I'm a Baby of the Atomic Bomb — and So Are You

Great Debates
41

I don’t feel bad about the bombing at all. The point of war is to kill the enemy and destroy their ability to make war at the strategic level. If anything, I think our modern leaders have forgotten this. This was a war that had engulfed the world for years (in the case of SE Asia, decades) and killed somewhere around 20 million people. Europe was reduced to rubble that it would spend the next 50 years recovering from. The Japanese were notoriously brutal to their enemies, to include civilians. If the fastest and easiest way to end the war was to drop a very large bomb on their city, that is the most moral answer.

It is easy to second-guess their decision not just with the benefit of hindsight, but also through the lens of changing cultural taboos. We live in the most gloriously peaceful age in human history. It may not feel like it, but it’s true. How many Americans have died in the GWOT? 6700? More Americans were killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima than have died in the entire 14 years of the GWOT. I’ve heard people describe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as “Expensive.” This is bullshit. Show me a war in which even 1% of the American population is a casualty and I will show you an “Expensive” war. How many combatants are believed to make up ISIS? 30,000? 40,000? In World War I, there were 30,000 combatants killed ON THE FIRST DAY of the Battle of the Somme. Our leaders in World War II were the products of World War One, where even a single battle’s casualties were measured in the hundreds of thousands. Modern Americans have no concept of what war was like for these people.

Further, the nuclear weapons taboo is a modern invention. Before WW2, people were enamored of the idea that a super-weapon could be invented that would end war forever. Pop culture of the era reveals that people genuinely believed that if a big enough weapon could be invented, then the enemy would be unable to resist and all war would cease. And, for people of that age, nuclear arms were no different from really big bombs. The health implications of radioactive side-effects were poorly understood at the time and mutually assured destruction was not yet a thing. And, partly, I think there’s a cultural issue here. We have become so terrified of nuclear war that, even in the modern age, there are many battles in which I believe tactical nuclear artillery SHOULD have been used but we chose not to because of our “humanitarian” beliefs. I’m kind of baffled as to how a protracted battle is “better” or “more moral” than just nuking the enemy right off the bat, but whatever…

Second, modern Americans are victims of a virulent strain of egalitarianism (if that’s the right word) that holds the enemy are human beings and their lives are just as important as our own. It is a notion borne of the premise that all sides in a conflict are equally “legitimate.” This is a tremendously important principle for minimizing suffering in war, as it gives us the ability to disassociate the combatant (or the civilian ) from the crimes of his leaders. It is also bullshit. If I make war on an enemy population, it is because I want to destroy them. The lives of our countrymen are inherently more valuable than the lives of the enemy. This notion runs contrary to our current emphasis on human rights and equality, but it is true nonetheless.

The life of my daughter is more important to me than the life of any other human being on Earth, including my own. I am willing to extend our enemies the benefit of the doubt. I am also willing to enforce the law of warfare, because (as I mentioned before) we have the luxury of putting forth the time and effort required to do so. But at the end of the day, there is no equivalency between the life of my daughter and the life of any other civilian; 1 American does not equal 1 Japanese, or German, or Afghan, or Iraqi, or anybody else. I will always place more value on American lives than the lives of our enemy, for no other reason than I am American and so protecting Americans benefits me (while protecting the enemy does not.) I’ll admit it is simple, cold-blooded pragmatism, and I absolutely expect the enemy to adopt a similar perspective from his own point of view. This does not necessarily mean I WANT to kill my enemy, but in a choice between mine or theirs I will always side with “mine.” And, when push comes to shove, there is no atrocity I would not commit to save the life of my daughter. Her life is not “worth” the same as one, or a hundred, or even a billion other humans; I would glass the entire Middle East rather than see her come to harm, and (As I said before) I expect my enemy sees things the same way.

42

I already touched on this in my longer post above, but NO, I don’t. The Japanese were the aggressors in WW2. Say what you will about FDR, the fact of the matter is that the Japanese were invading southeast Asia long before what we consider “WW2” even began. They were notoriously brutal to the people they conquered, military and civilian alike. And even then, the crimes of the Japanese were a drop into the bucket compared to the deliberate, industrialized horror of Nazi Germany.

So no, I don’t think we should weigh their lives equally. The life of an American or a Briton, trying to end the horror of Nazi Germany, DOES count for more than the life of a German. The same is true of pre-war Japan. The logic is pretty simple: Do you believe that the life of a criminal weighs just as much as the life of the victim they tried to harm? Or the life of the police officer who tries to stop them? I don’t. Not at all.

43

Actually I’m not a baby of the atomic bomb. My dad was already in his 30’s during the war, was taking care of five children because his first wife had run off and left him, and worked in a war-related industry. The Japanese would had to have invaded and occupied San Francisco before he’d have been drafted.

44

While I appreciate the use of hyperbole this goes beyond into just ridiculous - plenty of people did NOT go to the battlefield in WWII. I’m under 70 and mom, like most women, wasn’t in the military and dad wasn’t either (being first too young and then recovering from an extended illness). Now, a lot of my cousins that might apply to, as I had 5 uncles in the war, but not all the uncles went, either.

