Historian Gar Alperovitz, among others, has argued that US leaders knew they could have gotten a surrender from Japan, without dropping the bombs. There are a number of impressive quotes in support of this idea, like….
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” -Admiral William D. Leahy, Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
“…Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary […and] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ ” -General Dwight D. Eisenhower
“P.M. [Churchill} & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” -President Harry S. Truman, Diary Entry, July 18, 1945.
For a summary of the most radical “dropping the bomb was unnecessary” view held by any respectable historian, check out Gar Alperovitz’s 1995 “Foreign Policy” article. I’m not sure that I buy all of Alperovitz’s conclusions, but that the war could have been ended without either the A-Bomb or a full invasion of Japan is a fairly well-supported view. (Of course, some right-wing historians – notably Robert Maddox – disagree. But theirs is not the mainstream view.)
The issue wasn’t if the Japanese were prepared to surrender – but if they were prepared for unconditional surrender. Then and now, many experts believe that the Japanese would have surrendered if they had assurance that they would be able to retain their Emperor in some capacity. As Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki announced on August 9, 1945 (three days after Hiroshima, the day Nagasaki was bombed) “Should the Emperor system be abolished, they [the Japanese people] would lose all reason for existence. ‘Unconditional surrender’, therefore, means death to the hundred million: it leaves us no choice but to go on fighting to the last man.”
What Americans usually forget is that the Japanese didn’t surrender after August 5, 1945; nor after August 9. On the contrary, Japanese hawks were quite prepared to fight to the death after the dropping of the bombs; that the US so vastly out-powered them only added to the romantic fatalism driving their pro-war views.
So what did bring about the Japanese surrender? On August 11th, the Americans finally gave the Japanese Emperor and doves what they had been waiting for: surrender terms which said “the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied powers.” This amounted to an explicit statement that the Emperor would not be removed from office. After a few days of studying the terms, on August 14 the Emperor asked the Cabinet to accept the surrender offer; the Cabinet unanimously agreed to surrender that same day.
To the Japanese hawks, this was the one request for peace that could not be turned down. The Emperor was considered a god, after all. It was the Emperor’s request – not the two atomic bombs – that convinced the hawks in the Japanese Cabinet to surrender.
For further reading on the Japanese surrender, I recommend Doug Long’s essay Hiroshima: Was it Necessery?, as well as the Gar Alperovitz essay I mentioned above. Also, check out the Slactivist’s post on Hiroshima..
Johnny Carson: “I did not know that.” Thank you.
Good post… just thought I’d point out that you can’t seem to decide whether it’s Gil Alperovitz or Gar Alperovitz. (According to the linked essay, it’s Gar, I believe.)
Can anyone here comment on this theory:
We dropped the A-bomb on Japan not to send a message to the Japanese, but to send a message to Stalin. When we dropped the bomb, the defacto division of Europe had already taken place. Hiroshima was a real-world demonstration of our power, to prevent Stalin from getting ideas about going further west in Europe, or, using the lands “taken” in the Russian-Japanese war, insist on being included in any potential invasion of Japan and splitting Japan into North and South the way Germany was split into East and West.
I have not actually studied this, but it has always seemed to me the most plausible theory.
BTW, does ANYONE justify Nagasaki? I mean, whatever our motives, wasn’t once enough?
Umm, allow me to be the first for commenting without checking thelinks first.
Sorry.
That is, the first to criticize myself. I need to use preview as well.
My understanding is that dropping the A-bomb on Japan (twice) could only have been for show. After all, most of Japan’s cities had already been virtually annihilated by constant fire-bombing by US air forces. And it would be quite some time before enough A-bombs could be manufactured to make a significant military impact (I believe they only had two more at the time of the bombing of Nagasaki.) Using the A-bomb was a symbolic act if not a message. As a message (i.e. “we can destroy you at will”), it would be useless to the Japanese, who were well aware of that fact by mid-1945. Other targets for such a message would be few and obvious. It’s also possible that they used The Bomb because they could. New weapons have been used extensively during the last two Gulf wars as a demonstration, for nationalistic pride as well as for possible arms sales.
Thanks for the correction, Malcolm.
As for why we dropped the bomb, I think the geopolitical effects may have been more like “side benefits” than the sole reason. In retrospect – and to many people at the time – it seems like there were means of getting Japan to surrender that weren’t so destructive and were more effective.
But it was hard to understand that at the time. The Japanese experts who worked for Truman were analogous to the Japanese doves – and they had less influence than the tough-talking hawks with Truman, alas. At the end of a long war, diplomatic nicities didn’t seem very viable to a lot of people, and in particular to a lot of the folks who surrounded Truman but didn’t know much about Japan besides what they’d read in the papers. People who were saying things like “the American people will never accept anything less than unconditional surrender” and “the Japanese will never surrender to ordinary military force” seemed a lot more persuasive.
So I think Truman dropped the bombs for the stated reason – because he wanted to get the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. The problem was, it didn’t entirely work.
I imagine that this is what people will sound like when they talk about the second Gulf War fifty years down the line.
