Reading about the atomic bombings, it seems that the weapons didn’t actually kill more people or do more property damage than a few large conventional bombing raids. At this point, the Allied forces had overwhelming numbers of B-29 bombers to use in massive air raids, and lots of time and money. Supposedly, they killed about as many civilians with a few large air raids on Tokyo alone.
However, being able to release incredible flashes that devastate a whole city at once does objectively show it’s pointless to continue to fight. If the enemy shows he can do this at will, annihilating most any defense, well, it’s over.
But why couldn’t they have demonstrated this new capability by dropping the weapon on an uninhabited part of Japan? I was reading about the Nagasaki bombing : out of 80,000 people killed, a little over 100 of them were soldiers.
Couldn’t the message to the Japanese have been “we have a new weapon of unimaginable power, you are quite screwed. Send observers to this location to see what it does. P.S., you might want to evacuate first”
After the first bomb, the Japanese high command thought that maybe we only had 1, so I guess they could have done this twice.
This has been proposed and discussed many times. You might feel quite differently if you had been around (or killed) at Pearl Harbor and subsequent battles. Saving lives of the enemy was the last thing the US wanted to do at the time. Probably most of the US wanted revenge, too. Dropping a demonstration bomb might have worked, but dropping it on Japan certainly did. You do understand the concept of “enemy,” don’t you?
War isn’t nice and humanitarian concerns are quite different under wartime circumstances.
Otherwise, **Musicat **has put it pretty succinctly. It was wartime. We didn’t start it, we were sick of it and we took the first opportunity to end it with as few casualties on our side as possible. Too bad about the master race that started it. All else is revisionist nonsense.
Japan barely surrendered as it was. A demo bomb would have likely just hardened their resolve. And as Musicat notes we have covered this before - it is the realm of Monday morning Generals, Japanese pity parties, and the hate America for everything crowd.
Because, after spending 20 Billion dollars to make 3 bombs, the US wasn’t about to waste them on a piece of desert.
(among plenty of other good reasons).
While you might think exploding a giant bomb in the middle of the US, with thousands of observers, some arriving 6 months early to prepare, might be hard to keep a secret, I wonder if Japan intelligence ever learned anything about this before the real thing was dropped on Japan 3 weeks later? And if they got wind of it, how much detail did they know?
Because Tokyo had already been heavily bombed with conventional weapons and was largely destroyed anyway. Hiroshima, being farther away from US bases in the Pacific, had escaped most previous bombing. The US wanted a relatively intact city in order to demonstrate clearly just how destructive the new weapon was.
I doubt they had much more time than to get rumors about a super-bomb, if that. That rumor was pretty widespread, without details, within the week. I seem to recall newspaper stories that were covered up by a report of an ammo dump exploding; I guarantee not everyone believed that, knowing the hush-hush nature of the area.
A more pointed question that provokes instant anger whenever I’ve asked it (without every getting a substantive response) is this: While I understand that the rounding up of Japanese-Americans and putting them all in camps was an egregious violation of human and civil rights and almost certainly 99% unneeded… does that mean there was not a single spy for the Japanese among them? That not one of the 150,000 was indeed more loyal to the homeland than the US?
Tokyo was already a wasteland from the conventional bombings and firestorms. It would have had less political/military impact to bomb there. We also wanted a largely untouched site to evaluate the bomb’s effect. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were highly rated military targets as well, while Tokyo was political/civilian. For all the accusations, the US did consider excessive or all civilian casualties unacceptable.
The customized torpedoes that sank many ships in Pearl Harbor were built by nonstop shifts in Nagasaki.
I don’t understand the point of the question. What difference does it make? Even if a few spies were included, it still wouldn’t have justified it. Why weren’t more German and Italian Americans rounded up? Surely some of them might have been disloyal too.
Enemy aliens are almost always interred. The problem with the Internment of Japanese-Americans here in CA, etc is that not only were Japanese citizens interred (normal, acceptable) but so were American citizens of Japanese descent (racism).
An even more interesting question, but one that is potentially impossible to answer, would b: How many Japanese-American became spies for Japan because of the internment effort? But we’d probably stray into GD territory discussing that.
I am not in any way saying that because there were or may have been spies among those interned that it justified the action. It would not even if there were were, say, a dedicated phalanx of spies for Japan among those of Japanese ancestry.
But I don’t think the question is pointless, at all. I think it’s an important and relevant question. It is, though, one of those questions that can’t be asked because it sounds like it’s seeking a justification for the encompassing act. Because we must not be allowed to question the immorality of the internment, we can’t even consider a relevant and collateral issue.
So you want to send this message to the enemy a head of time:
Hi Japan
We are demonstrating our new awesome power, we will be dropping this new bomb (technically not a bomb but a device that will be exploding) on your uninhabited island 50 nautical miles NNE off the coast of Tokyo. We will be flying a B52 bomber, US design on a compass bearing of 271 degrees at a altitude of 30,000 ft with the conventional red white and blue insignia on the side and wings and we should be there about 1500 hours your time on Sat. Please feel free to observe from a save distance, it is our hope this would have the equivalent power of 20,000 tons (US) of TNT.
We do hope this is enough time for you to evacuate any civilian population. We also ask you very nicely please don’t shoot down out plane with the new weapon, it cost us quite a bit and we want to make a good impression with it.