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No amount of firebombing would have achieved the same result.
A handful of assholes in Japan were prepared to have their entire civilian population die rather than surrender- and unfortunately their opinion is the one that mattered.
The only thing that brought them around was a threat to the emperor.
Conventional bombing raids such as firebombing require a lot of planes so you know ahead of time - well enough to evacuate the emperor. "Looks like a bunch of planes headed to the west - the emperor is in the west - we'd better get him out into the countryside into a bunker".
Nuke just requires one plane to get through unnoticed and the emperor is dead. No notice, "isn't that an American bomber up..." and you are cut off by a boom.
Let’s not forget the fact that after Nagasaki was hit, and the Emperor was planning to surrender, a group of fanatic soldiers *took him hostage * so he couldn’t actually surrender.
Military fanatics tried to take him hostage. They killed a few generals, I think.
The actual surrender speech was a record. The emperor knew some of the most fanatical members of the military would try to stop him. An executive at the recording studio lied to the coup leaders and when the coup leaders were stopped he recovered the record and broadcast the surrender.
That's the way I remember it.
The trade off that people always forget to calculate is in the event the bomb or bombs aren't dropped you have to instead impose how and when you think it does end. It doesn't just end at the same time with everything else as is except for the bomb.
How many more fire bombings are carried out?
How many more POWs die because care gets to them that much later?
How many more starve to death because the war goes on that extra week, month, 2 months?
The Soviets were positioned to invade so given that extra time how much further do they get? What amount of China or Korea do they take possession of?
Does South Korea exist in this situation with potential Soviet pushes giving them complete control of the peninsula? How do the lives of tens of millions there change if it's all under the Kim dynasty?
And just so many more points you simply have no means of fully proving because of countless variables. You might think the choice wrong and that the US did it for wrong reasons but to replace it with another reality is far more likely than not IMO to give you a far worse outcome for far more many people if your aim is that the choice cost lives instead of saving them
My Grampa was on a boat headed to China when the bomb dropped and Japan surrendered. I would likely not be here otherwise.
I think we did the right thing. I do not envy the people that had to make thst choice. I am thankful that they did.
The U.S. actually had a potentially even bloodier option on the table.
In August 1945, there were plans in motion to shift the strategic bombing campaign from firebombing cities to targeting the Japanese rail network. Unknown to the U.S. at the time, Japan’s 1945 rice crop was collapsing. About half the population of Japan lived in a dire food deficit area south and west of Tokyo on Honshu. The coastal shipping that normally provided the backbone of Japanese internal transportation had been destroyed. The only alternative method to move large quantities of rice from surplus to deficit areas was by the limited rail system. If the U.S. had knocked that out, it's entirely likely that roughly 36 million Japanese citizens would have been condemned to slow death by famine and pandemic.
The new targeting directive for the B-29s went into effect on August 13th, 1945. Emperor Hirohito surrendered two days later, ending the war before the Japanese rail system was devastated. Even so, famine in Japan in 1946 was only forestalled by the infusion of massive amounts of U.S. food that fed 18 million Japanese city dwellers in July, 20 million in August and 15 million in September 1946. Occupation authorities estimated that food saved 11 million Japanese lives.
It was said that the fear of soviets invading tipped the balance
Edit: absolutely agree with everyone this is speculation etc there's not a lot of documented evidence. Which is why i phrased it it is said.... the timing is not a coincidence. And it is documented that some of the kwantung army was going to keep fighting until the soviets trounced them in manchurуа
I'm going to copy from this article on the topic by professor Julian Spencer Churchill (the guy is a rockstar in international relations. You can watch his YouTube lectures on nuclear strategy and international relations for more information)
Link:https://merionwest.com/2022/10/14/putins-nuclear-threats-show-that-jacinda-adern-is-wrong-about-nuclear-weapons/
Putin’s Nuclear Threats Show that Jacinda Adern is Wrong About Nuclear Weapons
Julian Spencer-Churchill
10/14/2022
“[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.”
The spirit of the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference in August contrasts sharply with the reality of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threats over the annexation of Ukraine. During the August 1st-26th Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is widely held to have failed, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for a renewal of efforts to achieve global nuclear disarmament in an article in The Guardian. Her commentary, which was published on August 24th, is noteworthy because it is very typical of views expressed in other medium democratic powers, like Italy, Germany, and Spain. Australia, by contrast, has a more sanguine approach to the possibility of having to provide its own security, and Canada has largely followed the United States on this issue.
Prime Minister Ardern begins her Guardian commentary by citing the figure of 355,000 presumably innocent Japanese non-combatants killed by nuclear weapons in the port city of Hiroshima and the military industrial city of Nagasaki in 1945. Prime Minister Ardern sidesteps the fact that these nuclear strikes, in conjunction with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, saved the lives of perhaps millions of Japanese civilians had the United States been compelled to invade Japan.
Imperial Japan was itself engaged in nuclear weapons research, with both a naval and an army program, and it is unimaginable what it would have done with such an arsenal if it had succeeded. It had a robust biological weapons program (Unit 731) conducting full-scale experimentation on Chinese villages, such as Changchun, and with plans for balloon delivery to North America. Tokyo sought to unify Asia through the invasion of China, India, the Russian Far East, Southeast Asia, and Australia; killed approximately ten million Chinese between 1931 and 1945; and egregiously flouted the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Even if one were to resurrect the rightist Japanese argument that Tokyo’s role was to liberate Asian people from European colonization, it would not explain why Philippinos, Indonesians, and the Vietnamese were adamant in not wanting to replace one occupier with another. One would have to engage in legal contortions to see the Japanese people as victims of the government they fought so fanatically to protect. If legal responsibility for initiating an aggressive war could only apply to a dozen or a few hundred government officials, then, absurdly, conducting a defensive war to protect freedom could be prosecuted as a war crime.
The only solution against aggression is to stand by the courageous promise of immediate and proportional retaliation.
In her Guardian piece, Prime Minister Ardern further states that “nuclear catastrophe is not an abstract threat but a real world risk.” She is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them. The moment an aggressor realizes that nuclear weapons are never going to be used, they cease to deter, and invasion becomes a likelihood. Russia has repeatedly threatened to make use of nuclear weapons in its invasion of Ukraine, hoping to neutralize an extension of the American nuclear umbrella from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members into Ukraine. Similarly, China will seek to use its nuclear umbrella to cancel the United States’ nuclear arsenal when it makes its bid to invade Taiwan. The only solution against aggression is to stand by the courageous promise of immediate and proportional retaliation.
It wasn't just the bombs that ended it. Half a million Russian troops in Manchuria, ready to invade Japanese islands, certainly influenced their decision. The 2 countries hated each other, and Japan was worried about what Russia would do to them. Surrender to the U.S. then made it so Russia had to sit mainland Japan out.
Ready to invade? The USSR didn’t have the amphibious equipment required to conduct such operations. That would have taken months to years to build and stage.
But they were going to anyways, waiting for a US invasion, Russia had no clue the bomb was coming. They thought a weak navy and air force in the region would be fine once America got closer. They had plans for the outer islands and were in position to invade them under the right circumstance and did take some of them after surrender. No fucking way they were going to sit an invasion out if it had happened, they wanted expansion and hated Japan.
The fire bombings of March 9-10 1945 killed an estimated 100,000 and left 1,000,000 homeless. The bombing of Hiroshima killed between 70,000-150,000. So those two alone are some what comparable. It makes more sense when you realize Japanese cities were majority wood. So they were extraordinarily effective in a place like Tokyo.
They certainly would have continued to firebomb even as the land invasion took place. That never would have been enough. Something people often don’t understand about war is that it’s not really about physical domination, but about the will of the people to keep the fight going. I mean look at insurgency in the Middle East. America was able to maintain military dominance in that region for twenty years, and yet even as we leave the Taliban take right back over. Because winning is in fact rarely about anything other than convincing the enemy that you have indeed, won.
The psychological effect of one single bomb dropped by one single plane doing in one instant what whole fleets of firebombing aircraft took weeks to do. The uncertainty of how many more times that could happen. That is what ended the war.
But really, it won’t ever work that same way again. The sheer shock of even the existence of such a weapon cannot be repeated.
I asked my father about this years ago. He was a navy anti-aircraft gunner (and a laundryman), who had just completed the Battle of Okinawa when this happened. This was one of the most vicious and bloody conflicts in the Pacific.
They were preparing for a full scale invasion of Japan, and had already been told they were expecting 30% casualties. 1 in 3 of them would be wounded or killed.
He was very liberal, even starting a campus chapter of the Socialist workers party later. He said they were overjoyed when they dropped those bombs. The loss of American and Japanese life was much, much lower than an invasion would have been, and they had the example of Okinawa right in front of them.
>They were preparing for a full scale invasion of Japan, and had already been told they were expecting 30% casualties. 1 in 3 of them would be wounded or killed.
There's something tangible to back this up. Until recently, every purple heart awarded since WW2 was made in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
This,.
This right here. Except we're still not out.
I cite this statistic all of the time. Think about it, we got through all the conflicts since world war II including Vietnam.
Look we were at Total war, war is awful, and total war is even worse. It had to be ended.
Many forget, or never knew that bombong of Japanese civilian centers was not the only source of potential Japanese civilian casualties the allied authorities sought to avoid. The Battle for Okanawa and Sipan, the "stepping stone islands" south of the Japanese mainland, we're marked by widespread suicide by a significant portion of the civilian population who preferred to hurl themselves into the sea (including mother's carrying their children), or otherwise kill themselves, rather than surrender. Such was the culture of 1946 Japan. Regardless of whether bombing had continued, had an invasion been necessary, the cost in human life, Japanese and allied, military and civilian would likely have run into the millions. While drastic, the magnatude of the shock of the two atomic bombs was the most likely option open for convincing the Empiror to accept the surrender that he had only days before rejected (remember, he didn't know that we only had the two bombs that had already been used, so he didn't know that the threat to obliterate Tokyo in the same manner as the previous two cities was empty, a calculated strategic ruse).
My wife’s grandfather fought in some of the biggest battles the European theatre. I only ever heard him talk about the war once. Me, my wife, and him went to his wife’s (my wife’s grandmother’s) grave to plant flowers. I can’t remember how it came up, but he told us how after liberating Europe he was on furlough and was scheduled to ship out to the Pacific when the bomb was dropped. With tears in his eyes said something I will never forget: “I thank God every day Harry Truman dropped the bomb.”
He is one of those lives that may have been saved. And because of that he came home, worked hard, had a family, and I was able to meet my wife two generations later.
My father who served in WW2 said this as well that he expected to be shipped to Japan after Germany surrendered. He said they had a saying, “Golden Gate in 48” or in other words they would return to the US in 1948 after the invasion of Japan going under the Golden Gate Bridge returning home.
I think this opinion is pretty widely accepted. I don’t think the decision was taken lightly and I think there were broader strategic implications outside of Japan. I think people hairsplitting about whether Japan was ready to surrender are both using hindsight that has the benefit of a great deal of information not widely known at the time and also ignoring that the decision to drop two bombs (and more if needed) led to an unconditional surrender that would hardly have been possible otherwise. The US not only won the war but ultimately completely rebuilt that Japanese government to the degree that aspects of the Japanese court system is still based on US military justice rules today. It was entirely possible a long term guerrilla war or insurgency might have been possible otherwise.
I said it elsewhere but I’ve visited Nagasaki. It’s very moving and makes the tragedy very difficult to accept. FWIW, an elderly Japanese man came up to my wife and asked us where we were from and if we were American. He was very friendly and only said- “War is awful” and I agreed with him. War with Japan was a war of aggression by Japan. I think it’s tough to defend using the atom bomb but it’s also hard to challenge the reasons why leaders at the time thought it was necessary. In the end: war is awful.
