This is the bit there is no evidence for. That some of the US leadership were also considering the post war relationship with Stalin, doesn’t change the fact the main consideration was making Japan surrender, and avoid the invasion of Japan.
Angrier. There’s a big difference between war of defense and a war of colonialism. Japan started a war with us, they didn’t need motivation to keep fighting since they wanted the fight.
Also, we attacked the population there all the time. Lots of killing, lots of rape, lots of torture. Didn’t work. We just made the Communists look better in comparison (an achievement, in its own twisted way given how bad they were).
Even if we only focus on just Japan (and not the Soviets) I recall reading something about Truman deciding whether to drop the bomb. He finally decided that if he didn’t and had to send US soldiers in every mother in the US would never forgive him.
Truman’s goal was protect US lives, not Japanese lives. Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of Japan to end the war, was considered so dangerous to US lives that the US government made enough Purple Heart medals that we still use them today.
It should also be noted that the invasion of Japan would have certainly cost more Japanese lives than dropping the bombs did. Not even close really. If the goal was to maximize lives saved then the atomic bombs probably were the best choice at the time (least bad of bad choices).
Moderating:
The discussion on the morality of the conflict of Vietnam is a worthy subject and has several of it’s own threads, but here it isn’t serving as a good comparison to the OPs question about using Nuclear weapons in a World War situation. Feel free as always to spin off a new thread, but do not continue it in this thread.
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
This is just a guidance, not a warning. Nothing on your permanent record.
Sorry, I read the OP and initial responses as opening discussion of total war. Not debating your modding. My bad.
This is pretty much. As the other Doper pointed out, killing 125,000 Tokyoites with napalm and magnesium in a single night’s firebombing gets a shrug, but killing people in two cities with nuclear fission is somehow considered morally wrong. It’s strange logic.
It reminds me of how the U.S. government set a “red line” for the Assad regime in Syria: “Don’t you dare kill your people with chemical weapons (but killing them with AK-47s is apparently okay.)” People get weirdly hung up on the method of killing. Death is death.
Disclaimer: I can understand why people today don’t want to use nukes - it can lead to nuclear retaliation if your adversary has nukes of his own. But in 1945, America had a nuclear monopoly. There was no risk that Japan would send nukes flying back at America in retaliation.
That’s fine - but as the OP was very narrowly focused on the one specific incident, and because it’s so emotionally charged, I wanted to keep it to said focus. A thread on the differences of Total War vs. Limited engagements would certainly be interesting thus the reminder of how easy it is to spin off.
When the bombs were dropped, President Truman was not aware of the extent of the carnage it would inflict on the civilian population. When he was enlightened about the burned, mangled, and radiation sickness-ridden victims, he was horrified to the point of being broken, and ordered that no further atom bomb be dropped without his express permission.
Do you have a cite for this?
IIRC Truman was disturbed by the total destruction (same as most people would be) but never wavered from the need to have used the atomic bombs on Japan. He certainly never seemed “broken” by the decision.
When reflecting on his decision just over one year later, (38) Truman wrote that he had “no qualms about it whatever,” (39) and that he had not lost a wink of sleep over the decision. (40) - SOURCE
Damn. Sure thought I had typed that correctly. 
Truman’s involvement in the decision was, more or less:
- He was aware of the atomic bomb development.
- He chose not to interfere with pre-existing bomb plans.
- He was less of a “decider” than a tacit approver, though it wouldn’t have proceeded if Truman had wanted it stopped.
- Truman didn’t order the dropping of the bomb, the military commanders issued the order.
- After the bombings, Truman did order the cease-fire (with regard to atom bombs only).
- While Truman was affected by civilian casualties, and this factored into his decision to halt bombing, the nuclear ceasefire was driven more from the belief that the bombings had achieved their military and political purposes, and there was no appetite to continue fighting past the end of a war that was obviously all over except for the paperwork.
- Truman regretted the civilian casualties, but he never regretted allowing the bombings to proceed.
ETA: this sat in my drafts folder for ~4 hours before I got back to finish it. So it may be a little out of sequence for where the convo has since gone.
I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say.
