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During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the Allies of World War II conducted two atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date.
There's quite a lot more information surrounding this event, but I would rather not present only one or two sides to the story. I would instead prefer that people discover it for themselves. I also feel it'll lead to a more interesting discussion that way.
Here is my understanding of events, given to me by my ninth grade world history teacher.
In 1266, Kublai Khan (third son of Genghis Khan) from the Mongol Empire sent emissaries to Japan with essentially a notification of an intent to invade, asking for surrender. Japan refused.
Kublai Khan then amassed the second largest naval invasion force seen on the face of the earth (D-Day is 3rd, not 1st) and launched for the shores of Japan. The entire fleet was destroyed by a giant typhoon and the invasion failed. The Japanese people were grateful to their gods for sending the huge typhoon to protect them.
Kublai Khan then amassed the true largest naval invasion force seen on the face of the earth, launched it at japan, and the typhoon now-famously-named Kamikaze forced the Mongols to decide whether they would be shipwrecked on Japanese soil or drowned out in the sea. Needless to say, the entire Mongol force was easily defeated.
And so for 800 years, the Japanese people believed sincerely and without a doubt that the gods were protecting their homeland from invasion, and that they could not lose a war on their own soil.
That is why they would not surrender when the USA invaded them. They did not believe that they could possibly lose, and so they fought tooth-and-nail to the very end, resulting in many millions more deaths than there would have been if they had surrendered when the war was evidently lost.
The nuclear bombs were dropped in order to shake the Japanese of the belief in their absolute imperviousness from invasion, in the interest of saving the greatest number of lives, as the Japanese would not have surrendered until their entire sovereign nation were destroyed by the war.
If this retelling is accurate, then it is hard for me to have an opinion. This is not a one-sided policy debate. There are very, very good arguments on both sides.
I just had to write an essay about this. Let me copy-paste. Bear in mind I wrote half of it in school on the morning of the day it was due, so it is what it is.
When President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the first time in human history atomic weapons had ever been used as an act of war. To this date, it remains the only time such an attack has been carried out on any nation. Proponents of this one-time occurrence maintain that the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary evil justified by the amount of British and US soldiers it saved from a deadly invasion of mainland Japan. However, historical facts strongly disconfirm this view of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the US was not justified in using atomic bombs against the Japanese because the bombs were not necessary to end the war, they caused the spread of dangerous nuclear arms around the world, and the use of the bombs on civilians violates the international laws of warfare.
The burden of proof on the issue of whether or not the US was justified in using atomic bombs against Japan clearly lies on the affirmative side. In the absence of any reason for using atomic bombs to kill hundreds of thousands of people, the use is obviously unjustified. The proponents of the dropping of the atom bombs attempt to justify their use by claiming that the use of the bombs caused the end of the war with Japan, thus saving millions of lives. However, this is plainly not the case. Historical evidence shows that Japan was planning to surrender regardless of the invasion of mainland Japan and that the Truman administration pushed through to use the bomb for reasons other than ending the war. The Japanese had all but admitted defeat as far back as February 1945, almost a half year prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, according to historian Peter Kuznick. At the Potsdam conference held on July 26, 1945, Japan made clear its intentions to surrender under increasing defeats and the threat of a Soviet invasion. Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reports that at the conference he briefed US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on his findings on a prior visit to Tokyo. Dulles stated, "they (the Japanese) desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." President Truman was aware of Japan's willingness to surrender. Truman's July 18th entry in his personal diary mentions a "telegram from the *** Emperor asking for peace." Plainly then, the dropping of atomic bombs was not necessary to end the war with Japan. Truman dropped the bomb for a variety of reasons; he did not want to seem weak to the American people, he did not want to waste years of time and money going into the research for the bomb, and he wanted to show the soviets the power that America had. Roughly 200,000 Japanese civilians died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That mass killing simply cannot be condoned given the failure of the attempts to justify its necessity.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, as mentioned, the only use of atomic weapons as an act of war to date. However this does not preclude the possibility of any use of nuclear weapons in the future. There are now 9 world powers equipped with vast arsenals of nuclear arms. Given the massive power of nuclear weapons today, even a single use of these weapons could plunge millions of people into a nuclear winter. The threat of nuclear warfare looms large around the world today, and the use of atomic bombs against Japan is in a large way responsible for that. What the US intended to do by dropping the atom bombs against Japan was to frighten the soviets by showing them how powerful we were. Instead what they succeeded in doing was prompting the soviets to scramble to catch up and develop nuclear arms of their own. This in large part caused the cold war. By displaying what incredible power the atomic bombs had to the whole world, the US caused other countries to realize that they needed an atomic weapon to keep up with the main military power of the time. Soon, more countries like the United Kingdom, India, the People's Republic of China, and Pakistan raced to develop nuclear arms of their own. The US had established a precedent of using nuclear weapons in a war if necessary, and this remains a precedent that cannot be reversed. Thus, the US should not have used atomic weapons against Japan as it caused the dangerous nuclear proliferation that characterizes our world today.
Finally, the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki violated international laws of war. It has always, down through history, been considered contrary to the nature of legal warfare to openly attack civilians. But that is exactly what the US did in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The civilians residing in those Japanese cities were mainly women, children, and the elderly. The purpose of outlawing attacks against civilians is to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Only the combative enemy can be attacked in times of war. The League of Nations, of which the US was a part and agreed with, made this custom a law. In 1938, the League unanimously ratified a piece of legislation titled Protection of Civilian Populations Against Bombing From the Air in Case of War. The main clause in this legislation explicitly states, "The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal." The US itself ratified this legislation. Only 7 years later, the US would then turn and violate not only one of the oldest moral imperatives of war in human history, but also a well-established international law. Therefore, the US bombing of Hiroshima was both immoral and illegal.
Sometimes in war, drastic measures must be taken to save lives in dire situations. It is unfortunately the case that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not one of those situations. The US illegally and immorally fired a deadly atomic weapon upon civilian women and children, killing roughly 200,000 people. This bombing was clearly not necessary as the Japanese were all but eager to surrender to the US prior to the dropping of the bombs. This unnecessary display of excess force caused a global nuclear arms race that resulted in mass nuclear proliferation. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki then stand among the worst mistakes in US history.
Well said underdogs. It is interesting to note that while there is evidence for Truman wanting to show off to Russia they already knew. Spies had sent back news to Russia of the Manhattan project long before the bombs were ever dropped, which is how Russia was able to drop its own no later than four years after the US dropped theirs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. - SOURCE
On another related note, Obama is now proposing (though it can't be made official till after the election) of bringing down our stockpile of nuclear warheads from the currently around 5000 to somewhere between 300 - 400, much less even than what was signed in the START treaty with Russia. Of course Republicans are all speaking out against it, but hey, why have the power to destroy the world a few times over when you can have enough to destroy it a few hundred times? - SOURCE
The proponents of the dropping of the atom bombs attempt to justify their use by claiming that the use of the bombs caused the end of the war with Japan, thus saving millions of lives. However, this is plainly not the case. Historical evidence shows that Japan was planning to surrender regardless of the invasion of mainland Japan and that the Truman administration pushed through to use the bomb for reasons other than ending the war. The Japanese had all but admitted defeat as far back as February 1945, almost a half year prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, according to historian Peter Kuznick. At the Potsdam conference held on July 26, 1945, Japan made clear its intentions to surrender under increasing defeats and the threat of a Soviet invasion. Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reports that at the conference he briefed US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on his findings on a prior visit to Tokyo. Dulles stated, "they (the Japanese) desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." President Truman was aware of Japan's willingness to surrender. Truman's July 18th entry in his personal diary mentions a "telegram from the *** Emperor asking for peace."
Is this true? Now, I'm using Wikipedia here to refresh my memory, so I'm not exactly using the most rigorous source, but here's what I've found:
Japan's Imperial headquarters said that, "We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan)
"Although picking up leaflets and listening to foreign radio broadcasts had been banned by the government, the American propaganda efforts were successful in making the key points of the declaration known to most Japanese. As a result, Prime Minister Suzuki felt compelled to meet the Japanese press, to whom he reiterated his government's commitment to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration)
Moreover, when addressing the press following the Allies' ultimatum for Japan to surrdender after the Potsdam Declaration, Japanese Premier Kantaro Suzuki used the word "mokukatsu," which can either mean "ignore" or "be silent about/wait and see." (the NSA released a good piece about this way back when: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/mokusatsu.pdf). The Allies and the US interpreted it as the former, ie that Japan planned to ignore the Allies' demands and fight on, even though it was probably meant in the latter sense. But regardless, as the Wiki article says, "Although mokusatsu may not have been intended to communicate to the Allies a refusal to surrender, the Potsdam Declaration ultimatum nevertheless allowed for only one acceptable answer, unconditional surrender. Any other answer would, as the declaration warned, cause "prompt and utter destruction." It was only after destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs, two assassination attempts on Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, and an attempted military coup against the Emperor (the Kyūjō Incident), that the Emperor himself broadcast acceptance (Gyokuon-hōsō) of the Potsdam Declaration terms, i.e., unconditional surrender, officially ending the Pacific war." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokusatsu)
So I find it hard to believe that Japan were willing to and wanted to surrender before the bombs were dropped.
In relation to this debate, it said that the estimated casualties for Operation Downfall (the invasion US of Japan) were so high that the US produced 500,000 Purple Hearts to be awarded to the wounded soldiers. To this day, the casualties sustained by the armed forces have never exceeded that number. In other words, the operation would have been so ridiculously costly in terms of the human lives it took that the atomic bombs were in comparison humane.
Estimates for the death toll were almost all in excess of 250,000 which is what the upper-estimates are for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are. But these figures depended on how assumptions of hard the Japanese civilians were going to fight for their homeland. Some estimates put the death toll in excess of several million.
The Japanese killed U.S. soldiers who were ready to kill and be killed. The U.S. killed innocent Japanese civilians who had nothing to do with the attack, they weren't prepared to kill or be killed. U.S. was wrong. End of story. Japan fought the right way, killing soldiers. U.S. fought the wrong way killing innocent civilians. Debate closed. Lock the thread.
The ultimatum was unnecessary and hypocritical. There was no reason to treat ending the war as an imperative at the time. The 'millions' of lives that were endangered by the continuation of the war were not in immediate danger, as if to say if the USA did not drop those bombs as soon as possible, millions of lives were going to be lost on the spot. There was time to negotiate. There is one especially egregeous point in the Potsdam Declaration that states: "the elimination "for all time [of] the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest". Now, the Japanese Empire was not one that had an especially peaceful and tolerant history, to be sure, but this is twice-over hypocritical hand-rinsing and condemnation on America's part. American exceptionalism and echoes of manifest destiny were at a critical high at the time and to-this-day have hardly faltered. America then, just as it does now, believed very much in using brutality to expand it's own interests and empire. And this whole ultimatum was an absolute false blame-shift. "Hey do exactly as I tell you to or else I'll have to kill you. I mean, I'll have no choice. If fact, you're the one with the choice. If I kill you it's really your fault." Absolutely repulsive.
Unconditional surrender was counter-productive to the goal of sparing as many innocent lives as possible. The US lost all credibility when it went against the advise of the British, and employ the demands as unconditional. To summarize what is known about the Emperor's reasoning and concerns leading up to the Potsdam Declaration, he did not want a resulting weakening (much less complete replacement) of the status of the Empirical power structure. So much so that it very well may be one of the singly biggest reasons he didn't surrender prior to the bombings. If negotiation has been left on the table, an atomic-bombingless end to WWII in the Pacific may have been the result.
The goal was not to shorten the war or save lives, but to intercept Soviet expansion. American military leaders had been found on record essentially predicting and preempting the imminent show down between Russia and the US. The atomic bombings were yes, perhaps in part to 'show off' to Russia, but more over to wrangle all of the Pacific territory that would otherwise be split with Russia. The execution was unjustifiably heinous. Firstly, Truman could have, given that it's known that we had at least 3 warheads in our possession at the time, used one of them as a demonstration. Perhaps off-coast or in an abandoned or ruined area. How would we expect Japan to have responded to vague, then-empty, and extraordinary threats of absolute, god-like capacity for destruction? Even if it didn't work, we had two more. Then comes the topic of target choice. It was beyond reproachable. To deliberately choose the most civilian-dense and intact cities puts Truman in the same category as Hitler, neither one was above mass murder of innocent people for the means of their contrived ends. It was not necessary as the stated point of the bombings were to convince Japan it could not win, and in fact the bombings were thus as literally contrary to the stated purpose 'of saving innocent lives' as possible.