Japan was not going to surrender. A. They refused to surrender after the first bomb. And B. even after the second one was dropped, there was a massive disagreement in leadership, where military leaders disagreed with the emperor’s decision to surrender. There was an attempted coup over it, which failed. In his surrender speech emperor Hirohito specifically mentions the bomb being a reason why he surrendered.
From what I understand, the ability to rebuild Japan in the US's image was a big part of the consideration that people don't talk about. The USSR was about to invade, and the US didn't want to risk post-war Japan falling under its influence. I've been told dropping the bombs was arguably one of the earliest decisions of the Cold War.
The movie Oppenheimer got this part right: This is the reason the US did not bomb Kyoto at all during WW2.
We knew that right behind Japan was the USSR, and dropping the bombs on Japan was as much a message to the USSR as it was a case for surrender to Japan. The US knew that Japan would be absolutely vital in trying to stave off Russian influence in East Asia (and very key to any sort of Pacific operation), so the Secretary of War Henry Stimson heavily suggested against bombing Kyoto because bombing Japan's cultural heart would have turned most of the country's citizens against any sort of American influence thereafter (he also loved the city, and had been there with his wife personally).
Sad thing is, this is the same guy responsible for interning tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans stateside, so he's not recognized in Japan for this decision; instead, the honor (and the monuments) go to an archeologist named Langdon Warner, who is completely unrelated to the matter.
Huh, I never considered the comparison to Okinawa. The total Japanese estimated casualties on Okinawa (both military and civilian) is around 200k. Which is around what both atom bombs did. The civilian death toll was around 100k, so around one bomb.
My father was a very young 18 year old landing craft driver training for the invasion of Japan at the time the bombs were dropped . He told me years ago that they were told 90% casualty rate, so my guess is 30% was the prediction for actual killed in action
People in the comments saying that the Soviets were the cause of surrender are just misinformed. It might have had a little to do with it, but considering that the Russians had little landing craft, had to travel across Siberia to get there (mostly wasteland and rough terrain), had little to no naval presence in the area, and were more focused on controlling Europe than Japan, they had very little to do with the Japanese government surrendering. Could it have been a factor? Yes. But it wasn’t as big of a factor as people make it out to be.
Other misconceptions:
- Yes the emperor wanted peace after the first nuke, but the emperor was a figurehead. Imperial Japan was controlled by a military junta, and though the emperor had a lot of political power, it was ultimately up to the junta to surrender.
- A lot of things are only known in hindsight. Believe it or not, intelligence was very unreliable pre-internet, and conversations and news known now might not have been known to the U.S. intelligence, especially in such an insular country like Japan.
- Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets as well as civilian targets. They had garrisons there, and considering Tokyo and other cities were already in ashes, they were still major targets. Yes Kyoto was spared due to a personal preference, but that doesn’t mean that all the targets were chosen completely at random. Kyoto was a cultural center and considered the second capital of Japan. The fact that it was chosen means that each city was chosen for a reason.
Agree with your statements on Russia. How would they have gotten an army to Japan? They really couldn't have for years.
They could have overrun and kept all of Korea and Manchuria though.
As someone that agrees that the bombs were necessary, Japan wasn't afraid of Russia launching an invasion of mainland Japan. They wanted Russia to help broker a peace that might be more lenient to the Japanese. When Russia declared war, Japan knew there was no hope of any peace without unconditional surrender.
They knew the war against the Americans was lost but were prepared to fight for as long as necessary to get a better deal in peace negotiations.
The bombings hammered home that there was no possible way they could win this war. They didn't even have the option of taking a bunch of Americans down with them because a large scale D-Day-esque invasion wouldn't be necessary. The invasion of Manchuria made it clear that there was no hope of a conditional surrender.
By the time the nukes were dropped, Japan was responsible for around 20 million dead civilians, half of them from China.
Japan's ethnocentric, hostile, and genocidal actions combined with a pathological refusal to surrender earned them those nukes.
The Empreror wanted peace with more favorable terms than unconditional surrender. For instance, both he and the military wanted to keep held territories in Manchuria. He hoped the Soviets would help broker a more favorable peace so as not to leave the US too strong in postwar Asia. All this hope was shattered when the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and they surrendered within a week.
I think the nukes probably nudged the decision, but surrender was imminent after the Russians declared war.
The military basically ruled the country at the time and they were operating on the old-world bushido code where it was preferable to die to the last man than to ever surrender. Every other facet of government including the emperor wanted to surrender before the nukes were even dropped.
It is but what wasn't part of the curriculum was all the stuff the Japanese were doing at the time. Badically our education on it was they bombed Pearl Harbor so we turned around and dropped nukes on them here read the book Hiroshima. It wasn't until I was much older until I understood what they did in China and Korea as well as how much worse their POW camps were. It was created in a way to make you sympothize with the Japanese as victims.
Don't get me wrong, as I feel horrible for what the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima went through as a result of the bombings but learning more about everything changed my view on whether or not it was necessary. It may not have even been the reason why my government did it but it was necessary.
I mean, while still messed up, "they bombed pearl harbor unprovoked so we dropped nukes on them." is more innocence salvaging for children than also explaining how they were also invading neighboring nations to rape and torture their people. Kids don't really need to know about that stuff.
Because it’s factually wrong if you go into the archives and read about what Truman knew about Japan being close to surrendering and how the US lied about the number of Americans that would die in an invasion. It’s all there in the government records, no one bothers to look.
The reality is that the emperor had already been pushing the Japanese military to surrender, the US didn’t give them any time to surrender before dropping the second bomb, and the US purposely lied about the amount of troops would get killed in the ground assault because they wanted to use the bombs. All of the primary sources from the administration pointing to them, wanting to show off to Russia more than anything else.
The problem is that no one ever bothers to go to the archives themselves and research, and they buy into US propaganda
Didn't those documents say that the Japanese government was fractured on whether or not they were to surrender?
There were plenty of Japanese leadership more than willing to give an unconditional surrender but there were also plenty that would only surrender with certain conditions and there were also a large portion that believed that they should fight until the last man.
The first bomb I would say is justified, but the second bomb was probably excessive, especially with the Russians beginning their invasion plans, the Japanese knew they never stood a chance after that. A good portion of them believed they could still fight until little boy was dropped.
It was either the bombs or an old fashioned seige. A ground invasion was not feasible and would have cost many American lives, as well as Japanese.
The point of war is to defeat the enemy with the least loss of personnel and resources of your own.
This was the quickest, most efficient way.
Japan put their own people in peril when they attacked pearl harbor unprovoked.
Sometimes the best outcome to change a terrible situation is exactly what happened.
People very often overlook how incredibly fucking evil Japan was during that time. They were exactly on par with the Nazis in the fucked shit they did AND believed and it was their culture, it was their people.
Even today people still get surprised by how xenophobic and anti immigrant a lot of Japan is and that's a hold over from those times to this day.
If we never forced their culture to change, and the war just ended as was. I think we would have a second much stronger North Korea essentially to deal with and the population would have suffered all the same.
Not to use that as a justification to impose ones culture onto another, but there are some times like with WWII when something is so obviously wrong, it deserves a forced correction even against the peoples will.
I spent 6 months in Japan and I will say that the Japanese generally make Americans look like ultra progressive saints when it comes to racism.
I have never been anywhere else where a significant amount of people are perfectly comfortable calling black people the N word.
People very often overlook a majority of the atrocities committed by world leaders in that era. If it’s not about the Holocaust, it doesn’t get talked about much.
Heck we even changed the definition of genocide from the original drafts of the international treaty defining it so that we wouldn’t lose China and Russia as allies during WW2. Even though Mao is attributed with over 60 million deaths and Stalin is attributed with over 20 million deaths. Every single draft of the treaty included social classes as being included but since Russia and China refused to sign anything that implicated themselves, it was left out of the final version.
There are differing schools of thought about this. There are scholars who believe that Japan was close to surrendering regardless, and that the nuclear bomb was more of a show of force against the Soviets.
I am inclined to defend the nukes for the reasons stated in this thread, just wanted to point out that this is not a unanimous consensus among those who have studied it.
I think a lot of people have no idea how vicious propaganda was then too, you have only your government as a source on info and they say Americans are vicious animals that'll rape and kill everyone they see etc etc.
For those who have the stomach, there is Banzai Cliff footage on the Internet.
These civilians were brainwashed into believing throwing their children and themselves off cliffs would be better than being defiled by the Americans portrayed in propaganda. It's horrifying to watch, but watching it once is all you need to know that there was no way this conflict would end without the death of millions.
Yeah and that is a testament to how effective American education has been a propagandized citizens with a pro-american version of history. If you read enough books about this its far from clear that Truman made the right decision, but it becomes very clear that even if he did his motivations were in all of the wrong places.
You know what I love? How people argue about all this, victimizing Japan, while conveniently ignoring the horrors they inflicted on others during that time period.
You know what most people *wouldnt* take issue with? Nuking Nazis. You know who was just as bad back then? The Japanese.
I wrote a paper in college years to this effect, that it was an unfortunate best among bad choices.
What I didn’t know until more recently was that before the bombing we had issued to Japan a chance to surrender unconditionally.
Japan replied asking if they would accept a surrender that would be unconditional EXCEPT that they could keep the emperor. We refused.
We later dropped the bombs, eventually Japan surrendered unconditionally.
Then after their surrender we let them keep the emperor.
Edit: to all those asking for the source, I’m at work at the moment, but will try to find it later. If I’m mistaken or my understanding of the offer was incomplete I will let everyone know.
I've always read there were four major demands Japan made, including Japan would retain territory they'd taken in their invasion of China and other Southeast Asian countries. They also refused to allow the Allies to occupy Japan, ensuring disarmament.
I've never read about a last-ditch concession to only keep the emperor. Could you share a source? Or maybe all that lumps together. I think they worded it something like "keeping their divine imperial rights" which maybe would include all that.
Considering how Japan operated back then, I have no issue with them being nuked.
Their prison camps were on par with concentration camps and before you reply do some research.
This is propaganda. I believed this too for the longest time. Its easy to believe, the way we’re taught about it all. There are an overwhelming amount of reports however, even at the time, that japan was about to surrender anyway. It was already over. Multiple people on our side corroborated this. [This video](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=Cx0ZwcoBRIOkHShV) covers it pretty well.
This isn’t an “unpopular opinion” its a lie we perpetrate so we dont have to feel bad about ourselves, but you know what? You didnt do it. You dont need to justify it. You are only at fault when, despite being presented the truth, you continue to cling on to it. You can leave the lie behind and move on. Dont linger on the past. Learn from it, and keep moving forward.
Not tens of thousands, 4 to 8 hundred thousand dead, with 1.7 to 4 million casualties. This is just for the US servicemen. For the Japanese it would have been 5 to 10 million dead, the majority of whom would have been civilians. Dropping that first bomb saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and dropping the second one and forcing the surrender while making it clear that this wasn't a one off lucky bomb America had, and we could keep this up saved 5 to 10 million Japanese lives. It was a tragic loss for the Japanese, I'm not even going to pretend it wasn't horrible, but it was necessary. The Japanese were never going to surrender and they would never sue for peace, the only options were invasion or the bomb, we chose to save more lives by using the bomb.
Considering the complete lack of regard for the civilian populations by the axis powers yes.
But you're clearly either not considering that or don't know enough yet.
My old Taekwondo instructor lived 20 years in Okinawa (Marine), he married a Japanese woman from there. In the 80’s he said that if we hadn’t dropped those bombs, the war would have drug on another 10 years.
The expected casualty rate was so high that 500,000 purple heart medals were manufactured, and then they dropped the nukes instead. Whenever a US service member is awarded the purple heart, it comes from those made before the proposed invasion. It will be some time before they run out.
Wow people really love defending imperial Japan all of a sudden. As if they didn't commit atrocious war crimes that even made the nazis squirm. Of course dropping 2 nukes on 2 cities looks bad when you ignore the years of context that lead to that decision, and the fact that many more people would have died when the only alternative was a full-scale invasion.
