It was an effective tactic for getting an unconditional surrender treaty signed really quickly. I’m nowhere near convinced that it was an effective tactic for minimizing overall loss of life in the last stages of a waning war, nor do I believe that the people who made the decision to destroy Nagasaki particularly cared about the lives of Japanese civilians. War brings out nasty things in people.
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The Japanese surrendered because the USSR entered the war, and Japan did not even have a pretense of having troops to defend against it (one under strength engineering (basically labor) vs a Soviet Guards armored division that had just taken Berlin. It’s not plausible that the Japanese cabinet really understood what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had killed tens of thousands of people and wiped out cities in single raids before, just that it had been done with one plane and one bomb. If it caused them to surrender rather than be invaded, it was totally worth it, but I no longer believe that. We may well have been able to negotiate these terms prior, and not being overrun by the USSR was why they collapsed when they did.
Or out in a desert somewhere. Or over top of the Japanese Pacific Fleet. Or 10 miles off the coast, near Tokyo, where everyone would see it and tremble. And we could have said we built 10 of them because we expected a few to fail, surrender now, or the bombings will continue. Or somesuch strategy. But civilians as legit targets? Just seems so strange to me, even for in the 40’s. Mothers, children, regular guys, schoolkids? That was OK in 1945? I just don’t see how that was a legitimate thought process even then. Sure, Japan was a terrible aggressor. They’d massacred hundreds of thousands in China. Destroyed us at Pearl Harbor. They needed to be put down. But civilians? Why was it OK?
Well yes. And the terms that they wanted included “no occupation,” and the preservation of the imperial system. The idea that the emperor was a mere passive observer of politics was to some extant a post-war fiction created because Macarthur thought that it would be useful to keep the emperor around. So when he pressed the council to accept unconditional surrender he probably believed that he was signing his own death warrant in an attempt to save his people. They didn’t accept terms of surrender that included occupation until after the second bomb. And if they hadn’t we would have dropped a third, and a fourth, and kept dropping them and we would have invaded. We were manufacturing them at a rate of 2-3 per month. And the invasion had been planned in detail by people who didn’t know of the existence of the atomic bomb.
When we occupied Japan, in may ways large and small we remade the country into one that would not invade its neighbors again. Something that we would have been unable to do had we agreed to the surrender terms that they were offering before we dropped the bomb. They may have accepted unconditional surrender if we hadn’t dropped the bombs. Or they may not. There IS a difference between shock and slowly ratcheting up the pressure.
I sometimes wonder how things would have been different if we hadn’t created the atomic bomb. The resources we expended were truly massive, not just a few eggheads in the desert. Entire cities, huge industrial plants were constructed. If those resources had been spend on conventional weapons what would we have made? More aircraft carriers and battleships? More tanks? It’s perfectly possible that directing all those resources into the production of nuclear weapons lengthened the war. But the idea that after putting all that effort into them that we wouldn’t have used them against an implacable enemy that systematically murdered prisoners, and large numbers of Chinese civilians and that refused to accept surrender on our terms despite having lost the war. Indeed they had shown a preference for suicide to surrender, not just by the military but by civilians too…Any US politician or general who declared that this was too terrible to use on the Japanese would have been in danger of being assassinated.
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Simonize makes a number of good points. Half-starved Japanese garrisons on far-flung islands had fought like tigers rather than surrender to superior forces, so there was every reason to expect that an invasion of the home islands would be a bloodbath on a scale never before seen. If the bombs offered an alternate, small wonder they went with them.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military installations that made them legitimate targets. Previously un-bombed cities were chosen to aid in the evaluation of the atomic blasts.
And if the bomb never had come to pass? Interesting. The U.S. Navy would ultimately form a ring around the Japanese islands, so no food or fuel could get in. The last generation of piston-engined fighters, alongside the new jet fighters, would sweep Japanese aircraft from the skies, so that radar-guided B-29s could attack their targets with impunity day or night.
On the ground in Japan, the population clings to their duties while food shortages spread. People in rural areas begin to starve.
Operation Downfall finally begins with naval bombardment of the landing areas for two weeks straight. On landing, opposition is initially light- but becomes fierce as troops move inland. Suicide attacks by Japanese soldiers are common- but then civilians begin attacking too- women, children. Every inch of ground gained is paid for in blood.
When resistance finally ends, most of Japan is a burned cinder. 400,000 Allied troops and seven million Japanese are dead. The Allies set up an occupying force to govern what is left. The Soviet Union governs Hokkaido and the northern third of Honshu- the rest falls to the US and the UK.
