Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Lucky Strike,” an alternative history of the bombing, makes an almost overwhelmingly powerful case that a war crime of extraordinary scale was committed not once, but twice.
http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=LuckyStrikeSwans
That was trite.
And Nagasaki is a shining example of that hell being visited upon a civilian population for little-to-no military purpose.
Does anyone really believe that the outcome of the war would have been significantly different if the U.S. had visited nuclear destruction on one city instead of two?
Wouldn’t it have been better to drop the bomb somewhere off the coast or in an unpopulated area of Japan and let the Japanese decide if they wanted to continue or surrender?
I guess that depends on if one was enough to force a surrender. That I can’t answer. I can answer that yes, dropping the bombs did shorten the war which in the long run saved lives on both sides.
What was special about Fat Man and Little Boy at the time is that they were part of an explicit plan to kill a lot of civilians with the biggest BFBs to that time. (There were other similar plans, like the bombing of Dresden). I can understand giving the finger to your opposite numbers in the military, but IMO it would have been unconscionable knowingly to do it to civilians. I’m glad that these guys didn’t.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
-Voltaire
For some reason the silence makes it an appropriate companion piece to richard rhodes’ the making of the atomic bomb which i would urge anyone to read who hasn’t. Though reaching the section dealing with the trinity test and having the modern means to immediately watch it has a horrific allure all to itself…
Gotta be silent though. What’s that asimov short story i’m reminded of? Having a vision of the very devil himself in the flames…
I watched a documentary years ago which revealed the US had intercepted and decoded communications between Japanese admirals discussing what terms of surrender should be. The US categorically knew the Japanese were on the brink of surrender but chose to drop the bombs, not to end the war which was about to happen anyway, but to signal to the world they had the bomb and to find out exactly what the effect on a real population would be. I wish I could remember what the source was but I’ve never seen this mentioned since.
That is exactly how Ted van Kirk explained it to my father in the 1960s, when Dad got to know him by way of borrowing his lawnmower. He said if they’d known, they would’ve dropped it anyway, but there was no real psychological impact at the time because it was just “a really big bomb” and they were a bomber crew.
And as others have pointed out here, that’s not at all an incorrect way of looking at it, really. The atomic bomb ranks somewhere in the middle of the range of hideous things we can and do inflict on each other, and the mystique surrounding it is a little bit absurd at this point. Personally I think contemplation of the death and destruction inflicted by war is somewhat cheapened, for lack of a better word, by an obsession with nuclear bombs. Torture, depleted uranium shells and brainwashing, all of which are in current use, are at least as much of a target for concern.
I still appreciate the video, though. As @chgoliz said, there’s a certain majesty to mushroom clouds that’s at odds with the horrors of war and radiation.
Well, the Japanese obviously didn’t surrender after the first one. Which logically answers the question of why we didn’t just do a demonstration on an uninhabited spot. If the destruction of Hiroshima didn’t force the surrender, what makes anybody think not destroying a city would have worked?
Myself, I’m not sure how different Hiroshima and Nagasaki were to the other 50 or so Japanese cities we destroyed using conventional explosives. Neither of these resulted in the largest death tolls. In either case, the argument can be made that destroying entire cities is a war crime. Of course, we invented the war crime. It’s a bit much to expect the victors to charge themselves as criminals. Compare the number of Japanese convicted of crimes relating to treatment of POW’s versus the number of Soviets. Hint: one of those numbers is 0.
It’s a question that we would have an answer to if the U.S. had shown any interest in finding out. Then, if the answer had been “no, surrender requires at least two cities turned into atomic ash” they still could have made Nagasaki Plan B.
The U.S. was also interested in showing off for the Russians who might have previously thought about taking part of Japan as spoils of war like they did with East Germany.
I had this coffee table book once upon a time.
100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with one hundred photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen and still photographers were sworn to secrecy.
I saw a performance of this opera once, too.
They were privately trying to negotiate terms of surrender even before Hiroshima. It’s pretty understandable why any government would resist the idea of unconditional surrender without any knowledge of what that might mean for themselves or their subjects (Mass slavery? Death Camps?). Even Churchill and Eisenhower thought that demanding unconditional surrender was asking too much.
Also, the Japanese government barely had time to figure out what the hell had just happened at Hiroshima before Nagasaki was destroyed. The Allies might have at least given Japan until the end of the week to get their shit together.
In either case, the argument can be made that destroying entire cities is a war crime. Of course, we invented the war crime. It’s a bit much to expect the victors to charge themselves as criminals.
This I actually agree with. But I also find the idea of burning entire civilian populations to death with firebombs to be morally abhorrent. Understandable in the context of wartime? Possibly, but hardly our best moment and certainly not something to be proud of.
I think Americans are sometimes numb to these kinds of horrors because there hasn’t been a full-scale military attack against an American civilian population in living memory. We think we got a raw deal when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but at least that was a military target. Maybe that’s why 9/11 made us lose our collective shit for over a decade.
You might be interested in watching Crossroads.
(EDIT: It isn’t silent, though: Terry Riley did the music. And it’s footage of tests.)
That reminds me of Quint’s often-quoted monologue from Jaws about the sinking of the Indianapolis, with its horrific description of survivors getting eaten alive by sharks… and the almost parenthetical mention of its role in delivering “the Hiroshima bomb.”
The following day, his burns swathed in bandages, Yamaguchi reported for work in Nagasaki, like Hiroshima an important industrial and military base.
At 11.02 on 9 August, as his boss reportedly questioned his sanity for believing that a single bomb could destroy a city the size of Hiroshima, a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.
There were apparently eighteen people who survived both bombs; there’s a book about nine of them here:
[quote=“Brainspore, post:37, topic:22161”]
Also, the Japanese government barely had time to figure out what the hell had just happened at Hiroshima before Nagasaki was destroyed. The Allies might have at least given Japan until the end of the week to get their shit together.[/quote]
In fighting this is called a “one two punch”.
And it worked. Even the notoriously hardline Japanese military brass had no answer, they couldn’t stop the peace from being signed. Getting them at the table before the politicians could be brought in line by the military was exactly the reason why it was done that way.
