"I say war by its very nature is immoral. If you are going to prolong a war by using a lesser weapon, that is an immorality. But I do not see any special immoralities where it comes to using the best weapon to get it over with in a hurry."
I also found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said, but at the same time, I can't imagine coming to the conclusion that the only way out is to drop not one but two atomic bombs on cities. It's easy to say "but if we hadn't done that we would've ended up killing many more on the ground" but that's speculation, even if it's well-founded. There's no alternative timeline that we can point at and say: look, this is what happened if we hadn't dropped the bombs so we had no choice. There was always a choice and I don't think I could ever make the choice they made.
Hmm, I guess thats true. The second bomb probably wasn't necessary. One must not forget though that the conventional firebombing of the vulnerable wood and paper housings had already claimed much more lives up to that point, so it wasn't exactly a difference in the scale of human lives lost.
Maybe the emperor was scared they'd drop one on him? I know the US military discussed that option.
If I recall, America first said, "surrender, or we will unleash an unimaginable weapon upon you." Japan says, "go pound sand." America drops the bomb and says, "if you don't surrender, we will do it again." Japan says, "there is no way you have more than one of those. Pound sand." America drops the next one. Japan surrenders.
There's also the "Would you prefer to surrender to us, or the Soviets who are currently grinding your Army into sand in Manchuria?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria)?
It would have taken some time for them to have arranged to invade more than Sakhalin Island on down to the Kurils, but it's very possible they might have grabbed some of the home islands, in which case Japan would have a lot more to be upset about than the four of the Kurils off Hokkaido it still wants back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
Seriously? He basically says that it's better that many innocent civilians die than that even more soldiers (but fewer civilians) die, over a longer span of time.
It's a pretty sane opinion to hold: basically, it boils down to "in war times, value(civilian) == value(soldier)". But I wouldn't call it "unassailable", and I'm sure many will disagree with it.
Part of the job description? How about conscription, how does that play into the equation?
The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. The question you need to be concerned over is, "What would we do in this day and age faced with a similar situation?"
Yeah, you're right, I edited that "part of the job description" stuff out again. Sorry for making you respond to something that was only in my comment for 3 minutes.
All that said, I'm not judging any actions, I'm not sure where you got that from. The GP said that the remarks made by the pilot were "unassailable". I just pointed out that that's nonsense because while it's a sane argument, there's also a sane argument against it. It's been many years and there's been no US bashing in this thread up until now, but absolute statements on the morality of what happened, in either direction, just don't seem to make sense anymore.
> The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today.
Plenty of people in the day opposed it as well. Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc: http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
The article doesn't directly address this, but most people think many, many more civilians would have died in a protracted land/aerial invasion of Japan.
You could basically factor out all the soldiers on both sides, and the total casualty count (just civilians) would have been higher.
That's the argument, anyway. I am not any sort of military expert, so I leave you to make your own judgement. But it isn't like they had the equivalent of twitter @dronestream highlighting civilian casualties back then.
In the non-nuclear regular-old B-52 firebombing of Tokyo, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, and the entire sprawling city was quite literally burned to the ground.
More quickly doesn't always equal less casualties, for instance. And even where more quickly does equal less casualties for your side, it could mean vastly more for the other side, or less military deaths but more civilian one. Or how about the potential for ongoing damage to both environment and survivors health.
This isn't to say that a nuclear attack, or any other weapon that could bring a war to a swift close, is automatically worse - just that's not automatically and unassailably better either.
I think his argument is based on the premise that the atomic bomb meant the war could be ended without protracted ground invasion and thousands of additional conventional bombing runs.
You can still dispute that premise -- and while I don't, many people do. But if you accept that premise, then yeah, it's a war. End (win) it as soon as you possibly can.
I also think that in a war, unless you think you are on the wrong side or perpetrating immoral aggression towards an underserving enemy, you should optimize for more deaths on the opposing side than on yours.
Also, I live in Tokyo (though I am American) -- and the sustained, conventional firebombing of Tokyo produced more devastation and casualties (though perhaps not horror) than Hiroshima or Nagasaki[1].
Of course dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations is a terrible thing to do, but to me the key point of Beser's lecture is that he reminds you that it was done in the context of a completely fucking horrific world war. Which really does radically change the equation.
Given an average of 100,000 [EDIT 100,000 per month since 1937] civilian deaths at the hands of the imperial army just in China alone (there were civilians being slaughtered in Indo-china and the Korean peninsula also), if the bombs ended the war just two months earlier than it would have ended (incredibly unlikely to the point of absurdity), it was a net gain in civilians saved.
And it can be well argued that the Japanese civilian deaths should be blamed on the imperial army for not capitulating when it was obvious the war was lost.
The estimate for the overall deaths in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere were 250,000 per month, we'd only liberated the Philippines from it. Korea, which had been under their boot for half a century, Malaya as it was called back then, the populous Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, South East Asia, they had captured a lot of territory and people, all of whom they viewed as untermenschen.
That's an entirely valid point in relation to WWII (although as I'm sure I've seen research suggesting that Japan was already trying to mediate a peace, and that the US were aware of this, before the bomb was dropped so it may not be as clear cut as those figures suggest).
However, my point was that even if it is true for WWII, it doesn't make it automatically true for any war as the quote seemed to be suggesting. The quickest way to finish a war isn't always the best.
Unassailable? That short-sited philosophy essentially legitimizes the use of any weapon if the goal in using it is to finish a war faster. The goal of each side in a war is to dominate and win as fast as possible, but there are degrees of immorality, and to stoop to deplorable means (gas, nukes, biological) to bring about a quicker end is to lose the high ground and very likely inspire surrounding nations to unite against you. Thankfully, our leaders have realized this, otherwise we'd have kept on using nukes when in conflicts since dropping them on Japan.
Sometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc.
One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused.
Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity.
Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question.
"Sometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc.
One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused."
"Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity.
Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question."
What I'm getting from these two comments is that it's good we dropped two bombs on civilians because it taught us that we shouldn't do that and that, also, there was some scary science fiction about worse ways for nuclear weapons to be introduced to humanity so our way wasn't that bad. Is that what you're intending, because I can't really read it any other way.
"Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point"
It's hard to argue hypotheticals, but really, you wouldn't change anything about history up to that point? Perhaps not strangling Germany quite as hard as we did after WWI? You wouldn't change that even if it'd completely erase the climate where the Nazis could rise to power?
I've always doubted the 'we made them do it' argument. Sure they were under pressure to repay WWI. That made them poor. But not every country that is poor, is also xenophobic, militaristic and nationalist to the point they are willing to kill everyone else in the world to get their way. The political climate of the country caused WWI; it also caused WWII. And the prevailing culture there was largely the reason, not details of what made them mad and rise up.
Its a form of victim blaming, little different from saying "if you didn't wear such revealing clothing, then rapists wouldn't bother you".
Not saying that at all. You might as well claim that I said it was good that forty million european civilians died in the war because in the end we won. It's quite the turn of wording.
No the point is we used the weapons when they were way less destructive and found them reprehensible. Imagine finding this out at the megaton level. When these weapons were used we had lots of uncertainty. There was lots of ignorance. Some involved in their development were not sure they'd consume the atmosphere or not. We simply were ignorant about a lot of things regarding them.
On balance though I think they resulted in more good than bad, given the alternative and in addition to the lessons learned.
It makes sense in the context of WWII, where conventional bombing campaigns killed people at a slower rate that atomic. Also, it just took a localized atomic campaign to cause that war to cease everywhere, whereas increased conventional bombing in all theaters would have not ended the war so quickly.
There might be a modern analogy to be drawn: "It's more moral to torturously murder a few enemies on internet video, such that the rest of your enemies are sufficiently scared to engage, than it is to try to engage them all in battle."
Wow!! Did you do like, debate club in school? Because even though I stand by my statements made in this thread so far, I am pretty sure you win.
(Although I do think there is still a point in there somewhere to be made about the underlying reasons the conflict is occurring in the first place. If you started it to implement your vision of a religious caliphate, revive the slave trade, etc... how does that change the morality of it?)
The major premise of the statement, that war was a given, is effectively 'unassailable' in this case, but it isn't difficult to imagine such a calculus being abused. I think it was especially a danger when one compares the apparent flight of talent from the public sector when you compare the people working for the federal government in the 30s and early 40s to the personality types and intellectual capacity of people behind the red scare in the 50s.
Furthermore there are even worse imaginable scenarios than occasional use of nuclear weapons, namely, complete compliance from everyone else without nuclear weapons. In my opinion, many of the people in government in the 50s and 60s really were motivated by an anger toward people who they thought were their inferiors displaying insufficient deference, and I think tools to demand greater compliance can have a self-reinforcing effect—"these animals don't respond to x level of force, so we use y level, which is much softer than z level" et cetera.
And yet with hindsight we see that after ending the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons were a significant factor in keeping the Cold War "cold" long enough for the relative strengths of the two systems to matter as much as how the balance of military power happened to lay at the end of WWII.
So my point isn't that I think the end didn't justify the means in this case, but that it is because of the specifics rather than the value of the rule. As a general rule, it is a horrible one. Just as sometimes fighting a war is better than not, the opposite can also be true, and whether or not its important to insist on supremacy, even when there is little cost, is a discussion that should come long before the analysis of different weapons' impact.
The danger is the implied generality of the rule. It is tempting to shift the conversation to quantifiable metrics like lives lost, because it is easier than the very difficult, soft discussions about whether pursuing various policies do anything to create the world we want to live in.
By most approximations, there were about 200,000 causalities from the bombs and their aftermath.
That said, had the bombs not been dropped, estimates ran into the millions for Allied casualties and tens of millions for Japanese (civilian + soldiers) casualties.
Ultimately it boils down to an issue of numbers (achieved by expediency).
Nothing justifies a massacre. Or war, or any sort of nonconsensual act (I'm asserting here that murdering people en masse is nonconsensual). There's no casus belli that makes war just.
But making shit stop, and stop right now? That can be useful as opposed to just.
Nothing justifies massacre -- except if you can claim that you can make a quick one right now, compared to an 'inevitable' long one, and that trade-off is worth it. (Back to square one)
You say 'all of it is wrong - ALL of it'. It implies it's equally wrong. But then, conveniently, the Japanese attacked first. So defending is kinda right, but of course it's just as wrong as mass murder of civilian populations. So it's kind of like a wrong but right necessary evil.
9-10 March "Operation Meetinghouse", six months prior to the nukes: "Approximately 15.8 square miles (4,090 ha) of the city was destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died." This was more deadly than either of the atomic bombs, it just required far more planes and pilots.
I feel like I'm going in circles here, but, this information shouldn't be used to justify nuclear mass murder, rather, it should be used to start questioning the conventional mass murder. It's not that 'we already were mass murdering people anyway'; it's 'on top of that, we were also mass murdering people with conventional attacks'.
That's a trite expression but actually a vitally important part of the international law of war. Initiating a conflict is the immoral act, collective self-defence is not. How far back does collective self-defence reach in terms of destroying the enemy's capability to attack you? That is the difficult bit and where so many people take issue with the Israeli use of this justification.
