Hacker News Reader

Comment by learingsci | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes it does though, eg Hiroshima.

There's good reason to believe that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially technical demonstrations warning the soviets, given the clearly imminent end of the war, to not start anything with us. There were already signs of a Japanese desire for surrender.

> There were already signs of a Japanese desire for surrender.

I'm no historian but this point doesn't sound very noteworthy unless it was the leadership who wanted that surrender. It took two bombs to make them surrender; they didn't surrender after the first.

Edit: actually this is much more nuanced than I think either of us make it sound. Japan did send out "peace feelers", but they were more like "we want peace but we don't accept your terms." The Japanese required that the US allow retention of the emperor, no occupation, self-conducted war crime trials, and even possibly keeping some of their conquered territory. The US wanted an unconditional surrender.

Probably the worst example, because Japan was probably going to surrender anyways.

And it was followed by another bomb.

> Japan was probably going to surrender anyways

Well yes. The question is how many more would have had to die to get it. This question doesn’t have an easy answer. To the extent there are wrong ones, it’s anyone claiming confidence.

A nonsensical false dichotomy of sorts. Between "Japan surrenders without a single further death" and "We have to nuke two cities for them to surrender" there are numerous steps of gradual escalation that could have been taken before arriving at the "nuke the cities" option. One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.

> One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths

There is a reason it took bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cause surrender. And if you telegraph that you’re going to bomb a remote place and the bomb fails, you’ve undermined your weapon’s credibility in unique ways.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that your confidence is wrong. What you’re talking about was contemporaneously and continues to be historically debated.

Hiroshima didn’t fix anything because they dropped another on Nagasaki.

Furthermore they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities.

> Hiroshima didn’t fix anything because they dropped another on Nagasaki

After which Japan surrendered.

This logic is like arguing 99% of a drug doesn’t do anything because the bug is only eradicated by the last effective molecule.

> they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities

This was considered. The bombs’ unreliability (and cost) made it a non-starter.

> Furthermore they could have only destroyed only one city if Hiroshima had been an at sea demonstration instead, maybe even destroy zero cities.

Given the immediate response to Hiroshima was disbelief, surely an at-sea demonstration would have been even less convincing than the observable absence of a city?

Even once the Japanese government confirmed that Hiroshima had indeed been destroyed by a nuclear weapon, part of the reason Nagasaki followed Hiroshima was that the Japanese forces estimated the US couldn't have built more than one or two more (they were correct, they just hadn't internalised what losing an entire city meant).

Even after Nagasaki, there were some who attempted a coup to prevent surrender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

Hooray genocide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com