Killing with guns isn’t ‘better’ than killing with gas/radiation etc - instead, it’s just easier on the conscience of the people sitting back home. We’re used to seeing gun battles on TV all the time. There’s no fire, no smoke, no damage to the surrounding area. The people that die aren’t burn victims with skin falling off their bodies. Most of the time, people that are shot dead just look…dead. Headshots can be nasty, but from what I’ve heard people mostly die from multiple gun shot wounds (massive internal organ failure and/or bleeding to death).
My tangent thought on this has always been, if people killed by guns looked as…disturbing… as burn victims or radiation burn victims, you’d have a much bigger outcry over guns in general…
One other aspect is that le May was running out of targets for his bombers. Sure they could fly around and drop bombs at random but they were also losing their own aircraft (not important) but personnel.
A bit of a hijack, but I read once that Truman had been totally in the dark about the A-bomb project. He knew so little, that when Roosevelt died, he was summoned to an emergency meeting…where he learned (for the first time) about the Manahattan Project.
That is why Truman deserves a lot of credit-he was quick to grasp the enormous responsibility thrust on him, and made the right decision.
This point is worth expanding on, and was discussed in detail in the other thread, as it was brought up by the side opposing the dropping of the bombs as evidence that the Japanese were ready to surrender. The negotiations were a complete joke - Togo instructed Saito (the Japanese ambassador to the USSR) that the Imperial government wasn’t seeking Soviet mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender. When Molotov finally talked to Saito it was to inform him of the Soviet declaration of war.
Even the Imperial government knew that victory was impossible by this point - their overall plan was to try and hold out for peace on their terms (also their goal in negotiating with the Soviets), by inflicting horrific casualties on the Americans and breaking US resolve. Of course, the atomic bomb completely undermined this; continuing to resist would be tantamount to national suicide. There was no way to defend against it, one plane that could deliver the same damage as an entire squadron. No way to break the resolve of the enemy.
From the Emperor’s speech accepting the terms of Potsdam.
And if anyone needed any evidence that Japan’s government wasn’t that keen on surrendering even after the bombs: note that Hirohito’s address to the nation itself admonishes government leaders to cease efforts at stopping the surrender (bolding mine).
That this was needed is evidenced by the events omf August 12-15: a significant attempt at a coup d’etataimed primarily at preventing the Emperor from surrendering.
It is true that Truman knew nothing of the Atomic Bomb till being sworn in as president (of which he was brought up to speed very soon after becoming president).
IIRC Truman was waffling on whether or not to drop the bomb. As I recall one of his advisers opined that if the American public learned he had this weapon and refused to use it and squandered American lives in an invasion of Japan he’d be impeached at the least and possibly worse.
Supposedly that cinched it for Truman and he went ahead with the bombings.
I’ve done a bit of reading of both some English and Japanese sites regarding the war and Japan’s ultimate surrender.
The conclusion I draw is that while the central government in Tokyo was indeed aware of the ‘widespread damage’ in Hiroshima, there were parts of the Japanese government that still believed that the bomb was too difficult and thus unlikely to be the cause of destruction in Hiroshima. And in any case, Japan believed that even if the US had built a bomb, it could not have built more than a couple.
This brings up an angle I hadn’t come across before: The US apparently wanted to drop the second bomb right away, so that Japan would think they had an unlimited supply (scroll about half-way down):
I hadn’t heard that before.
Another fascinating story concerns one Ltd. Marcus McDilda - check out his story here.
Anyway - my reading suggests Japan knew Hiroshima had been destroyed, but took two days before even meeting to discuss surrender - and there remained a faction in Japan that did not believe the US had the bomb. Given the above, plus the Ltd Marcus McDilda story, the clear reluctance on the part of Japan’s military to surrender even after Nagasaki…it seems pretty clear that the second bomb was probably needed after all.
Truman himself said otherwise. He said that he saw the decision as clear; the United States was at war with Japan and the atom bomb was a useful weapon - there was no debate over using it. This would seem to have been in character for Truman, who was not known as a “waffler”.
Because we’ve been killing people that way for years? And also because one plane did it. Because people trusted the Air Force to keep a fleet of bombers away, but how to protect against just one? You could hide from most bombs, but not from the A-bomb.
I grew up in the '50s, and TV and the movies were full of after the bomb stories - even more when missiles got developed. It was maybe the first time a concept safely in those junky science fiction magazines wound up in the real world. I think it also represented one fo the first cases where that crazy physics done by that nice Dr. Einstein could kill you.
Not sure how reliable this cite is but shows if nothing else this notion is out there. I’ll have to leave it to better read historians on this subject than I to sort it out (although it is not surprising Truman would write well of himself and his decisions):
But…the Japanese didn’t surrender because Nagasaki was the last city they could tolerate losing. It’s not like we firebombed 60 cities and nuked two and they said “Sixty-TWO…that’s our limit!”
They surrendered for two (atomic-bomb-related) reasons (I’ll skip the part about Russia, which isn’t germane):
We had an atomic bomb capable of destroying an entire city
and, possibly:
We demonstrated that we had more than one of the things. So for all they knew, we had a thousand.