(Unless you want to argue against armed self-defence tout court, that the participants in the defence of the Warsaw ghetto were also murderers etc. etc, which is a self-consistent but rather unusual position)
The US dropped incendiary bombs in dozens of japanese cities, so an atomic bomb didn't really add much to the brutality of the situation.
Furthermore, if the objective of these bombs was to simply convince the japanese to shorten the war, couldn't they have been dropped off the coast of Tokyo?
He addressed this: "Later, another person questions using the atomic bomb at all. Why not drop it as a show of force in a rural area far away from people? Why didn’t America prove it had a superweapon then ask Japan to surrender?"
“What would be lost?” Beser says. “The integrity of your threat is gone … the ability to carry out your threat is paramount. You do not win a war by just threatening to do things and then go ‘poof.’
The US actually did consider this, but were worried that it would embolden the Japanese if the demonstration ended up being a failure(i.e. the bomb didn't properly detonate, yield was less than anticipated, etc.
Think about the range of preferences held by Nazi high command as it became apparent they would lose the war: Some were prepared to go to their deaths and take as many of their own citizens with them in the name of ideology. Some desperately wanted a way to save their own skin, some were really trying to the greatest good for the greatest number.
A 'preview bomb' announced through diplomatic channels would lend itself to debate among the top leadership that had everything to lose in defeat: life, power, and "face".
Given that time to debate, there's more room to compromise with the hawkish view of adapt to the new weapon and keep resisting through rural and guerilla means. Japan's main play was to "rip off the steering wheel in the game of chicken" by saying we have every last person on this island ready to go kamikaze, you sure you want to walk into that? The actual bombings were probably necessary response of "ripping off our steering wheel" too. Basically, leaving no doubt as to the ruthlessness was essential to achieving the desired end - surrender without negotiation. Otherwise the US would be the impossible position of basically valuing the lives of Japanese citizens more than their own government which was prepared to use them as pawns.
All new evidence points to the fact that the Japanese were thinking of surrendering and that the Americans new it, before the bombs were dropped. Also it shows that the bombs had little to no effect on their reasoning.
They whished to surrender on their own terms which they did, more or less, despite the "unconditional surrender" bs.
I find it interesting but doesn't convince me. Their timeline, 20/20 hindsight, ability to predict a future without the bombings, and definitive "we know, know!, they were unnecessary" doesn't make me think highly of their argument.
My favorite example is that the first bombing only required one initial report from the governor for the council to understand what happened. The second bombing had a similar verbal report but they had to wait another day to get the full report to understand what happened.
Never mind the fact they don't seem to grasp the significance that one bomb dropped from one plane equaled up to 10,000 bombs, or more, from around 500 planes. Is there no consideration in that leisurely dropping one bomb delivered more kilotons than a full scale air raid is a major show of force? With the obvious promise of more to come?
For my part, I would say that the bombing were not the full reason for the surrender. But they did play a major part. They faced either nuclear destruction from the US or being totally wiped out by the Soviets invading. If the Chinese didn't get their licks in too.
What are you talking about? Japan completely gave up on declaring their own terms. Taking away the godhood of the emperor was a colossal blow. If Japan surrendered on their own terms, there would absolutely have been no occupation.
Japan for a decade after the war was a completely occupied, controlled, planned state (by the US). They got NONE of their own terms. What about "unconditional surrender" is BS?
"U.S. General Douglas MacArthur insisted that Emperor Hirohito retain the throne. MacArthur saw the Emperor as a symbol of the continuity and cohesion of the Japanese people. "
That was a tactical US decision to help reconstruction. It had nothing to do with the Japanese govt wanting it.
What is your source for this new evidence? There is overwhelming evidence that is quite the contrary to what you are saying at the time it happened (which is why they dropped the bomb) and even now in retrospect.
What new evidence? I searched for this a couple of months ago and found that the "Japanese were close to surrendering" is one more recent 'internet myth' that's been propagating lately, with no real hard, substantiated evidence. Please help me correct myself on this issue.
Documentary (Nova?) showed Emperor was planning how to secure his sigils of power, hide out. They were planning to lose, at any rate. But this is hearsay; I don't have a reference to that documentary.
The intercepts collected by the Allies on the internal debates of some of the Japanese, and the internal debates the US decision makers had over whether to opt for unconditional surrender or something believed to be more likely to be accepted are pretty well documented by this reasonably neutral source: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/
I'd really appreciate your at least calling out which of these 75 documents supports this thesis. I started skimming the titles and descriptions but didn't find anything contradicting the Official Story which I've been studying closely for the last few months before giving up.
Yes, of course, the Japanese were considering surrender, that was no secret to our decision makers, and yes, of course there was consideration of relaxing "unconditional" surrender, as we signaled to them WRT to the Emperor. We weren't stupid, that was one of many reasons War Secretary Stimpson removed Kyoto from all target lists (he was familiar with the east Pacific region and had visited the city prior to the war).
Of course it doesn't make it clear that some form of surrender is going to be straightforward since the Ambassador who's outspoken in acknowledging Japan should accept a settlement like that forced on Germany as the only way to preserve the Emperor is not in a position to influence an internal vote, and the more important Foreign Minister attempting to arrange "end the war" is also quite adamant that it won't be "like a unconditional surrender".
But it's also impossible to cogently argue that the US, being aware through intercepts that Japanese ministers both (i) want peace and acknowledge it might be painful and (ii) don't want peace if it involves "unconditional surrender", was sincerely interested in avoiding further casualties when after internal debate they chose to unambiguously insist upon (ii) being the condition for not wiping out cities.