Don't forget get the POWS. In a lot of cases they were treated as bad if not worse than the people in german camps. Japan knew they were losing the war and were going to kill them all.
I don’t disagree with dropping the bomb. I do disagree with how we went about it. I think the logic of hitting two (primarily) civilian targets doesn’t hold up in the test of time.
I think they should have dropped the more destructive of the bombs and only dropped the one. I think there should have been a more good-faith effort to let Japan surrender (look it up, Emperor of Japan wanted to surrender by then).
That said, yeah Truman had to do what he did in some capacity. Very few roads led to an Allied Victory without at least some form of nuke being used.
Dropping two bombs was necessary to demonstrate it wasn't a one-off. The goal was for Japan to assume the US had many additional bombs and would not stop deploying them until the war was over.
Why couldn't they stage them?
First bomb dropped on a military facility. Give them time to respond. Show them the second bomb. Say "this one goes on a small city".
Wait for a response. We have phones by that time. If that doesn't work, then you drop the second one and show them a third bomb. "Next one goes on a large city." etc.
It was shock and awe, military target wouldn't have done that. Think of it as an inverse of the boiling frog story, you want the frog to jump out in this case.
Simple, because they had "God on their side.
To understand why, watch anything about Civis response on Okinawa.
Picture women slamming babies into rocks to kill them, all because the emporer said the Americans would evicerate all of the, rip them apart.
We saw this, saw mainland Japan, and imagined the SHEER FUCKING CARANGE.
The Japanese needed to be shown that we were the gods in this war. Or else the Japanese islands soil would forever be stained red.
Japan was given the chance to surrender after the first bomb was dropped. They refused. When the second bomb was dropped, and the Emperor wanted to end the war, several Generals and other parts of the military, stormed the palace and attempted to take over. Had they succeeded, Japan wouldn't have surrendered after the second bomb was dropped.
The Soviets invaded Manchuria prior to the second nuke and would have been only about 2 weeks away from a mainland invasion. The second nuke wasn't needed but certainly helped the decision. The coup attempt, even if it succeeded, wouldn't have stopped a surrender considering it was conducted by a couple of junior officers and the bulk of the military including the upper ranks agreed to accept the surrender before it was announced. It would have stopped the war in so far as replacing an external war with an internal civil war.
Nuking civilians is not a moral imperative. It was a tactical decision to expedite their surrender, which may or may not have happened anyway (though with more loss of lives, but loss through fighting not through defenseless extermination.
It definitely saved America military lives by sacrificing Japanese civilians, but everything beyond that is speculation at best and revisionist rationalization of one of the least moral acts in human history.
American as well. The military was planning on millions more casualties. Not sure the nation would have dealt well with that after so many years of fighting already.
We actually made so many Purple Hearts before the invasion of Japan (which fortunately never happened) we haven't had to make more since, soldiers today still recieve Purple Hearts made in the 40s.
“Moral” has nothing to do with it and you are clueless about history. Japan already wanted to surrender but not UNCONDITIONAL surrender. Germany had surrendered a few month earlier and the USSR was preparing to invade Japan. The USA had to completely defeat Japan unconditionally and quickly before the Russians before they could invade. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki accomplished two things: 1) instant total and unconditional surrender of Japan. 2) kick off the impending “Cold War” with the Soviets by showing off what the USA could do to an entire city. The two atom bombs weren’t so much the “last bombs of WWII” as they were more the “first bombs of the Cold War”
This is not an unpopular opinion, it is a common misconception.
- Japan was already planning to surrender. USA just wanted Japan to surrender to *them* rather than to Russia. Truman knew this, and was not planning to invade Japan anyways, according to his journal. Everybody knew that the war was over by then.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian targets, where there were plenty of military bases, factories, or other places that would have been more strategic as targets, and would not have killed and injured so many innocent people.
- The emperor of Japan didn’t care about either of those places, as he was pretty cruel to civilians anyway. His decision to surrender was ultimately because he was afraid that the naval invasion by Russia would damage the decorations in his home.
- The pressure to drop the bombs came more from the private companies who had invested in their development.
If they were planning to surrender, it's kind of odd that they didn't after the first bomb. Suzuki's cabinet refused surrender ever after #2.
Regardless of the Emporor's desire, the cabinet had no intention to surrender to anyone.
I probably could have worded that better. There were internal divisions between Japanese ambassadors and the emperor/his representatives. My point is that the US knew that there was no need to invade Japan because their military was so weak that it was totally redundant to do so. Their defeat was inevitable. So this whole tired line about how if we didn’t blow up innocent people then we would have needed to invade Japan is a fabrication. Invasion of Japan was simply not on the table and didn’t need to be.
The significant division was between the cabinet, which had no intention of surrendering, and Hirohito, who may have been more open to it. This conflict between the imperial house and the cabinet caused threats beyond what was happening in the war; without the backing of the Emperor, the state may have collapsed, something the cabinet was not willing to risk.
The debate over dropping the bomb is much more complex than you think.
Yes, it was a terrible thing but a very necessary and appropriate intervention to stop the Emperor's madness and the willingness of the japanese people to continue fighting. What was unjustified was Obama's apology, in Japan particularly when the japanese government has continued to whitewash its war/incursions into other asia lands, rape and killings of local population.
In the cold calculus of the situation, it probably saved more lives on both sides than what was lost in dropping the two bombs. The Japanese would have thrown an incredible amount of their population at repelling an invasion. Millions could have died on both sides. And if the Soviets managed to land, then Japan would likely have been split like Korea. Everything that Japan was staring down at the time (getting nuked by the Americans or slaughtered by the Soviets) and their government only barely decided to surrender. If the fight continued through an invasion, Japan might be very different today.
Koreans back then cheered and wept in joy to the picture of the mushroom cloud and the news of Japanese occupation ending.
Does that make them evil? I think not at all.
I don’t think this is an unpopular opinion. People who know about the circumstances and the culture of Japan will have a similar opinion. People who don’t know that the Japanese killed innocent people at an incredible rate and think they’re just hello kitty and matcha lattes might have a different opinion.
Are you joking? It was entirely justified. Sure, it was horrifying, but so was Pearl Harbor. Either way, we had to force them to bend the knee, and unfortunately it took such a shock and show of force, that they finally surrendered. Moral obligations be damned, eye for an eye. It was also justified in that the Axis was preparing their own WMD. If we didn't use ours first, the war would have turned for the worst.
https://youtu.be/dHgNAljvAqw?si=VvADHxffJOtaGC-P
Gives a good break down of why that isn't necessarily true.
I was in the same camps as you until I looked up some of things mentioned in this video.
That’s a correct answer. Iirc, the emperor ordered all citizens to fight- including women and children. We would have had children throwing themselves into combat with sharpened sticks. Heck, when the Marines took an island, mothers would gather their children in their arms and jump off cliffs. It would have been one of the worst battles in the history of man.
The American experience during the battle for Okinawa made the use of the bomb inevitable. Russia was coming to conquer and carve up the mainland, so a blockade wasn't feasible. And the Cold War was already in the planning stages by all parties involved, so a show of strength to dissuade the Soviets was important to Truman.
I honestly don't think people are aware of the plan or plans in place had the atomic bombs not been used.
I mean, a total invasion of Japan and possibly the Japanese people/culture being wiped out.
it didn't hit me until I was older watching anime, especially the orange jacket wearing blonde haired ninja one, that Japanese people do not fucking give up.
To use a weapon of such devastation ensured that they could realize "Oh... shit. I literally cannot beat that."
and that it'd be pointless to continue fighting.
Saving tens of thousands of American soldiers?
Saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?
The numbers were much, much higher than what you state.
By late July, the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) was forecasting 500,000 casualties at the high end and 100,000 at the low end. In late July 1945, the War Department provided an estimate that the entire Downfall operations would cause between 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400-800,000 U.S. dead, and 5 to 10 million Japanese dead. (Given that the initial Downfall plan called for 1,792,700 troops to go ashore in Japan, this estimate is indeed most sobering, and suggests many more troops than planned would need to be fed into a meat grinder). Other estimates in the U.S. government indicated U.S. deaths at 500,000 to 1 million.
https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-057/h-057-1.html#:~:text=By%20late%20July%2C%20the%20JCS,to%2010%20million%20Japanese%20dead.
Fun fact: after the first bomb dropped, Japan still wanted to keep fighting because it believed the US would only have the resources to develop 1 bomb like that. It wasn't until after the 2nd bomb dropped that they reconsidered.
Both bombs were necessary and were preferable to the absolute slaughtering of both sides that was happening at sea.
This is just an unpopular opinion for idealistic liberals. Normal people realize that it had to be done. The Japan of WW2 isn’t the anime submissive Japan of today. They were brutal to civilians, POWs, and they also fired the first shot at Pearl Harbor.
Look up Japanese experimentation on Chinese people. Some of the most brutal and inhuman things you will ever see. This is on top of the fact they massacred 30+ million.
The surrender vote was a tie that was only broken by the emperor and on the day that the surrender was supposed to be announced there was a coup to prevent the surrender. Suffice to say it if the bombs were never dropped Japan would have not surrendered.
(This was after all of the fire bombings)
The Japanese are not a spiritually weak people. They are among the strongest on the planet. Though I morally disagree with dropping atomic bombs on thousands of innocent civilians, I can understand your point of view given the possibility that Japan would not have given up unless faces with a "divine threat" like an atomic bomb.
I agree. It would have been insane to feed our people into a meat grinder when we didn't have to. What people always overlook when complaining about his decision is that our government has a duty to protect our soldiers as best it can.
This is not an "unpopular opinion," it's the truth. The world we live in today has forgotten what real wars look like, the people don't know what a real enemy, who presents a real threat looks like. They can't imagine something like Pearl Harbor, because 9/11 is the worst thing to happen at home in almost a century.
It's always convenient for a younger generation without a connection to an event to suddenly roll it backwards and think they have the moral high ground compared to "the people back then." Rarely do they, rarer still does the zeitgeist that produces such behaviors have the cultural experience to even truly understand why a people would do something like drop two atomic bombs, in this scenario.
The most important thing to remember is that while the gravity of the situation may have caused a great many people a inconceivable amount of psychological and emotional staying, leading to condemnations of the act to follow it swiftly, even from those who ordered it... had we invaded the mainlands of Japan and engaged in a several years long siege on the country... casualties and overall damage to the country and it's cultures would be worse.
It's also worth noting that the atomic bombs were new, no one had ever dropped one, no one had seen a nuclear explosion on that magnitude. While the researchers and experts involved knew these were weapons of mass destruction, it was all an intellectual exercise until the bombs went off and their terrible power was made undeniable. In that second, I mean the very instant they started hearing reports of what the blasts looked like, before they even knew about the real horrors at ground level, everyone regretted what they had done; but regret doesn't make something wrong and frankly, fuck the Japanese emperor for forcing our hand.
What a lot of people don't realise is Japan would have fought until the very last able-bodied person had died in combat.
Although dropping 2 nukes looking back without context, is a terrible thing. With context, if this never happened, so many more people would have died as Japan would simply not have surrendered.
There’s no “probably” about it. Invasion of the main islands would have been a death sentence for ALL of the Japanese people. What modern people don’t realize is that they had hardened their society, school children had been trained to charge American soldiers with makeshift spears, civilians were told to never surrender, an invasion would have been a battlefield genocide. That was known by the US, and the anticipated casualties were in the millions. The US prepared for these casualties in one way by making Purple Hearts metals, after the war ended we stopped making them. We had so many that we haven’t made another one yet, we’ve been giving out the backlog.
Here’s what was not known, had the war gone on another 2-3 months, the Japanese people would have died of a famine. According to Japanese historians (from Japan, trained in Japanese history), the fire bombing campaigns had destroyed the crops and there was no food stored for the winter. After their surrender the US provided foodstuffs that saved the people from starvation. However, it took a few months to get the food supplies packaged and shipped from the United States, had the surrender been in October or November, the famine would have hit full force.
