I’ll venture that for most people in the government, justifying the billions spent on the Manhattan Project was a lot more important than justifying the civilian lives destroyed by its creation.
I don’t think it’s possible to separate these things. If the nuclear bombings were tactically necessary to avoid the invasion of the Japanese mainland, then they were morally justified, end of story. If it wasn’t tactically necessary and the US leadership knew that then it wasn’t morally justified.
Its the “knew that” part that is critical IMO. Its one thing to say that 80 years later when every detail from the internal discussions of the the Japanese government are public knowledge (not that I would say that necessarily). But it whole other thing to say given the evidence available to the US leadership in 1945, the bombings were not necessary to prevent (or try and prevent) an invasion of Japan (that they knew would cost millions of lives)
Exactly. And how would this demonstration work? You can’t tell the enemy about it in advance or the Japanese would just shoot down the bomber. (They ignored the Enola Gay because they thought it was a reconnaissance mission.)
So you do this demonstration over the ocean and you hope that someone of importance is looking in the right direction? And that they are believed? And the military leadership is actually swayed by this? When they weren’t swayed by the actual destruction of a Japanese city (Hiroshima), and that was after sending an observer to see the destruction first-hand!
And you expect the U.S. government to just waste one of its two available weapons that cost $2 billion to develop ($40 billion in 2025 dollars) and throw it away on a demonstration?
Frankly, it’s a ludicrous suggestion, which is why it was dismissed out of hand in 1945. After four years of world war, there was no doubt the weapon was going to be used on a military target. If it had been developed a year earlier, it would have been used on Germany.
The “Unjustified” side of this argument leaves out the deaths being caused by the Japanese in their occupied territories. They were brutal masters in SE Asia, Indonesia and occupied China. The food in these countries was feeding the Japanese army while the native populations were allowed to starve. Additionally, the IJA was still conducting a brutal war against the Chinese. These deaths would have continued had there been no nukes. IIRC, total deaths in SE Asia and Indonesia were rising by summer ‘45 to around 80,000, and 120,000 in China, so 200,000. That’s PER MONTH.
Yes. From the Wikipedia article:
So to directly address your questions, not only was there enough time to examine the damage at Hiroshima and report back to TPTB, but the ruling faction of the Japanese government received this report, and still dismissed any thought of surrender. And the American government knew this because they had broken the Japanese codes.
Thank you. So they knew what was what, and thought they could pull through any way.
Yes; they were a non-white, non-Christian population that was regarded as subhuman vermin and deserved death just for existing. So much so that the US had difficulty getting prisoners because many American soldiers would defy orders to take any of them alive. And treated the bodies as things to be disassembled for trophies and parts sent back home, something that was largely whitewashed from history. Really, if the US had has a few dozen nukes I think the odds are good we’d have just destroyed all their major cities and been done with it.
The moral debate came later, when being non-white and non-Christian was no longer considered a crime worthy of death by more people.
Yes, easily, and it wasn’t even close. I don’t know why people call this a great philosophical question – I think it’s probably based on ignorance of the realities of the war. The atomic bomb was the best possible outcome for the Japanese, let alone Americans.
People don’t appreciate just how fanatical the WW2 Japanese were. Women were throwing themselves off cliffs on Okinawa and Iwo Jima to prevent capture. They were sending toddlers with grenades at our troops. They were basically ready to commit national suicide to prevent a surrender to preserve their honor.
Their war plans for the defense of the home islands were things like training women to hide in closets and attack US troops with sharpened sticks. They had plans to bury children under roads with an aircraft bomb and a hammer and tell them to strike the detonator when they heard vehicles overhead. It would’ve been an absolute bloodbath as the Japanese would throw their entire civilian population at the invading force in suicide attacks. Several million Japanese people die easily during the invasion and very likely more than that.
The atomic bomb gave them a way to save face. It allowed them to say that they weren’t going to lose because they didn’t fight hard enough, but because there was a radical new weapon and the sun was dropped on them, and it’s understandable that anyone would surrender after that. And yet even then the military threw a coup to stop the emporer from delivering the surrender, a significant fraction of the Japanese still wanted to continue fighting even after it seemed like we could drop a nuke on them every week.