The bombings have utterly compromised any claim to responsibility and righteousness that the US thought that it had. Now we live in a world where the US (or certain elements therein) rather comically likes to claim that everyone else on the planet should abandon their nuclear weapons except us. See Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Un over there? They're so crazy they might do something so unspeakably mad and evil like drop nuclear weapons on innocent people's heads, surely we must invade their countries to prevent that. At all costs! Well, funny thing happened, the only people who have ever been so callously belligerent to drop nuclear weapons on innocent people were the US.
Closing thoughts. This is actually rather coincidentally true. Just this morning I actually had a this unbelievably real, lucid sort of dream where I was at work, and then after a short while we suddenly felt the whole building quake a little. I didn't think anything of it at first but noticed a lot of people across the building scrambling frantically to exit. So I walk over with some other people to see what the commotion is about, and as soon as we walk outside, we see a mushroom cloud not a mile or two away, dominating the entire view of the sky. There is only a few minutes of dream left from here, if that, which can be summarized as a succession of panic, screams and a feeling of hopelessness of an order that can't be described in words. Any second a wave of destruction is going to annihilate me and my family, there's no running or hiding, there is no challenging it. It was horrifying and I can't possibly overstate that. For just a few moments I believe I had some understanding of what it would be like. But that's my privilege too, that no matter how much I believed it was real at the time, it wasn't. I got to wake up from the nightmare. They didn't. There is no doubt in my mind that not only was Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'unjustified', but that they were acts of terrorism, the scale of which the world had never seen before or since.
I believe that all criminals should be killed. My god is Kira. He will bring the world to a new era of peace. The god of the new world is our savior.
Innocents live. Criminals die.
After a war, I believe you should be charged with war crimes if you killed civilians and not soldiers. If you fought the right way then you shouldn't be punished. I still don't like war in anyway. I believe that most soldiers are evil killers.
To answer the question, I'll respond to previous posters. The basis of my reasoning is thus: To determine if an act is justified, you must look at ONLY the knowledge one possess WHILE making the decision - information AFTER the event has occurred is USELESS because it was not in the possession of the decision-maker - to claim that someone's decision is not justified because of information they did not have is absurd because it means they would otherwise have to make an entirely irrational decision to satisfy you, when they had ZERO reason to believe that the irrational decision was correct.
Theftz22 said:
I just had to write an essay about this. Let me copy-paste. Bear in mind I wrote half of it in school on the morning of the day it was due, so it is what it is.
When President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the first time in human history atomic weapons had ever been used as an act of war. To this date, it remains the only time such an attack has been carried out on any nation. Proponents of this one-time occurrence maintain that the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary evil justified by the amount of British and US soldiers it saved from a deadly invasion of mainland Japan. However, historical facts strongly disconfirm this view of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the US was not justified in using atomic bombs against the Japanese because the bombs were not necessary to end the war, they caused the spread of dangerous nuclear arms around the world, and the use of the bombs on civilians violates the international laws of warfare.
Laws of warfare simply aren't followed. Anyone will violate a law when they feel they risk the lives of millions... given the hindsight bias is brought into this paper, you can't tell me you wouldn't drop a single nuke if you knew within a mile where Hitler and his top Nazi commanders were living in 1939? Or if you wouldn't, you've just refused to even try to stop the second biggest murderer of the twentieth century because you'd kill some civilians (many of whom blindly support the tyrant). There's also the fact that it (at a basic level) makes sense to violate a law dedicated to saving lives if violating that law saves more lives than upholding that law saves - more on that later, as this is an intro paragraph you wrote so I have an intro response, not something in-depth here.
Theftz22 said:
The burden of proof on the issue of whether or not the US was justified in using atomic bombs against Japan clearly lies on the affirmative side. In the absence of any reason for using atomic bombs to kill hundreds of thousands of people, the use is obviously unjustified. The proponents of the dropping of the atom bombs attempt to justify their use by claiming that the use of the bombs caused the end of the war with Japan, thus saving millions of lives. However, this is plainly not the case. Historical evidence shows that Japan was planning to surrender regardless of the invasion of mainland Japan and that the Truman administration pushed through to use the bomb for reasons other than ending the war. The Japanese had all but admitted defeat as far back as February 1945, almost a half year prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, according to historian Peter Kuznick. At the Potsdam conference held on July 26, 1945, Japan made clear its intentions to surrender under increasing defeats and the threat of a Soviet invasion. Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reports that at the conference he briefed US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on his findings on a prior visit to Tokyo. Dulles stated, "they (the Japanese) desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." President Truman was aware of Japan's willingness to surrender. Truman's July 18th entry in his personal diary mentions a "telegram from the *** Emperor asking for peace." Plainly then, the dropping of atomic bombs was not necessary to end the war with Japan. Truman dropped the bomb for a variety of reasons; he did not want to seem weak to the American people, he did not want to waste years of time and money going into the research for the bomb, and he wanted to show the soviets the power that America had. Roughly 200,000 Japanese civilians died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That mass killing simply cannot be condoned given the failure of the attempts to justify its necessity.
You've committed a logical fallacy (maybe not the precise term, but it's sufficient) known as "hindsight bias." You've made the assumption that the United States had all this information at the time. At the end of the day, the United States may not have taken the best course of action, from what we can see now, but it's damn clear if you look only at evidence before 1945 that the United States was 100% justified in their actions [as you'll notice all your evidence is past 1945 - useless for Truman]. They had 0.0% reason to believe Japan would surrender, since the military had taken over and they had vowed repeatedly to never surrender - yeah the people and the emperor would surrender, but the hardliners were the ones who had the means to fight back and would fight back. Indeed, it was the emperor who pled for peace (and succeeded this time) after the second bomb was dropped - the military was more than eager to follow "The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War" which dictated never surrendering [prosecute the war to the bitter end]. His note about the Emperor was insulting because the Emperor was not able to actually DO anything.
And estimates suggest that the invasion operation on Kyushu would have cost almost 400,000 lives - that's just the US, not the Japanese lives, in a US victory - and they'd have had to invade other areas as well...casualty estimates for a total on both sides are over 1,000,000 - the bomb ultimately saved 800,000 lives, American or Japanese... and how could you justify to an American people an invasion ten years down the road when you had a war-changing option and refused to use it? So many mothers would cry "If only they'd used the bomb, I'd have my son back..." And while some members of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could feel the same way, there's no guarantee we wouldn't have had to invade there as well... and that just means some of those who died in the bomb would have simply died a different way.
Theftz22 said:
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, as mentioned, the only use of atomic weapons as an act of war to date. However this does not preclude the possibility of any use of nuclear weapons in the future. There are now 9 world powers equipped with vast arsenals of nuclear arms. Given the massive power of nuclear weapons today, even a single use of these weapons could plunge millions of people into a nuclear winter. The threat of nuclear warfare looms large around the world today, and the use of atomic bombs against Japan is in a large way responsible for that. What the US intended to do by dropping the atom bombs against Japan was to frighten the soviets by showing them how powerful we were. Instead what they succeeded in doing was prompting the soviets to scramble to catch up and develop nuclear arms of their own. This in large part caused the cold war. By displaying what incredible power the atomic bombs had to the whole world, the US caused other countries to realize that they needed an atomic weapon to keep up with the main military power of the time. Soon, more countries like the United Kingdom, India, the People's Republic of China, and Pakistan raced to develop nuclear arms of their own. The US had established a precedent of using nuclear weapons in a war if necessary, and this remains a precedent that cannot be reversed. Thus, the US should not have used atomic weapons against Japan as it caused the dangerous nuclear proliferation that characterizes our world today.
Nuclear winter models were made under the assumption that there is no such thing as water on the Earth. It's not exactly scientifically valid by any stretch. Here's an article discussing the reality of the possibility of nuclear winter. It's got funky highlighting because I copy+pasted this from a place where I once had to highlight parts of the article I thought were important.
(Brian, February 8, “Nuclear War and Nuclear Winter”, http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4244)
Put on your jackets; today we're going to prepare for the nuclear winter, the theorized period of catastrophic global cooling following a nuclear war. Some say that, if war happens, a nuclear winter is a certainty that will devastate agriculture and kill billions; some say that it's greatly overstated or even outright made-up by anti-nuke activists. Does the prospect of a nuclear winter truly constitute one more reason why nuclear arsenals should be dismantled? Our purpose today is not to explore the myriad other implications of nuclear war, or to otherwise prove that it's a bad thing. That's pretty clear. The obvious effects of a nuclear blast, the initial explosion itself and the radioactive fallout, are well established and not in dispute. As destructive as those are, their long-term environmental effects are negligible. So what, then, causes the nuclear winter? The concept of a nuclear winter entered the mainstream in 1983, when the "TTAPS" team, named for its authors Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan, reviewed existing work and ran computational climate simulations to see what would happen when huge amounts of smoke were added to the atmosphere. The source of this smoke is not the nuclear explosion itself, but the all the building fires and wildfires that would follow each one. Take 150 nukes striking major population centers worldwide, and that's a lot of fires, with a smoke output greatly exceeding anything in human history. Members of the TTAPS team have also published many followup papers, revising and improving their estimates, but generally with similar results. Almost all of the simulations run by scientists replicating these results agree, at least in broad strokes, when the input variables are the same. It should be stressed that there are a lot of these variables.The principal weakness that these studies all share hinges on one of these variables, and it's a very important one:Exactly how much smoke will the fire following a nuclear bomb produce?In 1986, Joyce Penner from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published an article in the journal Nature in which she pointed out thatthis specific variable is responsible for determining whether the effects will be minor or massive. She also found thatthe published estimates of this varied widely. Penner's paper was not the only one critical of the TTAPS predictions. However, this fact is often misinterpreted. The differences that have been found among the various simulations are of degree. Laypeople who hear of the criticism often think that the idea of a nuclear winter has been "debunked" or that it's some kind of discredited myth. This is not the case. Perhaps the most often cited and most critical paper was "Nuclear Winter Reappraised" by Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider, published in 1986 in the journal Foreign Affairs. They did not dismiss the idea at all; rather they recharacterized it as a nuclear autumn. So here we get into the meat of the question. We know with pretty good certainty how a given amount of smoke in the atmosphere, distributed a certain way, will affect the climate and for how long; but what we can only guess at is how much smoke is produced when a city burns after a nuke. Our guesses are educated, but they're all over the map. Cities also vary wildly in just about every relevant aspect. Let's look at what we know from history. An obvious question to ask is whether these effects have been seen with any of the nuclear tests that many nations have conducted. Some 2,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated, somewhat less than half of which were in the atmosphere and are comparable to what would be used in a war. In none of them were any harmful smoke-induced environmental effects produced. However the reason for this is quite simple. Nuclear tests are not performed in cities filled with tens of thousands of combustible buildings; they happen way out in the desert or over the ocean, and no subsequent fires are created. Butwhat about the two cases when atomic weapons were used on real-life cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?Discussion of the subsequent fires in both cities are hard to come by, as they were not really what people were focusing on. Hiroshima developed a firestorm — where it builds into a single large fire with a central heat core that draws in oxygen with a powerful wind from all around — that peaked two to three hours after the explosion. Six hours after the explosion, nearly everything combustible within a one-and-a-half kilometer radius had been consumed, and the fire was almost completely out, leaving over 8 square kilometers destroyed. Descriptions of residual and secondary fires outside the radius of the firestorm are rare and hard to find, but it seems likely that several hundred or thousand small fires continued for the better part of 24 hours. Photographs taken of Hiroshima over the next few days do not show any significant evidence of vast amounts of smoke. Nagasaki was hit with a larger bomb, but its geography spared it a firestorm. Whereas Hiroshima is centered in a large flat plain, Nagasaki is irregularly shaped among hills and valleys, and cleft by a large harbor. Secondary fires were widespread, and Nagasaki firefighters had to cope with a damaged water system. It took several days to get the many small structure fires controlled or burned out. But Nagasaki's geography meant that there were far fewer fires than in Hiroshima. Again, the post-nuke photographs don't show vast atmospheric plumes of smoke. When the Iraqi army set 700 of Kuwait's oil wells on fire when they retreated in 1991, the wells burned for eight months, lofting about a million tons of smoke into the atmosphere. The TTAPS team predicted global climate change effects, that fortunately failed to materialize.Carl Sagan discussed this error in his book The Demon-Haunted World, and later research discovered the reason. The smaller individual smoke plumes, spread over a wide area, did not generate sufficient uplift to get the smoke into the upper atmosphere, even though theoretically enough smoke was produced. Temperatures did drop over the Persian Gulf, but the effect remained localized. Other cataclysmic events have proven that the nuclear winter scenario is not at all far-fetched. