It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to watching Oppenheimer.
What does it matter whether it's nukes or firebombs that leveled Tokyo and Dresden? It's terrible that a couple hundred thousand people died in the bombs, but frankly, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 85 MILLION people that died in WWII, and less terrible than the other couple of million that would have died in a conventional invasion.
I always find it interesting how willing everyone is to judge the US for dropping the bombs, and how willing everyone was to completely forget the ~ 30M people japan murdered during their colonial expansion.
> 30M people japan murdered during their colonial expansion.
"Japan" is just a label for an arbitrary grouping of people who live in close geographical proximity. It's incapable of murdering people.
Some in that group murdered. Others did not murder. Were innocent. Do you think a nuclear fireball can discriminate between the two?
> and less terrible than the other couple of million that would have died in a conventional invasion.
I don't think any invasion were necessary. I think they were days or even hours away from unconditional surrender without that. I think that overtures had already been made, but these were willfully ignored.
This is the only argument that supports the assertion that the nukes were war crimes. And if I am wrong in this premise, then I too concede the nukes were justified.
But, if I'm right... it's not difficult to imagine why they were dropped. We'd already seen for ourselves what they could do at Trinity, but the Soviets didn't have a clue. It was a demonstration for their sake.
All these arguments about how it wasn't necessary to drop the bombs seem to conveniently not mention the fanatic Japanese defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
We're specifically talking about the use of nuclear weapons in this instance.
If we're going to start totting up non-nuclear killing of civilians, then the U.S. is looking at the killing of approx 56 million indigenous people for a similar desire to "own" land.
I was specifically talking about deaths during WWII.
The US is partially responsible for the native american genocide, but I'd argue Britain and Spain are much more so (small pox and it's ilk did most of the killing at time of first contact)
Hell if we're talking this sort of original sin, where does it end? Humans have been exterminating each other from the dawn of time.
Could you point me in the direction of writing on this argument?
I'd always heard that there was significant justification for using the atomic bombs on the basis of overall loss-of-life that was expected in an invasion of Japan. I've never read any detailed analysis of this claim and I've mostly taken it at face value.
There is no honest assessment of the pacific conflict that doesn't end with millions of Japanese people dying. The Japanese did pearl harbor KNOWING that there would be no victory against the US if they decided to go to war. They gave themselves a chance of survival of about 2 years if the US committed.
Japan could have taken their ball and gone home at ANY TIME between the bombing of pearl harbor and their eventual capitulation, but they didn't want to because that would be inconvenient for their grand ambitions. The US was not "conquering" Japan, and did not want any land of Japan's.
By the end, Japan's army was acting on it's own, against the orders of the emperor. The reason millions of Japanese citizens died, as well as many American soldiers, is because a few leaders in the Japanese army did not want to give up the power they held. That is it.
The alternatives to dropping the atomic bombs were:
1. Blockade Japan until enough of the country starves to death that they surrender
2. Invade Japan and end up killing Japanese civilians who have all been brainwashed to rush invading troops with grenades and improvised weapons, as happened in Okinawa.
Additionally, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets. Hiroshima had an army HQ and Nagasaki was a major naval base. Yes, they wanted to select a secondary target that hadn’t been bombed before to demonstrate the power of the bomb to the Japanese, but if terror bombing was the sole intention, they would have hit Kyoto.
In the final analysis, dropping the atomic bombs was the best long term outcome for both Japan and the allied powers. Was it “honorable”? War isn’t about honor; it’s about making the best out of a choice of bad decisions. Maybe the Japanese should have considered that before they invaded China to start the damn war in the first place.
Also,
> the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that
In an alternate timeline, the people of the U.S. could have persuaded politicians that it was in their interest to disallow individual nations from having full control of nuclear weapons. Possibly put them under control of a multi-national organisation?
The problem with "nobody should have nuclear weapons" is that anyone who defects is in such a position of power that you basically cannot protect yourself from them. Unfortunately, the only stable situation in nuclear warfare is MAD and extreme nuclear taboo, which predominantly comes from MAD.
This is why nearly every country with nukes has an openly available and distributed "nuclear strategy" that comes close to saying "we won't use them if you don't", and why even Putin has towed that line so far.
> That it was the threat of Soviet invasion which really tipped the scales.
That's exactly what tipped the scales. The Soviet betrayal of the non-aggression pact, their march through the Inner Mongolia desert (Which Japanese planners considered impossible, given the lack of logistics infrastructure in it), their blitz through Manchuria, the complete collapse of Japan's positions in it, as well as the Soviet naval invasion of the Sakhalin and Kuril islands was what brought the war to a close. Japan could not continue the war without access to Manchuria, and was really, really not interested in getting occupied by the Soviets.