What was the alternative? The US wasn’t just going to pack up and go home. So there was an invasion of the home islands that would’ve killed millions and possibly tens of millions of Japanese. We could’ve continued the devastating air bombing campaign that killed far more Japanese people than the atomic bombs did. There was a conventional bombing raid that, in one night, killed more Japanese people than either of the atomic bombs did. And more importantly, the Japanese would look at conventional bombing as something they could endure or outlast. It’s not the game changer that the atomic bomb was, to allow them to surrender while saving face.
Blockade them? Starve them out? Turn their coastal cities to rubble with battleships? Same deal - they look at it as something to endure and continue resistance for years while millions starve.
Even if you only look at this in terms of Japanese lives and not even American ones, the atomic bomb was the best possible outcome for the Japanese. It was, if anything, a sort of kindness that allowed them a way to save face and save their lives rather than have them commit national suicide on a scale the world has never seen.
There’s no real debate here.
I don’t see the logic here. If the nuclear bombing was not justified, as in it made no difference at in the Japanese decision to surrender, why would the terrible atrocities in Japanese occupied territory factor into the equation? If they didn’t prevent the invasion of Japan they wouldn’t have shortened the Japanese occupation of the rest of Asia either.
We’re getting a little off subject here, but the Pacific war began because America didn’t like the Japanese invading a non-Christian non-white country (China), so we stopped selling oil and steel to Japan.
Regarding prisoners, this was a bottom-up decision by soldiers and Marines, to save their own lives. Clearly you haven’t done a lot of reading on the matter.
Mainly because they DID have a pretty good idea of what it entailed. But at the time the generals and political rulers were thinking A Bigger Boom For The Buck.
After it was seen what happens with real-world use (as opposed to a controlled test in the desert) that’s when everyone else said “…oh…”
No, that was them defying orders. And exaggerating the unwillingness of Japanese to surrender as an excuse.
You’re right, but some on the ‘Unjustified’ side believe Japan was essentially defeated, and would have surrendered within a few months, without being nuked.
Yes, it was justified, for all the reasons already mentioned.
Another one that I feel isn’t widely-enough appreciated is the necessity of demonstrating to the USSR that the US had such bombs and were willing to use them. Without this, the USSR would’ve no doubt gambled on further expansion once the dust settled from WW2, which would’ve resulted in even more loss of life and possibly a limited, multi-sided nuclear war. World peace isn’t possible unless Russia is reminded early and often that someone’s willing and able to annihilate them if they get too far out of line.
We were fighting the Nazis! What would it take for you to consider that maybe, just once, the United States were the good guys?
It’s also worth noting that even after the Japanese government (pushed by Hirohito) decided to surrender there was an attempted coup by military officers who wanted to overthrow the government and confine Hirohito so they could prevent the surrender from happening.
I have a friend who has said more than once that a problem with our warfighting since WWII was our failure to attack population centers. I have not studied this sufficiently to issue a firm opinion, but I wonder if that position has some merit. What would Viet Nam have been like if we had leveled Hanoi?
By not practicing “total war,” it seems an argument could be made that we’ve been not as interested in achieving “victory,” as in changing regimes and/or popular opinion. War is a horrible thing to be avoided whenever possible. By using limited military means, it seems more likely that the ends achieved will be more limited and short-lived.
Also, does it make a difference between whether we are viewing the A-bombs at that time, or however many decades in the future? Because a short number of decades later, Japan could be viewed as bearing limited permanent harm.
(BTW - one of my uncles - a navel captain - married a Japanese woman who had burn scars on the backs of her legs from Nagasaki. Certainly doesn’t bear on my views one way or another. Just offering as an anecdote.)
Exactly. It wasn’t about getting the Japanese to surrender, it was about threatening Stalin.
That’s why it was unjustified.
Why can’t it be both?
Negative. It was for both reasons, and both reasons were eminently justifiable on the grounds of preventing an order-of-magnitude greater loss of life.