Split in two during the Cold War, the economic rebuilding of Japan takes place in US- and UK-occupied zones. The Soviet zone remains an impovershed backwater until the USSR itself dissolves, forty years later.
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Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that we remain the only country that has ever unleashed a weapon of this type on another country (innocent civilians at that) - and yet we tell other countries they can’t build them because we think they can’t be trusted with them.
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hmm…I guess the Soviet occupation zone depends on just how long resistance continued. If Japan surrendered before the Soviets had invaded japan itself, (say after the fall of Tokoyo) I suspect that rather than giving them Hokkaido to occupy, we would have given them all of Korea and Manchuria. Which would have meant no Korean war.
Also, the US wanted to end the war before the USSR got too involved on the Japan front.
I really wish everyone could read Richard Rhodes’s books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which gets us to this point, and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which describes the really bad stuff that happened next. The US basically lost its mind, Bomb-wise, from the late '40s until the '70s.
The question of what if we hadn’t made the Bomb is a really interesting one. All the warring parties had atomic bomb programs, but it turns out none of them except the Manhattan Project had a chance of succeeding. That wasn’t known at the time, of course.
It seems to me that the real tragedy, from our 21st century, climate-changing point of view, is how the fear created by the Bomb poisoned the well for nuclear energy. Energy was a major interest early on, and nuclear power was very quickly deployed in US Navy ships, but shore-based nuclear power in the US has been at a standstill for decades, just when it’s needed most.
In the 40s, “Japs” were buck-toothed, horn-rimmed glasses men with pencil mustaches, not humans, so that’s one reason why it was okay,
I hope you realize I’m not saying that’s how I see the Japanese people.
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Ironic? Yes and no in my opinion. On its surface, yes it’s ironic, but dig a little deeper and the irony fades a bit.
The US, having developed the weapons as well as command and control systems and procedures, became the de facto expert on nuclear policy until 1949, I believe, when the Soviets set off their first nuke. In the more than 68 years since we attacked with nukes, we haven’t used them in anger again, despite a few very close calls (the Cuban Missile Crisis being the highest profile). I’d say that in that time, overall we’ve been pretty responsible.
When “toys” (deadly toys in this case) are available, the temptation to use them is pretty strong. We’ve figured out how to conduct international affairs without the active use of nukes. I’d say that puts us in a position of authority.
All that being said, I’d love to see a world without nukes, heck, without a single bomb or bullet left.
EDIT in response to ronaldpottol:
“The US basically lost its mind, Bomb-wise, from the late '40s until the '70s.”
I absolutely agree with you 100%. The proliferation of nukes and nuke testing is an example of when the “toys” were played with unnecessarily. Despite that, we managed to stay out of a nuclear war, By the skin of our teeth of course, but at least we avoided it.
So? Just because that’s what they wanted doesn’t mean they were going to get it. Trying to negotiate a surrender treaty is what most governments do when they find themselves facing inevitable defeat.
If my country was on the losing end of a war I’d probably hope that my government at least try to negotiate some kind of basic assurances, even if all they ended up walking away from the table with was a promise of “no death camps or wholesale enslavement.”
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I have no idea if the second drop was necessary or not, and it doesn’t matter much now.
I am still horrified at watching a video of 70,000 people being vaporized, incinerated and/burned to death. I would be equally horrified watching videos of the firebombing of Dresden, the holocaust or any number of other atrocities we as a species have inflicted on each other.
Hell, I can’t even watch all those awful youtube fail videos where people are clearly getting badly hurt. This video, despite its historical context, still makes me feel awful. Kids died in that mushroom cloud. Fuck anything that makes kids die.
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I think that we’re all going to agree that the size of the cold war nuclear arsenals of the US and USSR were absurdly huge and had no real justification. And I don’t mean that they were morally indefensible, I mean that from a political/military standpoint. The US and the USSR were deterred from attacking each other or their respective European allies. And I think that they would have been equally deterred by arsenals one fifth the size.
Parents often express similar rules against doing what they did.
What rings in my ears is how astoundingly EASY it is to blow ourselves up and make our planet uninhabitable. All we had to do was discover criticality, even in the absence of a full understanding of General Relativity, and then mine the earth and concentrate the elements that would explode in a massive fireball when reflected in on themselves.
It’s like the universe said, “Here, go ahead. It’s an APPLE. TAKE A BITE. It’ll kill ya, but don’t it taste GOOD?”
Shit, you’re gonna jinx it…
And bear in mind that Kurt was a survivor of the Dresden firebombing. (Like my mom. Hi, mom!)
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