Document 49, an appraisal of the situation which opens "President, Leahy and JFB agreed Japan looking for peace. President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia rather than some country like Sweden" is a reasonable indication the substance of these intercepts was available to Truman and other decision makers. Easy to see why the U.S. wanted to avoid protracted and potentially duplicitous negotiations via their frenemies; less easy to set the value of uncomplicated negotiations at ~200,000 lives...
As for Stimson, he wasn't stupid, but he was also heavily outgunned by the war party when it came to arguing for the relaxation of unconditional surrender, which is why it was not included in the Potsdam declaration against his express wishes. [There's also no evidence that signals of the relaxation of unconditional surrender were sent separately from this (and abundant evidence from cables the US was intercepting either side of Hiroshima that even Japan's peaceniks were only hoping they might be able to secure the Emperor's status)]
The US had of course outlined conditions for peace much earlier (before it was clear Japan had lost) which included a right to choose a form of government, were aware the Japanese ambassador was using this as a basis to argue the emperor's status might be an acceptable surrender condition prior to the Potsdam Declaration, and yet opted to remove signals of the Emperor's status from earlier drafts of that ultimatum before issuing it.
Given all this was known and debated at the time, it's difficult to cogently argue the Potsdam Declaration that actually went out was intended as anything other than a prelude to dropping the bomb.
Sorry for this not well proofread wall 'o text, I don't have time to condense it. It's based my analysis of the 3 documents you cited, and to the point of analyzing document #49 was written without close notice to all the points you make above.
The #1 point I'd make in response to them, which I touch on below, is that the Foreign Ministry had no power to speak of in the government to affect the needed change in posture. Not all ministries and ministers are created equal, the US traditionally elevated the Secretary of State to the highest level, xeno"phobic" Imperial Japan not at all.
33, MAGIC intercept (diplomatic PURPLE, and I'll note the leadership of Japan didn't trust the Foreign Ministry as of Pearl Harbor....), Foreign Secretary Togo to USSR Ambassador Sato, July 17th, a month after we took Okinawa, things were utterly dire, the US Navy was freely rampaging on the coasts and 3 days earlier had sunk 7 of the 12 railroad ferries that ran between Hokkaido and Honshu, taking out 80% of 1/4 of Japan's coal supply.
WHOA! I wrote the preceding before reading to the end of this document, based on Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945 (https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10132884), and this exact set of facts with numbers is discussed in detail at the end.
Anyway, note this language in the message to Sato:
"Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not asking the Russians' mediation in anything like unconditional surrender."
40: Wow, Sato ... spoke truth to power, totally burned his relationship with the government back in Japan (the members of which would soon be tried as war criminals, e.g. Togo died in prison), put Togo, subject to assassination, in an untenable position, and Sato's suggestion for immediate action, what we signaled we were willing to do, and which we actually did, surrender with the one condition of retaining the Imperial House, was utterly rejected.
And in part II we see us signaling the all but Imperial House surrender prior to dropping the first bomb. And:
"I am fully aware of the delicate aspects this matter involves at home."
Yep, do the right thing, get assassinated for your trouble. A bit like Germany falling to the Nazi's, Japan was doomed in the 1920s when a culture of acceptable political assassination developed. That plus a constitution that required the Army to form a government (the Navy as well, but for Japan the Navy was survival, the Army a luxury, a very very expensive one in the end).
Also mention of the rail ferry sinkings in Sato's July 20 message to Togo; it really was a big deal.
Side note, the Japanese never had any air or civil defenses to speak of. They really were unprepared. And they're really concerned about food and the fall harvest, something I've heard before. Plans were being draw up to collect acorns....
Sato also realizes that the only path to peace is through the Emperor, only he had the station to get the Army etc. to stand down, and even then it was resisted with murder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident).
"The Government will surely choose the road..."; yeah, following this message, just barely after 2 cities got nuked, the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and the Emperor intervened at the possible cost of his life.
"We must also recognize that another cause for the evils we have drawn upon ourselves today lies in the fact that even before the Manchurian incident there were those who showed contempt for diplomacy and indifference toward international relations".
I.e. those who rejected this proposal by Sato.
"We should, however, give a fair hearing to the argument that 'if the enemy actually carries out a landing, we will concentrate all our strength on a counter-attack and will thus bring about his disillusionment."
Note, this is a strong argument. Kyushu had been massively reinforced, 9 division or so, enough to prevent a successful amphibious assault, along with 8,000 or so kamikazes, which, under more difficult conditions, a long flight over water, had off Okinawa inflicted the worse causalities in a battle on the US Navy. Something we had no answer to. BTW, we knew they had ... at least 6,000, our estimate turned out to be an underestimate.
Anyway, Sato is wrong here, Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu, as originally planned was dead except in the eyes of MacArthur, who didn't believe the intelligence we were producing. Those who knew about the atomic bomb were planning on using a total of around 15 in the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, 5-9 in the former. After the 2nd bomb was dropped, there was serious discussion about using the 3rd in another strike against the homeland vs. reserving it for Olympic. See this excellent account about that period: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691128189
Ah, those who didn't know about the bomb? They were planning the details of liberal use of poison gas, this was not a "clean" theater like the one in Europe, this was war to the knife.
And, as I noted above, Sato's proposal was soundly rejected.
I don't think 49 is at all definitive, I'm not sure it's even useful. It was clearly drafted after the fact, it's undated but written after the surrender, and is a brief summary of two consecutive days two days before Hiroshima.