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, also in 1991, threw some 17 million tons of particulates into the upper atmosphere that caused global temperatures to drop by about a degree for several months. Sunlight dropped by 10%. This temperature drop did not, however, have any long-term effect on agriculture. Pinatubo was only a blip compared the the K-T extinction event of some 65 million years ago, when a theorized asteroid hit us with one hundred million megatons of destructive force, lighting virtually the entire world on fire. The evidence of this is called the K-T boundary, a layer of clay found all around the world.Sunlight was reduced by 10-20% for ten years, which caused a massive cascading extinction of species from plants to herbivores to carnivores. But we shouldn't expect anything like this to happen from a nuclear war. Times continue to change, including the nature of warfare. Nations no longer stockpile the megaton class weapons popular in the 1950s and 1960s; typical yields now are a fraction of a megaton. The United States' conventional capability is now so good that it can effectively destroy an entire nation's ability to wage large-scale war overnight, using only conventional weapons. But that doesn't mean the nuclear forces are no longer needed. Should a superpower strike first against the United States with nuclear weapons, the response would more than likely be nuclear, bringing Mutually Assured Destruction into play. But what about a small nation striking first? What about nukes in the trunks of cars parked in major cities? In the modern era, it's much less clear that any superpower would necessarily have anyone to shoot back at. Increasingly, non-superpower nations are building nuclear stockpiles. India and Pakistan might get into it with one another. Israel's foes might surprise it with nuclear weapons. Who knows what North Korea and Iran might do. Smaller regional nuclear wars remain a very real possibility. According to the worst-case estimates in the TTAPS papers, about one million tons of smoke would be expected from the fires resulting from each nuclear strike. And these smaller regional nuclear combats are expected to use about 50 nuclear weapons (compare this to 150 nuclear weapons for a broader global nuclear war). Thus, today's most likely nuclear scenario would be expected to produce climate effects similar to three Pinatubo events, according to the worst estimates, and still many orders of magnitude less than the K-T extinction. And so, while the nuclear winter scenario is a good prediction of the effects of a worst-case scenario, when all the variables are at their least favorable, the strongest probabilities favor a much less catastrophic nuclear autumn; and even those effects depend strongly on variables like whether the war happens during the growing season.A bomb in Los Angeles might result in history's worst firestorm, while a bomb in the mountains of Pakistan might create no fires at all. The simple fact is that there are too many unpredictable variables to know what kind of climate effects the smoke following nuclear fires will produce, until it actually happens. Obviously we're all very mindful of the many terrible implications of nuclear combat, and if it ever happens, the prospect of a nuclear autumn will likely be among the least of our concerns. The physicist Freeman Dyson perhaps described it best when he said "(TTAPS is) an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight... Who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?"
Furthermore, this first part is utterly irrelevant to whether the US use was justified - see the above about hindsight bias. And scaring the Soviets may have factored into Truman's decision calculus, but it was by no means the deciding factor, and was a tertiary concern, at best. The rest, again, is purely hindsight bias, which is unhelpful for determining if an action was justified (while it may help determine if an action was best for the course of history, it doesn't help us figure out if the action was at the time justified at all).
Theftz22 said:
Finally, the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki violated international laws of war. It has always, down through history, been considered contrary to the nature of legal warfare to openly attack civilians. But that is exactly what the US did in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The civilians residing in those Japanese cities were mainly women, children, and the elderly. The purpose of outlawing attacks against civilians is to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. Only the combative enemy can be attacked in times of war. The League of Nations, of which the US was a part and agreed with, made this custom a law. In 1938, the League unanimously ratified a piece of legislation titled Protection of Civilian Populations Against Bombing From the Air in Case of War. The main clause in this legislation explicitly states, "The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal." The US itself ratified this legislation. Only 7 years later, the US would then turn and violate not only one of the oldest moral imperatives of war in human history, but also a well-established international law. Therefore, the US bombing of Hiroshima was both immoral and illegal.
**** of Nanking. Already violated in nearly the same war. And people in Japan were sworn to fight for the country against invaders - if we had gone through with the invasion, there is no guarantee they wouldn't have acted as the army would, and fought back. Also see above about international law. And they saved over 800,000 lives by various estimates - when you must kill 1,000,000 or kill 200,000, killing 200,000 can hardly be seen as the immoral choice. Even low estimates put the invasion at costing 200,000 American lives - that doesn't count Japanese lives...
I've already as a result answered your conclusion. While it may have ultimately been a mistake [jury is out on that one... people already had ideas about this bomb - Hitler's scientists has been after it], it was indeed fully justified by what the United States knew. A tragedy nonetheless, but justified (or else you'll need to explain why making entirely rational decisions based on the information is not justified since "There was a better option, you just had to ignore all the facts you had and blindly leap into a solution you hope will work".)
blazedaces said:
On another related note, Obama is now proposing (though it can't be made official till after the election) of bringing down our stockpile of nuclear warheads from the currently around 5000 to somewhere between 300 - 400, much less even than what was signed in the START treaty with Russia. Of course Republicans are all speaking out against it, but hey, why have the power to destroy the world a few times over when you can have enough to destroy it a few hundred times? - SOURCE
Read the article I spoilered - 5000 nuclear weapons could at most cover about 100,000 square miles (that's generous), and since it's likely a mild nuclear autumn, that's nowhere near enough to destroy the world 100 times. I admittedly think it's a little excessive myself, but to state we'd be able to destroy the world 100s of times over is silly. There's also something to be said for being able to take out first/second-strike capabilities, which is why they'd like to have a larger stockpile - it's backup for if we already we know we're down pretty far, we can fight back - it could possibly protect those in rural areas or cities that weren't targeted. I can't say this logic is foolproof (I may have even straw-manned it) but that's the basic reasoning.
Rabbattack said:
The Japanese killed U.S. soldiers who were ready to kill and be killed. The U.S. killed innocent Japanese civilians who had nothing to do with the attack, they weren't prepared to kill or be killed. U.S. was wrong. End of story. Japan fought the right way, killing soldiers. U.S. fought the wrong way killing innocent civilians. Debate closed. Lock the thread.
Lol someone doesn't understand that the world isn't black and white, or how the debate hall works. The Japanese trained civilians to never surrender, as an honor thing - no guarantee if the invasion took place they wouldn't have been prepared to kill soldiers. Also many soldiers were stuck in the draft and not exactly ready to kill or be killed.
And if you've gotta kill > 200,000 Japanese citizens to stop a war, or 200,000 Japanese civilians to stop a war, you're telling me to kill more people because they weren't in the army??? Mkay...
Also, see the above on violating international war law - if you've gotta kill someone "the wrong way" to save even more people, you'd avoid killing them the wrong way? You seem like the type who wouldn't shove Hitler off a bride to kill him in 1939 so that 100 people on a runaway train would have his body as break to save them from dying... because stopping a train using a person's body is "the wrong way to stop the train, end of story, lock this thread."
Overtaken said:
The ultimatum was unnecessary and hypocritical. There was no reason to treat ending the war as an imperative at the time. The 'millions' of lives that were endangered by the continuation of the war were not in immediate danger, as if to say if the USA did not drop those bombs as soon as possible, millions of lives were going to be lost on the spot. There was time to negotiate. There is one especially egregeous point in the Potsdam Declaration that states: "the elimination "for all time [of] the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest". Now, the Japanese Empire was not one that had an especially peaceful and tolerant history, to be sure, but this is twice-over hypocritical hand-rinsing and condemnation on America's part. American exceptionalism and echoes of manifest destiny were at a critical high at the time and to-this-day have hardly faltered. America then, just as it does now, believed very much in using brutality to expand it's own interests and empire. And this whole ultimatum was an absolute false blame-shift. "Hey do exactly as I tell you to or else I'll have to kill you. I mean, I'll have no choice. If fact, you're the one with the choice. If I kill you it's really your fault." Absolutely repulsive.
No. It was a form of motivation to show the USSR they were in it to the end alongside them. There was also no guarantee the Japanese wouldn't bomb the US or a military base the next day - they'd already hit Pearl Harbor - thousands of lives may have been in immediate danger. The unconditional surrender was to avoid letting those who had led Japan, Germany, and Italy, and vowed to carry the wary to the bitter end, off the hook, because that is the type of surrender those who were running the war wanted - the US viewed this as a way to take it off the table. It may have been heavy-handed, but withdrawing at that point (2 years later) would have sent a signal that the US was soft, hardening Japanese resolve to the point where only a completely successful invasion (or the pair of nukes, which defeats the purpose) would have ended the war.
Overtaken said:
Unconditional surrender was counter-productive to the goal of sparing as many innocent lives as possible. The US lost all credibility when it went against the advise of the British, and employ the demands as unconditional. To summarize what is known about the Emperor's reasoning and concerns leading up to the Potsdam Declaration, he did not want a resulting weakening (much less complete replacement) of the status of the Empirical power structure. So much so that it very well may be one of the singly biggest reasons he didn't surrender prior to the bombings. If negotiation has been left on the table, an atomic-bombingless end to WWII in the Pacific may have been the result.
The goal was not to shorten the war or save lives, but to intercept Soviet expansion. American military leaders had been found on record essentially predicting and preempting the imminent show down between Russia and the US. The atomic bombings were yes, perhaps in part to 'show off' to Russia, but more over to wrangle all of the Pacific territory that would otherwise be split with Russia.
No. See above calculations - it was thought the invasion would cost over 400,000 US lives alone, and even more Japanese lives if it succeeded. It was a way to save the lives of both groups.
Overtaken said:
The execution was unjustifiably heinous. Firstly, Truman could have, given that it's known that we had at least 3 warheads in our possession at the time, used one of them as a demonstration. Perhaps off-coast or in an abandoned or ruined area. How would we expect Japan to have responded to vague, then-empty, and extraordinary threats of absolute, god-like capacity for destruction? Even if it didn't work, we had two more. Then comes the topic of target choice. It was beyond reproachable. To deliberately choose the most civilian-dense and intact cities puts Truman in the same category as Hitler, neither one was above mass murder of innocent people for the means of their contrived ends. It was not necessary as the stated point of the bombings were to convince Japan it could not win, and in fact the bombings were thus as literally contrary to the stated purpose 'of saving innocent lives' as possible.
No. If the bomb hadn't worked, then no threat would have worked and we'd have had to drop them both - it would have also spurred the Japanese on further that there was a high chance the things we had were duds, even after two successes, so two may have not been enough (and we didn't really have the resources to cheaply make more). They deliberately chose the areas of highest war-equipment output, very industrialized areas. They actually took multiple different areas off the table both A) because there were too many civilians and B) because the other targets of high military density had artifacts with history that was priceless to the Japanese - military commanders decided the historical value of those objects was more than the value of ending the war with one bomb, so they switched targets. And last I checked, Hitler killed about 6,000,000 Jews and more of other groups because he could, not because it would help him win a war. He also did so via torture-like methods. Truman dropped two bombs to win a war and save the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bombs were to force a surrender, so that invasion would be averted, as that would cost even more innocent lives, so that innocent lives were thus saved, as was the stated purpose. Nothing contrived about that.
