Let’s debunk the “forced Japan into a democracy” nonsense. Germany was not nuked. Germany became a democracy. Italy was not nuked. Italy became a democracy. Exactly what was it about the Japanese that only nuclear weapons could tranform their nation into a democracy? The bomb was not needed to end the war
The US had long since been reading every Japanese electronic communication. The Japanese had been trying to negotiate peace through the USSR, the only power not then at war with it. Eisenhower was opposed to the use of the a-bomb,
The US had full control over the Japanese skies for some time. The Japanese military was in ruins. Eisenhower argued against its use, as did MacArthur and former president Hoover.
Curtis LeMay said at a press conference:
This is the key. The Japanese were long willing to surrender on the sole condition of being able to keep their emperor. Truman withheld assurance for this condition in order to justify the use of the bomb.
The debate whether use of the bomb in Japan has made it less likely to be used since is more open. There may be a kernel of truth in that argument, but there is none in the others.
Right, If I even accept your statement that the only request Japan had was to keep their Emporer. With no military left, he should have been willing to step aside to save his people from just the conventional bombings. After dropping the 1st bomb, did he capitulate? No!!!
Now back to the surrender: no cite on this bald statement.
The decision to drop the bombs was made by US President Harry S. Truman, and followed the loss of around 400,000 lives over 3½ years of direct US involvement in World War II, around half of which had been incurred in the war against Japan. Truman’s officially stated intention in ordering the bombings was to bring about a quick resolution of the war by inflicting destruction, and instilling fear of further destruction, that was sufficient to cause Japan to surrender.
After the Hiroshima atomic attack (and before the Nagasaki atomic attack), President Truman issued the following statement:
“It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.” [1]
As detailed near the end of this article, whether or not the bombings were justified has long been a contentious issue.
Here is Potsdam Declaration
let anyone who cares, read it and decide for themselves.
The issue of the Emperor was not a minor sticking point. The Declaration outlined why unconditional surrender was the only choice.
The War Staff & Emperor should have surrendered. Truman saved at least allied lives in dropping the bombs; he may have saved far more Japanese lives than you think.
If war had continued, USSR would have been more involved and consolidated a greater influence in the area.
Japan may have been split up more. It may not have been able to go on to be a single democratic nation. I think the bulk of your arguments are just parroting the anti-bomb side without thinking through the entire picture.
The Japanese were prepared to surrender on the basis of the Atlantic Charter. Eisenhower, LeMay, and MacArthur were all opposed to the use of the atomic bomb. To justify its use now is revisionist.
Not only are they projecting Todays morality onto actions of the past (something I call “Presentism”, as it’s quite like racism in a way) they are also projecting todays assurance of America’s complete military superiourity into the past. Today, America really could “walk away” from Iraq, in fact we did so during Desert Storm. However, America’s victory in WWII was no forgone conclusion. In 1941 we were likely the 5th greatest military power, not #1 by a long shot as of today. We could have lost WWII. We could have been bombed or even invaded. There could have been death camps for America’s Jews and other “undesirables”. It could have been American women turned into sex slaves for Japanese troops, and our population used for germ warfare experiments.
I quote “You realize that nothing you said rebuts my point. I win again. You admit that you wouldn’t kill your own children. That means you’re conceding my point. It’s wrong to kill children. You know it. You don’t have a comeback for it, and all you can do is spray saliva.” post #76
You said this in response to my post #75: "Yes. We had to target industrial areas. If you don’t target the enemies means of making war, you greatly increase your chance of losing it, or at the very least- increase the length of the war- damning even more people to death.
We had to win WWII. If we hadn’t won it, it’d be our families in those death camps. The outcome of the war wasn’t a foregone conclusion you know. We had a primary duty to our own families. Thus, anything less than full out war is immoral. Fighting a 'limited war" and thus risking loss is what would have been the immoral choice."
While some of you are doing a great job taking apart Diogenes’s argument, I think I’ll actually address it head-on.
Diogenes, you are taking a moral-absolutist stance. That’s bad. We live in an analogue universe, where every action we take has countless consequences, both good and bad, and attempting to judge the base morality of an action without considering the consequences rapidly leaves behind anything approaching morality.
Hell, example. Giving medicine to children is right, yes? Does this apply to the nutjob injecting adrenaline into the hearts of newborns?
Of course not, you say. The specific circumstances of the situation completely negate the fact that the situation is generally morally good.
Now, I am not arguing that the specific circumstances of war negate the morality of killing children. However, will you concede that moral absolutism perhaps is not the best way to argue this?
If the Nazi’s had got the bomb first, I wonder if we’d be arguing that although it was horrible, it was necessary to kill all those people because they had a polluted gene pool and doing so probably saved civilization. The winners in war write the histories.
Okay, Dio, a few questions for you. This isn’t an attempt to attack you; it’s me trying to understand your position on this.
What is the moral difference between killing an 18-year-old who was drafted into service, and a 30-year-old who voluntarily works at a factory that makes armaments for the war effort?
Sometimes, I get wooshed. It happens. Sorry, that ‘lie’ is one of my pet bugaboos. I have great respect for the amount of work Al Gore did in re: promoting technology. (And great hatred for what his wife did… PMRC, etc.)