It's usefulness depends on one non-major actor's interpretation of events that I'm not even 100% sure he was a eyewitness of. I'm not even sure what the hell the content of the middle sentences of the first day is about.
What news was Leahy supposed to be holding out on? Neither he nor his Navy were involved in the future atomic bombings besides potential rescue of crews if ditching was required. It was all Army/War Department, and it almost resulted in the effective abolition of the Navy under Truman (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals).
Anyway, I still see no better alternative to the bombings as soon as we could possibly do them.
> All new evidence points to the fact that the Japanese were thinking of surrendering and that the Americans new it, before the bombs were dropped.
What new evidence? This doesn't even make sense. There were fighting until the last man on every island up to that point. What signs of surrender were there?
Internal documents (unavailable to the Allies) show they were actually coming up with terms of surrender. But that's not fair; the Allies didn't know. Its hindsight.
The Allies responsible for making the decision did have access to intelligence reports making it clear that senior representatives of the Japanese were trying to mediate an end to the war, including explicitly quoting many of the Japanese comments - both intentional communications and intercepts - to that effect.
There's no shortage of notes to suggest that White House decision makers were aware of these and debated the possibility that including a guarantee of the Emperor's position in the Potsdam Declaration might have made surrender possible, but didn't want Russians as mediators and were more concerned about domestic opinion of demanding anything other than unconditional surrender than actually hastening the surrender. Ultimately these considerations (and others) took precedence over saving lives, and if anything is hindsight bias it's the [plausible] argument that a more stable, peaceful and prosperous Japan was achieved through insisting on total defeat and not involving any Soviet "mediation".
Well, by then we were starting to get a good take on what the post-war Soviets were going to be like, and with FDR's death and Truman, not previously an insider, the government wasn't quite so in thrall to them.
However we did signal flexibility to the Japanese about the Emperor's position; we weren't stupid, we knew that might be part of an acceptable and otherwise "unconditional" surrender.
A declaration was made and unconditional surrender requested. The Japanese were warned that they would face complete destruction if they refused. The Japanese refused. It is only at that point that the US dropped the two atomic bombs.
Indeed, and my awkward essay https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=10132884 shows that we know we let the Japanese know prior to the bombings the one condition we were willing to allow, maintaining the position of the Emperor (well, eventually his position was diminished, but not abolished).
The Government, that is, the ministers including Army and Navy forming their parliamentary Cabinet (NOT a US style Cabinet), rejected it out of hand prior to bombings and the Soviet invasion of the Army's precious Manchuria.
Accepting that a nuclear weapon was the best way to end the war, was it really necessary to use 2? It's the second one that doesn't sit well with me. Even by the logic in this account, the first bomb made the threat of subsequent attacks real. At least it is still being discussed and debated.
They dropped the first and Japan did not surrender. Only after the second. So, accepting it was the best way to end the war, it was necessary to use 2. From what I've read, many high officials still didn't want to accept the surrender, even after the second bomb.
It started in between, and the Soviets had only made great progress, the IJA wasn't quite at the "wiped out" level.
However this thesis runs into at least two problems:
The Soviets were no great threat to the home islands, at least without the naval oriented Allies providing ships, boats and air cover. Nor do I recall them showing any great interest in that decisive part of the end game, vs. playing the same game they'd started with Eastern Europe. Which, let us not forget, included mass murder of locals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
The Emperor mentioned the atomic bombing in his famous radio broadcast, not the Soviet invasion. (Very few other contemporaneous, reliable records survived the mass destruction of documents before the occupation.)
Few doubt that it was a cause of the invasion, but there's absolutely no support for it being a greater cause than the atomic bombings, with the promise of more to come.
Its likely that they used 2 because they only had 2. If they had a dozen or the thousand they have today they would had used them all.
The real effects of such weapons were unknown and the public opinion didnt really care about killing all those inocent civilians(it is not that different from the mass bombings done in the war, with "conventional weapons")
US public opinion was never high on the Japanese since the turn of the century when the Japanese started industrializing and modernizing their military, threatening US dominance in the region. But after the Red Cross published their photos on the Rape of Nanking, US public opinion bottomed out so much I doubt the attack on Pearl Harbor made them much more hated.
Don't know about that. Both of my grandfathers (I'm American) enlisted the day after the Pearl Harbor attack -- along with half the men in their neighborhoods[1].
Committing atrocities in Nanking might not have been good PR, but I don't think it moved the needle like actually attacking America.
I agree. My grandfather and many of my family in that generation signed up the next day (I'm American too).
I should of been more clear in that after the Red Cross photos, I doubt Americans could have thought less of the Japanese. I mean that in the context of when the Japanese started publishing head chopping contests of Chinese civilians between officers in the Imperial Army, no one in the US could be any more outraged.
By the time of the bombings, what we'd recently learned about the Bataan Death March due to our very expensive liberation of the Philippines was the big motivator.
I've been reading Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves, the Army general in charge of the Manhattan Project, and I just came to this bit in the chapter titled "Hiroshima", right after he delivered the first paper report of the bombing early in the following morning:
[US Army Chief of Staff] General Marshall expressed his feeling that we should guard against too much gratification over our success, because it undoubtedly involved a large number of Japanese casualties. I replied that I was not thinking so much about those casualties as I was about the men who had made the Bataan death march. When we got into the hall, Arnold [Army Air Force Commanding General] slapped me on the back and said, "I am glad you said that---it's just the way I feel." I have always thought that this was the real feeling of every experienced officer, particularly those who occupied positions of great responsibility, including General Marshall himself.
