Or cross the streams!
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Your own links are demonstrating my point exactly.
The first discussed the viewpoint that the bombs were "necessary in order to save American lives and prevent an invasion that might have cost many more lives than the bombs took (emphasis added). An the rest of your links focus almost entirely on whether the bombs were “justified.” That’s exactly the conflation and confusion that results when terms like “necessary” are misused.
The concepts of whether the bombs were necessary to end the war is NOT interchangeable with whether the use of the bombs was justified given the alternatives. This is not semantics, it’s exactly the pitfall that should be avoided.
And those historians, along with numerous historians and authors at the US Army War College have long discussed and debated the degree to which the bombs were justified, NOT whether there were other options available to end the war. They are not conflating the same issue you are.
My POINT is that there is a very strong set of scholar ship in DEFENSE of dropping the bomb, whether or not they see it as “necessary” or “justified” (which seems like pointless hairsplitting)… 
Yes, there is probably a focus on a single word, but that wasn’t MY point at all.
If you wish to focus on literally one word as propping up your entire argument, have fun with that, I guess.
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Your POINT is not being argued and is shifting the goalposts from what I am actually saying. Words and concepts matter, and as I have explained the differences between these concepts leads to a misunderstanding of what actually happened. If you don’t care about the distinction between those concepts or why that distinction matters, then I’m not sure what else to tell you.
Yeah, exactly - and the use of nuclear weapons was just an example for him, not the point of his argument. He was just arguing for the genocide bit.
Yep, and he’s not alone in this, disturbingly - so many Republicans have been explicitly saying this lately, and what needs pushing back on.
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And even that rather ignores the question of “ending the war on what terms?” Because the Japanese government was willing to surrender before the bombs and the declaration of war by the Soviet Union, but NOT under terms that the US found acceptable. The demands that they made that the US was unwilling to accept were:
- No occupation
- Any war crimes trials were to be conducted by the Japanese
- Retention of the Emperor.*
That was the reason that US continued prosecuting the war, rather than “demonstrating the bomb to Stalin.” Now whether denying them those terms was “worth” the moral cost of continuing the war is a legitimate question. The thinking as the time was that Germany and Japan needed to be remade from the ground up to prevent them from threatening the world again after another 20 year pause. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was significantly worse than we can imagine. But then, so were the firebombings of Berlin and Tokyo. When you are setting babies of fire, the big difference between using nukes and incendiaries is how much avgas you used for the planes.
- The fact that MacArthur would decide that Hirohito would be more useful alive than dead after the fact was not envisioned when the US was discussing surrender terms.
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That’s always such recurring and obvious hole in the discussion it drives me nuts. It’s easy to sit back 80 years on and make strategic judgments, but the heart of it is pretty simple: the wars against Germany and Japan ended in Armageddon for each because the regimes in Germany and Japan were unwilling to consider terms remotely acceptable to the Allies and could do nothing other than fight to Armageddon by their nature. If these regimes were controlled by fundamentally rational actors, the war wouldn’t have lasted to 1945 in the first place! That’s a big part of what is so ridiculously infuriating about Graham’s utter lack of context–it just spurs more bad policy.
Defeat for both had been clear for the better part of 2 years (at a minimum), but they kept fighting and kept killing.
Those aren’t the same question, though. They could in theory have continued prosecuting the war without using nukes. I understand a number of generals thought they should. I’ve also heard that with the Soviets invading Manchuria, some people thought there was a good chance their conditions could have been talked down to only retaining the emperor, not that it was ever tested.
Of course, I’m not an expert on this at all. I don’t know if anyone here is on this particular event but Mindy is at least a proper historian to listen to.
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There’s also the political aspect, which isn’t often mentioned but was covered a bit too extensively by the professor in a ‘war in the nuclear age’ class I took in college.
(warning, half-remembered half quickly looked-up political wonkery ahead.)
In April 1945 Truman comes into office, and learns that the previous administration had spent during this war with so many other demands on the economy the modern equivalent of ~$27 billion dollars on a superweapon that could potentially end the war, and it is almost ready. By mid-April the scientists working on the bomb had already solved virtually all the major technical problems, and were mostly waiting for u235 and plutonium production to ramp up to usable quantities so they could build their designs. When, inevitably, the news got out of the bombs existence Truman would have to explain to his electorate why such a potentially war-ending and expensive weapon wasn’t used. It couldn’t be kept secret forever, too many people were involved. Kodak figured it out within a week, and they wouldn’t have been alone, they just got the idea first due to some freak fallout from the Trinity test contaminating their x-ray stock, and that fallout was just about everywhere in a few days in detectable quantities. Truman may well have faced impeachment either after the war for its non-use if the secret was kept until then, or if one of the seven members of Congress who were kept informed of the project decided the weapon’s non-use by the Commander in Chief needed to be overridden as soon as a bomb was ready and it was clear he wasn’t going to use it.
