Hacker News Reader

>It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it

This sort of emotional hand waving in the direction of uncertainty is always employed in these discussions. What is the path from the status quo of late summer 1945 to peace without atomic bombs and how much death and destruction are the high and low end estimates? The status quo is/was well documented at the time and has been scrutinized with a microscope from all sides with the benefit of hindsight since. You are going to have a hard time charting a path from the status quo to piece that causes less death and destruction than what actually happened without a case where a bunch of exceptional things happen in a row.

You might not like that "basically fire bombing but with extra science to make it cheaper" was employed to end the war because of the 2nd and 3rd order implications of this extra cheapness but it's nearly certain that it was the least bad way to end the war.

>the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.

These sort of statements are always weasel worded so as to avoid comparing the relative size of the factors. They stood to have their entire country bombed into oblivion. The soviet invasion was simply the final straw on the same way someone who's lost everything may choose to go postal over a minor slight.

This sort of emotional hand waving in the direction of what actually happened is always employed in these discussions. "What is the path to the defeat of the Nazis, without the Holocaust? Therefore the Holocaust was necessary?" Please, no it wasn't.

> Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated.

This roughly aligns with some of the island hopping campaign, but still the Japanese just wouldn't surrender. It was not on their culture to do so (at the time).

I'm not saying you're overall wrong, but saying I would not infer too much from your premise.

> To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it?

MacArthur wanted to invade. He wanted to invade with Olympic even though Kyūshū had been built-up extensively by the Japanese so that the initial plans having a 3:1 US troop advantage dropped to a 1:1 ratio:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Allied_re-e...

This was lunacy.

I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.

Can you explain why you think that's what I'm advocating?

Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself). A different way could have left an adversary with grudge just waiting to rebuild, but how things turned out completely took the fighting spirit out of Japan.

That's not my intention of the word peace. Whether through surrender or negotiation, it's the end goal I'm referring to.

Oh, I see. I misread your earlier comment as asking what I thought you advocated, rather than why I thought so. Let me try here to answer your actual question there.

I consider generally that to have left the Imperial flower intact through a negotiated surrender - even if achievable which I seriously doubt - would have led in about a generation to a dangerously resurgent sense of revanchism, as actually occurred in the 1960s, but was a matter largely of fringe comedy because the 1960s in Japan were not really such as to make anyone other than cranks wish for the return of the empire. In a future drawn with the gentler hand you describe, I think that time would not have been funny at all; that would, historically speaking including in my own earlier reference to Versailles, in fact be just the sort of movement to prompt yet another Pacific war - which if prevented would only be so because if not occupied by the United States, Japan would have faced Soviet conquest (remember Tsushima!), which famously left no flowers of any kind intact within its reach: they would surely have had a constant and enormous problem with civilian "misbehavior," no doubt resulting in collective punishment, but would succeed in keeping the victim off the world stage.

The idea of Soviet occupation as preferable is heterodox to say the least, but I'm still also very confused as to what sort of terms you think could have been achieved by either Truman or Hirohito, in the absence of the demonstration strikes whose necessity you discount, when even in their aftermath there was a somewhat credible military coup attempt, the so-called "Kyūjō incident," with the aim of continuing the war. That attempt failed because attack orders, sent under the name of a murdered major general, were ignored. They did not have to be. And you don't seem more interested in considering Stalin's extremely compelling reasons to spoil any multilateral peace negotiations that might occur, and the again potentially war-starting impact of an attempt at unilateral negotiations which it is hard to imagine even (the admittedly somewhat bellicose in comparison with his predecessor) Truman seriously contemplating.

You say peace is the goal, and no one disagrees. The problem that remains is to explain how peace is a consequence of the course of action you would prefer had been taken. It isn't so much that I disagree with your historical analysis as that I am asking you to present it.

> I consider generally that to have left the Imperial flower intact through a negotiated surrender - even if achievable which I seriously doubt - would have led in about a generation to a dangerously resurgent sense of revanchism, as actually occurred in the 1960s […]

See also Germany post-World War One: the other side (as a collective/society) not only has to be defeated they have to accept the fact they were defeated.

This was one of the hindsight things that I've heard said about Japan post-WW2: it may have been 'fine' to allow Hirohito to stay on as Emperor in 1945 and for a few years afterwards, but at some point the Japanese leadership should have been tried, and this includes Hirohito: he should have had to abdicate and then be tried.

> See also Germany post-World War One

Yes, exactly.

