1945: Why not starve instead of nuke Japan?

Factual Questions
21

Which is widely speculated to be the real reason for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima was actually designated as a “no firebombing site” to provide a pristine site to evaluate and demonstrate the practical effectiveness of atomic weaponry, much to LeMay’s consternation, as he was running out of cities to turn to rubble. We certainly could have blockaded Japan as their surface navy was pretty much destroyed at that point and the operating range of submarines was limited, plus petroleum to power ships all had to be imported and was in short supply. Whether more people would have died from famine than from the bombing is a matter of speculation, but for as much hubbub is made of the atomic bombings the firebombings performed by the XX Bomber Command killed far more people. I’d hardly call nuclear bombing a “humane” option, but it may have been the least destructive despite the horrific injuries to tends of thousands of innocent civilians.

Stranger

22

I don’t have any numbers but ‘starving them out’ by blockade is simply unfeasable. Compare it with trying to starve out Nebraska by blockading the US borders.

Under a blockade, which, by the way, wouldn’t be able to prevent people fishing, rural Japan would go back to business as usual - farming, lake and river fishing etc. The major change that would happen is that you’d de-populate the major cities - there not being enough fuel or remaining servicable infrastructure to bring food into the cities.

Japan was isolated for a long time before the war and can feed themselves.

23

Part of it was payback, pure and simple. Japan sneak attacked us. We don’t play that shit. We hit back as hard as we possibly could.

24

Just for kicks, how long would it have taken the US to make & deliver a third bomb if time were of the essence?

25

According to Wiki, it took approximately from February 1945, when the specifications for Little Boy were completed, to May 1945 until it was completed. In 1944/45, however, the focus shifted to plutonium implosion bombs, so it’s possible that another Fat Man could have been assembled slightly quicker than 4 months. But that’s also assuming that a sufficient quantity and quality of plutonium was ready as well.

26

This is from a review of Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age by Amir D.Aczel (Pulgrave MacMillan, 2009) in the August 29th edition of “The Economist.”

 "Newly declassified files show unambiguously that America was aware of Japanese attempts to sue for peace before the bombs were dropped, undermining the military reasoning for using the weapons."

If this is the conclusion of the book,( which I haven’t read, but I have a high degree of regard for “The Economist,”) there still several questions. First, does anyone know what the “newly declassified” documents actually show? Second, were there conditions for peace beyond the continuation of the Imperial Family?

The notion that Hiroshima had not been allowed to be systematically bombed implies that it wasn’t crucial to the Japanese war effort. If it was, necessity would have caused it to be bombed. Given that, isn’t the implication that the emotional/political impact of the bomb in Japan and, as important, the strategic impact in the USSR are the two most likely motivations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Now, if the “newly declassified” documents show that the Japanese endeavor to end the war wasn’t peppered with conditions, the notion that HST was convinced he had to impress the USSR becomes more compelling.

But that’s all a very rational, very logical, analysis. What those of us not living at the time can’t imagine is the emotional and psychological and social milieu in which the decision was made.

27

The assembly line for plutonium production for bombs was about ready in my understanding.

That we “only had two” is misleading. Only two were assembled at that moment.

I am pretty sure there was material for a third (and maybe a fourth ) at the ready.

Shortly after that, IIRC anywhere from one every couple months to a couple per month could have been produced nearly indefinitely. And that production schedule coulda even be ramped up more in a year or so.

So, basically we coulda nuked the beegeezus out the Japanese for years on end if they had chosen to be so stupid.

28

General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, had spent $2 billion (and this was back when a billion dollars was really worth something!) to develop the Bomb, and said fairly early on that it would take two to end the war.

By the beginning of August 1945 he had his two bombs, one gun-type (Little Boy) and one implosion (Fat Man), and was in complete command of their deployment. Today the President has to give explicit authority for the use of nuclear weapons, but that protocol (and the complicated procedural and technical interlocks that were later developed) was not in place in 1945.

Truman, who had only been in office since the death of Roosevelt four months earlier, and who had known nothing about the Bomb until then, essentially left it to Groves to use them has he saw fit.

Which Groves did.

