No contradiction at all, Randy, you asked the question, “If the Japanese had nuked the Grand Canyon what would you do?” I answered the question, I then, as is my wont when seeking extra credit stated that I didn’t feel that the Japanese would have picked an unoccupied target if they’d had the bomb and that they’d have nuked anything and everything they could have that was populated.
I must disagree, El Jeffe. Distroying a military base with the first bomb and then sending the message “We’ve got plenty of these new special bombs. You have no air force–you cannot stop us. We will continue to use these to destroy your ability to make war, then we will drop them on your cities. Your sacrifice will have no meaning. Surrender now.” would have been just as effective. Remember, all we had to do was convince the Emperor. An atomic explosion at night in Tokyo bay would have been very convincing.
“Destroying”…geez…
Wrongo- The Emperor had very little real power. The Tojo Military Government was certainly capable of shutting him up, and not allowing him to speak. What happened is that most of the Government really wanted to surrender anyway, but they knew any surrender talks would lead to them being shot down like dogs by the radical military Faction. The Emperor coming out and being (rather vaguely, note) in favour of surrender allowed them an honourable way out.
Note that there really wasn’t anything all that EVIIIIIIL about dropping a nuke. Sure, it killed lots of people in a horrible way, but so did the repeated firebombings of Tokyo. Somehow the propaganda has spread so that somehow “death by nuke” is worse that “death by firebomb”. I don’t think the dudes firebombed at Tokyo or Dresden would agree.
Well, my aptly named Dr., you just said that the Emperor was powerless to stop the war and then you said that when he came out in favor of surrender it tipped the balance. Thus my statement that he was the only person we had to convince. I maintain that using the weapons against military targets would have been just as effective in achieving our goal.
I do agree with you about the firebombing of cities vs. nuclear weapons. More people died in Dresden than Nagasaki. At that point in the war, bombing civilian populations was just standard operating proceedure. Judging the bombing in hindsight is perhaps not fair, but those are the terms of the current debate. Maybe the horrors of Hiroshima led to the 60-year-old taboo against the use of nuclear weapons in combat, which is a good thing.
Well, you have a point- what I meant was he was powerless to do it by himself. The nuking made Surrender an option for MOST. The Emperor coming out tilted the balance. But just convincing him would have only gotten him locked away as a puppet, as was done many times before in Japanese history.
bandit:
Stock war agitation propaganda. Compare to statements by our favourite iraqi information minister.
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And apparently, they fully intended to do it, if rather numbly. certainly they were being urged to die like kamikazes, and in the time, no one was sure they wouldn’t. Heck, I’m not sure now
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Do what? Die like “A hundred million shattered jewels”. Does this imply that all japanese were willing to die kamikaze deaths? You should never accept your enemys propaganda for truth without a good reason.
Compare kamikaze pilots to suicide bombers. Gives you some perspective.
Tuckerfan:
Hm must be thick. To little sleep? 
On the one hand you seem certain that the japanese of the WWII were ruthless enough to nuke the US from the world map, had they ever been given the chance.
On the other hand, if they did have the nuke, and first fired a warning shot instead of going right at it, you would:
“…argue that the Japanese didn’t have the courage to use it on a populated area…”
Do you mean that you would just argue that to convince others but secretely believe they would use it?
Or do you believe that anyone who fires a warning shot hasnt got the balls?
You have to straighten me out here.
I am a cantankerous SOB, and I wouldn’t care what the Japanese plans were, if they dropped a nuke anywhere on the US, I’d say whatever it took to keep opposition going. My beliefs on what they’d do next, would have very little bearing on my actions in that sense. I’d certainly expect them, if they had dropped the bomb on an unpopulated area, to switch to a populated area for their next target (and my guess would be Washington DC), but I wouldn’t let that stop me.
Ok.
May I then instead ask you what you believe the reaction of the majority of the population would be? Of the government?
Don’t know, wouldn’t care. I hate to use the “it’s the Irish in me” excuse, but if something get’s my dander up, then I become pretty irrational. In fact, at that point, I enjoy being angry. It’s rare that I get like that, but when I do, I’ll keep fighting until someone kills me. Were the Japanese to nuke the US in WWII and I was President, I’d issue the order to wipe 'em all out. The only way I could be prevented from doing that would be assassinated. I wouldn’t care if the entire US was protesting outside the front of the White House saying that we needed to surrender. Aren’t you glad I’m not the President?