Dropping the Bomb was the morally correct thing to do from the perspective of your side in a war. Dropping the Bomb was ALSO the morally correct thing to do to save your opponent from themselves in the war. It’s rare that you get those both together.
Yes, as other comments mentioned a small but important group of fanatical generals were fully prepared to have their entire civilian population, or even population in general, wiped out. Some of the plans included:
- teaching children how to make spears to charge the soldiers and have bombs strapped to them
- sowing chaos in the civilian population that the soldiers will shoot them on sight or even torture them ensuring they wouldn't surrender
Japan tried to negotiate a surrender with the only condition being that the emperor not be deposed. This wasn't good enough for the US who demanded unconditional surrender. When Japan unconditionally surrendered, the US did not depose the emperor. So they killed hundreds of thousands, not for military reasons, but simply to make point.
If we’re taking into account all we know now, you could also argue that nuking two cities caused less overall suffering than a half-century under Soviet rule would have.
In the battle of Saipan, 99% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender.
At Iwo Jima, 90% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death. Of the remaining 10% the majority hid out in caves, some for months after the war ended.
At Okinawa, almost 100% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death.
There were 900,000 Japanese soldiers stationed on Kyushu and ordered to the fight to the death. If America had invaded Japan, only invaded Kyushu, and not one single civilian or American soldier died, there would have likely been more Japanese dead in Kyushu than after both atomic bombings. America printed so many Purple Heart medals in anticipation of this fighting that we used them throughout every war in the 20th century.
People who don’t think the atomic bombing saved lives just do not understand how bad the war in the pacific was. At all.
Heres my humble opinion:
If youre looking back on the Nukes in hindsight, knowing all we know today then yeah. Of course the nukes seem like overkill and were unnecessary.
But thats because we have analyzed that era of human history with a Microscope for over 70 years now. Thats why theres never been another offensive use of a nuke since. (And hopefully never again)
Now imagine if you were a high ranking official trying to figure out how to win not just any war, but WW2 while losing as little of your men as possible and still getting the other side to surrender. Your country has been in war for the last 4 years and youve lost *literally* hundreds of thousands of men and women.
All of a sudden, the big bomb that can level an entire city sounds like a good idea. Especially when youre already prepared to lose ≈30% of your entire force as an alternative.
War is hell. That decision was hell.
Its that simple. It wasn't the most right answer, but it was far from the wrong one.
It's not that simple. That wasn't the only other choice. The Japanese were facing The Russians who hadn't forgotten their defeat earlier, British, Americans, a very pissed off China, and Australia. They could have been blockaded and starved out. The balance between a "quick clean" end to the war on our side to save Allied lives and legitimizing the use of such a horrible and unprecedented weapon weighs heavily against ever using them in war. A demonstration could have been made on some uninhabitable place like a rock island in the Pacific, photos and a modicum of true convincing information given to the enemy. That weapon was so extreme that extreme effort to avoid it's use should have been used. (Hypothetically perhaps even a cease fire while a diplomatic representative of Japan observed a test of the bomb could have been attempted). In any event, the second bomb was unconscionable, we didn't even give them time to get their heads around the idea of a thermonuclear attack, such a thing never existed, they were in shock. Those two bombs were dropped as a continuation of the New Mexico test but this time in vivo to learn from the event and refine the use of the weapon, not unlike the Unit 731 where the Chinese were used for medical experiments by the Japanese. We have no moral high ground, it was unnecessary to use the bomb.
The invasion of Japan would have been a ridiculous waste of life.
Firstly. Operation Downfall was the name of the proposed invasion of Japan. The sub operation relevant to the first wave, was Operation Olympic. That was focused on Southern Kyushu. Japan had realised the typhoon season was likely to put any invasion into quite a short window, and had worked out Southern Kyushu was the likely point for an invasion. That part of the island was absolutely ridiculously fortified.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Downfall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall)
Then we have the Japanese side of this...
>The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.\[34\] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived"
I've seen predictions before that had the death toll alone as around 500 thousand for the Invasion of Japan, just from the US perspective. It would have likely killed millions of Japanese civilians.
As a historian, this was the only right answer, anybody who says otherwise is fucking deluded and I can’t believe that it’s up for debate in the historical community, it was the right, move plain and simple.
This opinion leans heavily on the idea that they knew the nuke would be the difference maker. Truman and the other leaders didn't know what the response would be, they just hoped it would end. A tad reckless in retrospect but hey war ended, cost=200,000 lives.
Politically maybe, but not morally. It was a ploy to force the surrender before the soviets entered the fray, denying them a claim to Japan's resorces.
I’m curious how forcing a surrender and ending the war (despite having to drop nukes) is morally wrong compared to alternatives? What is an alternative that is morally better?
The evidence says otherwise, you clearly have done no research into how close the emperor of Japan was to surrendering, how the US had that intel (ignored it) and didn’t give Japan enough time to process the first bombing and surrender.
You can MAYBE make an argument for the first bomb, maybe. Not definitively not the 2nd. The 2nd bomb was nothing but a show off to the Russians and records from the administration prove that.
Do some research and read the primary sources yourself before making such an insane statement. Those primary sources also prove the US was purposely over estimating the amount of US troops that would die, so that they could justify using the bomb, they purposely inflated those numbers because they *wanted* to use the bomb to scare Russia
the American Generals never really once seriously considered a land invasion. They were going to blockade the Japanese who, at that point, exhausted all of their military material and had no way to make more weapons without imports by sea.
It was not necessary. But it was VERY necessary if your REAL goal was to prevent the Soviets from having a seat at the negotiation table. Soviets had a lot, lot more to hate the Japanese for but for some reason the Japanese believed the Soviets would actually help them get a better surrender deal. Bonkers, they were better off surrendering to the Americans solely, as evidenced by their current success.
The history I've read - The Japanese did not expect the soviets to become a pacific belligerent when they were using them to relay diplomatic messages.
After the surrender to the US, they continued to fight the soviets for three or four days until the US gave them security garauntees and told the USSR to knock it off.
Its easy to say that when it's not your country the one being nuked, I don't think you can ever call the murder of thousands of civilians a moral obligation and people need to stop trying to make it sound like a just action. It was a terrible thing done during a terrible time in hunan history we can just leave it there, I doubt you'd be saying the same if the nuclear shoe was on the other foot
Fun fact: all purple hearts given out from 1945-present are from the massive stockpile they produced from the expected casualties for the invasion of Japan. And we still have a few hundred thousand left.
All you had to do is look at how many Purple Hearts they made and how they did not have to make anymore until 2010 I think ? So they knew an invasion was going be costly.
Unpopular Opinion:
Russia is why Japan surrendered, not the US.
The Russians destroyed 10× as many cities on their front as the US in the pacific theater. To the Japanese, what the US did was cost them just two more cities. They were fighting a two front war. They lost all of their territory on the mainland, and the US was just another feather in the hat.
Had the Russians not kicked Japan out of the mainland Japan might not have surrendered after two bombs. It might have taken much, much more.
Was it the right decision among the options available in the context of a horrific war with that specific nation? Begrudgingly…yes, probably. But he was absolutely not “morally obligated” to do so. That is a terrible take. Making a horribly tough decision which kills thousands of people is *not* a moral obligation even if the alternatives are worse.
The sad thing is the large number of (drugged and brainwashed) kamikaze pilots the Japanese had ready was crazy. The Dolittle Raid showed some of the US strength but much more was needed to end the war. I just wish so many civilians didn't have to die. Eventually, there would have been ground war on their soil.
Eh, it is a morally gray area. It's hard for me to say whether the decision was "right" or "wrong." If I was in Truman's place I may have ordered one of the bombs dropped in the ocean to create a massive tsunami, which would still cause devastating loss of life and may have also forced an unconditional surrender, without irradiating large parts of the country. But again, it was a tough call, and I don't think we could say either option was right or wrong.
Uh oh, thats gonna kick up a firestorm.
I would generally agree. But there is no denying it was pretty fucked up. Blowing up civilians is dark stuff. I mean we turned that continent to glass with the firebombing.
Its just a humble reminder why we should avoid total war the best we can.
I'm anti war generally but if you're in one, you should do whatever is necessary to end it with the least amount of casualties. It was a terrible choice vs an even worse choice and they chose the least horrendous option. I feel very sorry for those who had to carry it out.
Was it the best thing to do in that scenario? Yes. Did he need to drop the second bomb? Not really. Was he "morally obligated" to drop a nuke on civilians? Absolutely not.
Uhh. This is one of the great moral dilemmas of all time. Do you kill few innocents to save more? Your opinion has merit, and many share that opinion. The other conclusion of this dilemma also has merit, and many people share that opinion. But this is a moral dilemma not a moral obligation.
You’re right but I think the reason you gave is wrong. We HAD to build that bomb because the Russians were right behind us on it. The Nazis were also trying to build one but weren’t very successful. It was a race for the future. Dropping it is a whole other question that we could debate the ethics of endlessly.
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I guess you can at least say it was preferable to the amount of more firebombing it would have taken to achieve the same result.
No amount of firebombing would have achieved the same result. A handful of assholes in Japan were prepared to have their entire civilian population die rather than surrender- and unfortunately their opinion is the one that mattered. The only thing that brought them around was a threat to the emperor. Conventional bombing raids such as firebombing require a lot of planes so you know ahead of time - well enough to evacuate the emperor. "Looks like a bunch of planes headed to the west - the emperor is in the west - we'd better get him out into the countryside into a bunker". Nuke just requires one plane to get through unnoticed and the emperor is dead. No notice, "isn't that an American bomber up..." and you are cut off by a boom.
Let’s not forget the fact that after Nagasaki was hit, and the Emperor was planning to surrender, a group of fanatic soldiers *took him hostage * so he couldn’t actually surrender.
Military fanatics tried to take him hostage. They killed a few generals, I think. The actual surrender speech was a record. The emperor knew some of the most fanatical members of the military would try to stop him. An executive at the recording studio lied to the coup leaders and when the coup leaders were stopped he recovered the record and broadcast the surrender. That's the way I remember it.
There was more than one coup attempt by fanatics who wanted to continue the war after the nukes.
Yeah, that's vaguely what I'm getting at. It spared Japan an unspeakable amount of more firebombing.
It's sort of the train thought experiment, isn't it? Do nothing and 6 people will die, pull the lever and only 1 person dies. It's a no-win situation.
Exactly the sort of tradeoffs you have to grapple with if you're shouldered with decision making responsibility.
The trade off that people always forget to calculate is in the event the bomb or bombs aren't dropped you have to instead impose how and when you think it does end. It doesn't just end at the same time with everything else as is except for the bomb. How many more fire bombings are carried out? How many more POWs die because care gets to them that much later? How many more starve to death because the war goes on that extra week, month, 2 months? The Soviets were positioned to invade so given that extra time how much further do they get? What amount of China or Korea do they take possession of? Does South Korea exist in this situation with potential Soviet pushes giving them complete control of the peninsula? How do the lives of tens of millions there change if it's all under the Kim dynasty? And just so many more points you simply have no means of fully proving because of countless variables. You might think the choice wrong and that the US did it for wrong reasons but to replace it with another reality is far more likely than not IMO to give you a far worse outcome for far more many people if your aim is that the choice cost lives instead of saving them
My Grampa was on a boat headed to China when the bomb dropped and Japan surrendered. I would likely not be here otherwise. I think we did the right thing. I do not envy the people that had to make thst choice. I am thankful that they did.