Overtaken said:
The bombings have utterly compromised any claim to responsibility and righteousness that the US thought that it had. Now we live in a world where the US (or certain elements therein) rather comically likes to claim that everyone else on the planet should abandon their nuclear weapons except us. See Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Un over there? They're so crazy they might do something so unspeakably mad and evil like drop nuclear weapons on innocent people's heads, surely we must invade their countries to prevent that. At all costs! Well, funny thing happened, the only people who have ever been so callously belligerent to drop nuclear weapons on innocent people were the US.
No. Most demand disarmament because the US has heard clear and direct determinations that "Israel should not exist and deserves to be nuked" or "We will nuke you" from various groups (those you listed). The US also knows that even if we disarm, there is no guarantee they won't rearm and then strike, and try to destroy our facilities so we don't have the infrastructure to counter-attack. And again, those groups aren't dropping nuclear weapons to try to avoid an invasion and thus save lives and avoid that group killing more people during the invasion - they are doing it because they think those people do not deserve to live. And there was nothing callous about the decision making process - you'd know that if you'd done more research surrounding Truman's decision.
Overtaken said:
Closing thoughts. This is actually rather coincidentally true. Just this morning I actually had a this unbelievably real, lucid sort of dream where I was at work, and then after a short while we suddenly felt the whole building quake a little. I didn't think anything of it at first but noticed a lot of people across the building scrambling frantically to exit. So I walk over with some other people to see what the commotion is about, and as soon as we walk outside, we see a mushroom cloud not a mile or two away, dominating the entire view of the sky. There is only a few minutes of dream left from here, if that, which can be summarized as a succession of panic, screams and a feeling of hopelessness of an order that can't be described in words. Any second a wave of destruction is going to annihilate me and my family, there's no running or hiding, there is no challenging it. It was horrifying and I can't possibly overstate that. For just a few moments I believe I had some understanding of what it would be like. But that's my privilege too, that no matter how much I believed it was real at the time, it wasn't. I got to wake up from the nightmare. They didn't. There is no doubt in my mind that not only was Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'unjustified', but that they were acts of terrorism, the scale of which the world had never seen before or since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism Defining terrorism is vague. But I believe that terrorism is an act meant to kill as many as possible, in a show of utter disregard for human life. There is a different between trying to end a war, and not caring if you start one. Driving planes into towers with the intent to kill as many as possible is terrorism. Dropping bombs on two cities because you are unable to end a conflict and fear the only alternative will result in even greater loss of life is not terrorism, and you do a disservice to those who lost their lives in 9/11 by comparing an attempt to (calculatedly) save lives to an attempt to murder as many as possible with no regard to who they are. This may be worth reading for you:
Issac 2(Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.
For you to call the act terrorism then, I will state that you must prove the only intent was to kill, and that the American lives at stake had nothing to do with the decision. Because if saving lives had something to do with the decision, it may have been injustice, but it may have been necessary to employ these morally troubling means for the morally valid end that was finishing WWII.
Rabbattack said:
I believe that all criminals should be killed. My god is Kira. He will bring the world to a new era of peace. The god of the new world is our savior.
Innocents live. Criminals die.
After a war, I believe you should be charged with war crimes if you killed civilians and not soldiers. If you fought the right way then you shouldn't be punished. I still don't like war in anyway. I believe that most soldiers are evil killers.
... I have no idea what this bit about Kira is, so I'll just ignore it for now...
If there is a train that will run over 10 people, and a lever that will switch the tracks and cause the train to kill one person, and a man is standing next to the lever, do you kill the man as a criminal if he pulls the lever to save 10 lives? Do you kill the man as a criminal if he doesn't pull the lever because he let the 10 die? What if the man is standing on a bridge, and he can either shove a person off the bride with a pole to save 10 lives, or else watch the 10 die, but can't sacrifice himself for the 10? Do you kill him for shoving the man off to save 10 others? Do you kill the man for doing nothing as 10 die?
...Who decides who is a criminal and who is innocent? Does George Zimmerman live in your world? Does he die? Does he live if Trayvon Martin did have a gun? Does he die if Trayvon Martin had a gun? Does a man who kills 100 people for fun, despite all those people having turned out to be serial killers and rapists, live or die? Does a man who did those things because he knew they were evil live or die? Does a man who did those things because he knew they were evil, but say he did it for fun because he wants to die (he's a liar) live or die? If you kill that man, despite him being a man who only tried to eliminate criminals and do no other wrong, does that make you a criminal so you die? If you tripped and fell on top of a child and passed out because you hit your head and then suffocated the child, should you die? Or are you innocent?
And what the hell does "If you fought the right way you shouldn't be punished" even mean? If you killed a civilian who was actually a spy and would've killed you do you still die? Who decides what fighting the right way is? Is mustard gas okay? Tasers at lethal voltage okay? Automatic machine guns okay? Rocket Launchers okay? Tanks okay? Knives okay? And you are telling me that if a solider has found his way to Hilter's base and killed him, he would be an evil killer?
To answer the question, I'll respond to previous posters. The basis of my reasoning is thus: To determine if an act is justified, you must look at ONLY the knowledge one possess WHILE making the decision - information AFTER the event has occurred is USELESS because it was not in the possession of the decision-maker - to claim that someone's decision is not justified because of information they did not have is absurd because it means they would otherwise have to make an entirely irrational decision to satisfy you, when they had ZERO reason to believe that the irrational decision was correct.
Laws of warfare simply aren't followed. Anyone will violate a law when they feel they risk the lives of millions... given the hindsight bias is brought into this paper, you can't tell me you wouldn't drop a single nuke if you knew within a mile where Hitler and his top Nazi commanders were living in 1939? Or if you wouldn't, you've just refused to even try to stop the second biggest murderer of the twentieth century because you'd kill some civilians (many of whom blindly support the tyrant). There's also the fact that it (at a basic level) makes sense to violate a law dedicated to saving lives if violating that law saves more lives than upholding that law saves - more on that later, as this is an intro paragraph you wrote so I have an intro response, not something in-depth here.
You've committed a logical fallacy (maybe not the precise term, but it's sufficient) known as "hindsight bias." You've made the assumption that the United States had all this information at the time. At the end of the day, the United States may not have taken the best course of action, from what we can see now, but it's damn clear if you look only at evidence before 1945 that the United States was 100% justified in their actions [as you'll notice all your evidence is past 1945 - useless for Truman]. They had 0.0% reason to believe Japan would surrender, since the military had taken over and they had vowed repeatedly to never surrender - yeah the people and the emperor would surrender, but the hardliners were the ones who had the means to fight back and would fight back. Indeed, it was the emperor who pled for peace (and succeeded this time) after the second bomb was dropped - the military was more than eager to follow "The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War" which dictated never surrendering [prosecute the war to the bitter end]. His note about the Emperor was insulting because the Emperor was not able to actually DO anything.
And estimates suggest that the invasion operation on Kyushu would have cost almost 400,000 lives - that's just the US, not the Japanese lives, in a US victory - and they'd have had to invade other areas as well...casualty estimates for a total on both sides are over 1,000,000 - the bomb ultimately saved 800,000 lives, American or Japanese... and how could you justify to an American people an invasion ten years down the road when you had a war-changing option and refused to use it? So many mothers would cry "If only they'd used the bomb, I'd have my son back..." And while some members of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could feel the same way, there's no guarantee we wouldn't have had to invade there as well... and that just means some of those who died in the bomb would have simply died a different way.
Nuclear winter models were made under the assumption that there is no such thing as water on the Earth. It's not exactly scientifically valid by any stretch. Here's an article discussing the reality of the possibility of nuclear winter. It's got funky highlighting because I copy+pasted this from a place where I once had to highlight parts of the article I thought were important.
(Brian, February 8, “Nuclear War and Nuclear Winter”, http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4244)
Put on your jackets; today we're going to prepare for the nuclear winter, the theorized period of catastrophic global cooling following a nuclear war. Some say that, if war happens, a nuclear winter is a certainty that will devastate agriculture and kill billions; some say that it's greatly overstated or even outright made-up by anti-nuke activists. Does the prospect of a nuclear winter truly constitute one more reason why nuclear arsenals should be dismantled? Our purpose today is not to explore the myriad other implications of nuclear war, or to otherwise prove that it's a bad thing. That's pretty clear. The obvious effects of a nuclear blast, the initial explosion itself and the radioactive fallout, are well established and not in dispute. As destructive as those are, their long-term environmental effects are negligible. So what, then, causes the nuclear winter? The concept of a nuclear winter entered the mainstream in 1983, when the "TTAPS" team, named for its authors Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan, reviewed existing work and ran computational climate simulations to see what would happen when huge amounts of smoke were added to the atmosphere. The source of this smoke is not the nuclear explosion itself, but the all the building fires and wildfires that would follow each one. Take 150 nukes striking major population centers worldwide, and that's a lot of fires, with a smoke output greatly exceeding anything in human history. Members of the TTAPS team have also published many followup papers, revising and improving their estimates, but generally with similar results. Almost all of the simulations run by scientists replicating these results agree, at least in broad strokes, when the input variables are the same. It should be stressed that there are a lot of these variables.The principal weakness that these studies all share hinges on one of these variables, and it's a very important one:Exactly how much smoke will the fire following a nuclear bomb produce?In 1986, Joyce Penner from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published an article in the journal Nature in which she pointed out thatthis specific variable is responsible for determining whether the effects will be minor or massive. She also found thatthe published estimates of this varied widely. Penner's paper was not the only one critical of the TTAPS predictions. However, this fact is often misinterpreted. The differences that have been found among the various simulations are of degree. Laypeople who hear of the criticism often think that the idea of a nuclear winter has been "debunked" or that it's some kind of discredited myth. This is not the case. Perhaps the most often cited and most critical paper was "Nuclear Winter Reappraised" by Starley Thompson and Stephen Schneider, published in 1986 in the journal Foreign Affairs. They did not dismiss the idea at all; rather they recharacterized it as a nuclear autumn. So here we get into the meat of the question. We know with pretty good certainty how a given amount of smoke in the atmosphere, distributed a certain way, will affect the climate and for how long; but what we can only guess at is how much smoke is produced when a city burns after a nuke. Our guesses are educated, but they're all over the map. Cities also vary wildly in just about every relevant aspect. Let's look at what we know from history. An obvious question to ask is whether these effects have been seen with any of the nuclear tests that many nations have conducted. Some 2,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated, somewhat less than half of which were in the atmosphere and are comparable to what would be used in a war. In none of them were any harmful smoke-induced environmental effects produced. However the reason for this is quite simple. Nuclear tests are not performed in cities filled with tens of thousands of combustible buildings; they happen way out in the desert or over the ocean, and no subsequent fires are created. Butwhat about the two cases when atomic weapons were used on real-life cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?Discussion of the subsequent fires in both cities are hard to come by, as they were not really what people were focusing on. Hiroshima developed a firestorm — where it builds into a single large fire with a central heat core that draws in oxygen with a powerful wind from all around — that peaked two to three hours after the explosion. Six hours after the explosion, nearly everything combustible within a one-and-a-half kilometer radius had been consumed, and the fire was almost completely out, leaving over 8 square kilometers destroyed. Descriptions of residual and secondary fires outside the radius of the firestorm are rare and hard to find, but it seems likely that several hundred or thousand small fires continued for the better part of 24 hours. Photographs taken of Hiroshima over the next few days do not show any significant evidence of vast amounts of smoke. Nagasaki was hit with a larger bomb, but its geography spared it a firestorm. Whereas Hiroshima is centered in a large flat plain, Nagasaki is irregularly shaped among hills and valleys, and cleft by a large harbor. Secondary fires were widespread, and Nagasaki firefighters had to cope with a damaged water system. It took several days to get the many small structure fires controlled or burned out. But Nagasaki's geography meant that there were far fewer fires than in Hiroshima. Again, the post-nuke photographs don't show vast atmospheric plumes of smoke. When the Iraqi army set 700 of Kuwait's oil wells on fire when they retreated in 1991, the wells burned for eight months, lofting about a million tons of smoke into the atmosphere. The TTAPS team predicted global climate change effects, that fortunately failed to materialize.Carl Sagan discussed this error in his book The Demon-Haunted World, and later research discovered the reason. The smaller individual smoke plumes, spread over a wide area, did not generate sufficient uplift to get the smoke into the upper atmosphere, even though theoretically enough smoke was produced. Temperatures did drop over the Persian Gulf, but the effect remained localized. Other cataclysmic events have proven that the nuclear winter scenario is not at all far-fetched. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, also in 1991, threw some 17 million tons of particulates into the upper atmosphere that caused global temperatures to drop by about a degree for several months. Sunlight dropped by 10%. This temperature drop did not, however, have any long-term effect on agriculture. Pinatubo was only a blip compared the the K-T extinction event of some 65 million years ago, when a theorized asteroid hit us with one hundred million megatons of destructive force, lighting virtually the entire world on fire. The evidence of this is called the K-T boundary, a layer of clay found all around the world.Sunlight was reduced by 10-20% for ten years, which caused a massive cascading extinction of species from plants to herbivores to carnivores. But we shouldn't expect anything like this to happen from a nuclear war. Times continue to change, including the nature of warfare. Nations no longer stockpile the megaton class weapons popular in the 1950s and 1960s; typical yields now are a fraction of a megaton. The United States' conventional capability is now so good that it can effectively destroy an entire nation's ability to wage large-scale war overnight, using only conventional weapons. But that doesn't mean the nuclear forces are no longer needed. Should a superpower strike first against the United States with nuclear weapons, the response would more than likely be nuclear, bringing Mutually Assured Destruction into play. But what about a small nation striking first? What about nukes in the trunks of cars parked in major cities? In the modern era, it's much less clear that any superpower would necessarily have anyone to shoot back at. Increasingly, non-superpower nations are building nuclear stockpiles. India and Pakistan might get into it with one another. Israel's foes might surprise it with nuclear weapons. Who knows what North Korea and Iran might do. Smaller regional nuclear wars remain a very real possibility. According to the worst-case estimates in the TTAPS papers, about one million tons of smoke would be expected from the fires resulting from each nuclear strike. And these smaller regional nuclear combats are expected to use about 50 nuclear weapons (compare this to 150 nuclear weapons for a broader global nuclear war). Thus, today's most likely nuclear scenario would be expected to produce climate effects similar to three Pinatubo events, according to the worst estimates, and still many orders of magnitude less than the K-T extinction. And so, while the nuclear winter scenario is a good prediction of the effects of a worst-case scenario, when all the variables are at their least favorable, the strongest probabilities favor a much less catastrophic nuclear autumn; and even those effects depend strongly on variables like whether the war happens during the growing season.A bomb in Los Angeles might result in history's worst firestorm, while a bomb in the mountains of Pakistan might create no fires at all. The simple fact is that there are too many unpredictable variables to know what kind of climate effects the smoke following nuclear fires will produce, until it actually happens. Obviously we're all very mindful of the many terrible implications of nuclear combat, and if it ever happens, the prospect of a nuclear autumn will likely be among the least of our concerns. The physicist Freeman Dyson perhaps described it best when he said "(TTAPS is) an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight... Who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?"