So politically not using the bomb probably would have not only kept him from being elected in the '48 election, presumably a goal of a long-term politician such as himself, but might well have negatively impacted his party, or even hypothetically removed from office. Certainly not his only consideration, but one of that seems to be overlooked in many discussions of the decision to drop the Bomb.
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There’s very little moral distinction between systematically setting fire to ever square mile of urban area and the people living there with nukes versus with incendiary bombs. Add to that the imminent famine as the blockade of the home islands tightened. And as blackanvil points out, NOT using nukes was probably not really in the cards. If he hadn’t authorized using the bomb, Truman would have been lucky to have been impeached, and not assassinated by a family member of some serviceman lost due to continued bombing and blockade or invasion. The realistic options were:
- Accepting a negotiated peace settlement.
- Continued naval blockade and bombing (including nukes) for an indefinite period of time until Japan collapsed.
- Blockade and bombing (including nukes) as a prelude to invasion of the home islands.
From a moral point of view, and to minimize the loss of life, 1. would have been the obvious choice. But there was a huge unwillingness to leave the people that started and prosecuted the war for the Japanese in power. Combined with the fact that the US tired of war and wanted it OVER eliminating 2. (although it certainly had its proponents, especially in the higher ranks of the Navy and the Army Air Forces) it meant that the US had decided on 3.
Maybe. That’s a lot of paragraphs and assumptions to say the two questions are the same, enough that I would say it’s not trivial and defer the matter to people with more historical knowledge than I have. Again, though, I understand some generals were against the use of nukes, which means someone at the time must not have thought they were necessary.
I will also say I’m not convinced everything here must have been done in such a perfectly rational fashion as people like to imagine. At the very least, Nagasaki was bombed only six days after Hiroshima. Less than a week of intense stress to decide whether a second city needed to be obliterated or not. I know it’s not the kind of narrative people like, but that’s the sort of circumstances where I could imagine the decision coming down to Truman’s blood sugar level when they discussed it.
For what it’s worth, there were several military leaders who opposed the use of atomic weapons, but their actual reasoning doesn’t typically make it into the explanation when their quotes re: opposition to the bombs get trotted out.
Curtis LeMay felt the use of the bombs was “unnecessary” because his strategic bombing campaign was about to bring about surrender, and all he needed was a few more months and a million or so additional casualties to finish the job. Likewise, Halsey was a vocal critic of the use of the bombs…because he thought that the naval blockade should have been given the opportunity to starve Japan into submission. Same with MacArthur, who advocated for a full-scale invasion of the home islands under his command. All of these options, in any combination, would have likely resulted in substantially more Japanese casualties than the bombs, but that part is often glossed over when discussing whether the bombs were “necessary.”
If you’re interested in the day-to-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour) history of the end of the war and the actual decision-making by Truman and Japanese leadership, there is absolutely no better source in my opinion than Richard Frank’s work in general, and Downfall in particular. Stunning work on every level.
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You left out a very important part of this:
“No occupation of the Japanese Home Islands, Korea or Formosa.” Japan’s leaders at the time really wanted to hold on to Korea and Taiwan.
Source: Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia
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That tracks. LeMay’s firebombing campaigns killed even more Japanese civilians than the nukes did, so he certainly didn’t seem to be concerned about that angle. The reason Hiroshima got the first bomb instead of Tokyo is because LeMay had burned Tokyo to the ground already.
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My wife’s family has no photos of themselves before the early 1950s. The reason? Everything was burnt in the Tokyo fire storm, and afterwards they were too poor to afford a camera.
On the plus side, somehow no-one got killed. The boys in the military managed to avoid overseas postings. The women and children sat out the end of the war in the countryside, picking hedgerow fruit, a passion my mother-in-law holds to this day.
Back in the UK, my mother and father survived the bombings and buzz bomb attacks on Birmingham and London. My grandfather was a tank driver in the desert war. He got malaria and was invalided away to a unit which scouted Italy for officer billets. He found two girls by the side of the road near Salerno and helped them. Our families are still friends now.
War Is Hell. But there is some humanity in it even so.
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LeMay was a real sociopath who quickly warmed to nuclear weapons once he saw their effectiveness.
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As an add-on to your point (not intended as a well actually…) the below lecture is excellent on decision-making process at the end of the war:
This discussion treats the end of the Asia-Pacific War, 1937-1945, not from the limited view centered on the US and Japan (and mention of the Soviet Union) but from a global perspective. Steeped in the most current scholarship on this important subject in American history, Frank explores the harrowing alternatives that faced American leaders, particularly those not involving atomic bombs. It further follows the basic principles of counting all the dead and treating them as sharing a common humanity.
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To add a bit more: there were never going to be any quick and easy outcomes to the war.
And each different outcome leaves us with a very different map of the world today. What we ended up with was neither the best nor the worst possible outcome, but hindsight is 20:20.
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