Let’s say we test-drop one on an evacuated city or similar structure with Japanese observers watching. Kablooie! Pretty impressive…but let’s say you’re right and the demo doesn’t persuade them; they’re in denial.
So we drop the second one on a real city, just like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Kablooie! It’s gone, baby!
We’ve not only demonstrated the actual death count the bomb can bring, but convincingly shown we have more than one of the things. So for all they know, we have a thousand.
Now we’re out of bombs – exactly like after the Nagasaki bombing.
Now we’ve shown we have multiple – exactly like after the Nagasaki bombing.
Now we’ve shown they will kill tons of folks – exactly like after either bombing.
So we’re actually no worse off militarily at all, except either Hiroshima or Nagasaki still exists. They’d been deliberately spared up to that point anyway to serve as test cities for the bombs, so they weren’t crucial to Japan’s war effort; and it’s one evening’s work for Curtis LeMay and company to firebomb them into oblivion anyway – and ol’ Curtis is running out of sizable targets, and would already have pasted Hiroshima and Nagasaki conventionally if he hadn’t been prevented by the target list restrictions which were solely atomic-bomb related. So we’d be set back one evening’s work and some napalm.
And of course there’s a chance that the implied humanity in offering a demonstration bomb would positively affect Japanese willingness to regard us as less monstrous, and a better prospect to surrender to.
Pretty sure we dropped leaflets on those cities telling everyone to get our of Dodge or be destroyed (or something to that effect). They ignored it.
Now, they certainly did not expect a nuke but as noted firebombing could achieve a similar result and they KNEW we could and would do that. They stayed anyway.
ETA: I think one issue with a demonstration was if the demonstration did not work. Dropping one on a city and not working they probably would not realize what happened. But a note to “watch us erase that uninhabited island” and then nothing happening would have been bad.
Remember these things were dicey, bleeding edge tech for the time and one design had not been tested at all. There was a real chance they would be duds.
Actually, we dropped leaflets on multiple cities after bombing Hiroshima, which were of the “you Japanese had better surrender soon” variety, not the “you Nagasakians are scheduled for day after tomorrow, better evacuate” variety.
Well, if you tell the Japanese - “We have this marvellous weapon, would you mind evacuating your city/deserted island and not attacking our lone bomber while we show you what it can do?” What would happen? As the list in the prior posts show, the advantage was that hundreds of bombers were still flying sorties before and after both attacks. The Japanese simply couldn’t take out every bomber in the sky that may or may not be nuclear. They had gotten used to ignoring single bombers on photo-reconnisance missions, but I’m sure that would change if they knew what to look for. Besides, what if it fizzled during the demo?
The main point here is that the atom bomb was just another weapon at the time. It didn’t become the embodiment of pure evil until after the long term total effects were know, and as the blast power went from the 7 to 20 kiloton range up to megaton range. People began to realize by then that it was truly opening the door to a lower level of hell. In 1945, it was just a bigger hammer for flattening cities as had been done for 6 years.
The only question I have with the ‘have them come watch the demo’ scenario is, my understanding that there was a larger-than-zero chance that the bomb wouldn’t work. Inviting the Japanese to come watch a demo that fails miserably (er, bombs, as it were) would only strengthen the resolve of Japan’s military to resist and fight on. They’d take it as a sign of Japan’s specialness, like the kamikaze wind that drove of the Mongol invadors centuries prior.
Remember that atomic weapons didn’t horrify people (well, in America at any rate) even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Popular Science and publications of its ilk were awash with stories about ground troops carrying tactical nuclear rocket launchers and mortars, battleships firing nuclear shells, and so on, right through the 1950s.
That’s a bit of a stretch. There was plenty of military brass around Oppenheimer during the Trinity test, when he quoted the Bhagavad Gita (“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), and several of them reported directly to Truman afterward.
In any event, Korea was a totally different war; South Koreans would obviously not have taken kindly to the US wiping out entire cities in the North, regardless of how they felt about the Communists.
To clarify something the first bomb they dropped on Hiroshima (little boy) was the gun type U-235 bomb. Basically the scientists were so sure that design would work they didn’t bother to do a test explosion. The second one (Fatman) was considered the iffy one. It used an implosion of plutonium to work. A version of that was tested in the Trinity test in NM. So to add to what you say what would the Japanese have thought if the demo bomb went off fine (since it was almost certain to work) and the second bomb that was actually going to be used against a Japanese city fizzled because of some timing issue or something. (Let alone hoping that no Japanese military leader would think “Why are they demoing something in a way I can’t judge battle damage and simultaneously wasting a weapon for no real reason?”)
Nitpick: The plutonium bomb (Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb) was dicey, bleeding-edge tech. That’s why an identical device was tested at Trinity - no one was sure the implosion mechanism would work.
But the Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy - that was a gun-type uranium fission weapon. Take a chunk of uranium, lob it at another chunk of uranium really fast, and it’ll fission. No one doubted it would work. I mean, it might have failed, for the same reasons any conventional munition of that era might fail - sometimes conventional explosives are dudes. But if the triggering charge fired, Little Boy was going to make a pretty darned big explosion for certain. And it could have been used for a demonstration with a high degree of confidence.
