity on the US, they were ripe for a bad surprise.
The US had been continously fire bombing Japan at the point the atomic bombs dropped. In the grand scheme of things the bombs were just very large blips in waves upon waves of destruction.
Japan would have been defeated without a US ground invasion and without the atomic bombs. But it would have been defeated by the Soviet Union, not the US.
There were three possible outcomes:
* an unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union, possibly following the death or arrest of the Emperor
* a conditional surrender to the US granting immunity to the Emperor
* an unconditional last-ditch surrender to the US to prevent a Soviet advance and further loss of territory
The atomic bombs played a very small part in this. As has been stated repeatedly in attempts to justify their use: the Japanese were "dedicated" to defend the mainland and the Emperor to the point of performing suicide attacks. The deaths from the atomic bombings meant very little relative to the civilian lives that had already been lost to the fire bombings before, after and throughout. But in consequence this meant that the integrity of the mainland territory and the life of the Emperor meant a lot - and this was threatened by the prospect of an invasion, not further atomic bombings.
The sad irony is that the demand of the surrender being unconditional was ultimately more about narrative-building and optics as the US effectively gave Japan what it wanted by leaving the Emperor untouched and not making any territorial changes. It's clear to see why the US demanded it but the outcome effectively met most of the terms a conditional surrender would have set prior to the atomic bombings.
In consequence the atomic bombs provided very little strategic benefits and only meant the US would have to go on with those attacks on its conscience - not that it seemed to weigh too heavily.
That’s the horrifying thing, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians so your enemy surrenders.
If America had not dropped the bombs and the Soviets ended up finishing off Japan like so many seem to think they would, the Soviets at the end of the war were NOT known for being gentle in their dominance.
There was no ending to Japan in WWII that did not kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
yeah, war sucks. Especially a world wide war, it's not a fun time.
"there is nothing good in war except its ending" - Lincoln
In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, said:
"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Selden mentions another critique of the nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11 August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through the Swiss Legation in Tokyo
The firebombing of Tokyo had similar death and injury stats to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and there were another 72 cities in Japan completely destroyed by bombing prior to the atomic weapons being rushed into use before the war ended.
Cities in Europe were also bombed, and later more tonnage was dropped by the US in SE Asia than they dropped in WWII .. many of those mines dropped remain to this day, still killing and maiming children.
Not exactly. Having firebombs at our disposal does not require the head of one country to have unaccountable power over the lives of everyone on earth. Firebombs do not require entire industries shrouded in secrecy, nor the transformation of security clearance, or lack there of, into a weapon for shutting down public inquiry and challenges, nor the creation of parallel government structure both invisible and unaccountable to the public.
The effects on the cities may not be that different, but nuke's unmitigated corruption of the democratic system is certainly horrifying.
And we should be exactly as horrified for what the Japanese did to mainland China. Or the fact that they allied themselves with one of the greatest genocides in history. We should be exactly as horrified at what the alternative was, which was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties that would have been caused by a conventional invasion just to get that country to stop doing what it was doing.
Not really.
Strategic bombing, as a concept, was about killing civilians. The idea that you should try not to kill civilians in war was still an evolving concept around WWII, in part because precision munitions and industrial warmaking were in their infancy and toddlerhood, respectively.
> The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
This made the entire population a military target (except for very young children, I guess).
That's actually the reasoning of war criminals…
I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime. A real fan of justice, aren't you. /s
Except there wasn't such “observation” and we cannot be certain that it would have happened. You are assuming that the Japanese would have fought this way, and you use this assumption to defend the idea that they were all legit targets.
> even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
What?
> I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime.
Except it's not “a legal argument in defense of war crime charge” at all, to accept it as an argument one must adhere to your vision in the first place, which make it a very weak defense to say the least. Akin to “yes I killed my wife but she was completely crazy and I'm sure I'd have killed me first at some point”, which I'd doubt any lawyer would be happy if you said that in court…
So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
Any American general or politician that agreed to these terms would have been seen as a fool or a coward, especially after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Singapore, etc.
As said in other threads, it was the nukes and the soviets invading what finally forced the surrender.
> So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
These points are both highly contested, yet you say them as if they are foregone conclusions.
One is not obligated to put disclaimers and counter-arguments in every comment, so long as you treat other people's counter-arguments with respect (which for me mostly means resisting the urge to reply to replies). In fact I think HN and discourse in general is at it's best when lots of people put forth different ideas, clearly and specifically articulated.
It took me a long time to come to this style of discourse. If you haven't tried it, I heartily recommend dabbling in simply and directly stating your view.
