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.
I found your last sentence hard to parse. Are you saying that all of the justifications you've heard for the bombing were absolutely unconvincing?
I have strong feelings both ways, but I find it hard to deny that it probably saved a lot of allied lives. It doesn't mean that it was the "right" choice, but I don't see how it can be possibly dismissed (put yourself in Truman's shoes).
> Most likely Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a million Japanese lives.
No, there were alternative ways. Before dropping to the city, you can just drop it to the mountains or along the sea coast to show the power of the bomb. If it doesn't work, do it multiple times in different locations. After that drop it to the military camps. If all doesn't go well drop to the city. Also it didn't have to happen twice in the city, because it was a matter of time for the Japanese government to surrender. It was just an inhuman action to drop two atomic bombs in the city skipping all of these steps.
I guess I just project my own personal worldview onto world affairs. I do stupidly bad things with some frequency, and I only ever recognize them as such in hindsight. Nobody acts against their own morals at the time, right? But I believe it's helpful to say, "Look, I did a stupidly bad thing because I didn't feel or think I had any other options, and I wouldn't have done it if I'd known better." Einstein said as much when he wrote, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger."
We don't know if there could have been an alternative that definitively ended the war and cost less lives. Things were winding down at that point anyway. I don't even necessarily feel that dropping those bombs was a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because it shone a light on the darkness that we are capable of as a species. Maybe those two bombs were all that prevented mutual destruction during the cold war.
But as an isolated event, nuking a city is just as horrific as pushing people into ovens - it's really quite comparable, actually - and I think it's best just to say, we did something awful, we thought we had to, it's over now, it won't happen again. Germany did this, for instance. And the only reason that didn't happen for the atomic bombs is because the US "won" the war.
The following summary by Alex Wellerstein represents his understanding of the consensus view. Notably the idea that the bombings where carefully motivated by some sort of ethical calculus is not something that historians now believe. From http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...
* It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used.
* Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
* American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
* Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honour.
> The bomb wasn't dropped on the torturers, the rapists, which in many cases were not held responsible for the crimes they committed.
This is the tricky part. I don't remember exact figures, but wasn't Truman's dilemma a choice between invading Japan or dropping the bombs? I don't really see a viable third option, and I don't remember reading about one either. The tragedy is that the Japanese were not given enough time to surrender after the first bomb was dropped.
Also, the United States has also done some terrible things "in the name of democracy," but I still think there is a difference in magnitude between installing a dictator in a foreign country and encouraging the systematic murder and rape of civilians.
The problem is that these things are on a spectrum - is it not possible to condemn both while admitting that one alternative was better? I obviously don't want anyone to use nuclear weapons, but how should we react when it is the option that results in the least amount of suffering?
And as far as saying "them" -- this was out of convenience. It is a pronoun, after all, and I was merely trying to say that elegant solutions are quite hard to find when you're dealing with ugly problems. Sometimes "less ugly" is all you can find.
> I realized that it actually did bring an end to the war
This may be the mainstream opinion in the US, but do note it's not the mainstream opinion in other countries. Alternative explanations include that the real purpose of the two bombs was to show the Soviets the nuclear might of the US (this view is suggested in the Hiroshima museum in Japan, but just in case you discount it because Japan is obviously not a neutral party, this opinion is also held in some countries in Latin America -- even some people in the US believe this). Even at the time, some people in the US army opposed the bombing and believed it had no military justification.
"But that's no different than the logic that went into bombing Japan to prevent an even more devastating invasion of Honshu. It is sickening and abhorrent, but not necessarily wrong, and it is not genocide. "
I see, we have a different base moral.
Well, in my world it is absolutely wrong to nuke a civilian city.
"so the bombs they had were like the weaker ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were powerful weapons, no doubt, but not fundamentally any worse than the kind of devastation that was already normalized with the firebombing of Dresden"
And the firebombing of Dresden was very wrong as well, but unlike those conventional bombings, the nuclear bombs lead to lasting contamination. The bang of a fusion bomb might be way bigger, but the radiation is way worse with nukes.
"to prevent an even more devastating invasion of Honshu"
And the calculus was never between nuking a civilian city vs. full scale invasion. There would have been plenty of other options, like let the bomb explode in the sky in view of the emperors palace, or if that fails, dropping it on actual military bases.
Humanitarian ethics was just not a factor anymore to those planning it. They wanted the data for the effect of a nuke on a city. And von Neumann seemed to have been among those cold planing strategists, since he did propose nuclear war with his quotes, where I do not see them out of context, but as a clear statement for first strike war with nuclear weapons. And the effect of this is genocidal.
> It's been a long time since I've read it, but I'm guessing the saving lives part of dropping the bomb.
I wasn't baiting an argument about the bombs, but I just don't want to let it slide by. That is with almost certainty a false claim. I know we don't admit in America that we are capable of producing and consuming propaganda, so it's exceptionally difficult to communicate that idea despite what facts & what leadership at the time said that is in the historical record. Something swept under the rug was that there were many senior military leaders who pleaded to not use the bombs on urban, civilian population centers, at the very least. Also contrary to popular belief, the Japanese leadership was actually desperately looking to find a way out of the war. It was over by that point. Hirohito had no way for his empire to survive, and he selfishly did not want to relinquish his role as emperor (he otherwise offered to surrender if he could).
Feynman wasn't a military general at the time and he likely had no way or time available of knowing the full consequences of use of the bomb.
My high school history textbook told me that the bombs saved lives. President Eisenhower said there was no reason to drop them. There are two sides to that story.