People always claim this, but it doesn't make very much sense to me. The Soviets did invade Manchuria I think the same day as the Nagasaki bombing, but a full invasion even of occupied China, let alone the home islands, would have been logistically challenging for them, and the Japanese would have known this. It would require sending and supplying troops through Siberia, which even today has limited infrastructure. They possibly could have used Western transport ships to stage their forces somewhere in the Pacific, but those transports would have already been full of American and British troops being staged in the theater for the same purpose.
At any rate, Japan prior to the atomic bombings had two reasons to surrender: the blockade and impending starvation of the Japanese people and the risk of an American invasion of the home islands. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the atomic bombings represented two more reasons. The entire weight of circumstances forced Japan to surrender when it did; I think it's very hard to deny that the atomic bombs were not a necessary aspect of that.
WW2 was an existential war. The Allied powers had agreed that the only acceptable end to the war was unconditional surrender by the Axis. Combatants mobilized their entire societies to fight -- the US was spending about 40% of GDP on the military in 1945. The nuclear bomb had never been used before, so the nuclear taboo did not exist. Allied air forces had been pounding Axis population centers with conventional bombs for years, killing millions. The American invasion of Okinawa caused the deaths of approx 100,000 Japanese troops, 20,000 Americans, and 150,000 Okinawan civilians. American military planners thought that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have similar casualty exchange ratios as Okinawa, which would leave hundreds of thousands of American troops dead, millions of Japanese troops dead, and millions of Japanese civilians dead.
There were scant alternatives to the bomb. The war had to end fast, the American people demanded nothing less. Wearing down the Japanese with continued strategic bombing, a naval blockade, and the Soviet invasion of Japanese held areas on the mainland would be slow, uncertain, and cause many more deaths than the atomic bombs did. The Japanese willingness to surrender is hotly debated, so all I'll say is this: the Americans had observed constant Japanese fanaticism over the course of the war. Japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender while they clutched grenades to their chests, the surrender of Japanese units larger than platoons was nearly unheard of, and the Japanese population was basically brainwashed. A common saying on the island was "victory, or a hundred million dead souls".
So given all that context -- existential war, lack of a nuclear taboo, normalization of strategic bombing, lack of belief in the Japanese will to surrender, and political pressure to end the war quickly -- dropping the bomb was inevitable. It was horrible, unfathomably cruel, and ended the innocent lives of blameless men, women, and children. It wasn't nice, fair, or honorable. But there was no better option, so we did it.
> So given all that context -- existential war, lack of a nuclear taboo, normalization of strategic bombing, lack of belief in the Japanese will to surrender, and political pressure to end the war quickly -- dropping the bomb was inevitable. It was horrible, unfathomably cruel, and ended the innocent lives of blameless men, women, and children. It wasn't nice, fair, or honorable. But there was no better option, so we did it.
The USA was pushing to an unconditional surrender of Japan, well aware that it was one of the few things the Japanese would deny for a surrender. Surrender was already in negotiations, it was just the unconditional part the Japanese were against to save some face with their population.
The USA wanted to drop the bomb, not negotiate, there was this new weapon that could show which nation has the biggest dick around and there was a willingness to use it as a showcase to the Soviets, to the world. And so the USA dropped the bomb.
There were other avenues to explore, Japan was already aware it was going to lose, continuing the blockade of Japan would obliterate their industrial production capacity as Japan doesn't have much natural resources, they wouldn't be able to leave the island under siege, it would've taken longer but an amphibious assault wouldn't necessarily be needed to force them into a negotiated surrender. The USA pushed the unconditional surrender as the only option exactly to have casus belli to drop the atomic bomb.
It's pretty naïve as well to believe the narrative that was pushed forward to justify dropping the bomb, it's part of American propaganda and something I wish Americans would learn from their past, the same as Japan does not educate their citizenry on the abominations they did during WW2, the USA does not educate its people on the absurdity of dropping atomic bombs and instantly vaporise hundreds of thousands of people just to show the world it had a new big dick.
> The USA was pushing to an unconditional surrender of Japan, well aware that it was one of the few things the Japanese would deny for a surrender. Surrender was already in negotiations, it was just the unconditional part the Japanese were against to save some face with their population.
Japan at the time occupied a large swath of East/Southeast Asian countries, causing unfathomable hardship to the civilians. Two million of Vietnamese died from famine in 1945. People died on the streets while rice were stocked in Japan Army's warehouses, no doubt in preparation for potentially fierce battle with the US. The quicker Japan surrendered the less suffering would be for civilians. Japan's surrender gave rise to many independence countries -- China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia.
If you don't want to be slaughtered by the millions, do not engage in Total War with anyone. Japan was not going to stop shooting the allies with whatever they could unless the allies killed every last one of them or invaded the homelands and attempted to put down the resultant insurgency.
