Something that I have wondered for some time now, would Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt have dropped the Atom bomb (presumably on Japan)? I know Pres. Harry Truman didn’t even know we had it at first. So apparently he probably wasn’t fully equipped to deal with all the new pressures of the presidency.
Also, I have been an admirer of FDR since I was a child. Him and Thomas Jefferson. They both literally reinvented the presidency.
And, I am not fully convinced dropping the bomb was even necessary. I mean, couldn’t we have just “threatened” Japan with it first? In the Eisenhower administration this was known as “brinkmanship” (from my high school history classes). And if it was inevitable to use it, did we really have to drop it on such a populated area? The reason why I bring these things up is I think FDR would have been more circumspect in his judgement, no?
I put this in GD. But I assume there is an easy historical way to answer this question.
Well of course there is no way to know. That being said, a pretty well-rounded president (Truman) was presented with a certain set of facts and acted in a certain way. It would seem from that limited data set that another well-rounded president (Roosevelt) would have acted the same way.
Had either president acted the other way, he would have been the only man in the room arguing for mercy for the Japanese. It would have been a strange position to take.
I dunno for sure but IIRC there were only two operational bombs available at the time, and I’m extremely skeptical that the Japanese would have heeded any more specific warnings. So, drop a bomb on a sparsely populated area as a warning and see what happens? The Japanese did not respond to the call for surrender after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
The whole “should we have dropped it” thing is one of the most explored areas of history, so there’s lots out there to read about this from the likes of much better than me. But here are my thoughts anyway.
How do we threaten them exactly? Tell them about it? They probably wouldn’t believe us. Explode it on a remote island with no inhabitants and invite them to watch? What if it didn’t work? That would probably be worse than not telling them about it in the first place.
Also, your question is probably borne of some feeling that dropping the bomb was wrong. Why do you think that?
I don’t think it was necessarily wrong. I am also a pragmatist. But as I’ve said, I do question if killing so many people was necessary. They could have dropped on a sparsely-populated area. Or even just a smaller city. To be truthful though, I honestly don’t know.
Certainly he would have. I don’t see that Japan would have surrendered unconditionally for Roosevelt more so than they did for Truman…and that was the condition that Roosevelt et al had decided was the minimum acceptable for the US to end the war. In fact, I actually think Truman (who, in the end, settled for slightly less than unconditional surrender) was actually a bit more flexible than Roosevelt would have been.
In the end it was a binary situation…either the US launched a massive invasion that would have potentially cost the US hundreds of thousands of casualties, or we attempted to end the war using an atomic bomb. Anything else is not reality based, IMHO, given the attitudes of the time.
There is absolutely zero evidence that the Japanese would have caved in due to supposed threats of an atomic bomb…and a lot of evidence that says they probably wouldn’t have batted an eye. After all, they DIDN’T surrender after the first ‘demonstration’, despite the fact that we wiped out a major city.
As for where we dropped it, the decision had as much to do with the fact that it was a military logistics hub as it did that it had a large civilian population. While distasteful today, this was the thinking of the time…the same thinking that had left Tokyo a completely burned out shell with hundreds of thousands of civilian dead (and this despite the fact we DIDN’T drop a nuke on it).
I’m not sure what you mean by “necessary” exactly. They were the enemy, we had the ability to kill alot of them, we did. The only relevant question IMHO is whether it was the best thing to do at the time given reasonably foreseeable reaction from other countries and other long-term effects.
On that score, I think it was a good thing to do. It showed folks that if you bomb US soil, you will have hell rained down upon you.
The thing to keep in mind here is that they wanted to get (pardon the phrasing here) the biggest bang for the buck. That meant any potential target needed to hurt them militarily, financially, logistically and to cause terror in their population (remember, this was a time when strategic bomber advocates still thought that a population could be subdued strictly due to terror) and cause the leadership to realize that they were completely helpless. It was intended to be a knockout blow that would force the Japanese to NOT want to fight to the death (which everyone, us included knew they DID want), and instead be willing to surrender unconditionally (which, again, everyone knew they did NOT want to do).
Also bundled in with our desire to get the most for our buck, we wanted to send a clear signal to the Russians, and hopefully put the fear of God (or at least of nuclear weapons over their own cities)…and dissuade them from their own plans to invade Japan and snag large chunks of the former Japanese empire for themselves.
There are some important points often overlooked in this debate:
[ul][li] The U.S. was already killing Japanese civilians ferociously; the Tokyo raid of 10 March 1945 killed about as many as the Hiroshimo bomb. And, regarding OP (as well as a poster in the Dopers’ recent President Elimination Game who made the same lapse), FDR was President at the time of the Tokyo raid.[/li][li] People familiar with what magicians can do might be skeptical of a mere demonstration. (Superfluous Parentheses makes the same point and comments that only two bombs were available at the time. IIRC that’s correct, though production was “ramping up” fast.)[/li][li] Pursuant to the last point, I think A-bombs would have always been used “in anger” at least once. If not in Japan, then in Korea or elsewhere.[/li][li] It’s very easy to believe Hiroshima saved lives. Look at the casualty figures from Okinawa etc. And the Japanese “samurai” ethic argued against their surrender; even after Hiroshima a high-ranking Japanese General wanted to continue fighting arguing that the suicide of the Japanese nation would be like beautiful poetry.[/li][/ul]
It is sometimes said that Truman rushed the bombing to avoid a Russian declaration that might have led to a split Japan similar to the split-up of Germany. I’m not sure about that, but I thought that Truman at the Potsdam Conference was encouraging the Soviets to declare war.