Groves was well aware that if the war ended and his bombs hadn’t been used successfully, Congress would have his ass over that $2 billion he had spent. So there was little question that they were going to be used.

I think billfish is right that there might have been enough plutonium for one or two more bombs, but ISTR that another uranium bomb couldn’t have been ready until November. The uranium 235 needed for the gun-type bomb had to be very laboriously separated from the non-fissile U-238 via several complicated physical processes (centrifuges, cyclotrons, gaseous diffusion). It was very slow and expensive.

It was much simpler (relatively speaking, of course) to get plutonium. Just run a reactor for a while, take out the fiendishly radioactive fuel rods, and separate out the PU-239 using chemical processes in a huge concrete “canyon,” doing everything by remote control. Child’s play!

The relative ease of obtaining PU was one major reason they had to invent the implosion bomb. If put in a gun-type bomb, PU will blow apart too quickly, before much of the mass has been converted to energy via E=mc[sup]2[/sup]. To get plutonium to chain react, you have to assemble a critical mass much more quickly, which is what the implosion device did.

29

Ah, commasense, the bureaucratic explanation!

“Truman, who had only been in office since the death of Roosevelt four months earlier, and who had known nothing about the Bomb until then, essentially left it to Groves to use them has he saw fit.”

I’d love to see a citation for that assertion. General Groves was a remarkable logistician, but no one that I know of ever praised his strategic or tactical talents. Are you really arguing that HST, much less George Marshall, would have left this decision to him?

Wacko.

30

(Bolding mine) Indeed – this was in part an exercise in seeing if this offensive would “break” the will and spirit of the adversary. At one point or another in the prior decades the theorists sought to find what would be an “ultimate weapon”, and thought that could be such as the machine gun, or poison gas, or aerial bombing: the one so terrible that when used against one that did not have it would break his will to fight, and that when in the hands of two “civilized” adversaries would so awe them that neither would dare go to war with one another casually. The nukes turned out to be it – which is the second half of the equation. Henceforth there were proxy wars, skirmishes, regional conflicts, insurrections… but no direct “hot” war between the Great Powers for 64 years and counting.

And yes, a lot of the thought process must have been influenced by the general mindset towards Summer of 1945. The accumulated pain, anger and sacrifices of the war would be so that one can imagine Allied leaders feeling that at this point they owed their peoples and forces a visible, evident crushing of Japan, that it be not just defeated but broken. And yes, a signal to others to watch their step and not try the same in the immediate future.

31

According to this site, everyone involved had a different idea of where and how ready the third bomb was. The consensus seems to be that the U.S. could have dropped the third bomb by about August 21. There were at least two more (conventional) bombing missions after Nagasaki.

Notassmartasithought, it’s simplistic to say that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace. Certainly *some parts *of the Japanese government were in favor of surrender, but it’s equally true that there was a strong contingent ready to fight to the bitter end. Remember, there was an attempted coup just before the official surrender, and even 3 days after the surrender, a formation of 14 Japanese fighters attacked a U.S. photoreconnaisance mission.

The big sticking point was the Japanese desire to maintain “Kokutai” – a concept that could be defined as narrowly as national sovereignty or as broadly as the essence of being Japanese. The Emperor was the most visible representation of Kokutai but only a small piece of a larger attitude.

32

Not entirely true. I mean, specifically, yeah, we did not know exactly what they’d do or when, but our pre-war treatment of Japan was seen by them as provocative to the point that they believed they were justified in attacking us. And while obviously we didn’t agree with that opinion, we were aware of their grievances and what they viewed as acts of war on our part. So it was technically no more a sneak attack than, say, our not announcing the date and time that we started bombing Baghdad.

33

kunilou, I didn’t claim that the Japanese government was suing for peace, I was citing a book review claiming they were. I seem to remember that there are some notable historians that claim that Japan was ready to surrender before the bombs were dropped, but not “unconditionally” surrender. Even after the bombs, the condition of the continuation of the Imperial Family was accepted. (To our great advantage during the occupation.) But the reviewer of the book in question said the book cited “newly declassified” documents.