No, he said the Emporer was not able to stop the war on his own. And he was not really very interested ion it one way or another until Hiroshima.
Which was not really true. The Emporer was a nutty guy who lived in insane luxury in his palace estate. The way the government was set up is that he basically sat around and listened to his advisors - the military people, and then said, “Make it so.” He likely didn’t really know or care what they were talking about.
And the USA experts were hardly able to analyze his psychology and views, much less how he’d react to an atom bomb. They DID know he was largely controlled by the military, and they probably would fight o the death. The atom bomb was such a big event that the Emporer, along with his less-extreme advisors, came down off their mountain.
I would once have agreed. But it seems they were gearing up for that and no one complained or refused. Surely not everyone would have done so, but I cannot honestly say I’m confidant about that being true. And Truman would have been less so: he’d seen what happened when we attacked Japanese held-lands before, so could he doubt that they’d have done so in defense of their own home?
Not really. Suicide bombers don’t live in a society where there is the all-encompassing and immediately physical father figure of the Emporer, nor are there the social ideas of the Japanese.
You’ll also note that in invasions of territory held by suicide-bomb-using-peoples, they don’t regularly fight to the last man, as quite commonly happened in WWII.
To dismiss the idea of an “island of kamikazes” as racist seems sort of silly. Just look at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Not only did the military fight to the last man, but the civilian populace largely commited suicide.
Factor in fighting for their very homes, and you have a pretty determined populace.
Or are you saying they wouldn’t defend their own homes to the extent that they defended some islands?
I don’t mean to sterotype them or anything, but I really believe the Japanese would have done so, for a while at least. And the American leadership must have believed they would.
“The death toll is catastrophic.”
simple:
BOTH bombs were dropped because the US wanted to test them. And to scare Salin shitless. The Japanese were ready to surrender before the bomb on Hiroshima, even, but the US didn’t want to know. The Japanese wanted to hold on to their Emperor, but that didn’t fit in the US Agenda.
So they bombed. Twice. They had 2 type of boms, so might as well test them at the same time, no?
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-08/18zinn.htm
http://www.tgarden.demon.co.uk/writings/articles/Hiroshima.html
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
the beginning of USA bloodthirstiness.
Look up US military activities outside the US after 1945. Never was there an imminent threat. They’re called wars of choice, and there were a LOT of them.
It should be pointed out that the reason so many of the civilians committed suicide was that they had been told by the Japanese military that the Allied forces would rape all of the women and ship everyone off to slave camps, which was nowhere near the truth.
There are stories of GI’s pleading with a woman standing on the edge of the sea cliffs not to jump or throw her baby down to the rocks below, but they couldn’t stop her.
elfje,
Sigh
On the SDMB’s we try and fight ignornace, not spread it. The US had no intentions of getting rid of the Emperor, in fact MacArthur wasquite adamant that the Emperor be allowed to maintain his position.
Actually it pretty much was the practice from the outset of the war. Warsaw was terror bombed by the Germans within the first month of the war. The practice also predates World War II, running back to the first uses of the airplane as a weapon. Germany in Spain, Japan in China, the British in Iraq, Italians in Ethiopia, etc. There was also the very limited (in scale) bombings that occurred in World War I with zeppelins and biplanes. You are correct with regards to Germany and England targeting each others cities, but I would note that the bombing of cities was expected to occur by both sides. One of the justifications for the policy of appeasement was the sorry state of Fighter Command in the late 30’s along with an overestimation of the size and capabilities of the Luftwaffe. The effects that strategic bombing would have both in terms of casualties produced and it’s psychological effects on the civilian populations was also greatly overestimated.
With regards to military versus civilian targets, the separation of the two is a bit arbitrary in the context of a total war. Industries drive nation’s war making capabilities, but they are run by civilians. Further complicating this was the inability to hit the declared ‘formal’ targets with the technology of the time. While the US did attempt to maintain somewhat of a fiction that they were targeting factories, rail yards oil refineries and such, it was well understood that this wasn’t where the vast majority of the bombs being dropped were actually ending up. ‘Bomber’ Harris did give up the fiction that factories were being targeted and called it de-housing.
