Well, no, they almost certainly didn’t. The 1m figure was not based on any real estimates, and was essentially a nice round number that became accepted as true with little to no basis in fact.
For the record, I believe that the use of the bombs were unimaginably horrible and probably a war crime with which our leader would have been tried if we were on the losing side (along with our firebombing), as well as being the least horrible option available at the time to end the war and cap the mounting death toll.
As my favorite history professor explained a long time ago, the moral superiority of the US in WWII did not come from how we fought the war because we did incredibly brutal things that were no better than our enemies. Our moral superiority came from what we did after the fighting stopped.
Not for nothing, but there are several less than idealistic reasons for a lot of those generals and admirals making those statements after the war. The Naval leaders wanted to starve Japan into submission by blockade, which would have given them credit for winning the war. Likely costing several million more civilian casualties and dragging the war out for another several months at best.
Bomber Command desperately (to the point of pathology) wanted to continue mass firebombing to prove the value of strategic bombing they had trying to prove throughout the war at a truly staggering cost to civilians. The army was the least interested in an invasion, given the casualties it would incur, but a good deal of their horror at the use of the weapons was that they believed it devalued the Army in future wars.
The Nation article is correct that the war had been lost for Japan at least since late '44. But Japan didn’t stop fighting. We knew pretty clearly from our Magic decrypts the armistice (not surrender) terms the peace faction of Japan’s foreign service was willing to negotiate, and we knew that they weren’t even close to terms we could accept, and that the small minority who advocated and armistice had no control over the military.
To be clear, there are a lot of reasonable arguments to make in good faith that we shouldn’t have dropped the bombs (even if I happen to disagree with them, I accept that reasonable people can and do disagree vehemently about this), but this article relies on a lot of half-truths and ignores the costs of those other options.
Yes, a student of history such as I should, and do know what I’m talking about.
Re-read my comment. Only the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Fat Man, which was an implosion-type plutonium-based weapon, used plutonium produced at Hanford Site. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Little Boy, was a shotgun-type enriched-uranium weapon, that got its material from Picatinny Arsenal.
And yes, I believe the mushroom cloud represents the detonation of a nuclear weapon, just not either of the specific ones used on Japan. It represents nuclear weapons in general.
Maybe instead of the atomic cloud, they could use a picture of a bomb or one of the classic bombers. Or create a mascot to ride/throw a bomb. Like this:
The “necessity” of the bombing aside, anything that results in thousands upon thousands of deaths not to mention the suffering of many more over the ensuing years is not to be romanticized, cheered or made into some cartoonish rah-rah. If it were in fact 100% indisputable that the atomic bombing of Japan saved lives overall (it is not) or that the world would be much worse off had it not happened (ditto) it still caused death and suffering on an unimaginable scale. Not funny, not romantic. At the very best, it can be remembered as a tragedy.
The estimate was projected based upon the tactics and tenacity with which the Japanese fought on Saipan and Okinawa, combined with the experience in Europe with the world’s first large-scale urban warfare. Of course we will never know what the exact toll would have been, but I believe no one of appropriate education and experience doubts that the invasion would have cost the Japanese far, far more lives than were lost in the two bombings, plus Allied casualties.
It’s a cartoon, not a technical drawing. The idea that you can tell which big explosion the cartoonist meant to represent (or if they meant to represent any particular big explosion) is nuts.
Please count the number of posts with an “evil America” theme that were in the thread before you came here to lecture them. It’s zero. Your horse is so high you can’t even see whether your enemies are real or just in your imagination.
I’m sorry, but that simply not accurate. The low end of estimates from the Joint War Plans Committee were around 220k US casualties and many times that for Japanese casualties. The high end estimates from Stimson were around 800k US casualties, with many times that for the Japanese.
I happen to agree with that, but I don’t agree that using exaggerated estimates not based on the actual estimates the US was using at the time is necessary or appropriate. Just as I don’t think it’s good history to pretend that Japan was trying to “surrender,” I don’t think the numbers should (or even need to be) inflated to argue the case for dropping the bombs.
Meh… not really a fan of these either, for the same reasons. There are plenty of different sorts of symbols they can use that are associated with nuclear power and energy that doesn’t glorify violence, IMHO. I wish people could be more creative about such things, but that’s not the world we live in right, now…
However, I base my observation from working in the NWC for 11 years, knowing what Hanford Site is/was, and how it was viewed by the local community prior to the impending ecological disaster.
I got here early. And really, there isn’t much in the way of anti-American posts. The posts pretty much discuss the whether we should have used nuclear weapons, or not. You’re the only one using the term “evil America.” I believe most BoingBoing readers know the folly of over-generalization.