I realize this thread has derailed into a discussion of Dio’s ethics, but I’m shocked that this thread has been so one-sided. Very good, honest historians still disagree over whether the bombing was necessary or not. Take a look at the wikipedia entry to give you just a taste of the debate.
IMHO, the interpretation that the US dropped the bombs in order to save more lives is one of the least plausible of competing historical interpretations. Very few historians seriously believe the invasion of Japan would have been so bloody as to result in the deaths of millions (the “million lives” quote was cooked up by the administration to defend the bombing post hoc). I think the more likely interpretation is that we used the bombs in order to prevent a Soviet invasion of Japan and in order to deter the USSR.
As evidence of this thread’s bias, this latter explanation, though common in the literature, hasn’t even been mentioned yet. :dubious:
Russian Influence was definitely one of the reasons to drop the bomb.
Keep in mind after Iwo Jima they wanted a fast way to end the war.
Keep in mind after you spent that much money on a project, you might want to demonstrate it to the Russians and others.
Keep in mind Truman probably did not understand the radiological damage the bombs would do. Think about the Bikini Isle testing.
We demanded an unconditional surrender, they chose to fight on.
We dropped 1 bomb and Japan had 1 less city, they chose to fight on.
WE dropped second bomb and Japan had 2 less cities, they finally surrendered.
I disagree this is evidence of the threads bias. We aren’t doing a full on debate of the reasons for the US to have dropped atomic weapons on Japan but merely discussing whether or not Limbaugh’s ‘win-win’ was an appropriate comment. I agree with you that the Soviet invasion of Japan was certainly a major factor in the decision whether or not to end the war rapidly. The US certainly did not want a repeat of what was happening in Europe where the Soviets were partitioning Germany into occupation sectors that had every appearence of being perminent. I think that this is another indication of a ‘win’ for the Japanese by not allowing the Soviets their shot at invasion…though its one of those grim ‘wins’ that is just the lesser of two evils again.
I don’t think anyone is saying that there is no debate on this subject…in fact a casual search will show you a LOT of debates on this subject in GD. Afaik though the general consensus among historians is that the Japanese militarist would not have allowed an unfavorable peace (let alone the unconditional surrender the US was demanding) that would not have allowed them to remain in power, they were preparing for a last stand with the intent of killing as many allies as they could to force a more favorable peace reguardless of the civilian casualties they would sustain, and even with the dropping of the two atomic weapons the militarist tried to keep the war going. As to the body count issue we’ll never know (thank the gods)…but as I said the US military had ordered something like 500,000 purple hearts (appearently we are still using them today in fact, despite Korea and Vietnam), and the general range I’ve seen for Japanese casualties is something like 700,000-5 million…extrapolated from the (aprox and from memory) 200,000 casualties they took on Okinawa. I think the 5 million is WAY high, but I don’t see the 700,000-1 million mark being that far from possibility. This seems a reasonable extrapolation to me as the population density of the main islands is higher, and the Japanese would fight all the harder for their main islands than even for Okinawa, and the fact that the Japanese had prepared the main beach defenses more elaborately, had husbanded planes, ships etc for suicide attacks, and had prepared the civilian population to resist at all costs.
To get back to the threads ‘bias’ for a moment: Note that BobLibDem has made many of the standard arguements for the ‘US didn’t need to drop the bomb’ side and no one really has taken up the gauntlet. There are counter arguements too all the points he laid out that have been debated in other threads on this subject…but this isn’t really a full blown debate about that. Least I’m not looking at a pit thread in that way.
I at least partially agree with Diogenes. I don’t think it’s morally right to kill civilians to win a war. But then, I don’t think it’s morally right to kill soldiers to win a war either. Certainly, you can’t win a war without killing, and if winning the war is the only outcome we’re willing to tolerate, then in that sense it’s necessary. But there’s a difference between “necessary to achieve a tolerable outcome” and “morally right” (at least to me).
And yes, despite being a self-professed pacifist, it’s possible I would kill someone to stop them from killing my family. I (thankfully) haven’t ever been in that position, so it’s impossible to say for sure. But even if I did, that doesn’t mean I think it’s morally right. I certainly don’t believe I’d say afterwards that I did the right thing. I’d just say I couldn’t bear to let my family die, right and wrong be damned.
I’m also not saying the consequences of dropping the A-bombs, etc., weren’t preferable to the consequences of not dropping them (although without being able to see what would have unfolded otherwise, I think it’s hard to say for sure.) But I don’t think you can judge right and wrong based solely on the consequences of your actions.
I’d greatly prefer it if people said we committed horrible atrocities to win WWII, because we genuinely believed the alternative to be even more horrible. Because anything that involves killing thousands and thousands of people is a horrible atrocity. Let’s not sugarcoat it by saying it was “the right thing to do”, or that it was “win-win.” It was horrible but we felt it was necessary. Let’s leave it at that.
Please note with regard to the previous post that “atrocity” can mean an appalling act, not just an act of great evil. I’m not accusing those who dropped the atomic bombs, or those who ordered it, of being evil. I think they did what they felt was necessary. I just take issue with such actions being called good, moral, right or just.
On an unrelated note, I think that calling someone a moron or an asshole because he reaches a different conclusion on a complex moral issue, or subscribes to a line of reasoning you consider flawed . . . well, I think it’s despicable. And I’m referring to the reaction of some of you to Diogenes’ comments, but who knows, in a minute you may be saying the same things about me.
