This is a subject that has been hotly debated since the first successful test in New Mexico, and with the anniversary commemorations in Japan right now, it has reignited my fascination.
For me there are two layers to this question; was this a tactically justifiable attack, and was it a morally justifiable attack?
I have looked at the points for both for and against on this subject and i think im somewhere in the middle between these camps, very curious to hear what people think.
It was obviously justified tactically, strategically, and morally.
This was total war and the enemy leadership was utterly unwilling to think of surrender before they received a game-changing wake-up call.
Which was delivered at the coast of a mere ~250K enemy killed. Vastly fewer than would have died in the follow-on invasion of the Japanese home islands. And with zero, repeat zero, American casualties. Versus the over 1M estimated for the planned invasion.
This is probably the cleanest example of a morally justified attack in wartime since the Roman days.
Obviously it wasn’t.
They had already offered surrender. All it achieved was to change the terms of the surrender.
And that could have been achieved by dropping the bomb offshore, to prove they have it. No need to use it on actual humans.
They were civilians, not “the enemy”.
That assumes that an invasion would have been necessary. O repeat, they had already offered a surrender.
Because, of course, white lives are more valuable than dirty foreign yellow lives. /s
Assuming that an invasion was needed. I repeat, they had already offered a surrender.
Just because you’ve repeated yourself three times doesn’t make it true.
Some factions of the Japanese government had put out some “peace feelers.” But the military leadership was the controlling faction, and they were never going to willingly surrender unless their hand was forced. There was never a formal offer of surrender before the atomic bombings, not even a conditional offer of surrender, much less the unconditional surrender the allies were demanding.
Not even the bombing of Hiroshima was enough to change this. It took a second bomb, and the prospect of an unending series of atomic bombs (for all they knew) to get the Emperor to intervene and overrule them. Even then there was an attempted coup.
Short of the atomic bombs, the Japanese government was never going surrender. And they were willing to sacrifice the entire nation (including old men, women, and children) to defend the home islands.
The atomic bombs were indeed a game-changer. It meant there would be no “heroic” fight to the death by these defenders as the military government was resigned to, just meaningless death from the air if they failed to surrender unconditionally.
There’s zero ethnicity involved. Sorry to ruin your neat nonsense moralizing. A government, a military, and it’s civilian populace are a single consolidated object called “The enemy”.
Total war is not a nice thing. But sometimes events force one’s hands.
Absolutely yes. Furthermore, it prevented more nukings. Nukes not being dropped on Japan would mean it’s highly likely they get used in another subsequent war, probably in Europe or Korea. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a big deterrent effect for all nations worldwide- one that’s lasted all the way through today.
2 nuke uses in Japan prevented 50 in China or 300 in Germany.
Now this needs a big fat cite, has someone come with serious evidence for that?
I have seen some arguments before, but so far, most of what I have seen is very weak. @robby has already pointed at what usually the discredited arguments try to make. And usually, the arguments fail when one considers that the ones in charge in Japan were divided. Yes, even after the second bomb had been used and Russia declared war to Japan!
It was only after the emperor told the war supporters to can it, that then any offer of surrender was seen a serious one by both the allies and Japan.
As so often happens in these kinds of topics, the basic facts need to be rehashed, again before any authentic debate can then proceed. I’ll just point out that the Russians coming into the war was also a significant factor, as was the relative shortage of bombs, with a 3rd ready, maybe, by the end of September; the demonstration option was thus discarded on those grounds.
And to point this out: approximately 100,000 civilians were killed in the firebombings of Tokyo than the atomic bombing yet we never hear moral outrage over that.
I believe that it has been documented that a few advisors had brought up the idea to the Emperor, but there was no movement to consider it and it definately had not been offered.
This in important, I think. I can see the morality of the nuclear bombings argued either way, but I don’t think they were special; killing is killing.
In a related issue, the statement “this was total war” has been made more than once but that just begs the question; is “total war” morally justifiable in the first place? Usually I’d say no, but the sheer craziness of the Imperial Japanese regime may actually have made it an exception. I mean, how many conflicts have there been where someone can make the argument that using nuclear weapons would lower casualties without being immediately laughed off?