Much of what the US did in Japan would be considered a war crime if it happened nowadays. The Pacific campaign also heavily leveraged existing racist sentiments and explicitly dehumanized Asian people which carried over into the Korean War (where the US did manage to commit more war crimes than either of the two Koreas) and the Vietnam War.
This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing and is orthogonal to the legitimacy of US involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars (the former of which explicitly contradicted a UN decision and presented a last-ditch effort to avoid an imminent North Korean victory). Japan was the aggressor and did horrible war crimes themselves. But that doesn't mean everything the US did was above the board and it doesn't excuse it. Opinions are still divided on the firebombing of Dresden and even by its most exaggerated retellings it pales in comparison to what happened in Japan.
Also what the article doesn't go out of its way to mention but implies: the atomic bombings were part of what led to the Japanese surrender but did not play the critical part Truman would later claim they did (while continously exaggerating the number of American lives saved by it over the years). The Soviet invasion and risk of annexation played a far greater part and surrendering to the US to stop the Soviet advance was preferable to a Soviet annexation that would have at best meant a guaranteed deposition of the Emperor if not an execution.
The Japanese Emperor was considered divine. Although the surrender ended up being unconditional the US did not hold him personally responsible and allowed him to remain in a ceremonial function. If there were no off-the-record agreements about this, it was at least a leap of faith with the understanding that the alternative was not an American occupation but guaranteed annexation by the Soviets who were known to not look too kindly on kings, gods or the territorial integrity of Japan (given the Russo-Japanese war preceding WW2). The US wasn't keen on risking the lives of its soldiers by invading the deathtrap that was mainland Japan whereas the Soviets had a reputation (accurate or not) of not fearing meatgrinders.
I have often heard that Japan denies or has never apologized for it's actions in China / Korea but there are numerous apologies that have been given. I think this is often repeated to both paint Japanese people as uncaring and also keep divisions between Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...
>On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first formal apology for Japanese actions during the war.[171]
>He offered his apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanjing, criticized Murayama for not providing the written apology that had been expected. She said that the people of China "don't believe that an... unequivocal and sincere apology has ever been made by Japan to China" and that a written apology from Japan would send a better message to the international community.[172] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
Imagine Germany had at numerous times apologized for WW2 and "the actions committed" without ever explicitly acknowledging the Holocaust, the mass murders in Poland and other annexed territories and so on.
Without explicitly acknowledging what Japan had done in Nanjing (or what Unit 731 had done as "experiments"), an apology means nothing. It's the difference between apologizing for a war and for the war crimes committed during that war. It implies that everything that happened can simply be paraphrased as "actions during wartime", which understates the extent of the heinousness of the crimes.
> However, Mariana Budjeryn, a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard argued that the denuclearization of Ukraine was not a mistake and that it was unclear whether Ukraine would be better off as a nuclear state. She argued that the deterrent value of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine was questionable. While Ukraine had "administrative control" of the weapons delivery systems, it would have needed 12 to 18 months to establish full operational control, and Ukraine would have faced sanctions from the West and likely retaliation from Russia. Moreover, Ukraine had no nuclear weapons program and would have struggled to replace nuclear weapons once their service life expired. Instead, by agreeing to give up the nuclear weapons, Ukraine received financial compensations and the security assurances of the Budapest Memorandum.[29]
12 months seems like a plenty of time for US/Russia to come and take back the nukes.
In the UK it was famously a cheap lock.
In the USSR, physical control of warheads was supposed to be under the KGB according to some sources.
What was the alternative?
The Japanese leadership knew for a year from their own internal reports that they couldn't win the war, and simply want to grind down US resolve. Imperial Japan wanted the following conditions:
* Emperor stays on throne
* Japan gets to keep territory
* any allegation of (e.g.) war crimes would be dealt with internally by the Japanese themselves
Would it be okay for Nazi Germany to surrender if:
* Hitler and the Nazis got to stay in government
* Germany got to keep Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc
* war crime allegations would be dealt by the Nazis themselves
The first bomb was dropped on August 6. The Japanese War Cabinet held a meeting on August 9 to discuss the situation, and decided not to surrender as they didn't think the US could create more bombs. So even after the first bomb was dropped, they wouldn't surrender.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb, which was dropped that morning.
The War Cabinet was split 3-3 on whether to surrender. After the second bomb.
They called in the full cabinet to discuss things. The full cabinet was split. After the second bomb.
They called in the Emperor at that point, and he said to end the war. Though in his announcement that was broadcast over the radio, the word "surrender" was never used:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast#C...
Seriously: what was the alternative? Invade the main islands (Operation Downfall)? What would have been the US casualties? What would have been the Japanese civilian casualties? Or blockade Japan and starve them?