First of all, FDR would have dropped the bomb on Geramny before he dropped it on Japan. To him, the Germans were always the primary enemy.
Second of all, the Allies were already dropping thousands of bombs a day on Axis cities. What’s one more? People only started thinking of nuclear weapons as something more than just bigger bombs after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Quoted since it needs repeating. The only reason the bomb wasn’t dropped on Germany first was that Germany had entirely capitulated in unconditional surrender over 2 months before the first test bomb was exploded in the New Mexico desert. If Germany had still been alive and kicking when the first bombs were ready, it would have had the dubious distinction of being the first nation to have nuclear weapons used against it. The war between Japan and the US, the Commonwealth et al had extreme racist and racialist elements to it **from both sides **that wasn’t as present between the Western Allies and Germany (but was certainly present on the Eastern Front). Some attempt at trying to preserve the fiction of precision strategic bombing for public consumption was attempted but ultimately abandoned by Germany and the Western Allies; the targets became cities rather than the fiction that individual factories could be precisely targeted. The creation of firestorms in London, Hamburg, Kassel, Dresden and other cities in Europe gives lie to the idea that “we’d only have done such things against Japan.”
Not being fully convinced of the necessity of dropping the bombs is an argument that has some legs to stand on, but “threatening,” or “demonstrating” its use on some abandoned island aren’t legs to look to for support. The time for threats or demonstrations has long since passed when nations are engaged in total war with each other, firebombing cities and sinking shipping, mining, and blockading ports to the point of leaving Japan to slow starvation whether atomic bombs are dropped or not.
Eisenhower’s brinkmanship was done during Korea with the reality of a USSR which had recently acquired nuclear weapons of its own. In this context where a war by proxies is being fought in Korea, brinksmanship and threats have meaning: how far can you threaten or push each other as nuclear armed nations that haven’t yet come to trading blows. Bombing populated areas is what was done in WW2; with the technology of the day ‘a city’ was as precise a target that could reliably be hit with strategic bombing. It’d take a lot of evidence to convince me that FDR wouldn’t have used the bombs yet Ok’d area bombing of European cities from late '42-45 and the same in Japanese cities from mid '43 (in a limited fashion from fields purpose built in China) or mid '44 from Tinian and Saipan until the end of the war.
FDR wouldn’t have dropped the bomb tends to sound too much to me like JFK would have kept us out of Vietnam. It sounds good and it feels good to think if only they lived they’d have made different choices than their VPs – but in both cases there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that their VPs were only furthering the policies that their presidents had enacted.
I read somewhere once (no cite - it was ages ago and may well be wrong) that the Japanese would likely have surrendered after the Hiroshima bomb but due to this sort of in-fighting they had not reached that point before the Nagasaki bomb was dropped. Does anyone know if this was true, or am I way off base here?
There was an attempted coup, or at least factional fighting, because the emporer may have been willing to surrender but much of the military leadership was not.
As to the OP, a lesser demonstration would not have worked. Japanese observers were invited to the Trinity test and saw what the bomb could do - so they already had their “invite them to an abandoned island and show them what it can do” moment. And more importantly - we demonstrated the bomb by blowing up one of their cities, and they still didn’t surrender. How would any lesser demonstration convince them? It was only when we did it the second time, and made the prospect of blowing up one of their cities every week a reality, that they were finally able to surrender.
My position on this issue has always been that the Japanese should thank us for dropping the bomb on them. Seriously. They should hold some sort of legislative meeting now and pass an official motion to thank the United States. Because their wonky culture beliefs wouldn’t have allowed them to surrender until they were almost wiped out as a country. They were training women and kids to use sharpened sticks to fight off our soldiers, to bury kids with explosives and wait until a vehicle sounded like it was overhead to set it off. Had we invaded the Japanese home islands, we would’ve had to kill tens of millions of them - women and children included - and nearly wipe the Japanese off the planet, in addition to the devastating blockade which caused starvation, and regular extremely deadly bombing and naval bombardment. If Japan had not surrendered when they did, they would’ve had untold more suffering. The A-bomb gave them an excuse to give up despite their culture code and at hugely less cost to them than it would’ve otherwise took.
So, let me see if I’ve got this right. There were only 2 operational bombs, yes? And they were utilised to quell a nation of suicidal warriors? What would have happened had the attack on Nagasaki not knocked some sense into them? How soon could the US have made another nuclear weapon?
By summer 1945 the Japanese had no navy, no ammunition and no fuel. America could have just set up a blockade and waited how many months or years it took to build more bombs. If the Japanese didn’t all starve to death first, of course.
General consensus, and the view point I agree with, is that the bombs were undoubtedly a terrible option, but the only moral option left to the United States at that time. FDR didn’t have a problem with the bombings of Dresden or Tokyo, which killed thousands of civilians. No reason to suspect he wouldn’t have dropped the bombs on Japan.
Another factor to keep in mind was the recent fighting in Okinawa. The Japanese there fought literally to the death rather than surrender, and the kamikazes did the same.
The message being sent by the atomic bombings was not simply “You will all die unless you surrender”. It was “you will all die and it will not be glorious. You will not be able to take any of the enemy with you. We will simply wipe out your cities one by one, and in return, you will be able to do nothing.”