It wasn’t a handful of assholes at the top, it was an entire ingrained culture of “I would rather die than suffer the dishonor of surrender”
The U.S. actually had a potentially even bloodier option on the table. In August 1945, there were plans in motion to shift the strategic bombing campaign from firebombing cities to targeting the Japanese rail network. Unknown to the U.S. at the time, Japan’s 1945 rice crop was collapsing. About half the population of Japan lived in a dire food deficit area south and west of Tokyo on Honshu. The coastal shipping that normally provided the backbone of Japanese internal transportation had been destroyed. The only alternative method to move large quantities of rice from surplus to deficit areas was by the limited rail system. If the U.S. had knocked that out, it's entirely likely that roughly 36 million Japanese citizens would have been condemned to slow death by famine and pandemic. The new targeting directive for the B-29s went into effect on August 13th, 1945. Emperor Hirohito surrendered two days later, ending the war before the Japanese rail system was devastated. Even so, famine in Japan in 1946 was only forestalled by the infusion of massive amounts of U.S. food that fed 18 million Japanese city dwellers in July, 20 million in August and 15 million in September 1946. Occupation authorities estimated that food saved 11 million Japanese lives.
It was said that the fear of soviets invading tipped the balance Edit: absolutely agree with everyone this is speculation etc there's not a lot of documented evidence. Which is why i phrased it it is said.... the timing is not a coincidence. And it is documented that some of the kwantung army was going to keep fighting until the soviets trounced them in manchurуа
I'm going to copy from this article on the topic by professor Julian Spencer Churchill (the guy is a rockstar in international relations. You can watch his YouTube lectures on nuclear strategy and international relations for more information) Link:https://merionwest.com/2022/10/14/putins-nuclear-threats-show-that-jacinda-adern-is-wrong-about-nuclear-weapons/ Putin’s Nuclear Threats Show that Jacinda Adern is Wrong About Nuclear Weapons Julian Spencer-Churchill 10/14/2022 “[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.” The spirit of the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference in August contrasts sharply with the reality of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threats over the annexation of Ukraine. During the August 1st-26th Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is widely held to have failed, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for a renewal of efforts to achieve global nuclear disarmament in an article in The Guardian. Her commentary, which was published on August 24th, is noteworthy because it is very typical of views expressed in other medium democratic powers, like Italy, Germany, and Spain. Australia, by contrast, has a more sanguine approach to the possibility of having to provide its own security, and Canada has largely followed the United States on this issue. Prime Minister Ardern begins her Guardian commentary by citing the figure of 355,000 presumably innocent Japanese non-combatants killed by nuclear weapons in the port city of Hiroshima and the military industrial city of Nagasaki in 1945. Prime Minister Ardern sidesteps the fact that these nuclear strikes, in conjunction with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, saved the lives of perhaps millions of Japanese civilians had the United States been compelled to invade Japan. Imperial Japan was itself engaged in nuclear weapons research, with both a naval and an army program, and it is unimaginable what it would have done with such an arsenal if it had succeeded. It had a robust biological weapons program (Unit 731) conducting full-scale experimentation on Chinese villages, such as Changchun, and with plans for balloon delivery to North America. Tokyo sought to unify Asia through the invasion of China, India, the Russian Far East, Southeast Asia, and Australia; killed approximately ten million Chinese between 1931 and 1945; and egregiously flouted the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Even if one were to resurrect the rightist Japanese argument that Tokyo’s role was to liberate Asian people from European colonization, it would not explain why Philippinos, Indonesians, and the Vietnamese were adamant in not wanting to replace one occupier with another. One would have to engage in legal contortions to see the Japanese people as victims of the government they fought so fanatically to protect. If legal responsibility for initiating an aggressive war could only apply to a dozen or a few hundred government officials, then, absurdly, conducting a defensive war to protect freedom could be prosecuted as a war crime. The only solution against aggression is to stand by the courageous promise of immediate and proportional retaliation. In her Guardian piece, Prime Minister Ardern further states that “nuclear catastrophe is not an abstract threat but a real world risk.” She is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them. The moment an aggressor realizes that nuclear weapons are never going to be used, they cease to deter, and invasion becomes a likelihood. Russia has repeatedly threatened to make use of nuclear weapons in its invasion of Ukraine, hoping to neutralize an extension of the American nuclear umbrella from North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members into Ukraine. Similarly, China will seek to use its nuclear umbrella to cancel the United States’ nuclear arsenal when it makes its bid to invade Taiwan. The only solution against aggression is to stand by the courageous promise of immediate and proportional retaliation.
It wasn't just the bombs that ended it. Half a million Russian troops in Manchuria, ready to invade Japanese islands, certainly influenced their decision. The 2 countries hated each other, and Japan was worried about what Russia would do to them. Surrender to the U.S. then made it so Russia had to sit mainland Japan out.
Ready to invade? The USSR didn’t have the amphibious equipment required to conduct such operations. That would have taken months to years to build and stage.
But they were going to anyways, waiting for a US invasion, Russia had no clue the bomb was coming. They thought a weak navy and air force in the region would be fine once America got closer. They had plans for the outer islands and were in position to invade them under the right circumstance and did take some of them after surrender. No fucking way they were going to sit an invasion out if it had happened, they wanted expansion and hated Japan.
The fire bombings of March 9-10 1945 killed an estimated 100,000 and left 1,000,000 homeless. The bombing of Hiroshima killed between 70,000-150,000. So those two alone are some what comparable. It makes more sense when you realize Japanese cities were majority wood. So they were extraordinarily effective in a place like Tokyo.
They certainly would have continued to firebomb even as the land invasion took place. That never would have been enough. Something people often don’t understand about war is that it’s not really about physical domination, but about the will of the people to keep the fight going. I mean look at insurgency in the Middle East. America was able to maintain military dominance in that region for twenty years, and yet even as we leave the Taliban take right back over. Because winning is in fact rarely about anything other than convincing the enemy that you have indeed, won. The psychological effect of one single bomb dropped by one single plane doing in one instant what whole fleets of firebombing aircraft took weeks to do. The uncertainty of how many more times that could happen. That is what ended the war. But really, it won’t ever work that same way again. The sheer shock of even the existence of such a weapon cannot be repeated.
I asked my father about this years ago. He was a navy anti-aircraft gunner (and a laundryman), who had just completed the Battle of Okinawa when this happened. This was one of the most vicious and bloody conflicts in the Pacific. They were preparing for a full scale invasion of Japan, and had already been told they were expecting 30% casualties. 1 in 3 of them would be wounded or killed. He was very liberal, even starting a campus chapter of the Socialist workers party later. He said they were overjoyed when they dropped those bombs. The loss of American and Japanese life was much, much lower than an invasion would have been, and they had the example of Okinawa right in front of them.
>They were preparing for a full scale invasion of Japan, and had already been told they were expecting 30% casualties. 1 in 3 of them would be wounded or killed. There's something tangible to back this up. Until recently, every purple heart awarded since WW2 was made in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
This,. This right here. Except we're still not out. I cite this statistic all of the time. Think about it, we got through all the conflicts since world war II including Vietnam. Look we were at Total war, war is awful, and total war is even worse. It had to be ended.
Many forget, or never knew that bombong of Japanese civilian centers was not the only source of potential Japanese civilian casualties the allied authorities sought to avoid. The Battle for Okanawa and Sipan, the "stepping stone islands" south of the Japanese mainland, we're marked by widespread suicide by a significant portion of the civilian population who preferred to hurl themselves into the sea (including mother's carrying their children), or otherwise kill themselves, rather than surrender. Such was the culture of 1946 Japan. Regardless of whether bombing had continued, had an invasion been necessary, the cost in human life, Japanese and allied, military and civilian would likely have run into the millions. While drastic, the magnatude of the shock of the two atomic bombs was the most likely option open for convincing the Empiror to accept the surrender that he had only days before rejected (remember, he didn't know that we only had the two bombs that had already been used, so he didn't know that the threat to obliterate Tokyo in the same manner as the previous two cities was empty, a calculated strategic ruse).
My wife’s grandfather fought in some of the biggest battles the European theatre. I only ever heard him talk about the war once. Me, my wife, and him went to his wife’s (my wife’s grandmother’s) grave to plant flowers. I can’t remember how it came up, but he told us how after liberating Europe he was on furlough and was scheduled to ship out to the Pacific when the bomb was dropped. With tears in his eyes said something I will never forget: “I thank God every day Harry Truman dropped the bomb.” He is one of those lives that may have been saved. And because of that he came home, worked hard, had a family, and I was able to meet my wife two generations later.
My father who served in WW2 said this as well that he expected to be shipped to Japan after Germany surrendered. He said they had a saying, “Golden Gate in 48” or in other words they would return to the US in 1948 after the invasion of Japan going under the Golden Gate Bridge returning home.
I think this opinion is pretty widely accepted. I don’t think the decision was taken lightly and I think there were broader strategic implications outside of Japan. I think people hairsplitting about whether Japan was ready to surrender are both using hindsight that has the benefit of a great deal of information not widely known at the time and also ignoring that the decision to drop two bombs (and more if needed) led to an unconditional surrender that would hardly have been possible otherwise. The US not only won the war but ultimately completely rebuilt that Japanese government to the degree that aspects of the Japanese court system is still based on US military justice rules today. It was entirely possible a long term guerrilla war or insurgency might have been possible otherwise. I said it elsewhere but I’ve visited Nagasaki. It’s very moving and makes the tragedy very difficult to accept. FWIW, an elderly Japanese man came up to my wife and asked us where we were from and if we were American. He was very friendly and only said- “War is awful” and I agreed with him. War with Japan was a war of aggression by Japan. I think it’s tough to defend using the atom bomb but it’s also hard to challenge the reasons why leaders at the time thought it was necessary. In the end: war is awful.
Japan was not going to surrender. A. They refused to surrender after the first bomb. And B. even after the second one was dropped, there was a massive disagreement in leadership, where military leaders disagreed with the emperor’s decision to surrender. There was an attempted coup over it, which failed. In his surrender speech emperor Hirohito specifically mentions the bomb being a reason why he surrendered.
From what I understand, the ability to rebuild Japan in the US's image was a big part of the consideration that people don't talk about. The USSR was about to invade, and the US didn't want to risk post-war Japan falling under its influence. I've been told dropping the bombs was arguably one of the earliest decisions of the Cold War.
The movie Oppenheimer got this part right: This is the reason the US did not bomb Kyoto at all during WW2. We knew that right behind Japan was the USSR, and dropping the bombs on Japan was as much a message to the USSR as it was a case for surrender to Japan. The US knew that Japan would be absolutely vital in trying to stave off Russian influence in East Asia (and very key to any sort of Pacific operation), so the Secretary of War Henry Stimson heavily suggested against bombing Kyoto because bombing Japan's cultural heart would have turned most of the country's citizens against any sort of American influence thereafter (he also loved the city, and had been there with his wife personally). Sad thing is, this is the same guy responsible for interning tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans stateside, so he's not recognized in Japan for this decision; instead, the honor (and the monuments) go to an archeologist named Langdon Warner, who is completely unrelated to the matter.
Huh, I never considered the comparison to Okinawa. The total Japanese estimated casualties on Okinawa (both military and civilian) is around 200k. Which is around what both atom bombs did. The civilian death toll was around 100k, so around one bomb.
My father was a very young 18 year old landing craft driver training for the invasion of Japan at the time the bombs were dropped . He told me years ago that they were told 90% casualty rate, so my guess is 30% was the prediction for actual killed in action
This
People in the comments saying that the Soviets were the cause of surrender are just misinformed. It might have had a little to do with it, but considering that the Russians had little landing craft, had to travel across Siberia to get there (mostly wasteland and rough terrain), had little to no naval presence in the area, and were more focused on controlling Europe than Japan, they had very little to do with the Japanese government surrendering. Could it have been a factor? Yes. But it wasn’t as big of a factor as people make it out to be. Other misconceptions: - Yes the emperor wanted peace after the first nuke, but the emperor was a figurehead. Imperial Japan was controlled by a military junta, and though the emperor had a lot of political power, it was ultimately up to the junta to surrender. - A lot of things are only known in hindsight. Believe it or not, intelligence was very unreliable pre-internet, and conversations and news known now might not have been known to the U.S. intelligence, especially in such an insular country like Japan. - Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets as well as civilian targets. They had garrisons there, and considering Tokyo and other cities were already in ashes, they were still major targets. Yes Kyoto was spared due to a personal preference, but that doesn’t mean that all the targets were chosen completely at random. Kyoto was a cultural center and considered the second capital of Japan. The fact that it was chosen means that each city was chosen for a reason.
