That doesn’t follow. The message we intended to send was “We can win this war so easily that, even if you hold out, we’ll still be barely scratched, so you might as well surrender now”. There’s no terror involved in that, just practicality. And that’s the message that was received. In fact, the decision to surrender couldn’t have been based on the horror of the weapon, because the horror took weeks longer to manifest itself.
The horror was apparent as soon as the first bomb exploded. Just because it got worse with radiation does not negate the immediate (and horrific) effects of the attack.
The immediate effects were the same as those of any other bombing.
Which (as I wrote), for the previous six months were also terror attacks.
I’m sure the timing use of the A bomb was simply to bring the war to a quicker end and the risk that Japan could develop (or already have) the technology for their own Abomb.
An invasion of mainland Japan would have had catastrophic casualties amongst allied personnel.
Indeed.
Here is a prior thread on the topic of what the various factions / departments within the US government thought it would take to defeat Japan conventionally. this gets very close to the question of how justified they beleived they were in using the nukes on Japan.
Well, I mean, if you do believe that Japan was going to surrender and the US dropped the bombs anyway, the reasons they’d do so are pretty limited. And it’s not like nobody in the US has ever dropped bombs out of mostly racism before (albeit usually not in a foreign country).
While there was some concern about how far the Germans might have progressed towards a bomb (unfounded, as it happened), no one involved with the Manhattan Project thought there was any chance Japan had done anything beyond the most preliminary experiments. (As indeed they hadn’t.) Given the extraordinary amount of resources and materiel needed to make our bombs, they knew there wasn’t the slightest chance Japan could be anywhere near making its own bomb.
In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes says that creating the enormous industrial plants needed to produce the fissile material used in the first two bombs, mostly at Oak Ridge and Hanford, was the equivalent of building the entire US automobile industry. In about two and a half years.
There was a path to Japanese surrender without a huge invasion with mass casualties on both sides, but it would have required an omniscient level knowledge of military strategy and of internal Japanese politics and infighting at the time, plus a puppet master ability to force decisions on leaders of both sides. And even with that, it still would have taken a long time, enough that Russia would certainly have gotten involved and fucked everything up.
I believe that the bomb was going to be inevitably dropped somewhere in the course of warfare. The insidiousness of acute and chronic radiation deaths were unknown and unanticipated. Even further testing wouldn’t have revealed it before somebody decided to make expensive bomb go boom.
War is hell.
The article seems to be tapdancing around the reality that a Soviet invasion of China would have only allowed them more opportunities to occupy land and turn it into authoritarian puppet states like they did in Germany and Korea, and which (like Korea) we’d probably still be dealing with today.
But then again, knowing the tankie mindset, “More Soviet client states” is probably a plus in their book.
If I remember correctly the whole “Japan was going to surrender anyway” completely misleads people with the word “surrender”. It’s like saying “the 1945 invasion of Germany was unnecessary because Germany was going to surrender anyway” which is true. Himmler and Goering were both looking for ways to surrender Germany behind Hitler’s back and had they Allied backing they could have launched a coup and taken over.
Of course, this was a “surrender” under their own terms. For Germany, it meant basically keeping the Nazi party in power and just agreeing to leave all conquered territories. For Japan it was similar, Japan’s surrender terms basically involved keeping the military government in place, keeping all captured territories in China prior to 1937 (Manchukuo, Korea, Taiwan), absolutely no war crimes trials or occupation of Japan. It was basically a ceasefire in all but name. Japan’s peace negotiations with the Soviet Union basically were like Himmler or Goering’s Germany peace negotiations with the Western Powers, they thought they could be used as a useful buffer state against the other side of the looming Cold War hence why they thought they could get away with keeping basically everything in place.
Billions of lives? How many total inhabitants of earth were there in 1945? That number seems way too high.
But they didn’t surrender after Hiroshima (Nagasaki was 3 days later). That certainly doesn’t lend credence to the idea that they were “on the brink of surrender” before it. Nor that they would have surrendered if we had used the bomb in a more limited demonstration. As I recall, it would in fact have been months before we could deploy another (third) one. But we created the impression that we could just keep going, and that’s what made them believe that they faced total annihilation.