The idea that there's some form of "Honorable" war is disgusting propaganda from people who wish to control others through violence.
> It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.
The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed approximately as many civilians, and left a million homeless. Also considered a war crime by many.
And yet Imperial Japan did not surrender after that. The IJA and IJN were mostly finished by then. They were unable to hold their conquered territory, and were being pushed back and defeated at sea. What was it going to take for the war council to agree to surrender?
> And yet Imperial Japan did not surrender after that. The IJA and IJN were mostly finished by then. They were unable to hold their conquered territory, and were being pushed back and defeated at sea. What was it going to take for the war council to agree to surrender?
Destruction of their capability to wage war and/or the removal of the people refusing to surrender. A nuclear weapon was one answer to that question, but I suspect that there were other motives in play e.g. testing the destructiveness of the bombs and to send a message to other nations.
There is a strong argument to be made that Truman should have been tried for war crimes for dropping the second bomb. You can justify the first bomb as shortening the war, bringing Japan to surrender. The second bomb was about getting an unconditional surrender with terms dictated by the USA.
The Nagasaki bomb may not have been necessary. As well a simple attack on Japan, the Nagasaki atomic bombing was also a cold-blooded test of the implosion bomb technology, and a demonstration for the rest of the world, particularly for the Soviet Union.
But between 100,000 to 250,000 died, Japanese and American, in the battle of Okinawa in 1945, the 3 month US invasion of Okinawa, before the atomic bombs were used. That was the first and only US attempt to invade the main Japanese islands, and it was a tragic and unnecessary loss of life.
About 80,000 died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
But Japan should have surrendered long before any of the atom bombs fell. They had obviously lost. If Japan's leadership could not take that obvious step, then there was no easy solution.
Especially with how little change the unconditional surrender had on Japanese life in the long run. Yes, the emperor came out and told the people he was not divine and has taken on a ceremonial role since then but the emperor was not forced to resign, members of the imperial family were immune from prosecution for war crimes (so the person at the top responsible for the atrocities in Nanking was never held to account for them), several politicians who were class A war criminals rose to the top of the Japanese political leadership after the war, and Japan has never officially apologized for their atrocities.
unconditional surrender meant that all of this was at the pleasure of the occupiers, who were currently operating concentration camps for japanese-americans; other possibilities included turning japan into a second nanjing or pine ridge, where to this day occasional rapes by whites continue with impunity
things have in fact worked out fairly well for japan, much better than it worked out for the people of jiangsu, but you can hardly blame the japanese leadership for expecting otherwise
Calling the US internment camps "concentration camps" is both disingenuous and a neo-Nazi talking point.
The internment camps were a disgrace, were wrong, and the US government was right to issue both an apology and compensation to people who were interred there.
The government of Japan has never done the same to Nanking. I don't believe they ever will.
> where to this day occasional rapes by whites continue with impunity
This is yet another disingenuous point - rapes by soldiers in Japan occur, they're bad, and the military both investigates and prosecutes those who take part, unlike Japan and Nanking.
you are the sort of person who compares people who disagree with them to neo-nazis; that is not the sort of person who is in a position to question my integrity in any way, much less viciously attack it as you have
(you can probably find neo-nazis saying the sky is blue as well)
i didn't mention the actually occurring rapes by soldiers in japan, which i agree in the actual world we live in are appropriately investigated and prosecuted; as demonstrated by my link, i was talking about rapes by whites in pine ridge and other so-called indian reservations, which to a large extent are neither investigated nor prosecuted
> you are the sort of person who compares people who disagree with them to neo-nazis
I'm really not - calling the internment camps "concentration camps" is literally a neo-Nazi talking point and meant specifically to draw moral equivalence between the Japanese interment camps and the death camps in Germany during World War 2. I'm sorry if that offends your delicate sensibilities, but it's true. Look over my comments on this account if you don't believe me here - I have not and do not call people neo-Nazis for disagreeing with me (and I'm not calling you a neo-Nazi, I'm saying that it's a neo-Nazi talking point).
I think there's no other fruitful discourse we can have here.
From my hazy recollection, Japanese leadership didn't believe the US had been responsible for Nagasaki. The second bomb settled that matter. All of these could be true though, they aren't mutually exclusive.
> the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that
By who, and how? They had and have literally nukes and the largest and most powerful army in the world. It would only be possible if they volunteered, but they wouldn't because not long after, other countries developed nukes. Nobody wants to give up nukes if others have them too.
It still shocks me how people seem to think that killing all those civilians has any honour at all - the U.S. should have been disbarred from holding nuclear weapons after that.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to watching Oppenheimer.