I have heard this argument so many times, it almost seems like this has been drilled into American minds post fact to rationalize the only nuclear attack in human history. I can never take this argument seriously. There was no way there would have been more deaths unless the bombs were dropped. Imagine someone suggesting dropping a bomb in a dense city as an argument for “saving lives”. It seems absurd. Nobody knows how the exactly the war would have played out. So there was no guaranteed outcome. So, the bomb was dropped at best based on some probability.
> In fact it is not even proven that the bombings had any meaningful impact to the decisions to surrender. If the Japanese didn't surrender after having whole cities firebombed, it is insane to think the atomic bombings would have had any more impact on moral.
If you look at which shaped fiction the most, there is no doubt that the nuclear bombings had a much greater impact than the fire bombings.
So I don't think it is insane to say that a single bomb with the power of thousands regular bombs can cause a significant impact on morale, compared to the regular bombs.
As to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I take the view that the former was justified, and the latter was probably not. There is every reason to believe that Japan was preparing to fight on the home islands the way they had everywhere else; to the hilt, with little quarter given. Hiroshima while horrendous, was not terribly different from the firebombings of cities like Dresden and Tokyo. There’s no question that in the absence of an atomic bomb, conventional weapons would still have been deployed, and I suspect far more widely and with death tolls near or in excess of seven digit figures.
So Hiroshima made sense. Then we really didn’t give them enough time to process the enormity of what had happened and surrender. They might not have, in which case Nagasaki was an option, but there are enough questions as to their full understanding of the events in Hiroshima that Nagasaki was premature, and possibly unnecessary. At the end of the day the world has been subjected to the second global conflict started by Germany’s desire to conquer Europe in a handful of decades. The appetite for a long slog to inevitable victory over a mountain of allied and Japanese corpses wasn’t there, and I don’t blame them,
> I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives.
You're not the only one, but most of the people who believe like you are Americans. Outside the US the prevalent view is pretty much against those atomic bombings; had the US lost the war, the people who ordered those bombings would have been found guilty of war crimes and hanged.
My own subjective opinion is that the US needs this narrative of "but we ended up saving lives", because anything else would run contrary to their own self image of "we are always the good guys".
Consequently, alternative considerations like that the bombings were a show of force with the Soviet Union as the target audience tend to get downplayed in the US, because it's harder to think of oneself as the good guy when you killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in one country in order to put fear into the leadership of another, unrelated country.
There are very few defensible historical positions that seem to rile up unreasonable criticism more than saying the use of atomic weapons on Japan might not have been justified, usually in the form of uneducated meme responses such as "they would never have surrendered" and "it's easy to say that now."
Given that we have evidence that many of those who were there at the time disagreed with the decision and that Japan had already been trying to work towards peace through back-channels, these responses seem to point to a deep need to feel like the United States didn't unjustifiably kill over 100k civilians.
There is little question that the bombings were a better strategic choice than Operation Downfall, which would likely have killed more on both sides, but to paint this as the only alternative is a false dilemma. There is even debate among (prominent, non-revisionist) historians and political scientists as to whether the bombings were the primary reason for the surrender -- contemporary letters from within Japan indicate that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria may have actually been the primary factor (though the bombings certainly played some part, and were a larger factor in arguments made by some particular officials).
"I am not the only one who believes that in the long term the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese lives."
You are absolutely wrong about that. A cursory examination would reveal that Japan was ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped. There was only one condition that they get to keep their emperor, but the allies ended up following that condition even after the unconditional surrender, so that just wasn't relevant.
And the logic that the atomic bombs were not that bad because there were even worse bombings is just wrong.
This thread is probably dead, but the main arguments I hear from people saying it was wrong is that Japan was extremely close to surrender and even negotiating terms before the bombs.
Also that it didn't need to be dropped on a populated city first, and that previous bombing of cities in the war proved that the tactic was relatively ineffective. And that the US had a conflict of interest; they wanted to end the war before the Russians were involved. As well as demonstrate the capability of the bomb to them.
Everything I said is debatable, and I don't blame Truman for making the decision he did. But Orwell's comment, that the arguments involved are "too brutal to bear" is definitely true. Most people can't answer the trolley problem, a hypothetical situation where you have to kill one innocent person to save 5.
Now imagine instead of 1 person it's thousands, and they aren't all just killed instantly but some horribly maimed or irradiated. And that whether it will work wasn't certain, or that the horrible alternative wasn't certain, and that there are all sorts of possible third options, etc. And so whatever you think the best choice is, the arguments involved are extremely brutal.
It is entirely possible that the decision to drop the bomb was made in good faith, but that the Japanese were already committed to surrender. The fog of war is very real (as this month has reminded us).
In context, the Hiroshima bombing wasn't the most deadly or the most destructive bombing of the war. The Tokyo firebombing takes that honor. Given that the US Army was in the habit of wiping cities off the map at will BEFORE Hiroshima, I wonder how much of an influence the bomb really could have had in 3 days...
The other side of it is that American history really undervalues the soviet contribution to the war. The US conventional story fully ignores that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria was cited by Japanese leadership as one of the reasons for full acceptance of the Potsdam declaration.
I don't disagree with what you are saying, but the conventional narrative that nuking two cities was the ONLY way to end the war really seems like an oversimplification of a very complex situation.
As you mention "total war" was already fully accepted, but I wish that that the complexity of the full situation was taught
I was intentionally trying to avoid the "was it fair, should they have done it" argument, because it's an infinite loop debate. When I quoted Mr. Yamaguchi as saying, "How could they do that?", I was not echoing his question, but commenting on the state of mind he was in when he asked it.
I am neither smart nor wise enough to comment confidently on whether the bombs ought to have been dropped or not.
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