Furthermore, this first part is utterly irrelevant to whether the US use was justified - see the above about hindsight bias. And scaring the Soviets may have factored into Truman's decision calculus, but it was by no means the deciding factor, and was a tertiary concern, at best. The rest, again, is purely hindsight bias, which is unhelpful for determining if an action was justified (while it may help determine if an action was best for the course of history, it doesn't help us figure out if the action was at the time justified at all).
**** of Nanking. Already violated in nearly the same war. And people in Japan were sworn to fight for the country against invaders - if we had gone through with the invasion, there is no guarantee they wouldn't have acted as the army would, and fought back. Also see above about international law. And they saved over 800,000 lives by various estimates - when you must kill 1,000,000 or kill 200,000, killing 200,000 can hardly be seen as the immoral choice. Even low estimates put the invasion at costing 200,000 American lives - that doesn't count Japanese lives...
I've already as a result answered your conclusion. While it may have ultimately been a mistake [jury is out on that one... people already had ideas about this bomb - Hitler's scientists has been after it], it was indeed fully justified by what the United States knew. A tragedy nonetheless, but justified (or else you'll need to explain why making entirely rational decisions based on the information is not justified since "There was a better option, you just had to ignore all the facts you had and blindly leap into a solution you hope will work".)
Read the article I spoilered - 5000 nuclear weapons could at most cover about 100,000 square miles (that's generous), and since it's likely a mild nuclear autumn, that's nowhere near enough to destroy the world 100 times. I admittedly think it's a little excessive myself, but to state we'd be able to destroy the world 100s of times over is silly. There's also something to be said for being able to take out first/second-strike capabilities, which is why they'd like to have a larger stockpile - it's backup for if we already we know we're down pretty far, we can fight back - it could possibly protect those in rural areas or cities that weren't targeted. I can't say this logic is foolproof (I may have even straw-manned it) but that's the basic reasoning.
Lol someone doesn't understand that the world isn't black and white, or how the debate hall works. The Japanese trained civilians to never surrender, as an honor thing - no guarantee if the invasion took place they wouldn't have been prepared to kill soldiers. Also many soldiers were stuck in the draft and not exactly ready to kill or be killed.
And if you've gotta kill > 200,000 Japanese citizens to stop a war, or 200,000 Japanese civilians to stop a war, you're telling me to kill more people because they weren't in the army??? Mkay...
Also, see the above on violating international war law - if you've gotta kill someone "the wrong way" to save even more people, you'd avoid killing them the wrong way? You seem like the type who wouldn't shove Hitler off a bride to kill him in 1939 so that 100 people on a runaway train would have his body as break to save them from dying... because stopping a train using a person's body is "the wrong way to stop the train, end of story, lock this thread."
No. It was a form of motivation to show the USSR they were in it to the end alongside them. There was also no guarantee the Japanese wouldn't bomb the US or a military base the next day - they'd already hit Pearl Harbor - thousands of lives may have been in immediate danger. The unconditional surrender was to avoid letting those who had led Japan, Germany, and Italy, and vowed to carry the wary to the bitter end, off the hook, because that is the type of surrender those who were running the war wanted - the US viewed this as a way to take it off the table. It may have been heavy-handed, but withdrawing at that point (2 years later) would have sent a signal that the US was soft, hardening Japanese resolve to the point where only a completely successful invasion (or the pair of nukes, which defeats the purpose) would have ended the war.
No. See above calculations - it was thought the invasion would cost over 400,000 US lives alone, and even more Japanese lives if it succeeded. It was a way to save the lives of both groups.
No. If the bomb hadn't worked, then no threat would have worked and we'd have had to drop them both - it would have also spurred the Japanese on further that there was a high chance the things we had were duds, even after two successes, so two may have not been enough (and we didn't really have the resources to cheaply make more). They deliberately chose the areas of highest war-equipment output, very industrialized areas. They actually took multiple different areas off the table both A) because there were too many civilians and B) because the other targets of high military density had artifacts with history that was priceless to the Japanese - military commanders decided the historical value of those objects was more than the value of ending the war with one bomb, so they switched targets. And last I checked, Hitler killed about 6,000,000 Jews and more of other groups because he could, not because it would help him win a war. He also did so via torture-like methods. Truman dropped two bombs to win a war and save the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bombs were to force a surrender, so that invasion would be averted, as that would cost even more innocent lives, so that innocent lives were thus saved, as was the stated purpose. Nothing contrived about that.
No. Most demand disarmament because the US has heard clear and direct determinations that "Israel should not exist and deserves to be nuked" or "We will nuke you" from various groups (those you listed). The US also knows that even if we disarm, there is no guarantee they won't rearm and then strike, and try to destroy our facilities so we don't have the infrastructure to counter-attack. And again, those groups aren't dropping nuclear weapons to try to avoid an invasion and thus save lives and avoid that group killing more people during the invasion - they are doing it because they think those people do not deserve to live. And there was nothing callous about the decision making process - you'd know that if you'd done more research surrounding Truman's decision.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism Defining terrorism is vague. But I believe that terrorism is an act meant to kill as many as possible, in a show of utter disregard for human life. There is a different between trying to end a war, and not caring if you start one. Driving planes into towers with the intent to kill as many as possible is terrorism. Dropping bombs on two cities because you are unable to end a conflict and fear the only alternative will result in even greater loss of life is not terrorism, and you do a disservice to those who lost their lives in 9/11 by comparing an attempt to (calculatedly) save lives to an attempt to murder as many as possible with no regard to who they are. This may be worth reading for you:
Issac 2(Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.
For you to call the act terrorism then, I will state that you must prove the only intent was to kill, and that the American lives at stake had nothing to do with the decision. Because if saving lives had something to do with the decision, it may have been injustice, but it may have been necessary to employ these morally troubling means for the morally valid end that was finishing WWII.
... I have no idea what this bit about Kira is, so I'll just ignore it for now...
If there is a train that will run over 10 people, and a lever that will switch the tracks and cause the train to kill one person, and a man is standing next to the lever, do you kill the man as a criminal if he pulls the lever to save 10 lives? Do you kill the man as a criminal if he doesn't pull the lever because he let the 10 die? What if the man is standing on a bridge, and he can either shove a person off the bride with a pole to save 10 lives, or else watch the 10 die, but can't sacrifice himself for the 10? Do you kill him for shoving the man off to save 10 others? Do you kill the man for doing nothing as 10 die?
...Who decides who is a criminal and who is innocent? Does George Zimmerman live in your world? Does he die? Does he live if Trayvon Martin did have a gun? Does he die if Trayvon Martin had a gun? Does a man who kills 100 people for fun, despite all those people having turned out to be serial killers and rapists, live or die? Does a man who did those things because he knew they were evil live or die? Does a man who did those things because he knew they were evil, but say he did it for fun because he wants to die (he's a liar) live or die? If you kill that man, despite him being a man who only tried to eliminate criminals and do no other wrong, does that make you a criminal so you die? If you tripped and fell on top of a child and passed out because you hit your head and then suffocated the child, should you die? Or are you innocent?
And what the hell does "If you fought the right way you shouldn't be punished" even mean? If you killed a civilian who was actually a spy and would've killed you do you still die? Who decides what fighting the right way is? Is mustard gas okay? Tasers at lethal voltage okay? Automatic machine guns okay? Rocket Launchers okay? Tanks okay? Knives okay? And you are telling me that if a solider has found his way to Hilter's base and killed him, he would be an evil killer?
No. It was a form of motivation to show the USSR they were in it to the end alongside them. There was also no guarantee the Japanese wouldn't bomb the US or a military base the next day - they'd already hit Pearl Harbor - thousands of lives may have been in immediate danger. The unconditional surrender was to avoid letting those who had led Japan, Germany, and Italy, and vowed to carry the wary to the bitter end, off the hook, because that is the type of surrender those who were running the war wanted - the US viewed this as a way to take it off the table. It may have been heavy-handed, but withdrawing at that point (2 years later) would have sent a signal that the US was soft, hardening Japanese resolve to the point where only a completely successful invasion (or the pair of nukes, which defeats the purpose) would have ended the war.
Pearl Harbor occurred over 4 years prior, and wasn't even on American soil (as Hawaii was not annexed until '59). So no, there is no way of legitimately contriving at the time that an army that could barely manage to kill 2,500 in a all-out surprise attack (half of which were from an incidental explosion), an army that had been beaten to the point of near-collapse even before the a-bombings, was some vague threat to 'thousands of lives', and that hundreds of thousands of innocent people needed to be slaughtered with certainty to prevent it.
On your next point, a couple things to say. This is classic fascist neoconservative logic, "we have to be brutal and unreasonably ruthless or else we'll look soft, oh no!" That's utterly illogical to any view-point besides that of a nation that wants to propagate itself and its empire through war but must offer false, often emotionally based, reasoning to its people. If all actors in a war conducted themselves like this, we would firstly have to excuse all war crime as such. See now, the holocaust is justified because in Hitler's mind, he needed to murder six million innocent people in order to show off how powerful and resolute Germany was, thus intimidating the allies and bringing a swifter end to WWII and resulting in less overall deaths. And secondly, no side would ever back off or surrender out of fear of appearing soft. Demands for unconditional surrender are never conducive to peaceful and swift resolution of a conflict. It is chest-beating imperialism and arrogance, it's inhumane, and doesn't 'intimidate' your enemy into surrender, it simply strengthens all sides' resolve to precisely never surrender, and take warfare to its furthest point of utter destruction.