It was quite evident to all of us, as well as to the [War] Secretary up on Long Island [resting after the Potsdam Conference], that our hope of ending the war thought the development of atomic energy was close to realization.
In general, they of course knew they were doing a terrible thing, but as discussed here, it was to stop a much more terrible outcome. E.g. an estimated 250,000 killed every month the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Or the mass use of nukes in the coming invasion; after Nagasaki a debate started about how to use the 3rd, to destroy another city or reserve it for the 5 or so needed for otherwise impractical Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushu (the Japanese had reinforced it, and had constructed way too many kamikaze planes, even more than we estimated).
What's crazy is that they planned to continue using them as they became available. So 3, 4, 5 ..., 20, etc. 100? It's hard to know at what point they would have stopped had the regime not surrendered (which they were already planning to do).
So it's not really "it's better that 200k Japanese civilians die than x US soldiers" (which is a despicable view and is based on the false views that massacring civilians is OK and that unconditional surrender was necessary), because they didn't know two bombs was the magic number. It could have been 10, or 50. Basically they were probably willing to kill a whole lot more civilians than they did.
They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. No time for philosophy.
> They were willing to fight until they won. Just like the other side. It had been reduced to that: fight to survive. Remember, 50 millions dead already. No time for philosophy.
Where "fight" means massacre civilians by the hundreds of thousands or millions. Where "won" means received unconditional surrender when they could already have a very favorable conditional surrender. Where "fight to survive" means they (the US in general and the US military, not individual soldiers) at this point (when they dropped the bomb) were in no danger of not surviving. Where "no time for philosophy" means no time for a conscience or morality.
And plenty of US military leaders at the highest levels did have a conscience and opposed using the atomic bomb against civilians at that point in the war. See my link in other comments.
A favorable condition of surrender is debatable (who knew what when). Otherwise you seem to have a very good grasp on the situation. Surviving means wiping out the country that had every intention of conquering the world. Stopping meant trusting them to be nice; we didn't even do that after winning. So stopping was not an option, because survival.
Is soldier versus civilian really such a different thing? It seems more like a gradient, to me -- you support your country by building bombs / planes / etc., that's very different than just living peacefully on your own farm.
It's important to recall that every nation's entire economy was subsumed in the war effort. American "civilians" wanted to kill Japanese; Japanese "civlians" probably hated Americans (there was a lot of racial prejudice in that era, on both sides).
Civilians may not have been combatants, but they were very much a part of the war machinery, and as such became a strategic target.
What most people in the west neglect about Japan was what it was doing to China and south-east Asia during the war. Their killing of civilians was greater than what the atomic bombs did. That's where the good came from - saving the rest of Asia, not saving America.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial cities making the weapons that the Japanese were using to kill the Chinese civilians. The residents were civilians but not entirely innocent. They were part of the war machine.
You could say the same of anyone working in any industry on any side during the War. The civilian farmers in the US weren't actively killing people, but their food was sustaining soldiers who sure were.
Surely the pilots were briefed about the destructive power of the weapon they were going to drop on civilians.
He knew. He had a choice. He could have chosen not to fly that mission.
Even with the risk of being court marshalled. Even if somebody else would have done it anyway.
He could have stepped aside and chosen despise or even punishment over glory.
But he didn't. He went ahead and pulled the trigger on women and children. He chose the glory.
Saying later that "those were the times" does not exonerate you from the sins committed.
--
This is a good example of choices that we might face in our lives.
We all have a choice not to participate in the insanity (or "immorality") of war.
In fact, if we all did, wars wouldn't exist at all.
Refusing to go to the battlefield and kill other young people is not immoral.
It is the most moral and humane thing you can do.
If you ever need to make that choice, remember this.
I highly recommend reading Tolstoy's "The kingdom of God is within you", were he does a very deep analysis of war, state, violence and Christianity not as religion, but as a non-violent philosophy of life.
I'm not sure what the point of your post is. The whole discussion happening around the atomic bombs dropped on Japan is - have they actually prevented more deaths, because Japan would not have surrendered otherwise? More people have died in firebombing of Tokyo, yet Japan was not willing to surrender.
Of course, you could shield yourself behind morals and just say "well, they could have chosen not to go to war and not to kill other people!", but it's no different than a 5 year old child saying "people just shouldn't kill each other", without real understanding why people do it. To err makes us human.
This is the utilitarian argument. The other one is, never agree to killing for any reason. But I'm certain that any pilot of that time had long given up the finer points of philosophy. Their cohort was diminished daily; they'd seen far too much death. A utilitarian view (kill these families to save many more) would have made complete sense to them. While modern, civilized (and maybe coddled) people have a hard time appreciating that view.
The dicussion of the morality of Nuclear Weapons is complicated.
>The whole discussion happening around the atomic bombs dropped on Japan is - have they actually prevented more deaths, because Japan would not have surrendered otherwise?
This is a common counter point. But ultimately we don't, and won't ever know. Some sources say Japan may have accepted a surrender that made some governmental provisions (namely saying that the Empiror was immune from war crimes) had been issued instead of pushing for unconditional surrender.
The nuclear debate isn't settled because, we're still trying to define our civilations relationship with it.
Thoughts on the matter might be different when fighting an enemy that has more or less threatened to wipe out all who disagree with them. Including the fact they have no problem killing your women and children before you've even decided to fight back.
You should really speak to some Chinese that are old enough to remember what they survived before you start judging with your modern sensibilities.
It was total war not declared by the side that eventually won. Consider yourself lucky.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I don't think he or she is referring to only the Allies side doing harm. The same blame would be placed on any war-wager, and that includes Japan.