Sure, lots of people either wouldn’t be here, or would have been conceived later, but plenty of folks would be unaffected by that factor.

45

There are a good number of Americans like me who have no ancestors who had a chance of being sent to invade Japan during World War II.

Regardless of that, why stop with the invasion of Japan? Every single one of us is descended from countless rapists, murderers, thieves, slavers, tyrants, genocidaires, grafters, grifters, fraudsters, and other moral and legal criminals of various kinds without whose raping, murdering, thieving, slaving, tyranny, genocide, graft, grift, and fraud we would not ever have been conceived.

Your argument is nothing more than an argument that might makes right and that it is foolish to abide by any moral code that disadvantages you.

There were a lot of Americans alive in 1945 who felt justified in maintaining a white supremacist system of oppression, among other things. Why should we ever consider it to be criminal or immoral?

Yes.

46

Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were burned alive by incendiary bombs. I’m not sure what the rush to invade was - worried the Russians would do it first? If Japan didn’t surrender after the a-bombs America could have kept bombing and blockading until everyone starved and Japan was completely destroyed.

The OP uses some peculiar logic. Whether something is or isn’t a war crime isn’t determined by what the perpetrators think at the time.

Another weird one is the idea that something that leads to your birth is morally good, or you’re a hypocrite if you argue against it. It reminds me of abortion protesters who ask, like it’s a huge gotcha, what if your mother aborted you? Well, I guess I wouldn’t be alive, would I?

47

My father was in the Navy, on the fleet flagship Eldorado, at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They were under heavy kamikaze attack in both battles. At the time the bomb was dropped, I believe his ship was in the Philippines preparing for the invasion of Japan. If that had happened, he could well have been a casualty.

When I was younger I thought that surely some way could have been found to defeat Japan without resorting to the bomb. But after learning about the fanatical defenses of Iwo and Okinawa, I came to understand that as horrific as they were the bombings ultimately not only saved US lives but many Japanese lives as well.

But this doesn’t prevent me from feeling regret for the lives lost, especially innocent. The lesser of two evils is still an evil.

48

I have said something like this quite often.

49

Try reading this sentence out loud; maybe you’ll see how bloodthirsty it sounds. You didn’t say the problem is Americans see the lives of enemies as being equal to the lives of Americans; you said the problem is Americans hold the enemy to be human beings.

Its not very complicated. The arithmetic of total war ends with suicide as nations conduct strategic nuclear exchanges and annihilate each other.

50

Sorry about the Japanese who died in the atomic bombings but I follow the conventional belief that a hell of a lot more Japanese would have died in various horrible ways had we invaded. Not to mention American lives saved.

51

The blockade strategy was an option, but everyone realized that the military leadership would not surrender by it alone. If you look at the internal debates by the Supreme War Council, the hard core faction was not swayed by either the atomic bombing or the Soviet entry into the war. The wouldn’t have cared if the entire country died.

As in Okinawa, they would have taken rice from the mouths of children to feed their troops. We simply could not starve out the IJA.

Likewise, we couldn’t keep millions of men in uniform sitting around waiting for years. The war needed to be ended.

There were also the millions of people dying in the countries which Japan was still occupying. Waiting years would have cost a horrific number of lives.

52

Makes no sense. The population of the US in 1945 was about 140 million. Say half of those were male. The number of men in uniform was about 12 million, so 83% of American males weren’t even in uniform. It’s unlikely that more than a couple million men would have been involved in an invasion of Japan. For comparison, the number of troops in the invasion of Normandy during the summer of 1944 (the whole thing, not just D-Day), all allies combined, was about 1.3 million.

We had overwhelming superiority in ships, planes, weapons, and supplies, and the generals and admirals were not complete idiots, so they probably would have imposed a blockade, and had few frontal assaults. The casualty rate would probably have been well under 10%. It was less than 10% during D-Day, with the Germans in better shape than the Japanese would have been, and with murderous frontal assaults.

And don’t forget that Russia declared war on Japan on Aug 8, 1945. Contrary to popular belief, they did not do it in response to the Hiroshima bombing; it was the other way around. Stalin had promised at the Yalta conference that the USSR would declare war on Japan within two months of the surrender of Germany, which took place on May 9, 1945 (in the Moscow time zone). The US moved heaven and earth to use the A-bomb on Japan before Aug 9, to try to get Japan to surrender before the Russians came in, so that they would not share the credit. If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, the Soviets would have been part of the invasion of Japan, thereby speeding the defeat of Japan, necessitating fewer Americans in the invasion, and diverting some of the casualties away from us.

But let’s say 2 million Americans were killed. That’s almost five times as many as the actual American death count for the entire war, all theaters combined, but still less than 3% of American men.

Maybe your dad wouldn’t have been around to have you, but most Americans’ dads would have been fine.