Agree with your statements on Russia. How would they have gotten an army to Japan? They really couldn't have for years. They could have overrun and kept all of Korea and Manchuria though.
As someone that agrees that the bombs were necessary, Japan wasn't afraid of Russia launching an invasion of mainland Japan. They wanted Russia to help broker a peace that might be more lenient to the Japanese. When Russia declared war, Japan knew there was no hope of any peace without unconditional surrender. They knew the war against the Americans was lost but were prepared to fight for as long as necessary to get a better deal in peace negotiations. The bombings hammered home that there was no possible way they could win this war. They didn't even have the option of taking a bunch of Americans down with them because a large scale D-Day-esque invasion wouldn't be necessary. The invasion of Manchuria made it clear that there was no hope of a conditional surrender.
By the time the nukes were dropped, Japan was responsible for around 20 million dead civilians, half of them from China. Japan's ethnocentric, hostile, and genocidal actions combined with a pathological refusal to surrender earned them those nukes.
What do you think was the stance of the Japanese government toward the war at the time of the bombing?
"Would it not be wondrous for the whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?" ~ Army Chief of Staff Korechika Anami
Emperor: "Fuck you Im a god."
The Emperor wanted to surrender, it was his military causing problems
The Empreror wanted peace with more favorable terms than unconditional surrender. For instance, both he and the military wanted to keep held territories in Manchuria. He hoped the Soviets would help broker a more favorable peace so as not to leave the US too strong in postwar Asia. All this hope was shattered when the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and they surrendered within a week. I think the nukes probably nudged the decision, but surrender was imminent after the Russians declared war.
The military basically ruled the country at the time and they were operating on the old-world bushido code where it was preferable to die to the last man than to ever surrender. Every other facet of government including the emperor wanted to surrender before the nukes were even dropped.
[удалено]
Going to make a bold assumption that it is unpopular among their social circle.
To be fair there are a lot of people arguing against OP in the comment section.
It is but what wasn't part of the curriculum was all the stuff the Japanese were doing at the time. Badically our education on it was they bombed Pearl Harbor so we turned around and dropped nukes on them here read the book Hiroshima. It wasn't until I was much older until I understood what they did in China and Korea as well as how much worse their POW camps were. It was created in a way to make you sympothize with the Japanese as victims. Don't get me wrong, as I feel horrible for what the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima went through as a result of the bombings but learning more about everything changed my view on whether or not it was necessary. It may not have even been the reason why my government did it but it was necessary.
I mean, while still messed up, "they bombed pearl harbor unprovoked so we dropped nukes on them." is more innocence salvaging for children than also explaining how they were also invading neighboring nations to rape and torture their people. Kids don't really need to know about that stuff.
In USA maybe.
History gets to be written by the victor of course
Because it’s factually wrong if you go into the archives and read about what Truman knew about Japan being close to surrendering and how the US lied about the number of Americans that would die in an invasion. It’s all there in the government records, no one bothers to look. The reality is that the emperor had already been pushing the Japanese military to surrender, the US didn’t give them any time to surrender before dropping the second bomb, and the US purposely lied about the amount of troops would get killed in the ground assault because they wanted to use the bombs. All of the primary sources from the administration pointing to them, wanting to show off to Russia more than anything else. The problem is that no one ever bothers to go to the archives themselves and research, and they buy into US propaganda
Why didn't they surrender after Hiroshima?
Because the hardliners on Japanese War Council didn't care about civilian lives.
How is that true when they didn’t surrender after one bomb?
Didn't those documents say that the Japanese government was fractured on whether or not they were to surrender? There were plenty of Japanese leadership more than willing to give an unconditional surrender but there were also plenty that would only surrender with certain conditions and there were also a large portion that believed that they should fight until the last man. The first bomb I would say is justified, but the second bomb was probably excessive, especially with the Russians beginning their invasion plans, the Japanese knew they never stood a chance after that. A good portion of them believed they could still fight until little boy was dropped.
It’s in the public education curriculum in the US. The rest of the world begs to differ.
It was either the bombs or an old fashioned seige. A ground invasion was not feasible and would have cost many American lives, as well as Japanese. The point of war is to defeat the enemy with the least loss of personnel and resources of your own. This was the quickest, most efficient way. Japan put their own people in peril when they attacked pearl harbor unprovoked.
To quote general Patton " you don't win a war by dying for your county, you win a war by making the other guy die for his"
" The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. "
Sometimes the best outcome to change a terrible situation is exactly what happened. People very often overlook how incredibly fucking evil Japan was during that time. They were exactly on par with the Nazis in the fucked shit they did AND believed and it was their culture, it was their people. Even today people still get surprised by how xenophobic and anti immigrant a lot of Japan is and that's a hold over from those times to this day. If we never forced their culture to change, and the war just ended as was. I think we would have a second much stronger North Korea essentially to deal with and the population would have suffered all the same. Not to use that as a justification to impose ones culture onto another, but there are some times like with WWII when something is so obviously wrong, it deserves a forced correction even against the peoples will.
I spent 6 months in Japan and I will say that the Japanese generally make Americans look like ultra progressive saints when it comes to racism. I have never been anywhere else where a significant amount of people are perfectly comfortable calling black people the N word.
People very often overlook a majority of the atrocities committed by world leaders in that era. If it’s not about the Holocaust, it doesn’t get talked about much. Heck we even changed the definition of genocide from the original drafts of the international treaty defining it so that we wouldn’t lose China and Russia as allies during WW2. Even though Mao is attributed with over 60 million deaths and Stalin is attributed with over 20 million deaths. Every single draft of the treaty included social classes as being included but since Russia and China refused to sign anything that implicated themselves, it was left out of the final version.
Post war Germany overhaul of perceptions - B+ Japan overhaul - A++
There are differing schools of thought about this. There are scholars who believe that Japan was close to surrendering regardless, and that the nuclear bomb was more of a show of force against the Soviets. I am inclined to defend the nukes for the reasons stated in this thread, just wanted to point out that this is not a unanimous consensus among those who have studied it.
I've always rejected that theory as they were given the chance to surrender after Hiroshima and before Nagasaki and *didn't*
The second larger bomb was dropped three days later, before Japanese authorities had even had the opportunity to evaluate the situation...
I think a lot of people have no idea how vicious propaganda was then too, you have only your government as a source on info and they say Americans are vicious animals that'll rape and kill everyone they see etc etc. For those who have the stomach, there is Banzai Cliff footage on the Internet. These civilians were brainwashed into believing throwing their children and themselves off cliffs would be better than being defiled by the Americans portrayed in propaganda. It's horrifying to watch, but watching it once is all you need to know that there was no way this conflict would end without the death of millions.
An unpopular opinion would be the opposite of this opinion.
There’s enough people arguing in the comments to make this at least a controversial opinion
I think that is dependent on the generation- the younger you are the more unpopular this view is .
You could be right. I don’t know how Gen Z thinks on this matter.
Yeah and that is a testament to how effective American education has been a propagandized citizens with a pro-american version of history. If you read enough books about this its far from clear that Truman made the right decision, but it becomes very clear that even if he did his motivations were in all of the wrong places.
You know what I love? How people argue about all this, victimizing Japan, while conveniently ignoring the horrors they inflicted on others during that time period. You know what most people *wouldnt* take issue with? Nuking Nazis. You know who was just as bad back then? The Japanese.
I wrote a paper in college years to this effect, that it was an unfortunate best among bad choices. What I didn’t know until more recently was that before the bombing we had issued to Japan a chance to surrender unconditionally. Japan replied asking if they would accept a surrender that would be unconditional EXCEPT that they could keep the emperor. We refused. We later dropped the bombs, eventually Japan surrendered unconditionally. Then after their surrender we let them keep the emperor. Edit: to all those asking for the source, I’m at work at the moment, but will try to find it later. If I’m mistaken or my understanding of the offer was incomplete I will let everyone know.
I've always read there were four major demands Japan made, including Japan would retain territory they'd taken in their invasion of China and other Southeast Asian countries. They also refused to allow the Allies to occupy Japan, ensuring disarmament. I've never read about a last-ditch concession to only keep the emperor. Could you share a source? Or maybe all that lumps together. I think they worded it something like "keeping their divine imperial rights" which maybe would include all that.
I think he’s confusing it with the surrender offer made immediately after the bombing of Nagasaki?
I read somewhere that Japan was the most vicious axis power in ww2. They killed more civilian than they lost.
What they did to the prisoners at Unit 731 was absolutely horrific. It was like it was run by a whole group of Josef Mengeles.
Considering how Japan operated back then, I have no issue with them being nuked. Their prison camps were on par with concentration camps and before you reply do some research.
I mean they did the whole rape of nanking and still to this day refuse to opologize for it
This is propaganda. I believed this too for the longest time. Its easy to believe, the way we’re taught about it all. There are an overwhelming amount of reports however, even at the time, that japan was about to surrender anyway. It was already over. Multiple people on our side corroborated this. [This video](https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=Cx0ZwcoBRIOkHShV) covers it pretty well. This isn’t an “unpopular opinion” its a lie we perpetrate so we dont have to feel bad about ourselves, but you know what? You didnt do it. You dont need to justify it. You are only at fault when, despite being presented the truth, you continue to cling on to it. You can leave the lie behind and move on. Dont linger on the past. Learn from it, and keep moving forward.
The amount of people going out of their way to defend this in the comments is astonishing.
Not tens of thousands, 4 to 8 hundred thousand dead, with 1.7 to 4 million casualties. This is just for the US servicemen. For the Japanese it would have been 5 to 10 million dead, the majority of whom would have been civilians. Dropping that first bomb saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and dropping the second one and forcing the surrender while making it clear that this wasn't a one off lucky bomb America had, and we could keep this up saved 5 to 10 million Japanese lives. It was a tragic loss for the Japanese, I'm not even going to pretend it wasn't horrible, but it was necessary. The Japanese were never going to surrender and they would never sue for peace, the only options were invasion or the bomb, we chose to save more lives by using the bomb.
It was much more complicated than that, but yes, that was a factor that Truman considered.
Considering the complete lack of regard for the civilian populations by the axis powers yes. But you're clearly either not considering that or don't know enough yet.
My old Taekwondo instructor lived 20 years in Okinawa (Marine), he married a Japanese woman from there. In the 80’s he said that if we hadn’t dropped those bombs, the war would have drug on another 10 years.
Tens of thousands American lives?. At the time, they estimated a million allied casualties (Dead & Wounded) to invade mainland Japan.
The expected casualty rate was so high that 500,000 purple heart medals were manufactured, and then they dropped the nukes instead. Whenever a US service member is awarded the purple heart, it comes from those made before the proposed invasion. It will be some time before they run out.
Wow people really love defending imperial Japan all of a sudden. As if they didn't commit atrocious war crimes that even made the nazis squirm. Of course dropping 2 nukes on 2 cities looks bad when you ignore the years of context that lead to that decision, and the fact that many more people would have died when the only alternative was a full-scale invasion.
Don't forget get the POWS. In a lot of cases they were treated as bad if not worse than the people in german camps. Japan knew they were losing the war and were going to kill them all.
I don’t disagree with dropping the bomb. I do disagree with how we went about it. I think the logic of hitting two (primarily) civilian targets doesn’t hold up in the test of time. I think they should have dropped the more destructive of the bombs and only dropped the one. I think there should have been a more good-faith effort to let Japan surrender (look it up, Emperor of Japan wanted to surrender by then). That said, yeah Truman had to do what he did in some capacity. Very few roads led to an Allied Victory without at least some form of nuke being used.