This feels a bit like a "the other side did worse things therefore revenge or killing is justified" type of argument to me. Using this kind of justification, either side could use it to their own advantage and we'd end up with an long spiral of justifications simply because "the other side attacked first" or "the other side did bad things, and we'll make it right by killing more people".
That said, this is just my view of what's right and wrong, and I'm quite ignorant on WWII - but the idea of attacking and invading in the name of preventing killing would seem to be not only unethical (killing is being done) but also irresponsible because the other side will retaliate with more killing. Not many people think of the responsibility.
If you are referring to me, I am speaking in terms of the actions of the Japanese against the Chinese. I'm not even discussing Allied behaviors. I do feel that in many ways the Allies did things I personally would not have approved of, I still have no problems that they were done.
The problem as I see it with these discussions, much as you point out you are ignorant of WWII, is that too many people do not fully understand WWII. They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly. This is extreme ignorance in action. The simplest reason is because we are now working on our second or third generation of separation of the time. We have not had a total war like there was with WWII. People are losing that perspective, that it was total war. I would imagine many recent college grads don't even realize what the term total war means.
So, why do I not have a problem with the nuclear bombings of Japan and the potential invasion? Because the Japanese were the aggressors. I have little problems with the actions of people defending themselves against aggression.
They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly.
It seems that they think that Hitler was evil and everyone else got taken along for the ride. It's so much more complicated than that, especially for those people who were there at the time.
I would imagine many recent college grads don't even realize what the term total war means.
A great many college grads, high school grads and people born after 1950.
We're talking about people who don't understand that "War" means more than people shooting at each other. People who don't understand that we haven't had a war in over 70 years.
The enemy has no problem killing you exactly for the same reason that you have no problem killing the enemy.
If these kids didn't listen (weren't forced by the State to listen) to older men telling them horror stories about the 'enemy', they would just hang out, drink and party together.
Anyway, it's impossible and inappropriate to explain this on HackerNews.
Above all, War is an infectious mental disease and we need to vaccinate ourselves from it if we don't want to get infected by it in the future.
It occurs primarily in our minds and then it manifests in destruction and bloodshed.
That's why I recommended Tolstoy's book. He does a much better job than I at explaining it.
Its prisoner's dilemma. If all nations would only read this book or that, then voila the world is a better place. But the first one to read and adopt (No more war!) is the first to be victimized. Its not a disease; its game theory. Tragic, tragic game theory.
> "If these kids didn't listen (weren't forced by the State to listen) to older men telling them horror stories about the 'enemy', they would just hang out, drink and party together."
I'm sorry, but that shows a complete misunderstanding of human nature. It's the same kind of "everyone is the same and wants exactly the same things as we do" attitude that led to the belief that we need to bring democracy to the Middle East, leading to the Arab (nuclear?) Winter there is now.
People fight wars. Always have and always will. And they don't stay out of wars in order to drink and party together - they stay out when the perceived costs are greater than the perceived benefits.
I totally agree, that it's immoral to participate in war, but how to reconcile that position with current world? Imagine you are a Kurd and ISIS is attacking your home. What would you do? The only way I see is to flee, but it's not scalable.
Unfortunately participating in a war means not only resisting evil, but also hurting innocents. Even modern wars kill large number of civilian population. For example, lowest estimations of Iraq War civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands.
>We all have a choice not to participate in the insanity (or "immorality") of war. In fact, if we all did, wars wouldn't exist at all.
Refusing to go to the battlefield and kill other young people is not immoral. It is the most moral and humane thing you can do.
That's just a defense of the status quo, though.
Going to war is automatically immoral if we are at a global maximum for, I don't know, whatever quantity you're trying to indirectly adjust by going to war.
The easiest example to use is probably WW2 (it also happens to be relevant to the article): If you want to minimize oppression, and you judge the morality of actions based on whether they increase or decrease the amount of oppression in the world, then refusing to go to Europe and fight the Nazis is not the most moral thing you can do - it's an act that doesn't decrease oppression as much as agreeing to fight the Nazis, and since you rank the morality of actions by the change in oppression, then going to Europe to kill young Wehrmachts is more moral than not going to Europe to kill young Wehrmachts.
If a person is faced with a choice of ending ongoing bloodshed at a cost of participating in that bloodshed ... then it is a coward and a despicable man who doesn't act.
Those who were a part of that mission acted with the intention of ending the war. And that's exactly what happened.
There would have been many, many more dead on both the Japanese and the American side if those bombs didn't drop. That was painfully obvious. Every single Axis power fought to the last man up to that point. Japan was the most fervent, fanatical of them all. There isn't a single shred of evidence to suggest that a ground invasion of Japan, which would have been necessary if it wasn't for the bombing, wasn't going to be an absolute horror worse than any nuclear bombing.
what i fail to understand is why female lives are worth more than mens?
while i agree that war is despicable and we all have the responsibility to work against systems and circumstances that will lead to war i think you coose the easy way.
from your comment I doubt you have ever been in the army- I have it's compulsory where I live so I can understand the pressure a bit better than somebody who never experienced this system.
another thing: during WWII in the Nazi regime it was not only your live that was forfeited when refusing to join the army but your family had to face repressions too.
I consider myself very lucky to not face such grave circumstances and decisions...
Female lives have always been more valuable. The survival odds (fitness) of a clan are directly related to the number of females. Because, of course that limits the size of the next generation i.e. growth.
Because ten women and one man can give birth to ten babies every 9 months (the next generation will be hideous, but one step at a time!). Ten men and one woman can only give birth to one baby in the same time period.
