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Hiroshima (1946)

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Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#171

Post by notorandit »

I will likely be downvoted.

Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians. It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union.

As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender.

None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely.

IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#172

Post by Havoc »

It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#173

Post by throwanem »

cmsefton wrote: post #169
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary. The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister. To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral Will…

I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#174

Post by cmsefton »

throwanem wrote: post #173
cmsefton wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary. The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister. To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral Will…

I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.

Can you explain why you think that's what I'm advocating?

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#175

Post by Mordisquitos »

alex_young wrote: post #131
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians? The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

The firebombing of Tokyo[0] on 10 March 1945 is often considered even more destructive and lethal than either of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or at the very least in the same ballpark. However, popular discourse never treats it as a crime against humanity.

What is the qualitative difference between the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one morning using an atomic bomb and the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night using explosive and incendiary devices?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#176

Post by Synaesthesia »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #168
Synaesthesia wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors. The conduct of the allies in WW2 was atrocious.

What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)? It's not that the answers are mora…

Targeting civilians is a war crime. No excuse for that.

Targeting civilians in places like Tokyo or Dresden didn't even help the war cause much. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.

Yes war is the supreme crime and what we should avoid in the first place. Still there are different ways you can conduct war.

A nuclear exchange would necessarily target civilians and be unlike anything before in history. It's a nightmare scenario that has to be opposed at all cost.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#177

Post by defrost »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #176
bigDinosaur wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)? It's not that the answers are mora…

Targeting civilians is a war crime. No excuse for that. Targeting civilians in places like Tokyo or Dresden didn't even help the war cause much. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities. Yes war is the supreme crime and what we should avoid in the first place. Still there are different ways you can conduct war. A nuclear exchange would necessarily target civilians and be unlike anyth…

> The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.

In our shared reality(?) the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi's in parallel with the mass bombing of industrial areas, factories, ports, dams, and general war making infrastructure, much of which was within German cities.

The Soviet Union defeated an increasingly under supplied resource starved German military.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#178

Post by tristramb »

cmsefton wrote: post #169
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary. The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister. To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral Will…

I agree with you in that decisions like this are always the outcome of multiple forces pushing different ways. But I would lean more to thinking it would have been very difficult for Trueman to have not ordered the use of the bombs.

It would have been electoral suicide because of the extra US casualties.

It would probably have led to the partition of Japan as well as Korea, leading to problems for the US in the post-war world. Although the Iron Curtain didn't descend till a few years later, by 1945, the USSR was already being very possessive about countries in Eastern Europe. Trueman was more aware of the dangers posed by the USSR that Roosevelt had been.

Just because a country had been defeated, it doesn't mean the government will surrender. Nazi Germany was effectively defeated with Bagration and the breakout from Normandy in 1944 but their government fought on to the bitter end. (In a way, the V1 and V2 missile programs did benefit Germany because they drained off resources which would otherwise have prolonged the war and allowed the use of the atom bomb on Berlin.)

And rushing to finish a war to minimise the influence of one party on the peace negotiations did have a precedent. It was what the French and British did at the end of WW1 to prevent the US from dominating the peace process. (But that didn't turn out very well.)

I think things like this would have been in Trueman's mind when he made the descision.

Re: Hiroshima (1946)

#179

Post by fch42 »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #123
throw0101d wrote: post #41

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon : * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making…

Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb". Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.

fair enough to notice though that while the Soviet Union may have had agreed to enter the war with Japan (at the Potsdam conference ?), it had not done so by the time the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was dropped. It did declare war on Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing. In a way ... Stalin chose the "let's go to war with Japan" date opportunistically. When it was clear there could be much gain without too much pain.

Which is not a dissimilar thing to the US "wavering" over the commitment to an invasion of Japan. The nuclear bombs "resolved" that. We'll never know what would have happened otherwise.

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