@Capn_Carl 's point was that the total cost of the war continuing was not only the Japanese and Americans to be killed in the prep for an invasion, and an invasion, and the resistance and …
In addition to all that carnage, every day the war continued the Japanese were killing thousands of people in China and other countries too.
All of that killing and dying would continue until the war was ended … somehow someday.
Taking a war that probably had another 3 years to run and stopping it dead in its tracks in just a couple of weeks sure saved a lot of people.
And even if, as some latter day historians believe, the Japanese were destined to surrender in exhaustion in, say, early 1946 before an invasion was mounted, the nukes still saved a lot of lives versus those spent.
And notwithstanding @Der_Trihs misguided assertion it was all motivated by racial animus, the vast majority of the lives saved by the nukes were one or another kind of Asian, not American.
The Americans had already demonstrated themselves quite content to kill Germans in great number at a time when an awful lot of Americans were 1st or 2nd generation offspring of German immigrants.
ISTM this is important and something Truman would have considered (whether or not to stop it).
(As an aside…talk about timeliness for an article on history to be posted here…your cite beats all!)
But it is a reason the US was reluctant/slow to enter WWI or WWII.
Granted. We were slow to start but once involved there was neither killing nor sparing driven by systemic racism.
Also, after Nagasaki, they accepted the surrender the very next day.
Another thing to consider is that although the nuclear strikes were extremely destructive, they weren’t even the most destructive or bloody single strikes on Japan that year. The firebombing raidswere worse in both ways, although they required more planes, more casualties, and more risk on the part of the US.
The time to debate the morality of a war is before it starts. Was it justified for the US to go to war with Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor? However you answer that question, you’ve also answered the question about the use of nukes.
Nagasaki was bombed on August 9, 1945. The emperor formally surrendered on August 15, 1945.
That coincided with an attempted coup to stop the Emperor.
I’ve told this story before, but perhaps not here. On the banks of the Sumida River in Tokyo is a park. I was headed from Senso-ji to the Tokyo Skytree on a hot day in early September 2019 and had decided to walk, and wound up taking a break in said park. In the park is an altar which of course caught my interest. “Why is there such an altar in a public place?” I asked myself and it was clearly being tended, with offerings of food and incense. One Google Translate of the sign above the altar later and I knew that it was dedicated to the dead of Operation Meetinghouse, though of course the Japanese text didn’t call it that, which made sense as I was in Asakusa. So I took a minute, despite not having anything to offer of my own, and thought about those who lived and died in that raid, nearly 75 years later. I haven’t made it to Hiroshima or Nagasaki yet, though I’d like to, to add it to my time spent in Los Alamos and the Trinity Site. And I’m sure at times I’ll be as somber there as well, just like I was suddenly on the banks of the Sumida, like I have been at sites like Dachau.
I’m from New Mexico. The history of the bomb, the barbarity of the Japanese in WWII (we still remember Bataan), the effects of the Trinity test and uranium mining and weapons production are still known and dealt with in this state. War is hell, Sherman was right about that. But so was Patton, that you win a war by making the other poor bastard die for his country. All the atomic bombs were, especially the first fission devices, were really more efficient ways to continue the total war. As far as I’m concerned it ended it faster, and thousands or millions who might have died throughout Asia lived.
Worth noting that the A-bomb was intended for Germany, and an atomic bombing plan for Germany actually existed which would’ve dropped atom bombs on up to 70 German cities. Germany would be defeated by the A-bombs, and Japan would be cowed into surrendering.
Of course things didn’t work out that way, Germany surrendered, yet Japan did not. Plans were revised accordingly.
Yes there was racial animus against Japan. No, it didn’t really factor into the A-bomb plans, which were a pastiche of military necessity, desire to realize the substantial investment in the Manhattan project, desire to test and understand the effects of the weapon, desire to deter a very dangerous and relentlessly expansionary USSR, and as much as anything, a vengeful fury against Japan for the treacherous sneak attack and immensely costly war that proceeded from it.
If all those factors are weighed together, racial animus need not be invoked at all, and to the extent that it existed, its influence was negligible compared to other factors.