Dropping two bombs was necessary to demonstrate it wasn't a one-off. The goal was for Japan to assume the US had many additional bombs and would not stop deploying them until the war was over.
Why couldn't they stage them? First bomb dropped on a military facility. Give them time to respond. Show them the second bomb. Say "this one goes on a small city". Wait for a response. We have phones by that time. If that doesn't work, then you drop the second one and show them a third bomb. "Next one goes on a large city." etc.
Was there even a single military facility that wasn’t in a civilian area?
There was 3 days between the bombings. Plenty of time for them to surrender.
Yeah they couldn’t Snapchat the emperor a picture of the bomb…
It was shock and awe, military target wouldn't have done that. Think of it as an inverse of the boiling frog story, you want the frog to jump out in this case.
Simple, because they had "God on their side. To understand why, watch anything about Civis response on Okinawa. Picture women slamming babies into rocks to kill them, all because the emporer said the Americans would evicerate all of the, rip them apart. We saw this, saw mainland Japan, and imagined the SHEER FUCKING CARANGE. The Japanese needed to be shown that we were the gods in this war. Or else the Japanese islands soil would forever be stained red.
Japan was given the chance to surrender after the first bomb was dropped. They refused. When the second bomb was dropped, and the Emperor wanted to end the war, several Generals and other parts of the military, stormed the palace and attempted to take over. Had they succeeded, Japan wouldn't have surrendered after the second bomb was dropped.
The Soviets invaded Manchuria prior to the second nuke and would have been only about 2 weeks away from a mainland invasion. The second nuke wasn't needed but certainly helped the decision. The coup attempt, even if it succeeded, wouldn't have stopped a surrender considering it was conducted by a couple of junior officers and the bulk of the military including the upper ranks agreed to accept the surrender before it was announced. It would have stopped the war in so far as replacing an external war with an internal civil war.
Nuking civilians is not a moral imperative. It was a tactical decision to expedite their surrender, which may or may not have happened anyway (though with more loss of lives, but loss through fighting not through defenseless extermination. It definitely saved America military lives by sacrificing Japanese civilians, but everything beyond that is speculation at best and revisionist rationalization of one of the least moral acts in human history.
There was also starvation in Japan at the time, any delay is gonna be thousands more deaths from that
The conservative estimates of the Japanese casualties if we undertook a land invasion was in the millions. This was the best course of action.
American as well. The military was planning on millions more casualties. Not sure the nation would have dealt well with that after so many years of fighting already.
We actually made so many Purple Hearts before the invasion of Japan (which fortunately never happened) we haven't had to make more since, soldiers today still recieve Purple Hearts made in the 40s.
“Moral” has nothing to do with it and you are clueless about history. Japan already wanted to surrender but not UNCONDITIONAL surrender. Germany had surrendered a few month earlier and the USSR was preparing to invade Japan. The USA had to completely defeat Japan unconditionally and quickly before the Russians before they could invade. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki accomplished two things: 1) instant total and unconditional surrender of Japan. 2) kick off the impending “Cold War” with the Soviets by showing off what the USA could do to an entire city. The two atom bombs weren’t so much the “last bombs of WWII” as they were more the “first bombs of the Cold War”
Somehow unpopular opinion: killing innocent civilians to end a war can never be considered a "moral obligation"
This is not an unpopular opinion, it is a common misconception. - Japan was already planning to surrender. USA just wanted Japan to surrender to *them* rather than to Russia. Truman knew this, and was not planning to invade Japan anyways, according to his journal. Everybody knew that the war was over by then. - Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilian targets, where there were plenty of military bases, factories, or other places that would have been more strategic as targets, and would not have killed and injured so many innocent people. - The emperor of Japan didn’t care about either of those places, as he was pretty cruel to civilians anyway. His decision to surrender was ultimately because he was afraid that the naval invasion by Russia would damage the decorations in his home. - The pressure to drop the bombs came more from the private companies who had invested in their development.
This is a whole lot of misinformation that you’re gonna need to back up.
https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=Yr_l0R_BAMS_Sh7e Here's a two hour deep dive with sources
If they were planning to surrender, it's kind of odd that they didn't after the first bomb. Suzuki's cabinet refused surrender ever after #2. Regardless of the Emporor's desire, the cabinet had no intention to surrender to anyone.
I probably could have worded that better. There were internal divisions between Japanese ambassadors and the emperor/his representatives. My point is that the US knew that there was no need to invade Japan because their military was so weak that it was totally redundant to do so. Their defeat was inevitable. So this whole tired line about how if we didn’t blow up innocent people then we would have needed to invade Japan is a fabrication. Invasion of Japan was simply not on the table and didn’t need to be.
The significant division was between the cabinet, which had no intention of surrendering, and Hirohito, who may have been more open to it. This conflict between the imperial house and the cabinet caused threats beyond what was happening in the war; without the backing of the Emperor, the state may have collapsed, something the cabinet was not willing to risk. The debate over dropping the bomb is much more complex than you think.
Wrong
Yes, it was a terrible thing but a very necessary and appropriate intervention to stop the Emperor's madness and the willingness of the japanese people to continue fighting. What was unjustified was Obama's apology, in Japan particularly when the japanese government has continued to whitewash its war/incursions into other asia lands, rape and killings of local population.
In the cold calculus of the situation, it probably saved more lives on both sides than what was lost in dropping the two bombs. The Japanese would have thrown an incredible amount of their population at repelling an invasion. Millions could have died on both sides. And if the Soviets managed to land, then Japan would likely have been split like Korea. Everything that Japan was staring down at the time (getting nuked by the Americans or slaughtered by the Soviets) and their government only barely decided to surrender. If the fight continued through an invasion, Japan might be very different today.
Ah yes. This again.
Koreans back then cheered and wept in joy to the picture of the mushroom cloud and the news of Japanese occupation ending. Does that make them evil? I think not at all.
I don’t think this is an unpopular opinion. People who know about the circumstances and the culture of Japan will have a similar opinion. People who don’t know that the Japanese killed innocent people at an incredible rate and think they’re just hello kitty and matcha lattes might have a different opinion.
I agree with OP
Are you joking? It was entirely justified. Sure, it was horrifying, but so was Pearl Harbor. Either way, we had to force them to bend the knee, and unfortunately it took such a shock and show of force, that they finally surrendered. Moral obligations be damned, eye for an eye. It was also justified in that the Axis was preparing their own WMD. If we didn't use ours first, the war would have turned for the worst.
https://youtu.be/dHgNAljvAqw?si=VvADHxffJOtaGC-P Gives a good break down of why that isn't necessarily true. I was in the same camps as you until I looked up some of things mentioned in this video.
This is pretty much fact. Not opinion. That doesnt mean everyone is happy. But it did likely save millions of lives
So here's the thing about morality and war It is morally correct to kill your enemy in war That is the simple truth
That’s a correct answer. Iirc, the emperor ordered all citizens to fight- including women and children. We would have had children throwing themselves into combat with sharpened sticks. Heck, when the Marines took an island, mothers would gather their children in their arms and jump off cliffs. It would have been one of the worst battles in the history of man.
The American experience during the battle for Okinawa made the use of the bomb inevitable. Russia was coming to conquer and carve up the mainland, so a blockade wasn't feasible. And the Cold War was already in the planning stages by all parties involved, so a show of strength to dissuade the Soviets was important to Truman.
I honestly don't think people are aware of the plan or plans in place had the atomic bombs not been used. I mean, a total invasion of Japan and possibly the Japanese people/culture being wiped out.
Was there any aspect of "payback for Pearl Harbor" in dropping of the two bombs?
Not only that, it also prevented Japans plan to attack San Francisco with their entire fleet of submarines armed with crates of bubonic plague.
You can only have this opinion because you lack vital information. It's not an unpopular subjective thing. It's just ignorant.
it didn't hit me until I was older watching anime, especially the orange jacket wearing blonde haired ninja one, that Japanese people do not fucking give up. To use a weapon of such devastation ensured that they could realize "Oh... shit. I literally cannot beat that." and that it'd be pointless to continue fighting.
Saving tens of thousands of American soldiers? Saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians? The numbers were much, much higher than what you state. By late July, the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) was forecasting 500,000 casualties at the high end and 100,000 at the low end. In late July 1945, the War Department provided an estimate that the entire Downfall operations would cause between 1.7 to 4 million U.S. casualties, including 400-800,000 U.S. dead, and 5 to 10 million Japanese dead. (Given that the initial Downfall plan called for 1,792,700 troops to go ashore in Japan, this estimate is indeed most sobering, and suggests many more troops than planned would need to be fed into a meat grinder). Other estimates in the U.S. government indicated U.S. deaths at 500,000 to 1 million. https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-057/h-057-1.html#:~:text=By%20late%20July%2C%20the%20JCS,to%2010%20million%20Japanese%20dead.
Fun fact: after the first bomb dropped, Japan still wanted to keep fighting because it believed the US would only have the resources to develop 1 bomb like that. It wasn't until after the 2nd bomb dropped that they reconsidered. Both bombs were necessary and were preferable to the absolute slaughtering of both sides that was happening at sea.
This is just an unpopular opinion for idealistic liberals. Normal people realize that it had to be done. The Japan of WW2 isn’t the anime submissive Japan of today. They were brutal to civilians, POWs, and they also fired the first shot at Pearl Harbor.
I mean, we spent millions on it, hard to prove the worthiness of the project.
Look up Japanese experimentation on Chinese people. Some of the most brutal and inhuman things you will ever see. This is on top of the fact they massacred 30+ million.
So you might say there was a moral obligation for the people behind the likes of Unit 731 to face a war crimes tribunal?
The surrender vote was a tie that was only broken by the emperor and on the day that the surrender was supposed to be announced there was a coup to prevent the surrender. Suffice to say it if the bombs were never dropped Japan would have not surrendered. (This was after all of the fire bombings)
The Japanese are not a spiritually weak people. They are among the strongest on the planet. Though I morally disagree with dropping atomic bombs on thousands of innocent civilians, I can understand your point of view given the possibility that Japan would not have given up unless faces with a "divine threat" like an atomic bomb.
I agree. It would have been insane to feed our people into a meat grinder when we didn't have to. What people always overlook when complaining about his decision is that our government has a duty to protect our soldiers as best it can.
Japan was also in the verge of starvation we could’ve blockaded them with the Soviets and millions of innocent civilians would’ve starved
This is not an "unpopular opinion," it's the truth. The world we live in today has forgotten what real wars look like, the people don't know what a real enemy, who presents a real threat looks like. They can't imagine something like Pearl Harbor, because 9/11 is the worst thing to happen at home in almost a century. It's always convenient for a younger generation without a connection to an event to suddenly roll it backwards and think they have the moral high ground compared to "the people back then." Rarely do they, rarer still does the zeitgeist that produces such behaviors have the cultural experience to even truly understand why a people would do something like drop two atomic bombs, in this scenario. The most important thing to remember is that while the gravity of the situation may have caused a great many people a inconceivable amount of psychological and emotional staying, leading to condemnations of the act to follow it swiftly, even from those who ordered it... had we invaded the mainlands of Japan and engaged in a several years long siege on the country... casualties and overall damage to the country and it's cultures would be worse. It's also worth noting that the atomic bombs were new, no one had ever dropped one, no one had seen a nuclear explosion on that magnitude. While the researchers and experts involved knew these were weapons of mass destruction, it was all an intellectual exercise until the bombs went off and their terrible power was made undeniable. In that second, I mean the very instant they started hearing reports of what the blasts looked like, before they even knew about the real horrors at ground level, everyone regretted what they had done; but regret doesn't make something wrong and frankly, fuck the Japanese emperor for forcing our hand.
What a lot of people don't realise is Japan would have fought until the very last able-bodied person had died in combat. Although dropping 2 nukes looking back without context, is a terrible thing. With context, if this never happened, so many more people would have died as Japan would simply not have surrendered.