Replace Hiroshima with a hypothetical New York and ask your question again. Do you see an alternative to nuking of a hypothetical New York to win a war?
It deserves at least an essay on just the situation and the various PoV's, see:
The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...
There's a very good case to be made that the primary motivation to use the atomic weapons was the fact that they existed ..
developed at very great expense for a European War that no longer existed, Germany having surrended when the weapons were finally complete - with only one test on a tower in a desert the military side wanted a real world 'battlefield' test and there was already an ongoing campaign to destroy each and every major and minor target in Japan (much much cheaper per city) using conventional HE & firebombs.
Well, instead of reading that article, I have already read the book that it references, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan:
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/829496
It goes through the timeline of the events, including who knew what, at what point.
Given Japanese intransigence (and their 'counter-demands'), the experiences of Okinawa, etc, I don't see any reasonable alternatives—unless you think a bloodbath of Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians is reasonable:
* https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/japans-last-ditch-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
If Japan was not willing to surrender after one bomb, and barely decided to surrender after two, what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
Truman's first priority was to the US people. If bombing Japan achieved peace faster, and thus reduced US casualties, why wouldn't he take that option?
Seriously: what is the counter-factual event in what the US/Allies should have done with Japan? Invade? Blockade/starve? Not go for unconditional surrender? Other? What is (was) the alternative?
And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein, having read his book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. He's also the creator of the Nukemap website:
It references many books, with a number of different viewpoints and arguments.
You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
> what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
> And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein
Cool. But not read much of his work covering the breadth of opinion on the use of the atomic bomb.
> He's also the creator of the Nukemap website
I know, he based that on contributions from various geophysicists and physicists who have spoken to him IRL.
It references Walker and Alperovitz. I'll be sure to add Alperovitz to my reading list.
> You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
I said I have read Walker. I have not said I've read only Walker.
> There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
By "number of" do you mean "two": Walker and the "consensus" / "traditional" view, and Alperovitz and the (so-called) "revisionist" view. (Kuznick is mentioned in passing at the very end.)
Walker is well aware of the ambiguity of the situation; from an interview:
> One argument has been made by the scholar Richard Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard makes the argument – going back to the atomic bomb versus the Soviet invasion – he says that the bomb was essential to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those armies in China and other parts of East Asia to surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among American officials and Japanese officials, that the emperor’s order to surrender would not be obeyed by generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who could’ve fought on for a very long time at enormous cost to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they couldn’t defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it. It’s a very interesting argument that I think makes a very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb was and the impact of the Soviet invasion.
* https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/voices/oral-histories/j-samuel...
Further:
> Walker: […] Those are the positions. And as I, and a lot of others, argue – I’m certainly not alone – they’re both seriously flawed. The traditional view because Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on or around November 1, and a lot of could’ve happened between August and November of 1945. Also the view that if an invasion had been necessary, it would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives: there’s simply no contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It was made after the war as a means to justify the use of the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, were saying that perhaps the bomb wasn’t necessary. It’s also beyond question that the invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman had to use the bomb because if he didn’t the only other option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn’t hold up.
> Kelly: In the view of the revisionists.
> Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you don’t use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates for lives lost that were projected by military experts in the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the numbers are far from hard evidence. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of Japan. That was something that came about later.
> My argument is that Truman didn’t have to be told that an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew that even without an invasion, the war was still going on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we had one month when there weren’t any major battlefronts between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of the war, which is July 1945.
> In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever. So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in the month of July of 1945 without any major battlefronts.
> You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28 [misspoke: July 30], 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water for a very long time and either died from exposure or from sharks. Just a horrific story.
> As long as the war was going on, that was going to happen, and that’s what Truman and his advisors were concerned about. No one had to tell them that the alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives. That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that’s just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had a chance to end the war as quickly as possible.
* Ibid
I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan basically didnt have any means of defense. I think nuking a country that is defenseless is probably evil even if in their hearts they are unwilling to accept unconditional surrender (this last point is even in contention).
The Japanese took 'too long' to surrender, so by the time they contacted the US government on August 14th, because of communication delays the sorties had already gone out early August 15th and dropped their payloads:
* https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14980968
> I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan basically didnt have any means of defense.
The Japanese didn't think they were defenseless:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps
From a 1946 article:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if-the-...
So basically defenseless. I understand that your opinion is that at the time they did not think of themselves as defenseless but this actually doesnt matter to me in the moral claims. The fact is that they were defenseless and we nuked them twice. We nuke them because we wanted to test these weapons and AFAIK the USA kept these cities from bombing raids in order to test the effectiveness of the weapons.
