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.
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.
Or maybe I was making a conscious choice to comment on the one but not the other. In the last 20 years or so, there's been a wide reconsideration about the morality of dropping bombs (whether nuclear or conventional) on civilian populations during the war. I don't think we need to have yet another conversation about that. Instead, I'm trying to understand the Japanese viewpoint, where they get a telegram that 100k people have been killed in a raid and think "Bummer, but we fight on!".
Japan has committed many atrocities and had no moral high ground, nor would I have suggested so. I am not debating how many conscripts to sacrifice and so on, and you are free to question my intelligence however much you wish. I reject your framing of my answer to the OP and engaging with false implications and things I have not claimed.
More to the point, the bomb(s) could have been dropped on military targets away from civilians and still fully display their destructive power to the same effect of forcing a surrender. Did they absolutely need to be dropped on top of cities and murder so many civilians? This IS a display of barbarism and revenge, no matter how conducive to the goal of ending the war.
Since backing off the war completely wasn't a realistic option, they basically had a choice between nuking Japan until it surrenders, or prolonging the war on land and sea, and the latter was estimated to take much more lives on both sides.
I'm not saying that the US chose to go with the first option out of altruistic reasons, but dropping the atomic bombs wasn't an atrocity compared with the usual firebombing, and saved a lot of lives that would be lost if the war continued.
The morality of the action of dropping 2 nuclear bombs on Japan is separate from the question of whether the Japanese government was making a bona fide attempt to surrender.
> Imperial Japan did some awful things, but those actions by themselves could never morally justify the indiscriminate slaughter of 50,000 civilians.
Right or wrong, the "indiscriminate slaughter" of civilians was the norm in WWII. In that sense, there was nothing unusual about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As many as 200,000 civilians died in the firebombing of Tokyo, which would be as much or more than both atomic bombings combined. [1] If firebombing civilians was considered acceptable at the time, it is hard to understand why the atomic bombings would have any kind of different moral quality. Indeed, from the accounts of both the atomic bombings and firebombings I have read, I would very much prefer to die in an atomic bombing, which in many respects seems almost merciful in comparison. As many as 900,000 Japanese civilians died in conventional bombings. [2] The emphasis on the atomic bombings has always seemed strange to me: what is the difference between killing 200,000 civilians in a horrific firebombing and killing 200,000 civilians with nuclear bombs? Why so much questioning of two bombings and not the countless others that killed many more?
The horror of the atomic bomb was not that we killed 200,000 civilians, it was that it took only two bombs to do it rather than many. There was no new lack of moral concern for civilians. Civilians had no direct reason to fear atomic bombs more than conventional bombings: with the near-wholesale destruction of Japanese anti-bomber defenses, they were going to be just as dead. Atomic bombs were a strategic threat analogous to your enemy suddenly gaining huge reinforcements. And this strategic threat (though it hardly mattered to Japan) quickly escalated: go to the Nuclear Secrets nukemap [3] and compare the atomic bombs dropped on Japan with the megaton bombs developed by the US and USSR.
(I don't mean to place undue emphasis on the US bombings of Japan, either: again, the killing of civilians was a norm in WWII.)
I don't see how it was any more immoral than anything else in WW2 that caused mass death and mayhem. Certainly if you are simply talking about casualties.
What was more immoral about dropping the a-bomb than firebombing Tokyo?
"we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender."
That may well be the case but it is not remotely clear that the people making that decision knew it for a fact which is what actually has bearing on the morality.
Also - why focus so much on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, London, Coventry, etc. were all attacks on civilians. We tend to judge atomic bombing as being special because of the thermonuclear age that followed but if it wasn't for that, we'd think of them as "strategic" bombing of population centres exactly the same as all the other such bombing done by all sides in WW2.
I meant that it was just to drop the bomb to stop the war even at the cost of Japanese casualties because they are at fault for letting their nation be led to war.
This doesn't excuse inflicting unneeded violence but it does mean that it is more just that the aggressor bear the cost.
> 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.
The Japanese were killing more civilians in China and other occupied territories in two weeks than a single nuclear bomb did. If the bombs shortened the war by just a month, and that's a perfectly reasonable estimate, they were morally justified.
Read up on Japanese atrocities. They were just as bad as Nazi concentration camp.
> until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed.
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
> What is your "yes" referring to? That was not a yes-no answer.
I misread it as "Would anyone" instead of "Why would anyone".
> Not only completely weighted to one side, but consisting in its vast majority of civilians.
That's nothing new with atomic weapons. There was massive firebombing of Japanese cities prior to the nuclear attack.
From January 1944 until August 1945, the U.S. dropped 157,000 tons of bombs on Japanese cities, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. It estimated that 333,000 people were killed, including the 80,000 killed in the Aug. 6 Hiroshima atomic bomb attack and 40,000 in Nagasaki three days later.[1]
That puts the loss of life from the atomic attacks at just over a third of the total loss of life from bombing. The question is how long would the Japanese have decided to prolong the war before losing (or winning, given some unforeseen circumstance) and would more or less people have died before that point. A show of overwhelming force, with the promise of more to come, can go a long way towards stopping hostilities very quickly.
> There has been no "war to end all wars", in spite of hopeful predictions. We haven't had WW3, but "one side being vastly superior" has not prevented the US from being engaged near constantly in various wars since after WW2.
Total loss of life in WW1 is estimated to be around 18 million people (11 million military, 7 million civilian).[2]
Total loss of life in WW2 is estimated to be between 50 million and 80 million.[3]
Any conflict since WW2 hsa been miniscule in comparison. Total casualties in Vietnam are estimated to be below 1.5 million over almost an entire decade.[4]
I would say that we are very lucky there hasn't been a WW3. It likely would have casualties in the hundreds of millions.
> It is indeed a very complex topic, but questioning the ethics of those involved in the development of atomic weapons, especially given all we know about the way it was done, is a completely reasonable stance.
I didn't take the original statement as much of a "question" of ethics, as an assumption that none of them could be expected to act ethically ("why would anyone expect them to behave 'ethically'" is the specific wording) because of the nature of the work. I think it's likely that some of them thought they were working for the greater good, and we cannot assume a failure of ethics in all cases.
I looked up some basic numbers on the death toll of World War II in the Pacific theater. It seems to be in the ballpark of 30 _million_ people that died.
I think it would be fair to say that bombing a civilian city into oblivion is immoral. Unfortunately, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only cases where this happened. And at the end of the day, it's killing people that's immoral, and vaporizing them with different types of bombs... well, it feels like we're starting to split hairs here, right?
It's odd to me how bad we are at sensible discourse wherever the word "nuclear" is concerned.
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.
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.
>Please tell me how the US should have reacted to how they would have won the war while considering your moral principles.
They could bomb military targets, not civilian populations. Yes, Tokyo contained some military facilities, that doesn't justify firebombing the entire city.
The entire doctrine of "bomb the civilians into war weariness" has not been found to be successful, and even in 1944 there were already examples showing that. It more often causes the bombed to rally together against a common enemy, like London in the Blitz or what still effects North Korea today.
Your example of one child in a synthetic fuel facility is ridiculous. I understand that some civilian workers of factories will unfortunately be victims, and that bombs will miss their targets. That's not comparable to wide scale firebombing or nuking the population.
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.
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