Dropping a nuclear bomb 2 miles offshore would have caused much more death & destruction than was done by dropping it on a city in the middle of a valley.
You do recall hearing about damage to Japan from a recent Tsunami, that was hundreds of miles offshore?
Why is this still debated?!?
Of course it was necessary. One bomb didn’t do it. Two bombs almost didn’t do it. The Japanese govt still deadlocked on voting to surrender or continue. The Emperor had to take the unprecedented action of breaking a tie and voting for surrender. And even then the military still tried to arrest him and stage a coup to avoid surrendering*!*
The entire population was mobilized to throw back an invasion. Vast kamikaze-type weapons were built to fight to the last man, woman and child. If they hadn’t surrendered there is an absolutely 100% chance that they would have done this. As I said they nearly did it anyway.
At the time they were just big bombs. The full implications of nuclear weapons and an apocalyptic WWIII was not grasped, nor did it come into play, until after the Soviet bomb and then the H-bomb appeared. Even the Manhattan Project scientists didn’t predict how significant radiation deaths would be as part of the weapon.
I once read a quote in which a Japanese general compared the impending suicide of the Japanese people to beautiful poetry. Does anyone have a cite for that?
Thanks for making this point, often overlooked. If the A-bomb had not been used against Japan, it would have been used later, probably against North Korea. Seeing is believing.
My father was a Marine training to be a part of the invasion of Japan. If the bombs weren’t dropped I probably would not exist. So if I was back in 1945 I would drop it. But if I was in 1945 how could my 17 year old father be a Marine at the same time?
People wonder if the bomb really mattered, but the answer is in Japan’s announcement of surrender:
That is one of them there pair of ducks.
IMO not only did using the bombs save massive numbers of lives on both sides, it was probably good they were used for another reason.
Lets say we didn’t use them. A few years go by. Russians make the bomb as well. Now both sides have a handful of them.
Then the US and Russians get into a skirmish somewhere. Somebody finally decides to use one in battle. Chances are that it would spiral out of control and a fair number on BOTH sides end up getting used.
End result, way more than 2 atom bombs get used before the military and public fully realize the enormity of using these things.
One of my professors used to celebrate with bubbly in the department on bombing day. Man I wish he was teaching at Emory these days 
ISTM we’d be seriously misestimating the difference in power between a 16-20 kT nuke and a magnitude 9 earthquake that moved the whole island 8 feet to the East.
Wouldn’t want to be on the waterfront those 2 miles in, for sure, but you would not be wiping out that much up and down shore.
Indeed. That earthquake released more than 20,000 times as much energy as Fat Man.
There was an episode of The Time Tunnel about this back in 1968. Pearl Harbor instead of Hiroshima, though.
I totally agree. In terms of ‘alternate history’ the only place I can picture an atomic bomb being first used in war and it not spiraling out of control is at the end of WWII. Plus if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered and the invasion of Japan went forward two things would have been true:
[ul][li]We would have had 3-6 more A-bombs ready to support the invasion and we *would *have used them.[/li][li]We compelled the Soviets to help us against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany, so they would have been invading from the north (even though after seeing their occupation of eastern Europe we didn’t want them in Japan).[/li][/ul]
Even if it hadn’t resulted in war breaking out between the US and the USSR at the time it would have meant partitioning Japan into North & South like Korea so, there’s that. Not to trivialize the actual bombings, but using it against the island nation of Japan as the ultimate WWII-era secret weapon was the perfect ‘control-group’ scenario to show humanity nuclear weapons’ potential with just enough death & destruction but not too much nor too little (i.e. in only a test).
The 1st bomb was dropped and no surrender
2nd bomb was dropped and they still did not want to surrender.
1000 planes over Tokyo and they surrendered before the planes landed.
NO the bombs should have been dropped.
How about in China. Bomber pilots. POWs.
On the mainland. China, Burma, Korea, etc.
Absolutely, we could have starved the Japanese out. Would have cost untold suffering and millions of Japanese civilian lives, not to mention all our POWs too.
Dropping the Bomb saved millions of Japanese* lives. It was the best solution for the Japanese people.
You guys dont seem to get it- there was no reason NOT to drop the Bomb.* It was just another weapon*. It’s only later, after we realized that Nuclear war could destroy the Human race that use of atomic weapons became such a horrible sin.
Yep.
The navy’s plan to starve them out would have cost 7 Million civilian deaths.
Not to mention the firebombings. More died at Tokyo than Hiroshima. Altho the A-Bombs killed around 120K , more than twice that had died from conventional bombings.
The Japanese were starting to execute American POW’s and use them in horrific experiments:
You seem to be laboring under the misguided assumption that not using the atomic bomb would somehow have saved Japanese lives.
Even had we not used it, there’s every likelihood that we’d have hit Hiroshima with a conventional bombing raid every bit as destructive. Look at what we’d already done to Tokyo five months before Hiroshima got bombed.
You also seem to forget that in the eyes of the people of the time, the Japanese weren’t deserving of mercy, having attacked Pearl Harbor, murdered POWs, and perpetrated all the other war crimes that they were responsible for (comfort women, Mukden POWs, Unit 731, etc…) Plus, they weren’t seen as obeying what were thought of in the US as the conventions of warfare, which didn’t exactly endear them to the troops.
Unconditional surrender wasn’t something open to negotiation- the US was definitely war-weary at that point, but still had a grim resolve to see the war through, and using the atomic bomb was seen as a way to speed that along and save American lives. They’d already LONG since got over caring about killing Japanese civilians, so why NOT use the atomic bombs?
If the Japanese had the atomic bomb first and dropped them on Seattle and Omaha, that would have ended the war too. I’m sure we would all be agreeing it was necessary, just in a different language.
Does everyone in Japan speak English now?