Hiroshima (1946)

* 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 process leading up to the eventual surrender.

What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:

> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives

I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a neighboring graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.

I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shima_Hospital

Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?

Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.

>And what social epistemology, actually?

Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar would later make the case that the physicists would have done these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.

The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.

Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:

  "The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was.  With the pace of science in this present century it was inevitable that means of mass destruction should appear.  Since the concept of one world under law is far in the future, it was also inevitable that great states should face one another thus armed. If there were no A-bombs the confrontation would still have occurred, and the means might well have been to spread among a a people a disease for a chemical that would kill or render impotent the whole population.  History may well conclude, if history is written a century from now, that it was well that the inevitable confrontation came in a spectacular way that all could recognize, rather than in a subtle form which might tempt aggression through ignorance.  At least we all know, we and the rest of the world, that there are A-bombs and what they can do."

It's worth remembering that if it weren't for them doing what they did, you might not have the life you do now.