Also the Japanese being 'too long' to surrender because they were not a well organized fighting force by that time. I think it was days before they even understood what happened in Hiroshima.
and to address your edit: The irony is that we actually gave them what they wanted. The wanted to keep the emperor and we caved.
It doesn't matter what "reality" is: it matters what (your enemy's) perception is. The Japanese did not think themselves defenseless.
You have not beaten your enemy when you think you have: you have beaten your enemy when they think you have.
Should we have dropped the bomb?
That's the last decision in a series of policy questions on both sides, each a complex response to complex questions going back at least a decade.
First Japan was allied with nazi Germany. And nazi Germany was putting jews, handicapped people, romanians, gays, etc. into crematoriums, alive. These weren't soldiers either.
Second Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
There were many ways to not get at war in the US. Those two weren't among them. What was the US supposed to do? Not drop the bomb and let Russia annihilate and conquer Japan?
These two atomic bombs were horrible but during WWII the US pretty much single handedly saved (most of) the world from both nazism and stalinism.
I'm not saying the US have always been acting in good faith lately but during WWII I'm not sure the US can be faulted much.
Put it another way: a world war vs fucking evil incarnate is messy.
For example, your point:
> Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
The U.S. Export Control Act (July 1940), freezing of Japanese assets (July 1941) and then the oil embargo (August 1941) are examples of some of the nuance I see.
Nobody would ever defend the Nazis as victims yet people come out of the woodwork to defend Imperial Japan, their brutal attempt at colonialism, and the equivalent holocaust they committed. As I've said before, the Japanese sure got good marketing after the war.
Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go? How about if the U.S. rounded up all Japanese Americans and put them in camps? Also completely okay, I guess, because Imperial Japan.
When enemy civilians die because of our attack — it's just consequence of their foolish resistance.
So, enemy commits war crime, while we are not!
When you repeat the justification that the Japanese government used for going to war with the US more or less verbatim without explaining the background, well, that would be you, sir.
> "I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides actions because the other side was worse."
That's not a moral or principled stance. That's just whataboutism.
> "Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go?"
You seem to be looking for an answer to paint me in a bad light and I'm feeling magnanimous today so I'll oblige you: like most Asians other than the Japanese, I see no moral problem with either the atomic bombings or the firebombings of Japanese cities in WW2.
I don't feel like I'm trying to paint you in a bad light, rather hoping you'll concede that one side doesn't get a free pass if the other does something atrocious.
Perhaps it was my having been raised a Quaker during a formative period of my life, but an eye for an eye is quite the opposite of my philosophy.
That's an odd way to critique Imperial Japan, given that the US was allied with the Soviets, under Stalin no less..
We don't make Red Envelopes to apologize for Agent Orange.
It's maybe a stretch to compare it to modern Russia bombing Kyiv — because modern atomic weapons are orders of magnitude more horrific.
In my social circles I'm usually the first one pointing out the tiniest scent of anti-americanisms but this is too pathetic, even for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
With all due respect to the enormous civilian suffering behind yours and the following numbers, why should there be an official excuse other than the obvious of winning the war against a barbaric enemy that had already ferociously invaded most of eastern Asia, the western Pacific and ruthlessly killed over 15 million people in the process?
The atomic bombings, by the perspective of the time and what had already been done, weren't even so terrible in terms of dead. The mass firebombing campaigns of the entire last couple years of the war against Japanese cities, using completely conventional weapons, had already killed possibly as many as 700,000 people with hardly any allied leader batting an eye, or the U.S. public for that matter. Given this mentality, and the subsequent lack of an apology for those conventional bombings, what would have made the atomic bombings deeply unique? (except for the nature of the bombs themselves).
Let's not also forget that Japan itself did everything possible to make the use of atomic bombs seem reasonable, having promised repeatedly that it would fight even in the face of horrendous casualties both for its own people and the forces of any invading army. Given the absolutist stance of Japanese forces in the field previous to those last weeks, fighting until every last man is dead and killing as many civilians as they could in the process, on directives and mentalities instilled directly from Tokyo, it's not hard to see why the Americans took seriously the idea of an unimaginable bloodbath in any potential invasion of the home islands.
Just look at the battles of Okinawa, in which the local forces encouraged their own local civilians to commit mass suicide as they lost the island, or the battle of Manilla, in which the knowingly losing Japanese just kept fighting, butchering, raping and burning the city solely for the sake of doing so.
Under the lack of foresight at the time, and given the nature of Japanese belligerence, it's not hard to understand why the U.S decided to drop the two atom bombs, given what they'd already done while still facing Japanese intransigence. Maybe it wasn't the most moral of choices, but under the circumstances, it had an understandable logic of hardened pragmatism that it's too easy to sweep under a rug of condemnation today with foresight, which itself might be mistaken even now.