We now view things from a perspective of overwhelming U.S. military dominance. We face no existential threat. And sure, at that point the ultimate outcome wasn’t in doubt. But the allies had been fighting a terrible war that for a long time they had no certainty that they would win. I don’t know if there was a better way that could also have worked, but I find it difficult to condemn those who made the decision to end it in such a terrible way.
I assume the meaning was that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have made a subsequent global nuclear exchange less likely. But that wasn’t part of the calculus in 1945, so I don’t think it speaks to the claims in the article.
Perhaps they were still trying to figure out what the fuck happened?
Well, Truman told them immediately - that was the famous “rain of ruin” statement, reiterating the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender. They knew exactly what had happened by the next day, but made a decision not to surrender.
On 7 August, a day after Hiroshima was destroyed, Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists arrived at the city, and carefully examined the damage. They then went back to Tokyo and told the cabinet that Hiroshima was indeed destroyed by a nuclear weapon. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging “there would be more destruction but the war would go on”.[183] American Magic codebreakers intercepted the cabinet’s messages.[184]
Purnell, Parsons, Tibbets, Spaatz, and LeMay met on Guam that same day to discuss what should be done next.[185] Since there was no indication of Japan surrendering,[184] they decided to proceed with dropping another bomb.
It will be argued forever that if the US had waited 1 week (or is it two?) after Hiroshima before bombing Nagasaki, the Japanese high command would have had time to absorb what was surely a worldview-altering bit of news that takes time to digest.
That might have worked. It might well have made no difference.
Toyoda’s estimate that we had few weapons at the ready was not far off the mark. IOW, he was prepared to call the US’s bluff that we could keep nuking Japan every day from tip to tail until there was nobody left alive in any city to surrender. That suggests an extra few days would have made no difference.
After Hiroshima an extra one or few nuked cities would have. Had we waited a week to do Nagasaki, the possibility exists that during the interval the hardliners further solidified their POV and the history books would now record the Japanese government having folded after the 5th nuked city and after both Tojo and the Emperor were assassinated and counter-assassinated.
The problem with alternative history is that the possibilities are endless and the most likely path is not taken at every branch.
There’s a plausible argument to be made, and it’s certainly the argument that the US leadership believed, that a significant wait before the second bombing would have made Japan less likely to surrender, not more. If we wait before the second attack, that means that even if we can do this, we can’t do very much of it. We’ll win eventually, but it’ll take a long time, which gives Japan the chance to hurt us badly before they’re destroyed (which, by this point, was their only remaining war goal).
On the other hand, if we can drop an atomic bomb and destroy an entire city instantly every time the weather’s favorable, then that means that we’re going to win quickly anyway, and Japan will never even have the opportunity to hurt us again at all, and the only question is how many Japanese people will be killed before the inevitable surrender.
The true situation, of course, was somewhere in between, but by dropping the second bomb so quickly, we created the convincing bluff that it was the second situation. There was a risk, of course, that the Japanese would call our bluff, and discover that we didn’t yet have a third bomb ready, but even if that had happened, we wouldn’t be much worse off than we would have been in the scenario where we carefully hoarded and rationed our nukes for the most critical situations in the first place. So it was probably a good gamble.
Don’t forget after the emperor wanted to surrender there was an attempted coup to oust the emperor (or have him quietly tucked away somewhere) that came close to succeeding.
Also:
The Potsdam Conference had an agreement among the allies that ONLY unconditional surrender was acceptable. The Soviets would never have agreed to a negotiated peace. At best wishful thinking on the part of the Japanese. I am pretty sure they knew the terms of surrender decided at that conference.
On July 26, the United States, Britain, and China released the declaration announcing the terms for Japan’s surrender, with the warning as an ultimatum: “We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.”
< snip >
We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction. - SOURCE
As an aside…didn’t president Truman learn of the Trinity test at Potsdam?