but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did.
It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.
It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.
- Drop the first bomb in the ocean in front of an envoy of observers and give Japan a week to deliberate their response
- Blockade the island, threaten land invasion, and wait for the emperor to call for surrender as they gradually run out of fuel
- Drop a bomb on Hiroshima but give more than 3 days for the government to understand what happened and consider surrendering before dropping a bomb on Nagasaki
- Allow the USSR to go ahead with a ground invasion while the US sits on the sidelines
etc...
But sure, in the fine grained detail, if the US has not dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, we would not today be commenting on Hiroshima (1946) saying "they shouldn't have dropped nuclear bombs on Japan"
The message in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "We can put eleven men on a fancy plane and make one of your main cities simply disappear, and you can do nothing about it."
That made not surrendering simply and objectively not worth it.
Seventy scientists on the Manhattan Project signed a petition [0] to president Truman about doing something like that before actually using the bomb, but the petition was intercepted and Truman didn't even hear about it in time.
Geopolitics 101 from HN.
That is to say, I think it's important to hear the argument against this alternative explicitly raised as a justification for the use of nuclear weapons, because ignoring that motivation is intellectually dishonest.
People rarely say that because there is little evidence for it - it was the USA that was pressuring Stalin to declare war on Japan. Little Boy was dropped on Aug 6, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan on Aug 9 as they agreed to at Yalta. (While the Soviets considered invading Hokkaido after Japan surrendered, very few people think they would have succeeded. The USA had given the Soviet Union some ships that could be used, but they would not have been nearly enough.)
Hell, if America breaks out in civil war...
Nor was attacking Pearl Harbor.
I mean, yeah. The act is one of many countably infinite quantum events that contribute to the reality that I experience. My point is that there's a strong argument to be made that the US not dropping the bomb would have resulted in largely the same state of the universe with significantly less suffering in it.
The US blockades Japan causing food shortages. The military prioritizes what little food is available for themselves. The know the population will starve, but it’s necessary to defend Japan against the foreign Invaders. As long as there is enough food for the military, the war can continue.
Now you have a mass famine where millions of women and children slowly starve to death. Japan uses it for propaganda showing how cruel the West is and how if the West would just sign an armistice leaving the military junta in charge, all these people could be saved.
Is that better?
> It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.
My response was not wrong as to that. The Allies did care a great deal about the Japanese people, and you can see that in the Potsdam declaration, but they also cared about their own soldiers' lives. If we hadn't had, or did not want to use, the nukes, then maybe we might have tried blockading for a while, who knows -- it's what the then leadership surely would have considered, and you can't blame someone today for mentioning it.