Only if we had started a war with them because they got in the way of the resources we needed to invade Canada and Mexico.
Speaking of context, what is the context for this alternate history? Would the bombs have saved millions of American lives from an invasion, and would the Japanese government have rebuilt the U.S. with tens of billions of dollars of aid instead of ravaging, enslaving, mass murdering, and razing it as a conquered country as they had been doing for a decade?
What do you think?
I think that, using their own goals (and not our own, because that would just be silly), I am pretty sure that Japan would have no problem justifying using those bombs if they thought there was a chance that doing so might slow (or even stop) our involvement in the war.
We aren’t asking them if they feel it would be justified.
The question for you is if the use of atomic bombs by the Japanese would be morally justified?
You asked the question. What is your opinion? Not what would the Japanese think.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Brendanman posts
By 1945, the Allies had near total control of the skies and could bomb Japan with impunity. The Enola Gay didn’t encounter enemy fighters or flak on its way to bomb Hiroshima. At some point in 1945, the Japanese just stopped responding to allied air attacks for the most part as they simply didn’t have the resources.
In no universe was Japan “starting to win the wear [sic].” At best, they hadn’t lost yet. Japan could no longer defend itself from aerial attack, was limited to kamikaze attacks by untrained pilots, and was prepared to fight to the last civilian if invaded.
But regardless, the situations are completely different. WWII, including the war in the Pacific, was a total war situation. And the U.S. was trying to defeat an enemy by requiring its surrender after responding to an attack made by that enemy resulting in thousands of deaths. The general feeling was, “They started it, and we’re going to finish it.”
Iran, on the other hand, is a war of choice following the U.S. tearing up an agreement (by Trump in 2018) that Iran had been adhering to. Were the U.S. to firebomb Iranian cities indiscriminately or use WMDs in an unprovoked attack would be a war crime and invite sanctions by he rest of the world.
Not in 1945, certainly. Nor in 1944. Probably not even in 1943. Most experts say the War in the Pacific turned at the Battle of Midway in 1942, but the war was not even close to a certainty then.
I would ask that the war in Iran should maybe go to the other several threads about it, not here. Please.
But my question concerns whether the Japanese could justify, to themselves, the dropping of two atomic bombs on the United States. It is way too easy to justify to yourself an attack on another country.
Is anyone arguing that they wouldn’t have done it if they had the chance?
I don’t see how that helps us decide if the US was justified or not. Can you connect the dots?
Imperial Japan performed atrocities daily that would make Art the Clown blush. They clearly wouldn’t have an issue in using an extremely powerful bomb on their enemies.
Here is your question.
Nothing in those words can be construed to ask if the Japanese could justify the action to itself at the time. The entire thread is about the question of whether people today consider it justifiable. That’s the context.
Do you believe that anybody, even the Japanese, in today’s world would consider their bombing America justifiable? Remember, again, that opinions today cover the past 80 years not just 1945.
I’m not seeing where the argument is. Of course it was justified, and the right decision as well. The other options (invasion of the home Islands and continuing the blockade and bombings) were likely to both cause millions of deaths each.
By comparison, the Japanese got off lightly with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki strikes, and the 300,000 deaths between the two.
There was, naturally, no nuclear taboo back then, and those atomic bombs were developed to be used. Even so, even in 1945, atomic-bombing Kyoto was deemed to be not justified. So it was not simply “anything goes”. Food for thought.
I don’t know if Stimson’s veto of Kyoto as a target was a question of “justification”, as much as other places had more military value and less cultural significance, and Henry Stimson personally had affection for the city.
The long pole in the tent for targeting was actually which cities hadn’t already been bombed to ashes by that point in the war.
That’s what I’ve always heard.
I’ve also heard that Heidelberg in Germany was never bombed for similar reasons. And during the final Allied advance in 1945 it was simply bypassed, reportedly because the American general had read Mark Twain’s book about the historic city.
All true, but one interesting thing is that Stimson said during the meeting on July 24 that “if elimination [of Kyoto from the list of targets] was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area…”
It is established that this was not all cold calculation on his part, but there seems to me to be a sense that he felt it was not “justified” and that he recognized that the Japanese would feel that way, too. As opposed to the people who put it at the head of the target list because it would really send the Japanese quite a message (cf. nuking New York City)