Do those documents shed light on the primary motivation to use nuclear weapons? That’s the question. Without having read this new book, I’m asking the teeming millions if they know what these “newly declassified” documents reveal about the issue.

34

Richard Rhodes, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” 1986, pages 650-651, 690-691.

The Interim Committee, which was established to decide how to use the bomb, and which included Marshall, recommended to Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes on June 1 that the bomb be used as soon as possible. Truman agreed, but put nothing in writing at that time.

They were waiting for the Trinity test to prove that the implosion device would work. Truman heard about the results on July 24 while he was in Potsdam with Churchill and Stalin. (Stalin already knew through his spies.)

That day Groves drafted a memo giving the 509th Composite Group, which he commanded, permission to “deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki…” It went on to say, “Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff…”

That memo was approved by Marshall and Truman from Potsdam. From that point on, Groves was in complete control.

I’m not saying Groves did everything himself without consulting anyone else. His superiors and the president knew what he was doing and approved.

But his authority and power were immense. The target sites had been selected by a committee under his command. And he had created a juggernaut of almost unbelievable proportions, building up in about two years an industrial complex equal in scale to the entire U.S. automobile industry at the time, and it wasn’t going to be stopped.

My point was that Truman’s involvement was far more hands-off than is conceivable today for any decision involving nuclear weapons. He did not order the bomb used on a specific date on a specific city. He said okay, and Groves took it from there.

You’ll withdraw this insult now?

35

FYI, I just noticed this at the link that kunilou provided:

I worked with Goldberg on his history of the Manhattan Project in the 1990s, and went with him to visit the uranium separation plants at Oak Ridge, TN, the plutonium production reactor at Hanford, WA, and on interviews of many Manhattan Project scientists and workers, such as Eugene Wigner and Philip Morrison. So it should come as no surprise that I’m repeating his claims.

The author of that site seems dubious of this particular assertion, but I have no idea how his scholarship or reputation compare to that of Goldberg.

36

commasense,

For Krissake, those citations document that Truman and Marshall, along with Byrnes and Stimson, were the people who OK’d the use of the bomb and the four possible targets. See pages 682-692. So they hadn’t “essentially left it to Groves to use them has he saw fit.” Beyond what I quoted of your other post, there is this:

“Groves was well aware that if the war ended and his bombs hadn’t been used successfully, Congress would have his ass over that $2 billion he had spent. So there was little question that they were going to be used.”

So according to your post, it wasn’t the potential human cost of an invasion, the desire to end things quickly, the desire to impress the Soviet Union, or the inability to lay siege to the Japanese islands, or simple blood revenge, but Groves’ need to keep his butt out of a sling. That’s why I called it the “bureaucratic” explanation. I thought that was obvious.

So no, as I in general find the bureaucratic explanation more likely to be found among conspiracy theorists than serious historians, I’m willing to stand by my

wacko.

37

This is not news. Yes, there were “Japanese attempts to sue for peace” but not from official Japanese sources. They were also vague feelers from Togo to Russia about a non-unconditional surrender, which Russia ignored.

wiki “O*n July 26, Truman and other allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration outlining terms of surrender for Japan. It was presented as an ultimatum and stated that without a surrender, the Allies would attack Japan, resulting in “the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland”. The atomic bomb was not mentioned in the communique. On July 28, Japanese papers reported that the declaration had been rejected by the Japanese government. That afternoon, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki declared at a press conference that the Potsdam Declaration was no more than a rehash (yakinaoshi) of the Cairo Declaration and that the government intended to ignore it (mokusatsu lit. “kill by silence”).[17] The statement was taken by both Japanese and foreign papers as a clear rejection of the declaration. Emperor Hirohito, who was waiting for a Soviet reply to noncommittal Japanese peace feelers, made no move to change the government position.[18] On July 31, he made clear to his advisor Kōichi Kido that the Imperial Regalia of Japan had to be defended at all costs.[19]”

"On June 30, Tōgō told Naotake Satō, Japan’s ambassador in Moscow, to try to establish “firm and lasting relations of friendship.” Satō was to discuss the status of Manchuria and “any matter the Russians would like to bring up.”[39] Satō finally met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov on July 11 but without result. On July 12, Tōgō directed Satō to tell the Soviets that,

His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice upon the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. But so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on with all its strength for the honor and existence of the Motherland.[40]

The Emperor proposed sending Prince Konoe as a Special Envoy, though he would be unable to reach Moscow before the Potsdam Conference.

