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Comment by jihokoo | Hacker News Reader

The article also poses the idea that its unlikely that the U.S. would surrender a war after a city was destroyed.

Article also gives the example of UK not giving up after German bombing in WW2.

Would America surrender if SF or NYC was nuked? No.

Would America surrender if we were essentially defeated, blockaded, and the enemy were bombing our cities with impunity? Of course we would.

It isn't like America just snuck two nukes into Japan. It had totally defeated the Imperial Navy and was essentially bombing Japan without any resistance.

The comparison between Japan in August 45 and UK during the Blitz is just stupid.

Even if the Soviet attack was the last straw, it was only a straw. They were trying to use the Soviets to negotiate a better peace and it failed. This is like blaming your QB for missing the Hail Mary for losing the game. It was the first 59 minutes of game that caused you to lose.

People online (not real historians) like to hype this up to bandwagon the "US didn't win WWII, the USSR did" mythology. The truth is it was a huge combined effort.

The Imperial Navy was so utterly defeated and out of resources that they were sending pilots on kamikaze missions to save fuel. Virtually all training had been suspended in the final months of the war because the Japanese had no access to oil. This is why their initial thrust in the war was south to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (the history of the Royal Dutch Shell facilities in the region is an incredible but largely untold story in WWII).

Depriving the Japanese of oil was an early and effective tactic of the American Navy in the Pacific. The Japanese made a faulty assumption that they could defend supply lines from the Southern Zone to the Japan. In many ways, this was the downfall of Japanese naval forces in WWII. The Japanese also didn't realize that the US and Britain had long since cracked their codes, both military and diplomatic, and even when the Germans told the Japanese their codes had been compromised, they refused to believe it!

Quoting from Daniel Yergin's The Prize:

> Of Japan's total wartime steel merchant shipping, some 86 percent was sunk during the conflict and another 9 percent so seriously damaged as to be out of action by the time the war ended.

The Allies were sinking Japanese oil tankers faster than the Japanese could build new ones!

Japanese defeat in WWII can't be assigned to any single cause, but the vastly superior supply chain of the US Navy in the Pacific and the enormous petroleum production capabilities of America is surely up there.

Yes, as I've already mentioned it deserves more thought than just two sentences when you're trying to sell the idea that nuclear weapons are not deterrents to large scale wars. So far modern history has already disproved Hasegawa's opinion. Ever since the advent of global ballistic weapons, we have yet had another major world war besides conflicts here and there. They have kept the peace.

World wars are uncommon whether we have nuclear deterrents or not, after all we had none before 1914. However we have had major near decade long regional conflicts and many wars by proxy between nuclear powers. While it's persuasive to think that nuclear weapons have prevented world wars, there isn't much evidence to support that idea.

While it is true that there weren't any wars called World Wars before 1914, what really distinguished those wars was the weapons technology and the massive devastation that resulted from that. Human nature does not change as quickly as technology does, though, and if you define a world war as a war that involved all the major powers of the time, there were in fact four wars in Europe before that that involved all the great powers of the time in two rival alliances: the Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War of 1756-63, and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

With that in mind, that makes world wars considerably more commonplace. Given the timing between the six world wars, we're in a definite lull. Nuclear deterrence is likely the major reason for that.

In terms of "massive devastation", scaled for population, I strongly suspect the Thirty Years War will give either World Wars a run for their money in the area over which they were fought. It certainly left very deep scars that were felt up to WWII....

Echoing your point, the Napoleonic Wars ended 99 years before the start of WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo The precursor wars which very much were an input into WWI ended less than 45 years before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War (and I'm in the camp that primarily blames France for initiating WWI).

There's a big difference between wars conducted directly by major world powers and little conflicts by proxy. They are not the same thing especially when it comes to scale. The other replies to your post have already made my point.

Don't forget that France surrendered.

France likely surrendered because their home country defense force was defeated and their capital overrun, the countries administration had little chance of extracting itself from the rest of France before being completely overrun.

This does not always mean surrender; think Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The difference for Russia in my opinion is that they had a large homogeneous land mass upon which to move and maintain their administration.

I think it was the large number of casualties the soviets were wiling to tolerate, I doubt the French would have encouraged the loss of a million as was incurred during Stalingrad. Consider also that the large land mass was a liability as it had to be defended, for example from Japan.

The USSR had time, resources (human and material) and the land buffer to keep fighting. The farther Germany pressed into the USSR, the more Germany's resources and supply lines were stretched and the Soviets eventually realized that.

Similar reasons cost Napoleon dearly ~130 years before.

Also, Stalin's massive ego wouldn't allow a city named after himself to be taken by the Germans. That's the primary reason that particular city suffered the high casualties that it did. Stalin once told Churchill at the Tehran Conference that "when one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics."[1]

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=8fp1A2s6aQwC&pg=PA510&dq#v=...

Well, in World War I the French did have 1.3 millions casualties. But there the French leadership did not face a situation were the war seemed hopelessly lost in the face of rapid German advances.

But the distinction is that its wasn't the potential of losing Paris and Parisians that forced France to surrender. The French government judged that they had more to lose than gain from continuing to fight.

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