Is there any validity to this article ?
I
Jacobin is always going to be against anything that involves war or killing. Not exactly objective.
It’s on Jacobin so the safe bet is no.
Always against the U.S. winning a war, but certainly not against Bashar al-Assad gassing villages, Russia killing people in Ukraine, or other war or killing by the ideologies they like.
I’m not familiar with the jacobin site so I can’t speak to whatever bias it may have, but to answer the OP question on its own merit, I would imagine that at this point it’s probably impossible to know for sure. Was the conventional argument, that the Japanese were not going to surrender until all the islands of Japan were physically taken over by boots on the ground, resulting in many Allied casualties, actually what the American brass believed, or a convenient fiction?
My guess would be, a little of both- there probably was a fear that an invasion of Japan would be necessary, and that it would be a bitter, protracted battle with many Allied losses. But at the same time, the second after the Trinity test proved successful it became Chekhov’s Bomb; it was inevitable that it would be tested against an enemy. That’s just how we humans work. The amazing thing is that nobody has ever used a nuke in a wartime situation since.
Another interesting question to ponder is, if the Manhattan project was successful, but the bomb had not been used against the Japanese, showing the world how horribly destructive atomic weapons were right out of the gate, would that have resulted in an apocalypse situation a few years down the road if we (meaning all humanity) had waited until more powerful bombs had been developed and several countries had them?
I’ve been following the issue since that debacle at the Smithsonian over a quarter of a century ago. Actually, since before that. It’s an unbelievably complex issue, not least because there’s still a lot of personal feeling tied up in it. And there is an abundance of quotes and evidence so that you can find just about anything to bolster your stance. The Japanese government was pursuing peace talks and investigating paths to end the war. And there were hyper-nationalists calling for the Japanese to fight to the last man to defend the home islands. There were people in the US who didn’t want to use the bomb sat all, and those who wanted a “safe” demonstration, and those who wanted to use the opportunity to gauge the destructiveness of the bomb, and those who wanted to justify the cost, and those who wanted to intimidate the Soviets. And those who honestly believed, after the fierce opposition on Iwo Jima, that the Japanese had proven that they absolutely would not give in, and that erasing their cities one by one was the only way to get them to surrender without recklessly endangering US servicemen.
What can you say? They didn’t have perfect knowledge or perfect communications. You can’t say “The US knew this…” or “The US felt this way…” when clearly not everyone concerned knew or felt the same things. And it’s also true that big, ponderous undertakings develop a momentum that is hard to stop, whether it’s the Manhattan Project or the buildup to the second Iraq war, that makes it hard or impossible to stop once it gets going.
At a quick glance, there’s a lot that is valid in the article. But the provocative title isn’t one of those things.
I’ve never believed that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima was unnecessary.
Nagasaki, however…
True, and also a huge strawman.
It was inevitable that Japan was going to lose the war. The only question was how many casualties it would take on both sides, and how many prisoners of war and others subjugated by the Japanese would have to die before the fighting stopped.
My own view is that a way should have been found to use the bomb(s) on as purely military targets as we could find, noting also that such demonstrations would doubtfully have convinced hard-liners who were thwarting surrender up until the end.
Was there even such a thing as a purely military target, of significant enough value to be worth it, out of range of a city?
I can buy that the use of the bombs might have been a mistake, and that it might have been possible to achieve the same objectives without it. But if so, that’s a conclusion we’re reaching in hindsight. Did anybody in the American decision-making process actually know that at the time? That, I’m highly skeptical of.
Those bombs would have made horrible tactical weapons. They were and always will be terror weapons. As such, they were just an extension of what the USAAF had been doing over Japan since the start of 1945.
The firebombing if Tokyo in March 1945 resulted in more or less the same number of deaths as Hiroshima. But the citizens died “normal” deaths: being burned to ashes in a conventional fire. Instead of…burned to ashes in nuclear fire. I’m not sure, as a dead person, there’s much of a difference.
“Nuclear” is a dirty word to may people, it alone makes people cringe, rebel against it’s use. But dead is dead. The only difference is the survivors suffer differently, but they still suffer.
I think the bomb had to be used. Only to keep it from being used in the 70+ years since. Without knowing how bad it was, it would have been used, and in large numbers. Hell, MacArthur wanted to use it in Korea! There definitely would have been nukular confrontation, toe to toe with the Russkies, sometime in the late 50s-on.
The article says this:
“This is noteworthy considering the historical evidence now clearly indicates that Japan was on the brink of surrender at the moment when these weapons were employed.”
Which is complete bullshit.
The geography of Japan limited how an invasion could be done. The Japanese knew we were coming, and knew which way we would be coming, and they were making preparations for the invasion. The Japanese had proven over and over again in the island hopping campaigns that they would fight until the last man.
