When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.
If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility?
> The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan.
So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.
Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?.
WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).
Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too.
And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.
My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties.
If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.
As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver.
They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP.
To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.
They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb.
Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless.
A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501
People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now.
The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?).
Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from.
So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies.
> but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.
Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something.
In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people.
On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all.
Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.
Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable. But, thanks for the historical analysis here nonetheless.
Fair enough. But the people with the best understanding of events as they were happening, were those actually making the decisions at the time.... and they decided to drop the bomb.
For years after that it's been 'backseat drivers' second-guessing that decision despite their own claims being totally unfalsifiable. While it might be nice to be able to look back on hindsight, no one had a crystal ball at the time, which is why it's inappropriate to pin decisions made in 1945 with the moral qualms of a generation that has never seen world-wide total war.
We don't know if there could have been an alternative that definitively ended the war and cost less lives. Things were winding down at that point anyway. I don't even necessarily feel that dropping those bombs was a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because it shone a light on the darkness that we are capable of as a species. Maybe those two bombs were all that prevented mutual destruction during the cold war.
But as an isolated event, nuking a city is just as horrific as pushing people into ovens - it's really quite comparable, actually - and I think it's best just to say, we did something awful, we thought we had to, it's over now, it won't happen again. Germany did this, for instance. And the only reason that didn't happen for the atomic bombs is because the US "won" the war.
The first says, we did something bad, but it was justified, i.e. we didn't do anything morally wrong. The second says we did something bad, we thought it was justified, but it turns out that it was a mistake. Einstein is clearly expressing the latter, whereas official American policy expresses the former, and there has never been an apology.
Presumably you have a proposed option to have done that without atomic weaponry and that the Americans should have recognized with the information available to them; what is that option?
Instead you get "we did what we had to", which is unapologetic, and doesn't allow the possibility of there being better options. It basically comes down to admitting doubt vs. reinforcing belief (since asserting an unfalsifiable claim is a belief).
Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that invading Japan was the only alternative. I mentioned somewhere, perhaps not in reply to you, that dropping atomic bombs on remote regions of Japan would have demonstrated military superiority with far less casualties.
And another post in this thread linked to this article:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...
If you're actually really interested in this, and maybe you are since you're obviously interested in military stuff, I'm pretty sure there are entire bookcases filled with books and journal articles weighing the pros and cons of the decision to drop the bomb.
But there's a difference between loss of life in combat versus deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation or of prisoners who are in your care. It's not about who has the highest scorecard of death and depravity.
Ask the same question about incendiary bombing, which happened throughout the war. The B-29s dropping incendiaries on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic attacks. Are those pilots war criminals? Are the artillerymen who leveled towns and villages full of people war criminals? Based on the "total war" approach embraced in WW2, they were not.
I mean, it was essentially, "We have unlimited capacity to randomly murder 100,000 of your civilians at once, we've demonstrated it twice now, so submit to our authority." Well, they did.
FYI I'm not personally advocating that obliterating cities is ok. I find it morally repugnant. I'm Just recounting the generally accepted standard of the time.
Also doing it Charlie Sheen style helps (winning!)