53

The fighting and casualty rates on Iwo Jima and Okinawa were savage, but a straight extrapolation of those rates to the entirety of Japan is unrealistic. The small area of the Iwo Jima and Okinawa meant that virtually all fighting was head-on, with precious little room to maneuver or bypass. In addition, afterwards Japan was out of everything: men, food, ammunition, fuel, guns, armor, planes, transport- you name it. The main islands would have mostly been defended by barely-trained civilians with improvised weapons. In this case breaking the enemy’s “will to fight” was irrelevant: if the entire Japanese people had fought to the last child we could and would have obliged them and occupied a graveyard.

Also, when reading about estimated casualties, the figures usually include the expected number of those wounded enough to be hors de combat, which for Okinawa was about four times the actual deaths.

54

While most Americans (and others!) living by 1945 would have stayed alive and healthy w\o the bomb, they sure wouldn’t have had the *same *babies as they, as a matter of fact, did.
There’s some 100 million sperm cells in a single male ejaculation, and it’s largely a matter of chance which one of them fertilises the egg. So, if your father’s orgasm had happened a fraction of a second sooner or later than it did, it wouldn’t be you sitting here; it would have been someone else (perhaps going by the same name)!

55

Then a butterfly fart is as significant as the bomb, and I don’t think that’s what the OP was getting at.

56

Nope. The effect of the bomb would (if we imagine the two events happening contemporaneously) be immensely larger.
Within 48 hours, the bombing of Hiroshima would have (albeit, indirectly) affected most of the world, while the poor old butterflies’ fart couldn’t, even in theory, have reached from central Spain to Portugal in that same time.
Now, a butterfly farting down in the middle ages would, of course, outdo Napoleon as well as Hitler when it comes to shaping the world of today…

57

So your suggesting, what, that the majority of American men would have been killed if we’d invaded Japan? You realize that’s absurd, right? We lost less than half a percent of our population in the entire war. WW2 Casualties

Plus, what about all the people who were too old to fight, or too young?

Also, this

indicates you really don’t understand how probability works. Gambler’s Fallacy

58

There’s no need to “extrapolate.”

“the Cornerstone of Peace monument at the Okinawa Prefecture Peace Park identifies the names of each individual who died at Okinawa due to World War II. As of 2010, the monument lists 240,931 names”

If the Battle for the Japanese Mainland had just cost as many lives as Okinawa, the death toll could have exceeded that of both A-bombs added together. (The 241,000 does includes deaths before the April 1945 invasion, but 150,000+ were killed during the Battle.)

59

My bolding. There was no “probably” about it. The US blockage against Japan is one of the more well known facts of the war. It doesn’t matter, the troops had their food and they would allow the civilians to starve, which they would be starting to do.

Kyushu, where the US planned to attack first is covered with low, steep mountains, which were perfect for the Japanese style of defense. I used to live in Miyazaki, where part of the action would have taken place.

You can’t flank an army dug into the mountains.

The US was hurrying to complete the bomb and to end the war. There certainly were discussions if the Soviet entry was really necessary, but I don’t recall any specific discussions concerning speeding up the bomb specifically for this. If you have any cites, that would be great.

Truman mentioned the bomb in a nonspecific way at the Potsdam Conference in that the US had a new, really powerful weapon, but Stalin didn’t react, much to the surprise of Truman and Churchill. What they didn’t know is that Stalin already had reports on the atomic bomb from his spies.

This is incorrect. The Soviets would not, and could not have been involved in an invasion. They lacked the amphibious fleet to land troops.

That actually was the subject of the discussion of the Joint Chiefs and the commanders in the field. Intel showed that the initial estimates of the defense of Kyushu was less than half of actual troop strength. The Japanese had changed defense strategies from late 1944, which is one reason why the casualty rates of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were so much higher than in earlier battles.

This is utter and complete rubbish. The IJA was still alive and capable of mounting a formidable defense of the home lands.

Initial invasion plans had planned on a 3:1 advantage for US forces, when in fact Japan started rapidly building up their army there.

Deployed throughout Kyushu and on adjacent islands, the Sixteenth Area Army had three armies and two special forces with a total of 15 divisions, 7 independent mixed brigades, 3 independent tank brigades and 2 fortress units. The US was planning on attacking with 14 divisions: eleven US Army infantry divisions and three Marine divisions.

The Japanese were much better prepared for Kyushu.

They had stored ammunition in caves where US naval bombardment and bombing could not touch it. Because of the great increase in the number of troops, they had less rounds per soldier than what they would have wanted, but that only meant that more men could be wasted on banzai attacks, if they were so inclined.

They had 10,000 planes slated for kamikaze attacks with instructions to attack troop and equipment transport.

As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, but the point which the OP apparently wished to make was that everyone would be dead. :rolleyes:

60

That idea was in fact seriously considered and was rejected- MacArthur was particularly opposed to it - because it was deemed to be inhumane and uncivilized. Starving millions of people to death was, amazingly enough, something Allied leadership decided it did not want to do if it could be avoided.

A prolonged ending also placed Allied POWs in the likely position of dying before the war ended.