Apologies for the slight hijack away from the central thread of why the second atomic bomb was used; but I think the question makes a bit more sense if phrased the other way around. Within the context of the time that it was used, it seems more appropriate to ask “Why wouldn’t it have been?” It’s been years since I read it, but I’d highly recommend ‘Thank God for the Atom Bomb and other Essays’ by Paul Fussell.
It mustn’t have been up to MacArthur, then.
Have a look at these sites:
http://www.dannen.com/decision/index.html
http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm
"The Potsdam Proclamation
On the evening of July 26, 1945 in San Francisco (which in Tokyo was the morning of July 27) a message from the Allies now commonly known as the Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast in Japanese. The broadcast was relayed to the Japanese government on the morning of the 27th (Pacific War Research Society, The Day Man Lost, pg. 211-212).
The proclamation demanded “the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces” (U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the U.S., The Conference of Berlin (Potsdam), vol. 2, pg. 1474-1476). It made no mention of Japan’s central surrender consideration: the retention of the Emperor’s position (Butow, pg. 138-139). What made this crucial was that the Japanese believed their Emperor to be a god, the heart of the Japanese people and culture (Pacific War Research Society, Japan’s Longest Day, pg. 20). The absence of any assurance regarding the Emperor’s fate became Japan’s chief objection to the Potsdam Proclamation (Pacific War Research Society, The Day Man Lost, pg. 212-214). In addition, the proclamation made statements that, to the Japanese, could appear threatening to the Emperor: “There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest” and “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals” (U.S. Dept. of State, Potsdam 2, pg. 1474-1476). "
Which does not change the fact that they would likely continue to do the same in japan.
Both of these statements are true. We were not willing to let them have any slack in negotiations, nor were we willing to let them feel they had any safe point to bargain from at all. And lets not forget that the people who wrote Potsdam did not include McArthur. Even McArthur may not have been absolutely wedded to the idea of keeping the Emporer until the occupation was secure. In the end, he was being pragmatic and found that a reformed, humble Emporer was much more useful than a corpse. But if Hirohito had proved more resistant, who knows what might have happened?
Historical revisionism almost at its worst. The Japanese “surrender” offer amounted to a patheticly transparant attempot to hold onto their military government and escape personal reponsiblity. And our “agenda”, whch you implicitly damn, was simply the preservation of peace in the region in the future. Your assertion that we neeed to test the bombs is farcical; there were excellent testing facilities and the scientists had very accurate guesses as to how destructive it would be. your comments about Stalin are unsupported by scholarship.
So we must wait until the enemy is at the gates to fight them? Bull. We may have made some mistakes, but at least we’re fighting for something larger than ourselves. If you love narrow self-interest so much, you’d best watch out - we have the ability to take over much of the world, you know…
By striking first, you lower yourself to your enemy’s level, and therefor are no better than him. Ideals of Freedom and Democracy sound very false, coming from a Super Power that is only bent on fortifying its own position in the world and is willing to go over dead bodies to reach that goal.
The USA cares only about the USA, methinks. Now I don’t care if that’s so, but at least have the guts to come out and say it, instead of bombing countries under the guise of “the good guy”, and spawning rhetorics that you’re doing it to “liberate” a country. Don’t claim to have the moral ground, when in fact the majority of the world’s population thinks you’re the text book example of amorality.
ANd I know you have the ability to take over most of the world. You’re trying your damndest best to do so, at the minute. Oh, I know, not a lot of countries will actually be bombed into submission, no.
Most of em will either be diplomatically and economically starved until they acceed, or they’ll be scared into complying.
It’s nice being an economic super power, isn’t it? It’s just not so nice the way you’re abusing that power.
We also care about Freedom and Honor, and we’re willing to fight for it.
Argumentum ad Populum, Wild Hyperbole, and/or an Outright Lie.
Why is this a bad thing? By our standards, most of the world’s rulers rank somewhere between that crud that accumulates between your toes and Satan. maybe they will learn something about dealing nice, now.
I love this. We don’t bother the world, people criticize us for being isolationist. We try and remake it, people call us imperialists. We try to live in it, we get planes dropping into the WTC.