Satō advised Tōgō that in reality, “unconditional surrender or terms closely equivalent thereto” was all that Japan could expect. Moreover Satō suggested that Tōgō’s messages were not “clear about the views of the Government and the Military with regard to the termination of the war,” thus questioning whether Tōgō’s initiative was supported by the key elements of Japan’s power structure.[41]

On July 17, Tōgō responded,

Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind ... Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender.[42]

In reply, Satō clarified,

It goes without saying that in my earlier message calling for unconditional surrender or closely equivalent terms, I made an exception of the question of preserving [the Imperial House]."*

In other words, surrender with options and conditionally was a vague possibility, maybe.

38

Can we keep the chest beating out of GQ?

39

When it became obvious to Japan that they were losing the war, they started back channel negotiations about surrender terms. They may agree to leave China. They may agree to reduce their military. But, they wouldn’t agree to unconditional surrender which we insisted. We wanted the leaders, including the Emperor, charged with war crimes. We wanted to end Emperor worship. We wanted to end the militarism of the government. We wanted Japan to acknowledge their responsibility for the war.

What they wanted were armistice terms. They lost the war, they give up their war aims, but that was it. I don’t think the government would have surrendered even if we invaded. The government knew what the U.S. would do to them. They knew they’d be charged with war crimes. They knew they had no hope. Surrendering on our terms meant certain death for those in charge.

There hope was by prolonging the war, we would accept less than unconditional surrender. If that meant invading the main islands of Japan, so be it. They knew they were going to lose, but they were attempting not to surrender completely.

Hiroshima was one of the largest cities in Japan and was a major port. It was the home of the Second Army. It also had quite a few military depots. Hiroshima wasn’t bombed before, but the Japanese knew it was a potential military target. Students tore down buildings as firebreaks in case we fire bombed it like we did with Tokyo.

I don’t know why we hadn’t bombed Hiroshima before, but it wasn’t because it was a center for rainbows and unicorns. Bombing is a cost benefit analysis. How much damage can you do? How much is it going to cost you in supplies and manpower. Are you better off putting your resources elsewhere? I haven’t found any reasoning why Hiroshima wasn’t attacked before.

It is possible that Hiroshima was chosen for the bomb because it was intact. A bomb on Tokyo might not show the awful power of the bomb since much of Tokyo was already destroyed and much of the war infrastructure had been dispersed to the suburbs. In Hiroshima, much of the military infrastructure was still in the city center. The whole idea of the bomb is that we could do it with a single plane and there was nothing the Japanese could do. Firebreaks were worthless. There was nothing for the artillery to hit. Surrender is the only option.

It was Harry Truman who okayed the bombing, and knowing what we know about Truman, I don’t think he’d have allowed it just to show the Soviet Union. I think he truly thought this was the best way to save American lives…

Remember this is the man who refused to be goaded into attacking the Soviet Union or bombing China during the Korean war. He refused Britain’s request to help return the Shah or Iran to power and refused to help the French in Indochina. He was not a pacifist, but wasn’t about to start a war or bomb a city to prove a point.

I am sure there were generals who were itching to see what this thing could do. I am sure a few of them wouldn’t have minded to demonstrate the bomb on Moscow. But, their statements are not the same as statements of the U.S. government.

40

Actually, no. The surrender was unconditional, as agreed to at the Potsdam Conference.

"The Allied response was written by James F. Byrnes and approved by the British, Chinese, and Soviet governments, although the Soviets agreed only reluctantly. The Allies sent their response (via the Swiss Political Affairs Department) to Japan’s qualified acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on August 12. On the status of the Emperor it said,

From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms. ...The ultimate form of government of Japan shall, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people"

It did leave open the fact there could still be a (powerless) Emperor, but that was within the precepts of the Potsdam Declaration.

The Japanese still wanted no occupation force, and a continuation of kokutai (national polity). This was outside Potsdam.