The instrument concluding Germany's surrender and nominally ending the First World War, and for which my prior use of the name is metonymous, is known to history as the Treaty of Versailles [1]. Its terms were notoriously punitive largely at the insistence of the French, who regarded themselves with some justification as having paid the majority of the victory's cost, and Germany was denied any participation in the negotiations which determined the surrender terms to be imposed.

Combined with the Dolchstosslüge ("'stab in the back' lie") serviceably excusing the military failure and logistical collapse which made further hostilities impractical for Germany to pursue, thus leaving no options but to sign or be occupied, so were the conditions laid for "World War 2: The Sequel," as of course eventuated in practice. The actions taken with respect to the defeated powers thirty years later were designed with enormous and successful care to avoid a second, nuclear-armed, repeat. In this connection and as minimally an example of earnest intent, consider the so-called "Marshall Plan." [2] (Therein also see 'Aid to Asia' within 'Areas excluded'.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

> Your use of the term "peace" instead of "surrender". As a result of this unconditional surrender Japan was reformed in a way that's very beneficial to the rest of the world (and, you could say, itself).

In the novel The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick it is argued that Japan and Germany lost WW2 by winning it. IRL, they won WW2 by losing it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle

I wouldn't really say those were the subjects of Dick's thesis here. 'Close, but no cigar.'

> I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary.

I have never been able to credit the idea that, after decades of the very liveliest and most systematically institutional brutality, the Empire of Japan was suddenly seized by a new dovish spirit of peace and cooperation, one second before the initiation of the Hiroshima device killed a quarter million people, or one second before the Nagasaki device killed a hundred thousand or so more.

I have never even understood where in that dream lies its appeal.

(See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44797067 wherein is belatedly addressed your actual question.)

I agree with you in that decisions like this are always the outcome of multiple forces pushing different ways. But I would lean more to thinking it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.

It would have been electoral suicide because of the extra US casualties.

It would probably have led to the partition of Japan as well as Korea, leading to problems for the US in the post-war world. Although the Iron Curtain didn't descend till a few years later, by 1945, the USSR was already being very possessive about countries in Eastern Europe. Trueman was more aware of the dangers posed by the USSR that Roosevelt had been.

Just because a country had been defeated, it doesn't mean the government will surrender. Nazi Germany was effectively defeated with Bagration and the breakout from Normandy in 1944 but their government fought on to the bitter end. (In a way, the V1 and V2 missile programs did benefit Germany because they drained off resources which would otherwise have prolonged the war and allowed the use of the atom bomb on Berlin.)

And rushing to finish a war to minimise the influence of one party on the peace negotiations did have a precedent. It was what the French and British did at the end of WW1 to prevent the US from dominating the peace process. (But that didn't turn out very well.)

I think things like this would have been in Trueman's mind when he made the descision.

> it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.

He didn't really though, did he?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both on the "to be bombed" list since at least a month before Truman became President, well before he even learned of the existence of the ultra secret atomic bomb program.

The March 1945 Tokyo bombing marked the beginning of a total war aerial bombardment campaign that included civilian residences that might include factory workers.

That campaign had a target list of 100+ cities, 72 of which were destroyed prior to the bombing of Hiroshima.

Truman more or less did no more than agree that the new secret weapons, the Little Boy and Fat Man designs, be tested on targets already slated to be bombed.

He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.

The "extra US casualties" are entirely hypothetical, existing only on the assumption that there would be ground invasion of the mainland which was hypothetical given the program started before Truman became POTUS to flatten Japan to eliminate any resources of resistance and to continue to do so until the country surrendered.

> He had little choice, not because of an electorate that knew nothing of the secret weapons and wouldn't know if they were not used, but because of the near unstoppable force of the greatest R&D weapons expenditure in the world to that point .. viewed by many in the know as entirely wasted unless used in war against the Japanese now that the Germans had surrendered before they could be used there.

He allowed the first two bombings to occur as President, as was intially planned when he was still VP. He knew they would occur and was okay with it.

He could have stopped them. This evidenced by the fact that there were also plans for bombs 3+ but he ordered that any further bombings were to be under his explicit (as opposed to implicit) orders.

To think that somehow the Manhattan Project was "unstopped" is ludicrous. Every order Truman gave was followed, and if want want to argue it was "unstoppable" you would have to produce some kind of evidence that people were willing to disobey Truman's orders. (And object to or think is a bad idea is not the same as disobey.)