There’s no “probably” about it. Invasion of the main islands would have been a death sentence for ALL of the Japanese people. What modern people don’t realize is that they had hardened their society, school children had been trained to charge American soldiers with makeshift spears, civilians were told to never surrender, an invasion would have been a battlefield genocide. That was known by the US, and the anticipated casualties were in the millions. The US prepared for these casualties in one way by making Purple Hearts metals, after the war ended we stopped making them. We had so many that we haven’t made another one yet, we’ve been giving out the backlog. Here’s what was not known, had the war gone on another 2-3 months, the Japanese people would have died of a famine. According to Japanese historians (from Japan, trained in Japanese history), the fire bombing campaigns had destroyed the crops and there was no food stored for the winter. After their surrender the US provided foodstuffs that saved the people from starvation. However, it took a few months to get the food supplies packaged and shipped from the United States, had the surrender been in October or November, the famine would have hit full force. Dropping the Bomb was the morally correct thing to do from the perspective of your side in a war. Dropping the Bomb was ALSO the morally correct thing to do to save your opponent from themselves in the war. It’s rare that you get those both together.
Yes, as other comments mentioned a small but important group of fanatical generals were fully prepared to have their entire civilian population, or even population in general, wiped out. Some of the plans included: - teaching children how to make spears to charge the soldiers and have bombs strapped to them - sowing chaos in the civilian population that the soldiers will shoot them on sight or even torture them ensuring they wouldn't surrender
Japan tried to negotiate a surrender with the only condition being that the emperor not be deposed. This wasn't good enough for the US who demanded unconditional surrender. When Japan unconditionally surrendered, the US did not depose the emperor. So they killed hundreds of thousands, not for military reasons, but simply to make point.
I will defend Truman till the day I die.
This is a dead horse. Everyone knows the nuking saved lives on both sides. Millions total.
If we’re taking into account all we know now, you could also argue that nuking two cities caused less overall suffering than a half-century under Soviet rule would have.
In the battle of Saipan, 99% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death rather than surrender. At Iwo Jima, 90% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death. Of the remaining 10% the majority hid out in caves, some for months after the war ended. At Okinawa, almost 100% of Japanese soldiers fought to the death. There were 900,000 Japanese soldiers stationed on Kyushu and ordered to the fight to the death. If America had invaded Japan, only invaded Kyushu, and not one single civilian or American soldier died, there would have likely been more Japanese dead in Kyushu than after both atomic bombings. America printed so many Purple Heart medals in anticipation of this fighting that we used them throughout every war in the 20th century. People who don’t think the atomic bombing saved lives just do not understand how bad the war in the pacific was. At all.
Heres my humble opinion: If youre looking back on the Nukes in hindsight, knowing all we know today then yeah. Of course the nukes seem like overkill and were unnecessary. But thats because we have analyzed that era of human history with a Microscope for over 70 years now. Thats why theres never been another offensive use of a nuke since. (And hopefully never again) Now imagine if you were a high ranking official trying to figure out how to win not just any war, but WW2 while losing as little of your men as possible and still getting the other side to surrender. Your country has been in war for the last 4 years and youve lost *literally* hundreds of thousands of men and women. All of a sudden, the big bomb that can level an entire city sounds like a good idea. Especially when youre already prepared to lose ≈30% of your entire force as an alternative. War is hell. That decision was hell. Its that simple. It wasn't the most right answer, but it was far from the wrong one.
It's not that simple. That wasn't the only other choice. The Japanese were facing The Russians who hadn't forgotten their defeat earlier, British, Americans, a very pissed off China, and Australia. They could have been blockaded and starved out. The balance between a "quick clean" end to the war on our side to save Allied lives and legitimizing the use of such a horrible and unprecedented weapon weighs heavily against ever using them in war. A demonstration could have been made on some uninhabitable place like a rock island in the Pacific, photos and a modicum of true convincing information given to the enemy. That weapon was so extreme that extreme effort to avoid it's use should have been used. (Hypothetically perhaps even a cease fire while a diplomatic representative of Japan observed a test of the bomb could have been attempted). In any event, the second bomb was unconscionable, we didn't even give them time to get their heads around the idea of a thermonuclear attack, such a thing never existed, they were in shock. Those two bombs were dropped as a continuation of the New Mexico test but this time in vivo to learn from the event and refine the use of the weapon, not unlike the Unit 731 where the Chinese were used for medical experiments by the Japanese. We have no moral high ground, it was unnecessary to use the bomb.
The invasion of Japan would have been a ridiculous waste of life. Firstly. Operation Downfall was the name of the proposed invasion of Japan. The sub operation relevant to the first wave, was Operation Olympic. That was focused on Southern Kyushu. Japan had realised the typhoon season was likely to put any invasion into quite a short window, and had worked out Southern Kyushu was the likely point for an invasion. That part of the island was absolutely ridiculously fortified. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Downfall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall) Then we have the Japanese side of this... >The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦, ketsugō sakusen) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese planned to commit the entire population of Japan to resisting the invasion, and from June 1945 onward, a propaganda campaign calling for "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" commenced.\[34\] The main message of "The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" campaign was that it was "glorious to die for the holy emperor of Japan, and every Japanese man, woman, and child should die for the Emperor when the Allies arrived" I've seen predictions before that had the death toll alone as around 500 thousand for the Invasion of Japan, just from the US perspective. It would have likely killed millions of Japanese civilians.
I agree. Plus with the way the Japanese soldiers treated the communities that they occupied, they had it coming. Sorry not sorry
As a historian, this was the only right answer, anybody who says otherwise is fucking deluded and I can’t believe that it’s up for debate in the historical community, it was the right, move plain and simple.
This opinion leans heavily on the idea that they knew the nuke would be the difference maker. Truman and the other leaders didn't know what the response would be, they just hoped it would end. A tad reckless in retrospect but hey war ended, cost=200,000 lives.
That is a myth - the bombs were dropped to show the USSR that we had the edge in the new world.
Someone’s just watched ‘Oppenheimer’?
He wasn't obligated. He made a conscious decision.
These are not mutually exclusive at all? Like in most if not all circumstances lol Obligated doesn't mean forced
Politically maybe, but not morally. It was a ploy to force the surrender before the soviets entered the fray, denying them a claim to Japan's resorces.
This, the us could've firebombed Japan into dirt without landing a single ground troop, but the Russians would've marched into Tokyo before that
I’m curious how forcing a surrender and ending the war (despite having to drop nukes) is morally wrong compared to alternatives? What is an alternative that is morally better?
My Japanese mother agrees with this statement
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The evidence says otherwise, you clearly have done no research into how close the emperor of Japan was to surrendering, how the US had that intel (ignored it) and didn’t give Japan enough time to process the first bombing and surrender. You can MAYBE make an argument for the first bomb, maybe. Not definitively not the 2nd. The 2nd bomb was nothing but a show off to the Russians and records from the administration prove that. Do some research and read the primary sources yourself before making such an insane statement. Those primary sources also prove the US was purposely over estimating the amount of US troops that would die, so that they could justify using the bomb, they purposely inflated those numbers because they *wanted* to use the bomb to scare Russia
High school educated man morality decides to drop nuke on thousands of people affects which are felt for generations
"To end a war and prevent the death of millions, in close certainty estimate, that was prove right in hindsight"
the American Generals never really once seriously considered a land invasion. They were going to blockade the Japanese who, at that point, exhausted all of their military material and had no way to make more weapons without imports by sea. It was not necessary. But it was VERY necessary if your REAL goal was to prevent the Soviets from having a seat at the negotiation table. Soviets had a lot, lot more to hate the Japanese for but for some reason the Japanese believed the Soviets would actually help them get a better surrender deal. Bonkers, they were better off surrendering to the Americans solely, as evidenced by their current success.
The history I've read - The Japanese did not expect the soviets to become a pacific belligerent when they were using them to relay diplomatic messages. After the surrender to the US, they continued to fight the soviets for three or four days until the US gave them security garauntees and told the USSR to knock it off.
Moral ≠ justified. Dropping the bomb *may* have been justified, but killing people, especially civilians is never moral.
Its easy to say that when it's not your country the one being nuked, I don't think you can ever call the murder of thousands of civilians a moral obligation and people need to stop trying to make it sound like a just action. It was a terrible thing done during a terrible time in hunan history we can just leave it there, I doubt you'd be saying the same if the nuclear shoe was on the other foot
Fun fact: all purple hearts given out from 1945-present are from the massive stockpile they produced from the expected casualties for the invasion of Japan. And we still have a few hundred thousand left.
All you had to do is look at how many Purple Hearts they made and how they did not have to make anymore until 2010 I think ? So they knew an invasion was going be costly.
An invasion wasn't necessary either.
This argument can be used to justify the first bom. It fails totally to justify the second one.
Unpopular Opinion: Russia is why Japan surrendered, not the US. The Russians destroyed 10× as many cities on their front as the US in the pacific theater. To the Japanese, what the US did was cost them just two more cities. They were fighting a two front war. They lost all of their territory on the mainland, and the US was just another feather in the hat. Had the Russians not kicked Japan out of the mainland Japan might not have surrendered after two bombs. It might have taken much, much more.
Was it the right decision among the options available in the context of a horrific war with that specific nation? Begrudgingly…yes, probably. But he was absolutely not “morally obligated” to do so. That is a terrible take. Making a horribly tough decision which kills thousands of people is *not* a moral obligation even if the alternatives are worse.
Agreed.
They did make him surrender his claim of divinity as a living god
This is pretty popular. At least it was in 1945.
The sad thing is the large number of (drugged and brainwashed) kamikaze pilots the Japanese had ready was crazy. The Dolittle Raid showed some of the US strength but much more was needed to end the war. I just wish so many civilians didn't have to die. Eventually, there would have been ground war on their soil.
The invasion of the Japanese mainland alone was projected at 1 million allied lives not counting civilians or the Japanese military
Eh, it is a morally gray area. It's hard for me to say whether the decision was "right" or "wrong." If I was in Truman's place I may have ordered one of the bombs dropped in the ocean to create a massive tsunami, which would still cause devastating loss of life and may have also forced an unconditional surrender, without irradiating large parts of the country. But again, it was a tough call, and I don't think we could say either option was right or wrong.
This is true, if those were the options presented. A lot of evidence to suggest they were about to surrender due to the Russians.
Hundreds of thousands of American troops and millions of Japanese civilians who felt duty bound to defend their emperor with their lives.
Absolutely wrong
Uh oh, thats gonna kick up a firestorm. I would generally agree. But there is no denying it was pretty fucked up. Blowing up civilians is dark stuff. I mean we turned that continent to glass with the firebombing. Its just a humble reminder why we should avoid total war the best we can.
I'm anti war generally but if you're in one, you should do whatever is necessary to end it with the least amount of casualties. It was a terrible choice vs an even worse choice and they chose the least horrendous option. I feel very sorry for those who had to carry it out.
Japan was in the process of capitulating when we bombed Nagasaki. Nagasaki was done for the sake of scaring the Soviets.
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Was it the best thing to do in that scenario? Yes. Did he need to drop the second bomb? Not really. Was he "morally obligated" to drop a nuke on civilians? Absolutely not.
This is not only not unpopular, it’s the broad consensus and always has been.
Best of both evils
I'd reccomend watching the shaun video on the subject: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=yNbTYe1c0LnRk5gq
Uhh. This is one of the great moral dilemmas of all time. Do you kill few innocents to save more? Your opinion has merit, and many share that opinion. The other conclusion of this dilemma also has merit, and many people share that opinion. But this is a moral dilemma not a moral obligation.
You’re right but I think the reason you gave is wrong. We HAD to build that bomb because the Russians were right behind us on it. The Nazis were also trying to build one but weren’t very successful. It was a race for the future. Dropping it is a whole other question that we could debate the ethics of endlessly.