Ok, then there is the fact that 'letting them off the hook' has nothing to do with the leaders of the European axis, who had already lost and surrendered at this point, it only involved Japan. Even just considering Japan, firstly, there is no reason that negotiation is tantamount to aquitting everyone of war-crimes, if that is what you are getting at. And secondly, this is really interesting, despite the unconditional ultimatum, Hirohito was not ever tried for war crimes (yet some of his officers and generals certainly did, for carrying out orders he surely gave them). Extremely interesting still, is the fact that among the war-crimes America indicted Japan upon: water-boarding. But that is a topic for another time.
Finally, on this point I just want to make notice that my point here is that negotiation was an option that Truman deliberately rejected in favor of the genocidal destruction of innocent people, and that point you ignored entirely.
That's actually correct, I must have misread an article I was reading earlier or perhaps it was referring to an earlier conference. But either way, whether Britain did or did support it at whichever point is inconsequential here. My main point was that based upon what is, and was known about the state of affairs in Japan at the time, there was almost incontrovertible reason to believe that a negotiated and peaceful surrender could have been at least attempted and likely have been successful. It was not imperative that the war ended immediately to save more lives than the 100 - 200 thousand people murdered by the bombings.
No. See above calculations - it was thought the invasion would cost over 400,000 US lives alone, and even more Japanese lives if it succeeded. It was a way to save the lives of both groups.
The estimates, even if true, are immaterial. It assumes that the only two possibilities were a war that carried on until 400,000 thousand people or more were killed conventionally, or that hundreds of thousands had to be killed as the result of an inefficacious ultimatum. Those were not the only two options.
No. If the bomb hadn't worked, then no threat would have worked and we'd have had to drop them both - it would have also spurred the Japanese on further that there was a high chance the things we had were duds, even after two successes, so two may have not been enough (and we didn't really have the resources to cheaply make more).
I'm not sure I understand this sentence correctly. Which bomb do you mean to say? The hypothetical, off-shore demonstration? If so, I don't see how it applies. The Potsdam Declaration was premised upon the threat of 'absolute ruination of Japan from the sky', or something to that effect. There was a threat made either way so either way there could have been a dud bomb and we were taking that risk regardless. The difference is that one threat was condescending and empty (Japan had no reason to believe that the destruction referred to in the ultimatum was atomic weaponry, or that atomic weaponry was as powerful as it was. They had never seen one before, nor had any proof that the US had such weapons and was not bluffing). The other, would have been a morally responsible way of demonstrating to Japan that we now had technology that rendered their victory utterly impossible, and working out a functioning and amiable surrender.
They deliberately chose the areas of highest war-equipment output, very industrialized areas. They actually took multiple different areas off the table both A) because there were too many civilians and B) because the other targets of high military density had artifacts with history that was priceless to the Japanese - military commanders decided the historical value of those objects was more than the value of ending the war with one bomb, so they switched targets.
That's false from the sources I've read, here is one example:
"There had been four cities chosen as possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata (Kyoto was the first choice until it was removed from the list by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson). The cities were chosen because they had been relatively untouched during the war. The Target Committee wanted the first bomb to be "sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released."
Hitler killed around 6,000,000 jews, perhaps, that number may be exaggerated a bit. And the nature of Holocaust is more complex than high-school level history classes in America would like to admit. In the narrative we falsely call 'history' here in the US, everything bad people we invade and kill have done is because they hate freedom, are demons-incarnate and just kill massive amounts of people because it's just a fun thing to do. Every bad thing we have done however was naturally excusable and for a noble cause in the end (slavery, and just barely slavery, is the only thing now that we actually are taught that we messed up on). You've bitten hard into the propaganda as I did too for a long time. Now don't misread me either, I'm by no means saying that Hitler didn't commit any war crimes or that the holocaust didn't happen, I'm saying there is very excellent reason to believe that the holocaust narrative we are taught in school contains some gross mischaracterizations, exaggerations, implications, and omissions of certain details. As I am typing this I am realizing that this should probably be its own thread. If you want to, let me know and can continue this separately.
He also did so via torture-like methods. Truman dropped two bombs to win a war and save the lives of hundreds of thousands. The bombs were to force a surrender, so that invasion would be averted, as that would cost even more innocent lives, so that innocent lives were thus saved, as was the stated purpose. Nothing contrived about that.
I'll just say this one thing briefly: Hitler and the majority of the German people at the time, rightly or wrongly (for the record it should be well understood that 'wrongly' is the correct answer) believed very earnestly that the Jews were responsible for the collapse of the German (classically 'Prussian') empire, the ruination of the economy resulting from the Wiemar Republic, and so on and so forth. They didn't believe that the Jews were just an innocent ethnic minority that would be 'fun' to go and mass exterminate, but that they were subversive intruders trying to unleash a conspiratorial new world communist order. To them, they were saving lives by getting rid of the jews, just the same sort of "ends justify the means, kill X people or 10X people will if we don't" mentality of Truman, or Osama bin Laden for that matter. (Just go to Stormfront and Alex Jones' web sites and see how these ideas about Jewish conspiracy are still alive even to this day) There is also evidence that of the active killing of Jews in concentration camps, much of it was incidental or by passive starvation (which ironically might actually be the Allies fault in part for their assault on German supply lines, which resulted in famine in Germany and German controlled areas.) And there is no evidence to my awareness that Hitler 'spontaneously' dropped the Madagascar Plan in favor of extermination out of some sort of sadism or evilness, but that it just became impossible in the midst of fighting a losing war.
No. Most demand disarmament because the US has heard clear and direct determinations that "Israel should not exist and deserves to be nuked" or "We will nuke you" from various groups (those you listed). The US also knows that even if we disarm, there is no guarantee they won't rearm and then strike, and try to destroy our facilities so we don't have the infrastructure to counter-attack. And again, those groups aren't dropping nuclear weapons to try to avoid an invasion and thus save lives and avoid that group killing more people during the invasion - they are doing it because they think those people do not deserve to live. And there was nothing callous about the decision making process - you'd know that if you'd done more research surrounding Truman's decision.
That is the way American media likes to report and narrate but we should be more keen to realize that they always have motivations that involve self-defense, sometimes rightfully in a way, sometimes wrongfully, sometimes in a preemptive sense, sometimes in a realtime sense, but always a reason that at least appears to have semblance of an ethical basis, no different than the ones used by the US to justify real and threatened violence against other nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_terrorism Defining terrorism is vague. But I believe that terrorism is an act meant to kill as many as possible, in a show of utter disregard for human life. There is a different between trying to end a war, and not caring if you start one. Driving planes into towers with the intent to kill as many as possible is terrorism. Dropping bombs on two cities because you are unable to end a conflict and fear the only alternative will result in even greater loss of life is not terrorism, and you do a disservice to those who lost their lives in 9/11 by comparing an attempt to (calculatedly) save lives to an attempt to murder as many as possible with no regard to who they are. This may be worth reading for you:
Do you know the actual reason (or reason given at least) Al-Qaeda committed the attacks on the World Trade Center? You would probably be shocked to learn that it was to them, a justified response of self-defense for the four-decade-plus long unwelcome military occupation and meddling of the US in the Middle East. We can debate whether or not they are correct and to what extent, but what can't be denied is that they absolutely view themselves as victims of wonton western aggression and that covert operations like 9/11 are the only viable option they have for conducting an operation of self-defense against American invasion and the oppression and loss of life on their end. Another thing to note, is that terrorism can be simply understood as any act that is designed to gain influence or leverage by evoking fear or 'terror' into a group of people. This means that, without question, 9/11 was an act of terrorism but so too was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We literally admit this much when we say that the purpose of the bombing was to "shock Japan into surrender".
Issac 2(Prof of political science at Indiana-Bloomington, PhD from Yale Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, p.)
WHAT WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion.Because it threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood, often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies.
For you to call the act terrorism then, I will state that you must prove the only intent was to kill, and that the American lives at stake had nothing to do with the decision. Because if saving lives had something to do with the decision, it may have been injustice, but it may have been necessary to employ these morally troubling means for the morally valid end that was finishing WWII.
In addition to the comments I've made above, I just want to add emphasis on the fact that Hiroshima/Nagasaki was not a morally valid means, however morally valid the ends were. Simply put, I haven't been convinced that it was literally the only choice Truman could have made, and that Bin Laden was different because he totally had alternative means to putting a stop to the continued, unwanted and quite depraved occupation, selective dictator propping, and unwarranted and potentially racist support of Israel by western countries (especially the US obviously).
Pearl Harbor occurred over 4 years prior, and wasn't even on American soil (as Hawaii was not annexed until '59). So no, there is no way of legitimately contriving at the time that an army that could barely manage to kill 2,500 in a all-out surprise attack (half of which were from an incidental explosion), an army that had been beaten to the point of near-collapse even before the a-bombings, was some vague threat to 'thousands of lives', and that hundreds of thousands of innocent people needed to be slaughtered with certainty to prevent it.
Fear drives people to do irrational things - I can't attest to the mindsight Truman and his commanding officers were in, but it's dangerous to underestimate an enemy and almost never hurts to overestimate the enemy - these people felt the US was in clear and present danger - even if it wasn't, that doesn't mean that they should have acted differently on the basis of information they didn't have. It also wasn't an "all-out surprise attack", it was sending a small part of the fleet to accomplish a mission, that they barely failed at. If Japan had sent everything they had, Pearl Harbor would have likely ceased to exist - they'd had more than enough planes to crash into the area to make sure no one got away, they were just looking to shut the port down via sinking a ship is all.
Overtaken said:
On your next point, a couple things to say. This is classic fascist neoconservative logic, "we have to be brutal and unreasonably ruthless or else we'll look soft, oh no!" That's utterly illogical to any view-point besides that of a nation that wants to propagate itself and its empire through war but must offer false, often emotionally based, reasoning to its people. If all actors in a war conducted themselves like this, we would firstly have to excuse all war crime as such. See now, the holocaust is justified because in Hitler's mind, he needed to murder six million innocent people in order to show off how powerful and resolute Germany was, thus intimidating the allies and bringing a swifter end to WWII and resulting in less overall deaths. And secondly, no side would ever back off or surrender out of fear of appearing soft. Demands for unconditional surrender are never conducive to peaceful and swift resolution of a conflict. It is chest-beating imperialism and arrogance, it's inhumane, and doesn't 'intimidate' your enemy into surrender, it simply strengthens all sides' resolve to precisely never surrender, and take warfare to its furthest point of utter destruction.
You missed the boat entirely on my next point - the unconditional surrender doctrine was assumed in 1943, and there was a reasoning for it at the time - I can't say the reasoning was good, but it was agreed upon. Fast forward two years - the Japanese hardliners are looking for any sign of weakness, and trying to convince people Japan can win (they even tried to state the first bomb the US dropped wasn't atomic, but merely a ton of explosives all strapped together and detonated well, or something like that). If you abandon the doctrine you've pursued for two years, it does 2 things: 1) It convinces the Soviets, your biggest ally, that you are no longer in the fight to the finish with them, so that they may give up your support, and you've just lost the manpower for an invasion (that would occur in the absence of nuclear weapons used) so that US casualties go up further and operation odds go down. 2) You give the Japanese hardliners exactly what they want - something they can call weakness, and a reason to fight on even longer to try to extract even more demands from the US - if you've got one, you can probably get more, given that the US is probably doing this because they're tired of war, as the reasoning goes... - the ultimate result being either the nukes all over again (which has done nothing except distance us further from the Soviets and make the US look weak) or else the full-scale invasion, in which the US likely lacks Soviet support and the Japanese have a reason to fight even harder (and again, I believe I have read that honor dictated that all should try to fight the enemy, even women and children, and that some commanders said they would fight to the last woman and child on Japan - that's a gruesome image for someone trying to end a war with as few casualties as possible). Who knows how many women and children would have died if we had rescinded unconditional surrender and been forced to invade? Far more than were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's for sure.
