Yes, we told them.
Tokyo was already pretty much destroyed. Waste of time to bomb it.
We not only told them (and the rest of the world), we warned them we would do it again.
Instantly and repeatedly.
Yep.
I would have done it then, and if I was sent back in time from today, I’d still do it.
The decision was already made, for all practical purposes, long before. We had already decided that flattening cities was an acceptable tactic of war. Whether a city is flattened by one bomb or a thousand is largely immaterial, and what differences there are are all in favor of the one bomb.
Not at the cost of tens of thousands of civilians it wasn’t.
But if they understood Hiroshima immediately, what difference did Nagasaki make?
A U.S. invasion of Japan would not have cost the lives of tens of thousand of civilians? I mean, the U.S. invades Japan, or the U.S. drops the bombs. You can’t realistically tell me that you see another option.
What conditions do you think Japan should have been allowed? Should they have been allowed to keep the conquered territory in China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.?
They didn’t surrender after Hiroshima; they did surrender after Nagasaki. This is a question? This is a failure to understand.
To be fair, The Soviets also invaded Manchuria the same day as Nagasaki, which was a large contributing factor in the surrender.
I still voted to bomb though. Both cities would have been firebombed if not nuked.
Maybe I can’t, but can Eisenhower?
Or Fleet Admiral Leahy?
This. The Japanese cities were tinder boxes. The invasion would have included heavy bombing on a regular basis. It would be a repeat of Dresden over and over and over again.
One thing I’ve always wondered about - if the bomb hadn’t been used in 1945, would it been used later on in some other war? There’s a large anti-nuke sentiment these days partly because of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a world where those events never happened, the history of how we think of nuclear weapons would’ve been different.
The war had to end, and every day it went longer thousands more died.
One can rather sympathize with the position of a man handed a super weapon that might finally end a war so bloody it really cannot be fully comprehended.
Yes, there is a failure to understand here.
I asked if they had immediately grasped the enormity of Hiroshima. It seems to me that any people that did, would have surrendered on that basis. How could they not? That they did not, in those first few days, suggests that they did not grasp it.
Maybe another week or two after Hiroshima was all it would have taken in any case, without Nagasaki.
Allied forces were dying by daily thousands in August 1945? Where?
Why can’t you use the same argument for nuking Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc., all of which went on longer than WWII?
Can we have a cite that, at the time of Hiroshima, “thousands per day” were dying?
I agree.
Now frankly I dont think it would have made Japan surrender but at least we can go down in history as saying we tried.
I’ve posted extensively on this, so I’ll see if I can get some time to dig up some of the things I’ll quickly post about here.
I really respect your opinions on many if not most things,* but you are horribly misinformed on this one.
Of all of the possible actions, this would have been the absolutely worst option. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) which was almost completely turned into fanatical militants by this stage of the war, was plotting to introduce direct military rule in Japan. They had created an elaborate bunker complex in the Southern Japanese Alps in Nagano, and had a place for Hirohito. He refused to leave Tokyo because he knew that if he left, it would have resulted in martial law. Quite possibly, they would have replaced the Emperor with another, more hawkish member of the Imperial family and the war would have continued into 1946, no matter how many bombs they dropped.
For reasons I’ll post later, a demonstration would not have worked. No serious historian makes that argument today.
Completely agree, except that the fig leaf of a “military target in a populated city” is simply fiction.
Agreed. Based on what we know now, the use of the atomic bombs on the two cities was necessary. There is one or two historian who argue the the Soviet entrance into the war was more critical, but I’ll present an argument as to why I disagree.
Quick math: They save the lives of over 100,000 Allied POWs as well as over a million others: Japanese soldiers, Allied servicemen, Japanese civilians and Allied civilians.
Terribly poor use of the fallacy of an appeal to authority. Eisenhower was in Europe when he made that comment. Leahy didn’t know the whole story, especially was was happening in the Big Six, the key members of the Supreme War Council and their deliberations. We know that now and we know that it took the bombs. I’ll post more later.
Nope. We know the deliberations of the Japanese internal politics and one point that the Minister of War, General Anami, the single most powerful person in Japan, save the emperor believed that the US only had one bomb.
Civilians, Allied and Japanese, were dying daily by the thousands in August 1945.
Missed the edit window.
Notes:
*Last I checked there are rules against insults but not against compliments.