After the Japanese lost the battle of Okinawa, they knew they couldn’t win the war. But there was absolutely no plan for surrender. Instead, the Japanese plan was to make the invasion so costly and horrible that the Allies would agree to some sort of cease fire and armistice long before Japan would be forced to surrender. This was called Operation Ketsugo, and it is very well documented. They planned to mobilize the entire population of Japan to fight, calling it the “Glorious Death of 100 Million”. Kamikaze attacks would be increased (again, fighting until they ran out of men or airplanes), and civilians would be told over and over again that their only choice was to fight to the end or to commit suicide, exactly as had happened to the civilians on Okinawa. The Japanese fleet was heavily damaged and running out of fuel, so they planned on placing their remaining ships in defensive positions to help fight off the invasion.
Does this sound like an enemy that is clearly ready to surrender? That article is laughably stupid and blatantly ignores well-known facts.
Even after the two bombs were dropped, Japan still refused to surrender. The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender, and the Japanese were not willing to surrender unconditionally. Japan hoped that the Soviets would step in and force the Allies into some sort of armistice instead of surrender, but after the Soviets declared war on Japan there was no longer any hope of that. The Japanese leadership deadlocked, with some in favor of surrender and others strongly opposed to it. Finally the Emperor himself stepped in to break the deadlock.
Were the bombs the only option? No. But the alternative was predicted to be somewhere between half a million to well over a million U.S. casualties. It took two bombs and the threat of the Soviets having a say in what happened to Japan afterwards to end the war. The Japanese were clearly not ready for surrender just with the threat of invasion.
Not really. At the time, nukes were just really big bombs, no worse than other bombs, just bigger. They didn’t become terror weapons until the 1950s.
Not the stupidest take on the bombings I saw this week. That was insisting that “the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was willful genocide against a non-white population”, resulting in “Japan becoming colonized by Western powers”.
Hiroshima was the headquarters of the Second General Army, the 5th Division, and the 59th Army. Interestingly, I first learned that Hiroshima was a significant military target at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. As a former nuclear weapons launch officer, I’d been reluctant to go, as it seemed somehow disrespectful. I’m glad changed my mind; it presented one of the most balanced portrayals I’ve seen of the American decision making leading up to the bombings and the role the Japanese government played in making it happen.
That article is very poor. It asserts its claims as proven facts while offering no primary evidence to support them. The “evidence” it gives is other works that were written by third parties decades after the fact. The credibility of those other works seems to be that they’re saying things the article’s author agrees with.
One could similarly find military “justification” for the fire-bombing of Dresden, seeing that two highway routes used by military traffic ran through the city and Dresden was considered to have industrial importance, as 110 factories were located there (largely spared in the bombing though).
There was a proposal before Hiroshima that a demonstration be made by dropping the bomb on the center of Tokyo Bay (where casualties would’ve been relatively minimal), or on an island like Truk, formerly an important Japanese naval base but basically neutered by 1945. Hiroshima seems to have been picked largely because it hadn’t suffered significant damage previously, and the effect of the atomic bomb could be better judged.
None of this validates the article mentioned in the OP, or establishes that the emperor would have been sufficiently impressed by demonstration bombing to step in and overrule the national suicide-promoting hard-liners. I still think an attempt should’ve been made, as the U.S. had an additional bomb to use and more in the pipeline that would’ve become available prior to the scheduled invasion of the home islands in November of 1945.
As you implied above, Japanese casualties would have been much bigger than this, certainly far greater than for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So anyone saying they oppose the bombing because of the loss of life is full of it.
Ever read Hersey’s “Hiroshima?” I think it counts as a terror weapon, especially thanks to the deaths by radiation after the bombing, something not a part of other equally deadly bombing runs. Remember this was like no other weapon at the time. I’ve read lots of sf from the early '50s about nuclear attacks and they are in no small part horror stories.
The bombing may have saved billions of lives, since I doubt tests where fake villages and part of the ocean were blown up would have the impact of the bomb on real people. There were enough idiots in favor of attacking with nuclear weapons even after they knew what they could do. The Balance of Terror probably saved all our asses.
I’m biased, because my dad was on occupation in Southern Germany at the time, and it was clear he would have been off to Japan if the invasion had happened. So this isn’t theoretical to me.
The first nuclear bombs were not intended as terror weapons, any more than the conventional bombs used on Dresden and Tokyo were. The nuclear bomb was developed to accomplish the same mission that those conventional bombs did, just much quicker and more easily.
Yes, but this was something new. Nobody – at least nobody in a position of authority – knew that radiation was going to be a big issue, or that death by exposure to radiation or fallout was going to be a major feature of the atomic bomb. I’ve read quotes by military leaders in which they said they didn’t believe it – that the victims suffered thermal burns. Another factor was the suddenness of it. You could generate a firestorm in Dresden by enough standard bombing, but it took time. The atomic bomb was a firestorm in a single shot. Add to that the intense radiation at all wavelengths. That contributed to the suffering and terror. People blinded, with flesh hanging in strips, with the patterns from their clothing seared into their skin. And the intense thirst. It was a quantum leap in misery. But it was largely unforeseen.
IMO, most of the strategic bombings in 1945 were indistinguishable from terror attacks. War production was essentially already extinguished by cutting the supply of resources. The intent was to diminish the civilian population’s support for the war by making day to day life terrifying. The very fact that it was proposed that a mere demonstration of the a-bomb’s potential might scare the enemy into ending the war is proof that it was, in fact, a terror weapon.