The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan

Did you even read the article, Daniel?

Contrary to your assertion, the essay is not asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?". It is stating - categorically - that the commonly accepted narrative is based on an insufficient accounting of the facts, and that this narrative is unsustainable in the face of a more complete record of what actually happened.

Here's the key passage:

"It didn't take a military genius to see that, while it might be possible to fight a decisive battle against one great power invading from one direction, it would not be possible to fight off two great powers attacking from two different directions. The Soviet invasion invalidated the military's decisive battle strategy, just as it invalidated the diplomatic strategy. At a single stroke, all of Japan's options evaporated. The Soviet invasion [of Manchuria] was strategically decisive -- it foreclosed both of Japan's options -- while the bombing of Hiroshima (which foreclosed neither) was not."

Again, that's not "speculative" or "pseudo-historical" writing. And there's no way an attentive reader of good will could characterize it as such. Now, you may dispute the veracity of the facts. Or you could bring additional facts to bear. And you may reasonably disagree with the writer's conclusions. But for a guy who is ostensibly adverse to arguments that "smell of a political agenda and manipulation", you do yourself no favors by (a) seriously misrepresenting the basic nature of what's being said, and (b) responding to your straw man in the most inappropriately condescending manner possible. (Seriously, lumping this in with UFO conspiracies, as though the Soviet military were what? A figment of unreliable imagination?)

If you want to see some real slimeball rhetoric, sir, look no further than your own remarks. The only good thing about dishonesty of this sort of is the amusingly ironic dearth of self-awareness that it also represents.

One really has to be careful with this kind of reasoning. That Japan minimizes its war crimes (as other countries do) and engages in propaganda (as other countries do) does not render irrelevant what Japanese scholars have to say about how and why Japan surrendered in 1945. Indeed, nearly all the important evidence on this is bound to be of Japanese origin (not to mention language), so it's the obvious place to start to learn about it.

Agreed.

The cherry-picking on this topic is extreme. One guy claims Lehey was the leader of the U.S. Military during WWII. He was not. He was the senior-serving military official, who worked as chief of staff to Roosevelt. You could call him an early CJCS, or you could just use his title: chief of staff. Marshall was probably the closest we had to a senior person actually running the war, as anybody with a modicum of WWII history can tell you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Marshall The only reason to pump up Lehey is to add authority to the quote, which was made years later during a completely different political situation. When you see this kind of thing, it never bodes well for the argument.

But you beat down one red herring and three more pop up. It's like talking to those 9-11 guys. They already know the answer. Just a matter of selectively arranging facts in a convincing narrative.

The author gives it away towards the end "...There is real resistance to looking at the facts. But perhaps this should not be surprising...They fill an important psychic need."

Well there you go. From the author's comments, and those on this board, I take it this is supposed to be some kind of argument between "patriotic" Americans and the facts (as told to us by the revisionists), instead of what it is: rewriting history to suit current fashion.

I actually wish the revisionists well. Maybe they can get their way and we can go through 100 years or so of believing that the A-bomb was not the proximate cause of the end of WWII. Then a new fashion will take hold, and we can come back to believing what 95% of the people at the time it happened believed. The neat thing about this is that people get educated about history. Frankly, if history is your passion and you spend time on this and know your stuff, I could care less which theory you pick. These stories need to be remembered.

Whenever this topic comes up I reminded of this quote:

But perhaps George M. Elsey, a young naval intelligence officer assigned to the Truman White House, provided the best reply to revisionist historians and others who question the decision to drop the atomic bombs. Asked by David McCullough for his biography of the President (Truman, Simon & Schuster, 1992) about the decision, Elsey replied: "Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made. He could no more have stopped it than a train moving down a track. It's all well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing."

http://hnn.us/articles/44729.html

William Leahy was not the "leader of the US military at the time." That would be a) Harry S. Truman, or b) George Marshall, depending on whether you consider the Commander in Chief to be the leader.

Even sub-city-sized weapons like the ones dropped on Japan are too large to actually launch in the modern world; the political repercussions are much too great. The only use for a nuclear arsenal is to promise Mutually Assured Destruction, and it really doesn't take much for that.

The dangerous super-weapons of the future are small, simple ones that can kill just the right person, anywhere, anytime. That arms race is happening right now, and progress is rapid.