I never said we excuse all war crimes - the war crimes that occurred elsewhere were with the intent to disregard human life and to kill as many as possible. Given that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred for the opposite reasons, I argue they are (at worst) less ever war crimes. Shows of strength don't justify murder, but Hitler A) hid these killings from many, even Germans and B) the US was targeting industrial areas, and C) he also was not seeking surrender by the Jews, but complete and utter annihilation, which is what a full-scale US invasion would have likely resulted in, and the US wanted to avoid. It may not have been a good decision, but it was justified in 1943 given the war situation (again: ban hindsight bias - they had to make sure Hitler and his top allies did not escape punishment, this seemed most fitting over a laundry list of conditions where a loophole might exist) and it was what they were stuck working with in 1945.
I'll ignore your political insult as to my logic, because your own argument doesn't seem to be fully reasoned out.
Overtaken said:
Ok, then there is the fact that 'letting them off the hook' has nothing to do with the leaders of the European axis, who had already lost and surrendered at this point, it only involved Japan. Even just considering Japan, firstly, there is no reason that negotiation is tantamount to aquitting everyone of war-crimes, if that is what you are getting at. And secondly, this is really interesting, despite the unconditional ultimatum, Hirohito was not ever tried for war crimes (yet some of his officers and generals certainly did, for carrying out orders he surely gave them). Extremely interesting still, is the fact that among the war-crimes America indicted Japan upon: water-boarding. But that is a topic for another time.
Finally, on this point I just want to make notice that my point here is that negotiation was an option that Truman deliberately rejected in favor of the genocidal destruction of innocent people, and that point you ignored entirely
Hirohito wasn't tried because he pled for surrender, which revealed to the US who was really running the show - they let the puppet go. They had also received reports of horrors (Bataan March of Death) - it's also a question (as mentioned above) of what the hardliners would spin abandonment of this doctrine as - Truman and his aides assumed the worst (never underestimate the enemy) and so abandoning this doctrine could only at the time be viewed as foolhardy.
The decisions of the American government these past 20 or so years aren't related to the discussion at hand. And US soliders were waterboarded for being US soliders, even if they were obviously peons who didn't know anything about general plans. The CIA was fearful (never overestimate enemy) of another attack on American soil that could claim millions of lives (there was supposed to be a nuke - bad info caused perception of an immediate risk) and sought those who were believed to have connections to the big guns. That's a topic for another time indeed though.
If you've read all of what I just read, you'll see why Truman and his advisors had already realized negotiation wasn't an option, unless he wanted to engage in a genocidal destruction via army of the entire mainland of Japan, as compared to bombing two cities to try to end the war. And again, they could have very well been prepared to fight US troops had they arrived during the invasion. And thus I have not ignored this point at all.
I have to go to bed right now (school tomorrow in 6 hours bleh). I'll read and respond to the rest of your post later.
The Japanese killed U.S. soldiers who were ready to kill and be killed. The U.S. killed innocent Japanese civilians who had nothing to do with the attack, they weren't prepared to kill or be killed. U.S. was wrong. End of story. Japan fought the right way, killing soldiers. U.S. fought the wrong way killing innocent civilians.
Hiroshima was a military target, so you wouldn't consider the bombing of it inappropriate. Granted the hydrogen bomb was a fierce escalation of firepower in comparison to previous conventions, but you have to realize that it was excessive only by -today's- standards. Bombing in WW2 often resulted in civilian casualty, not because of some evil or devious plot, but because bombs were just inaccurate. Bombing campaigns often relied on volume to determine effectiveness. This meant destroying one factory may result in the total annihilation of the surrounding neighborhoods.
It's most definitely not closed, or there would be unanimous agreement by scholars who to this day debate on whether or not the bombs should have been invented, let alone used. From the other side of the coin, many feel that the bombs were a necessary step to stop Japan from killing itself. The mentality of early 20th century Japanese has been argued to be that similar to samurai, following Bushido, in which case honor demands that every citizen, soldier or not, fight to the death. The US was realized that this coupled with the sheer magnitude of ground force required to effectively occupy Japan, would have resulted in far more casualties than would be had by the dropping of the two bombs.
Again, not to steal Thor's thunder (ha!) if he's already pointed these things out, I was just surprised to see actual DH posts again.
Hiroshima was a military target, so you wouldn't consider the bombing of it inappropriate. Granted the hydrogen bomb was a fierce escalation of firepower in comparison to previous conventions, but you have to realize that it was excessive only by -today's- standards. Bombing in WW2 often resulted in civilian casualty, not because of some evil or devious plot, but because bombs were just inaccurate. Bombing campaigns often relied on volume to determine effectiveness. This meant destroying one factory may result in the total annihilation of the surrounding neighborhoods.
It's most definitely not closed, or there would be unanimous agreement by scholars who to this day debate on whether or not the bombs should have been invented, let alone used. From the other side of the coin, many feel that the bombs were a necessary step to stop Japan from killing itself. The mentality of early 19th century Japanese has been argued to be that similar to samurai, following Bushido, in which case honor demands that every citizen, soldier or not, fight to the death. The US was realized that this coupled with the sheer magnitude of ground force required to effectively occupy Japan, would have resulted in far more casualties than would be had by the dropping of the two bombs.
Again, not to steal Thor's thunder (ha!) if he's already pointed these things out, I was just surprised to see actual DH posts again.
I forgot about the draft and felt like blurting out irrelevant statements at the moment. I believe all fighting and war is wrong and pointless. I really just don't like how America acts a lot of the time. Please feel free to disprove the statement I wrote when I gave little consideration to facts and statistics at the time. Truly amazing, 10/10 argument!
You've committed a logical fallacy (maybe not the precise term, but it's sufficient) known as "hindsight bias." You've made the assumption that the United States had all this information at the time. At the end of the day, the United States may not have taken the best course of action, from what we can see now, but it's damn clear if you look only at evidence before 1945 that the United States was 100% justified in their actions [as you'll notice all your evidence is past 1945 - useless for Truman]. They had 0.0% reason to believe Japan would surrender, since the military had taken over and they had vowed repeatedly to never surrender - yeah the people and the emperor would surrender, but the hardliners were the ones who had the means to fight back and would fight back. Indeed, it was the emperor who pled for peace (and succeeded this time) after the second bomb was dropped - the military was more than eager to follow "The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War" which dictated never surrendering [prosecute the war to the bitter end]. His note about the Emperor was insulting because the Emperor was not able to actually DO anything.
Well I haven't looked at this stuff at all in a while, but just looking at my quote I clearly argued that the Truman administration did know about Japanese intentions to surrender prior to the dropping of the bombs and it's very obvious that I listed multiple examples from during 1945. Read this quote again:
The Japanese had all but admitted defeat as far back as February 1945, almost a half year prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, according to historian Peter Kuznick. At the Potsdam conference held on July 26, 1945, Japan made clear its intentions to surrender under increasing defeats and the threat of a Soviet invasion. Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reports that at the conference he briefed US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on his findings on a prior visit to Tokyo. Dulles stated, "they (the Japanese) desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." President Truman was aware of Japan's willingness to surrender. Truman's July 18th entry in his personal diary mentions a "telegram from the *** Emperor asking for peace."
Well I haven't looked at this stuff at all in a while, but just looking at my quote I clearly argued that the Truman administration did know about Japanese intentions to surrender prior to the dropping of the bombs and it's very obvious that I listed multiple examples from during 1945. Read this quote again:
The Japanese had all but admitted defeat as far back as February 1945, almost a half year prior to the dropping of the atomic bombs, according to historian Peter Kuznick. At the Potsdam conference held on July 26, 1945, Japan made clear its intentions to surrender under increasing defeats and the threat of a Soviet invasion. Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reports that at the conference he briefed US Secretary of War Henry Stimson on his findings on a prior visit to Tokyo. Dulles stated, "they (the Japanese) desired to surrender if they could retain the Emperor and the constitution as a basis for maintaining discipline and order in Japan after the devastating news of surrender became known to the Japanese people." President Truman was aware of Japan's willingness to surrender. Truman's July 18th entry in his personal diary mentions a "telegram from the *** Emperor asking for peace."
They had 0.0% reason to believe Japan would surrender, since the military had taken over and they had vowed repeatedly to never surrender - yeah the people and the emperor would surrender, but the hardliners were the ones who had the means to fight back and would fight back. Indeed, it was the emperor who pled for peace (and succeeded this time) after the second bomb was dropped - the military was more than eager to follow "The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War" which dictated never surrendering [prosecute the war to the bitter end]. His note about the Emperor was insulting because the Emperor was not able to actually DO anything.
The reason Truman ignored the Emperor's pleas was because he knew there was no way in hell agreeing to a conditional surrender would do anything but excite the hardliners that the US was soft and they could fight back. And Dulles is ignoring the hardliners too, who likely would attempt subversion of any retributions or restituions and probably resort to guerilla warfare if the US had occupied Japan (as it was and is).
Again, backing down on unconditional surrender would've alienated the USSR further and given the hardliners hope, and they're the ones who had power. The war only ended because the Emperor made a public plea for peace, causing Hirohito to order the Supreme Court to accept the terms in the Potsdam Conference guidelines - and there was a failed coup that almost knocked Hirohito out of power before this was finished JUST so the war could continue, AFTER the two nukes. Yeah, the army tried to boot him out after both nuclear bombs so they could keep fighting anyway. And you're telling me Japan was ready and willing to surrender?
I'd find other sources but I'm tired and haven't had time to address all the other stuff because school and AP testing.
Also I don't expect to resolve this debate, as historians have never come to a consensus either. I'm just offering the facts of one side because they're there.
The Hiroshima Bombings have been disproven countless times by researchers due to the fact there was several other options America could have taken place. Japan was nuked as a warning to other countries that this is what America is armed with. It was not because "there was no choice".
Is this admission that the US was indeed fighting "wrong"?
Hiroshima was a military target, so you wouldn't consider the bombing of it inappropriate. Granted the hydrogen bomb was a fierce escalation of firepower in comparison to previous conventions, but you have to realize that it was excessive only by -today's- standards. Bombing in WW2 often resulted in civilian casualty, not because of some evil or devious plot, but because bombs were just inaccurate. Bombing campaigns often relied on volume to determine effectiveness. This meant destroying one factory may result in the total annihilation of the surrounding neighborhoods.
Any city could be considered a 'military target'. Especially in a country like Japan. I don't see how it makes anything appropriate. It certainly is an under-handed little word that makes us instantly at-ease with the idea of murdering tens of thousands of people with a WMD. One little two-word phrase and we have gone from genocidal lunatics to righteous heroes. I am beginning to wonder if the World Trade Center was just a legitimate military target. All is fair, after-all.
But there is an extremely important difference, ethically, from bombs being inaccurate, and bombs that very accurately level a city. Innocent deaths that were not in anyway intended from an inaccurate conventional sort of bomb, that one creature, but knowing full well that the majority of the damage would be to innocent civilians, and calculating that into the decision, thereby making the innocent deaths intentional, well that creature carries a much heavier burden.
The mentality of early 20th century Japanese has been argued to be that similar to samurai, following Bushido, in which case honor demands that every citizen, soldier or not, fight to the death.
That makes no sense. It's self-defeating logic. Japanese people would never surrender/fight to the death, so we have drop atomic bombs on them to get them to do something (surrender), which we have only just established they would never do thereby justifying the action in the first place? And shame on you, for indicting the countless thousands of innocent women, children and elderly on such an obscene charge. Has been argued? You owe them an apology. And I will rescind this statement if you can show me proof outside of the ridiculous propaganda that the Japanese, down to the civilians and children no-less, were the mindless, victory-or-death, honor-bound samurais you believe they were. In the meantime, I'm going to provide proof that they weren't.