In 1945 the main ‘moral’ objection to the atomic bomb was voiced by the scientists who developed it. That was more a matter of personal guilt than any set of moral values. The general population of the Christian US embraced it with enthusiasm.
Tit-for-tat morality is futile in the context of war. In 1945 the US and Japan were murdering each other daily, wherever they came in contact. Any discussion of morality was just propaganda.
Was it justified? Of course it was. Whether or not it was effective is irrelevant.
I doubt the US population would have supported a ground invasion of Japan. A minimal blockade would have starved them into submission.
Well stated on both counts — how much is the justification (or morality, different things) of the “what” is determined by the “how”?
In discussions of alternatives to this, we often go into whether the Allies should just have kept at what they were already doing and burned every city town and village to the ground and blockade-starved Japan into surrender, no need for bloody invasion. IOW to me that means the choices were of HOW hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians die, and how fast or slowly. But that die they would.
TBF, at the time this “application” was something novel.
Also, back to the issue of Total War, I can only imagine that even before summer of 1945 in spite of all glowing rhetoric from political leaders, those in the war rooms were morally exhausted. How much “total war”, how many years and how many decisions to cause the deaths of thousands or of millions until “eliminate a whole city to prove our point” becomes just another cost/benefit calculation. Hell, years before this, Bomber Harris was advocating rendering the German population homeless — because he could not precision-target only strategic assets w/o taking too many casualties.
War is Hell, said Sherman and he was right.
Two other considerations. Regarding total war, the attitude towards the Japanese at the time was, for many Americans, the more killed the better. Also, fallout was not known about until after the bombing so any discussion about how many died due to that must be tempered.
Nuked, firebombed or defending their homeland beaches with rakes? They were set to die anyways.
I’m not usually a fan of the ends justify the means way of moral reasoning. In this case, however, I think the results are positive enough and the likely alternatives negative enough to say it was the right thing. I think it’s highly likely that any other outcomes would have led to a hypothetical present day Japan that is a worse place to live than the one that we actually have. Maybe we end up with a situation like Korea where the Soviet Union ended up controlling Hokkaido and possibly the parts of Honshu northeast of Tokyo, complete with a Japanese “Dear Leader” and the people in those areas living just like the current day North Koreans do. Maybe we end up not sending in MacArthur to be the de facto ruler of Japan for several years, and instead send in someone also who almost certainly does a worse job. Maybe Japan in the present day is under the Chinese rather than US sphere of influence, with the people living under a Chinese style Japanese Communist Party. Maybe they end up looking like an East Asian version of Iran, just substitute the Emperor for the Ayatollah and Shinto for Islam. Maybe they just end up a lot less wealthy than the current actual Japan, and end up looking like the present day Philippines or Vietnam. However this hypothetical no nuke timeline ends up, I’d bet that the hypothetical present day Japan is a worse place to live than the actual one.
Much less, but not zero.
Maybe a demonstration atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo Bay before Hiroshima would’ve swayed the hard-liners. Maybe not.
A demonstration A-bomb wouldn’t have swayed the hard-liners, because they weren’t swayed by 2 detonations over Japanese cities and a huge Soviet army that was sweeping away the Japanese army in Manchuria.
My parents generation lived, fought and died in WW2, not a single one of them ever said a word about the two A-Bomb drops being morally wrong or unnecessary. They just lived though total war in Europe and saw how Russia defended its homeland, they saw the Bomb as a blessing from God.
This revisiting history and judgment of the pass based upon lack of first hand knowledge or experiance would have been deemed candy assed behavior by my dad.
I’ve seen this argument several times and it’s never made sense to me.
The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Japan didn’t surrender. Why would they have surrendered if we had dropped an atomic bomb in the ocean instead? I don’t see how a demonstration bombing have made a bigger impression than an actual bombing.
There were three days between the two drops. Was that enough time to examine the first to determine the damage and get the info back to TPTB, considering lines of communication were shot? What did they actually know about the explosion and how it was delivered?
It seems to me that the central argument against the atomic bombings is that killing people with nuclear weapons is somehow morally different than killing them with conventional weapons. And I personally don’t see that. I feel that if you’re making a choice between ending a war by killing a hundred thousand people with nuclear weapons or ending a war by killing five hundred thousand people with conventional weapons, then using nuclear weapons is the more moral choice.