Could you elaborate on this please? I have read quite a bit about this subject but have never heard of any Japanese observers at Trinity, or even being invited.
I can’t see how anyone can argue that some more direct threat would have made Japan surrender. We actually used the bomb to blow up Hiroshima and they didn’t surrender then. Why would a threat have been scarier than an actual bombing?
Only three days elapsed between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Isn’t it possible that the Japanese government simply didn’t have time to realize how badly devestated Hiroshima had been? The transportation infrastructure was a mess, and even in good circumstances modern states can have trouble quickly assessing the scope of a major disaster.
Well (playing Devil’s Advocate since I agree that the Bomb needed to be used) I suppose they might say prior to any of this happening no one knew and we should have tried with an example bombing of some uninhabited place.
Presuming more new bombs were coming online in relatively short order that might even be an acceptable thing to try. Of course not sure how the Soviets might have responded if given time to think on what just happened.
Nah…hell, the US government was able to assess the scope of the Pearl Harbor attack and declare war on Japan barely 24 hours later.
The Japanese government knew full well what happened very shortly after it happened. While the fiddly details may have been unavailable without a doubt they knew a city had been effectively leveled by a single plane dropping one bomb. Japan had a nuclear weapons program of their own. They knew what one was so this was no magical thing to the government.
I’ve never heard anything like this either. Wouldn’t make any sense either, since they didn’t really know if The Gadget worked, or what exactly would happen if it did;
Stalin was aware of the bomb through [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs]espionage, though I’ve never seen evidence that the Japanese were.
In any case, the Japanese had ample warning of Allied intentions if they didn’t surrender. Terms were clearly laid out in Potsdam and Cairo. The Potsdam Declaration, issued just after the Trinity test, states:
http://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html
Truman references Potsdam directly after Hiroshima:
The Japanese certainly had their moment.
We actually should all be grateful, not just the Japanese. I don’t those who built the bomb, or anyone else, had any idea of what it could do to people - certainly not in the detail described by Hersey in “Hiroshima.” I wonder how much more likely either we or the Russians would be to use the bomb if a real example of its effects was not available.
I think they had a good idea what radiation could do to people. Several people died when building the bomb from radiation exposure. They knew it was not pretty.
The Pearl Harbor attack was essentially isolated to one part of the island, it didn’t wipe out the entire city. Everyone (including the survivors) could see the planes. Of course the US government could scope out the situation - it was obvious what had happened. Japan declaring war shortly after the attack also kinda helped.
In Hiroshima’s case, no one knew what the hell had happened. There wasn’t an entire squadron of planes. Survivors initially thought that only their neighborhood had been firebombed. It took people who were actually there days before the realized the extent of the damage. Headquarters back in Tokyo heard about the bombing, but IIRC they were just coming to grips with the full extent of the damage when Nagasaki hit.
I personally suspect that even if a week had passed, Japan probably would not have surrendered right away, so in the end the whole point might be mute. But to say that three days was enough for everyone in Japan to fully realize what had happened just isn’t true, in my view.
Turns out I was wrong, sorry, please forget what I said. When I thought about it more, it wasn’t actually that I remembered reading (I think on another message board argument) that Japanese observers were invited, but some from a neutral country who were allowed to communicate the results diplomatically. However, I can’t find any support for the idea at all, so I was misinformed.
I’ve never understood this “made it worse” line of reasoning. I mean, I get that a demonstration might not have convinced them, but how could our relationship with Imperial Japan have gotten any worse?
I mean, they were already sending their young men against us in suicide attacks and training the civilian populati0on for mass martyrdom, and we had already leveled their 60 largest cities with firebombs and were preparing to drop nuclear weapons on them.
Without the bomb existing, they would have dug in and awaited frontal assault. In the actual event of the bombs destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the military government dug in and awaited frontal assault for a few days until the Emperor made an unprecedented plea that they change their minds. Wouldn’t a failed demonstration have resulted in them digging in and awaiting frontal assault? We’d have been right back where we started, but we were there before we had the bomb and we were there after using it (until the unpredictable action by the emperor).
What would we have lost in terms of the relationship and the chance to end the war? Trust? They already thought we were liars and cowards. We hated each others’ guts on a national scale.
So what are you saying?
Nonsense.
The average Joe in Hiroshima may have been pretty puzzled but the government got the idea quickly enough. Some 70% of the population of Hiroshima survived. There were people at all sorts of ranges from ground zero. People in the hills could easily look into the city and see the devastation. There was plenty of ability and people to report back to Tokyo. Doubtless Tokyo immediately flew down some experts to assess it as well and report back which would have taken no more than a few hours for a first look from the air report to get back.
And, as mentioned, the Japanese actually had their own nuclear weapons program. While nowhere near as far along as ours their scientists certainly knew of the theory and the potential of such a weapon. President Truman announced the next day it was an atomic bomb.
In short, the Japanese government knew pretty quickly what it was facing.
But we didn’t know they weren’t going to surrender. The question isn’t really “would a demonstration have worked?” so much as “do we want to just indiscriminately kill when there’s a significant chance we can skip that part if we put our minds to it?”
People here seem to be arguing two conflicting points. Some are saying we should have allowed the Japanese to witness a test bomb so they could fully appreciate how devastating it would be against a real city. Others are saying that the Americans, who did witness a test bomb, did not fully appreciated how devasting a bomb would be against a real city.
But we know it now. So what are you arguing? That the people back in 1945 should have made the wrong choice?
Nitpick: moot.
Wrong in what way? A choice that doesn’t end the war but does demonstrate one’s humanity and fairness certainly leaves one no worse off militarily.
It could then be followed by the same choice we made historically, nuking a city. No worse off overall, but a permanent record of America having tried to do the right thing instead of just pasting Japan as soon as we could.
IIRC the people in the US familiar with the bomb knew it would be devastating but I think they underestimated the lasting effects of radiation. They knew radiation was a part of it and was nasty but (again IIRC) thought it would be pretty much done and over faster than it was.
You have to remember that the atom bomb did not take the war to some new level. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the biggest bombing raids of the war. The conventional bombing mission on Tokyo on March 9 killed more people and destroyed more property than the atom bombs did. In 1945, the atom bomb was just seen as a much more effective version of the strategic bombs that been used throughout the war.
Actually it would have left one a hell of a lot worse of militarily. We had three bombs (I always thought it was two until reading this thread). Dropping one as a demo would have wasted 33% of the available weapons, at a time when we did not know how many Japanese cities would need to be razed to bring about surrender.