Peace Overtures
In April and May 1945, Japan made three attempts through neutral Sweden and Portugal to bring the war to a peaceful end. On April 7, acting Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu met with Swedish ambassador Widon Bagge in Tokyo, asking him "to ascertain what peace terms the United States and Britain had in mind." But he emphasized that unconditional surrender was unacceptable, and that "the Emperor must not be touched." Bagge relayed the message to the United States, but Secretary of State Stettinius told the US Ambassador in Sweden to "show no interest or take any initiative in pursuit of the matter." Similar Japanese peace signals through Portugal, on May 7, and again through Sweden, on the 10th, proved similarly fruitless.
By mid-June, six members of Japan's Supreme War Council had secretly charged Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo with the task of approaching Soviet Russia's leaders "with a view to terminating the war if possible by September." On June 22 the Emperor called a meeting of the Supreme War Council, which included the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, and the leading military figures. "We have heard enough of this determination of yours to fight to the last soldiers," said Emperor Hirohito. "We wish that you, leaders of Japan, will strive now to study the ways and the means to conclude the war. In doing so, try not to be bound by the decisions you have made in the past."
By early July the US had intercepted messages from Togo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow, Naotake Sato, showing that the Emperor himself was taking a personal hand in the peace effort, and had directed that the Soviet Union be asked to help end the war. US officials also knew that the key obstacle to ending the war was American insistence on "unconditional surrender," a demand that precluded any negotiations. The Japanese were willing to accept nearly everything, except turning over their semi-divine Emperor. Heir of a 2,600-year-old dynasty, Hirohito was regarded by his people as a "living god" who personified the nation. (Until the August 15 radio broadcast of his surrender announcement, the Japanese people had never heard his voice.) Japanese particularly feared that the Americans would humiliate the Emperor, and even execute him as a war criminal.
On July 12, Hirohito summoned Fumimaro Konoye, who had served as prime minister in 1940-41. Explaining that "it will be necessary to terminate the war without delay," the Emperor said that he wished Konoye to secure peace with the Americans and British through the Soviets. As Prince Konoye later recalled, the Emperor instructed him "to secure peace at any price, notwithstanding its severity."
The next day, July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired ambassador Naotake Sato in Moscow: "See [Soviet foreign minister] Molotov before his departure for Potsdam ... Convey His Majesty's strong desire to secure a termination of the war ... Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace ..."
On July 17, another intercepted Japanese message revealed that although Japan's leaders felt that the unconditional surrender formula involved an unacceptable dishonor, they were convinced that "the demands of the times" made Soviet mediation to terminate the war absolutely essential. Further diplomatic messages indicated that the only condition asked by the Japanese was preservation of "our form of government." The only "difficult point," a July 25 message disclosed, "is the ... formality of unconditional surrender."
Summarizing the messages between Togo and Sato, US naval intelligence said that Japan's leaders, "though still balking at the term unconditional surrender," recognized that the war was lost, and had reached the point where they have "no objection to the restoration of peace on the basis of the [1941] Atlantic Charter." These messages, said Assistant Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss, "indeed stipulated only that the integrity of the Japanese Royal Family be preserved."
Navy Secretary James Forrestal termed the intercepted messages "real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war." "With the interception of these messages," notes historian Alperovitz (p. 177), "there could no longer be any real doubt as to the Japanese intentions; the maneuvers were overt and explicit and, most of all, official acts. Koichi Kido, Japan's Lord Privy Seal and a close advisor to the Emperor, later affirmed: "Our decision to seek a way out of this war, was made in early June before any atomic bomb had been dropped and Russia had not entered the war. It was already our decision."
In spite of this, on July 26 the leaders of the United States and Britain issued the Potsdam declaration, which included this grim ultimatum: "We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurance of good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."
Commenting on this draconian either-or proclamation, British historian J.F.C. Fuller wrote: "Not a word was said about the Emperor, because it would be unacceptable to the propaganda-fed American masses." (A Military History of the Western World [1987], p. 675.)
America's leaders understood Japan's desperate position: the Japanese were willing to end the war on any terms, as long as the Emperor was not molested. If the US leadership had not insisted on unconditional surrender -- that is, if they had made clear a willingness to permit the Emperor to remain in place -- the Japanese very likely would have surrendered immediately, thus saving many thousands of lives.
The sad irony is that, as it actually turned out, the American leaders decided anyway to retain the Emperor as a symbol of authority and continuity. They realized, correctly, that Hirohito was useful as a figurehead prop for their own occupation authority in postwar Japan.
Contained is the extensive laundry-list of official communications between Japan and the Allies (and intermediaries) throughout early-mid 1945. If you don't wish to read it entirely, It's easy to summarize: After the massive and catastrophic b-29 bombing campaign and complete naval blockade, Japan's authorities were rallying for capitulation. They were aware, and we were aware of their awareness, that Japan had no possible outlook for victory, and wanted to negotiate, willing to surrender completely in every respect so long as the Emperor remained in his position. Truman, as if determined to delay and reject until he could issue a command to drop the atomic bombs, refused every such offer. Then, in true irony, the Japanese accepted the terms of 'Potsdam', and Truman allowed Hirohito to retain his position of leadership and title anyway.
The US was realized that this coupled with the sheer magnitude of ground force required to effectively occupy Japan, would have resulted in far more casualties than would be had by the dropping of the two bombs.
This is all predicated on the false notion that it was necessarily true that we otherwise had to initiate 'Downfall'. We had Japan on the complete, and frankly desperate, defensive since earlier in the year, had complete control over the surrounding seas, they were already on the brink of collapse and attempting to surrender in an agreeable manner such that complete control of their nation wasn't abdicated to foreigners. There was no imperative to invade, nor a need to demand unconditional surrender, only so if you accept the murderous intentions of a bully empire and one Harry Truman.
I had a much longer response but I decided to delete it as I didn't necessarily want to enter the debate, rather impart some information that I don't believe has been covered here.
The Soviet Union's part in the end of the Pacific War is heavily under represented in Western history's scope, which widely focuses on/considers the atomic bombs the deciding factors of the war.
Manchuria/Korea was still in Japan's control and Russia was not at war with Japan. Significant resources were coming in from the continent. Japan's largest and most prestigious army were still not a relevant part of the "Pacific War" at this stage and were primarily located in Manchuria. Japan knew atomic bombs took considerable time to produce and that they could sustain war efforts as long as they weren't at war with Russia.
Stalin manipulated Japan into believing he would help them surrender to the Allies, and believed this was the case up until the 24th of July, 1945 when they suddenly withdrew their embassy staff.
The Soviets agreed to declare war on Japan in 1943 ("3 months after Germany's defeat" - upheld to the hour, by the way) and wanted to annex Manchuria as well, they had their own agenda.
Japan's army was completely defeated by the Soviet's in the largest land war front of all time (apparently; 2 million soviet soldiers covering a land area the size of mongolia)
The defeat and surrender of their main army force, the loss of Manchuria and the significant fear of land invasion from the continent (a lot easier than a pacific one I'd say) with a very conquer-happy Soviet Union were largely the final reasons for Japan's unconditional surrender.
America planned war with Japan without the Soviets as a consideration (trust issues, right?). America had no means of taking Manchuria and assumed Japan would maintain control of it throughout their continued war plans. They didn't believe the Atomic bombs were going to be enough to force surrender and still maintained plans of land invasion.
Hardly. You have painted Japan as innocent, and I was merely demonstrating that Japan was anything but.
Any city could be considered a 'military target'. Especially in a country like Japan. I don't see how it makes anything appropriate. It certainly is an under-handed little word that makes us instantly at-ease with the idea of murdering tens of thousands of people with a WMD. One little two-word phrase and we have gone from genocidal lunatics to righteous heroes. I am beginning to wonder if the World Trade Center was just a legitimate military target. All is fair, after-all.
Why would "any city" be considered a military target? Let me be clear: in war military targets are things like personnel headquarters, factories, training facilities, power plants, etc. etc. The committee to decide which cities were potential targets for the A-bomb came up with 5 locations:
Kokura, the site of one of Japan's largest munitions plants;
Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters;
Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries;
Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; and
The target selection was subject to the following criteria:
The target was larger than 3 mi (4.8 km) in diameter and was an important target in a large urban area.
The blast would create effective damage.
The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945.
Now if you're Al-Qaeda sure, the WTC is a military target. It represents the CENTER of commerce in the United States. It houses offices devoted to all kinds of money movers. It is indeed an important target, by WWII standards, and by today's standards. So your attempting to garner sympathy against the destruction of Hiroshima by eliciting an emotional response in comparing it to 9/11 is a wasted effort. I believe a better example you'd be looking at is if they'd flown planes into Disney World. Which they didn't...
But there is an extremely important difference, ethically, from bombs being inaccurate, and bombs that very accurately level a city. Innocent deaths that were not in anyway intended from an inaccurate conventional sort of bomb, that one creature, but knowing full well that the majority of the damage would be to innocent civilians, and calculating that into the decision, thereby making the innocent deaths intentional, well that creature carries a much heavier burden.
It's not as if we didn't warn them. In fact it was well documented, by THREE nations! You've referenced it, it's all in the Potsdamn Declaration. "Prompt and utter destruction." Nazi Germany surrendered, and without the bombs. Why? Cause war had raged for almost a decade, wearing them down, bit at a time. Germany made a lot of tactical mistakes also, which opened opportunities for Allies to advance. Japan, though? They hadn't been up against us for nearly as long. Do you really think the Allies wanted to drag out ANOTHER decade of war to stop Japan? Please... the solution presented itself with the invention of the first true WMD. One bomb probably would have been enough, but two, absolutely. Their surrender was indeed unconditional, and by doing so they did indeed avert "prompt and utter [total] destruction."
That makes no sense. It's self-defeating logic. Japanese people would never surrender/fight to the death, so we have drop atomic bombs on them to get them to do something (surrender), which we have only just established they would never do thereby justifying the action in the first place? And shame on you, for indicting the countless thousands of innocent women, children and elderly on such an obscene charge. Has been argued? You owe them an apology. And I will rescind this statement if you can show me proof outside of the ridiculous propaganda that the Japanese, down to the civilians and children no-less, were the mindless, victory-or-death, honor-bound samurais you believe they were. In the meantime, I'm going to provide proof that they weren't.
Contained is the extensive laundry-list of official communications between Japan and the Allies (and intermediaries) throughout early-mid 1945. If you don't wish to read it entirely, It's easy to summarize: After the massive and catastrophic b-29 bombing campaign and complete naval blockade, Japan's authorities were rallying for capitulation. They were aware, and we were aware of their awareness, that Japan had no possible outlook for victory, and wanted to negotiate, willing to surrender completely in every respect so long as the Emperor remained in his position. Truman, as if determined to delay and reject until he could issue a command to drop the atomic bombs, refused every such offer. Then, in true irony, the Japanese accepted the terms of 'Potsdam', and Truman allowed Hirohito to retain his position of leadership and title anyway.
"Japanese government had promulgated a National Mobilization Law and waged total war, ordering many civilians (including women and children) to work in factories and military offices and to fight against any invading force."
"On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyuma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war."
"The Japanese code of bushido—'the way of the warrior'—was deeply ingrained. The concept of Yamato-damashii equipped each soldier with a strict code: never be captured, never break down, and never surrender. Surrender was dishonorable. Each soldier was trained to fight to the death and was expected to die before suffering dishonor. Defeated Japanese leaders preferred to take their own lives in the painful samurai ritual of seppuku (called hara kiri in the West). Warriors who surrendered were not deemed worthy of regard or respect."
"The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war far more generous than unconditional surrender."
This is all predicated on the false notion that it was necessarily true that we otherwise had to initiate 'Downfall'. We had Japan on the complete, and frankly desperate, defensive since earlier in the year, had complete control over the surrounding seas, they were already on the brink of collapse and attempting to surrender in an agreeable manner such that complete control of their nation wasn't abdicated to foreigners. There was no imperative to invade, nor a need to demand unconditional surrender, only so if you accept the murderous intentions of a bully empire and one Harry Truman.
Except there was no way the Allies were going to allow Japan to surrender with their -current- establishment still in place. Fighting Germany taught us that. WWII may have even been averted altogether in Europe had the US and others taken a stronger approach to the aftermath of WWI.