They didn't know of the effects the bomb would have on the hibakusha.
In a total war scenario, civilians who are engaged in support activities for the war effort are valid targets.
If the Germans or the Japanese could have, do you think they wouldn't have bombed American steel factories and weapons plants?
After what the Japanese military did to the people in Nanking, they have NO right to stand on moral high ground and complain about what happened to their civilians.
Americans didn't force children to watch their mothers being raped, the Japanese did that. Americans didn't give children candy laced with anthrax spores, the Japanese did that. Americans didn't force Japanese women to endure hundreds of rapes as "comfort women", the Japanese did that. Americans didn't force Japanese civilians or POWs to take part in lethal experiments, the Japanese did that.
Dropping those bombs was right. Dropping those bombs was just. Yes, those were the times and the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the only message that particular enemy was prepared to receive.
They didn't know of the effects the bomb would have on the hibakusha.
As far as I can tell, it's the severe discrimination they received at the hands of their countrymen that was/is their biggest problem, e.g. as Wikipedia puts it, "The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation."
The physical injuries we inflicted with the atomic bombings were on a par with our systematic firebombings of their cities, especially when everything came together and a firestorm developed, like in the first firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000, and Hiroshima.
Right. American troops even sang Kumbaya in Vietnam. Napalm, agent orange cough cough. Remind me again which country has dropped the most amount of explosives in other countries and how does that measure up with the second highest.
Know what's different? When they were running amok in My Lai, there were American civilians protesting against the war back at home.
There were American civilians being shot by national guardsmen because they were opposed to what the military was doing to strangers on the other side of the planet.
The Japanese had been preparing to fight to the last man before those bombs dropped. It was the right thing to do.
It should also be pointed out that My Lai and Kent State were aberrations, the former punished, the latter unsuccessfully prosecuted, but the authorities did attempt it.
The mass murder of untermenschen in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by every means known to man, the Bataan Death March and general savagery towards POWs, was Imperial Japanese policy.
To me what is very amusingly different is the holier than though, upholder of freedom and democracy chip on their shoulder many wear to a fault. Given history (both old and recent) it takes some chutzpah (and perhaps ignorance / indoctrination) to wear that attitude when one is responsible for enslavement of one race and, for all practical purposes, political depopulation of another. I bear no ill will, far from it, just something that tickles my funny bone in some dark way.
My ancestry contains enslaved Africans, indentured servant Irish and Native Americans.
The history of this country isn't some dry, academic matter for me. It's how I came to exist.
This country isn't perfect. This country has done some terrible things, especially to non-whites and Jews but that doesn't change any of my previous points.
> Saying later that "those were the times" does not exonerate you from the sins committed.
Exonerate? Perhaps not. But context does matter, and people make decisions with the information they have available at the time.
One thing I have found helpful in understanding what you describe as "the insanity of war" is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. He has an episode on this very topic, which he entitled "Logical Insanity[0]" regarding the build up to the dropping of the atomic bombs, and how the incremental escalation of savagery in WWII might gradually alter people's perspectives on morality.
I think the arguments are valid for his paradigm. Some of us may have problems even entertaining such ideas, but then again we grew up to a docile, friendly japan. Just to make it more contemporary, swap Japan with Iran.
(Disclosure: I'm not in anyway against Iran or something)
Plenty of US leaders at the time opposed it (some privately). Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc:
The cost in Iraqi lives and destruction has probably been a few times greater than that from the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it would have been quicker.
Whether it would have lead to functioning government that wasn't expansionist and that served Iraqis without prejudice is another question entirely. We never really discussed the aims to be achieved by the use of conventional arms either though.
One could also weigh the thousands of US soldiers lives lost and >$1T cost against the cost of a few nuclear warheads.
I don't think it's too difficult to see how the arguments to justify two specific uses of atomic bombs are entirely dependent on their context, and making them sound like general rules probably does people a disservice.
It wouldn't have been quicker, though. Anyone can see that: if you nuke Iraq, you'd face a massive, worldwide, prolonged counter-movement.
The fact that this didn't happen during WW2 means that it was one of the only times you could actually get away with using nuclear weapons, and the people making that decision knew that they could get away with it. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have used them. They relied on ignorance that simply doesn't exist today.
They relied on ignorance that simply doesn't exist today.
I think that goes a little to far. More like they "relied" on the context of a World War that had butchered 75 million people, 1/3 of that in the Pacific. And as I've noted elsewhere, was butchering 250,000 people per month in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and was looking to kill maybe a million Allied soldiers, with no upper limit for the Japanese population, as had just been demonstrated in Okinawa.
Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching. Was it the right thing to do - I don't think so. I'm sure when they nuked they knew the radiation effects would affect these regions for years to come.
Yes, being the only country with an unknown number of warheads, plus an undamaged domestic industrial base had a lot to do with it, too.
My point being that his description of the moral calculus for the decision has little to do with any scenario without the same context. But not only because of the results, because the justification had to do with the necessity of defeating Imperial Japan rather than a comparison of the costs of the different ways of achieving that defeat.
That is the criticism of the oversimplified ends justify the means justification for the use of atomic bombs in Japan. It wasn't about ending the war, it was about achieving aims that had been determined were imperative, through war, with a lesser loss of life.
I don't follow your logic. He said it justified a quick end to the war against a strong adversary. Iraq barely put up fight against the American war machine. If anything, Bush and Cheney wanted it to go on a little longer so they could funnel some more money to their military-industrial buddies. I'd hate to sound like some talking-points liberal but at this point I think that part is already accepted as fact.
That's a pretty unassailable statement.
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