I agree with Amp’s assessment that what likely happened was that the hawks in America, with little understanding of Japanese culture, and the hawks in Japan, with a burning drive to protect the Emperor, were simply the louder voices. It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually the second Gulf War is considered to be largely unnecessary (it’s already moving in that direction) but that the hawks on either side of the world just wouldn’t let it be.
For more discussion of this issue, see http://lefti.blogspot.com (among other things, you’ll find there the answer to “why we bombed Nagasaki”)
This is a tough call, but I have to side with Harry S Truman, and the much-maligned Smithsonian Institution exhibit. The United States and Japan were in locked in a brutal, if, compared to the USSR-Germany struggle, minor battle. (Tip: the proper understanding of WWII is that it was total war between these two European antagonists, and for the rest of us, a cutthroat sideshow.) Given that both sides of the Pacific War were murderous xenophobes, and that Japan believed it was fighting against national annhilation, there wasn’t much room for less-than-terrible methods. The firebombing of Tokyo, as well as several other of Japan’s cities, didn’t stop the war. While there was a racist component to our use of it, FDR would have happily bombed Hitler if the bomb had been ready soon enough. Certainly Truman and Byrnes figured that the bomb would keep the super-powerful Red Army out of France and Italy. But the decision to bomb Japan was defensible on its own. I don’t believe the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima deserved this fate, and I often wonder how many American Christians know that Nagasaki was the site of the largest Christian church in Asia, but I can’t say Truman was wrong.
As someone who has left a paper crane in Hiroshima, seen the before and after pictures of ground zero, and looked closely at the shadows that once were people and the melted clocks that were made by Fat Man (or was it Little Boy?) not by Salvador Dali, I don’t think it was that simple.
The Emperor intervened in political discussions, something unheard of, to appeal for surrender. As a result, there was a clique of the military which planned a coup to keep on fighting – even if it meant overthrowing the Emperor. They might have succeeded.
Yes, the sticking point was the personal inviolability of the Emperor. Yes, Truman probably didn’t fully understand that objection to unconditional surrender. But also yes, there is a case that can be made for trying the Emperor as a war criminal for some of the things he did during the war himself, or so I am led to believe.
One should also remember that the Dresden firebombing killed as many if not more people than either of the A-bomb blasts and that the firebombing of Tokyo was at least as devastating. We should also remember that one of the targets seriously considered for atomic destruction was Kyoto, a city without any military installations and the cultural center of Japan.
“One should also remember that the Dresden firebombing killed as many if not more people than either of the A-bomb blasts and that the firebombing of Tokyo was at least as devastating.” – gmoke
Slacktivist gives 230,000 as the total number of deaths due to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If memory serves me, this is the death toll not only directly due to the blasts, but additionally due to radiation-induced illnesses over several decades. (Forgive me if I’m mistaken; it’s been about 20 years since I worked for Jack Schull.) And that brings up an important point…
I think the death toll from these bombings needs to be viewed in a long-term context. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first wartime uses of nuclear weapons, uses directed against whole cities full of humans, and as such, are properly regarded as the beginning, not the end, of an atrocity that has not yet fully played out. People who live in the next century, if indeed there are people still living by then, may have a clearer idea of the true death toll due to these two acts.
Every U.S. president, including Truman, has acted in America’s short-term interests, as best he understood them. (Well, actually, there’s this fellow occupying the White House right now…) While I do not fault Truman personally, and tend to agree with Ampersand’s assessment that the hawks on both sides of the Pacific got the better of the argument, with disastrous consequences, I do think we have a long way to go before we can know what those uses of nuclear weapons on human targets spells for the future of humanity. I do, however, have no hesitation in condemning the decision to bomb; that’s a moral question, not a question of arithmetic.
This discussion also highlights the monstrous moral calculus of the Japanese government at that time. If Alperovitz’s arguments are true, then no price was too high, and no amount of casualties (military or civilian) was unacceptable, as long as the emperor’s life and dignity were preserved. From Hirohito’s point of view, it’s hard to see his actions as motivated by anything more grandiose than personal survival. Certainly, he renounced his claims of divinity promptly enough after the war.
As for Alperovitz’s article, I take it that no relevant Japanese source material exists? There is a lot of discussion of what Japanese leaders might have done in the face of different options, but there is no examination of Japanese documents to indicate what they were actually planning to do.
Also, Alperovitz does not attempt to estimate the cost of Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Presumably a Soviet invasion would have carried a significant cost in human life (especiaaly considering how spendthrift the Russians were with soldiers), and subsequent Communist rule over a portion of Japan would have carried with it several decades of political oppression and enviromental degradation.
I’m not trying to say Alperovitz is wrong. He’s presumably a qualified historian and has done a lot of work in this area, which I certainly have not. I’m just identifying a few additional questions that were raised in my mind.
When I was studying this question at a rather left-wing university 20 years ago, Alperovitz was generally considered a bit of a nutball. If his view has become the mainstream historical view in the meantime, that’s news to me.
What Brian, gmoke, and Steve said: we were in a life-&-death war against an enemy that had given every sign of being utterly implacable, and which had opened hostilies by attacking us in a move as nasty as 9/11. That should be borne in mind in any discussion of whether the A-bomb was necessary. Yes, it killed many civilians, but the fire-bombings were worse, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because they were among the few cities in Japan with military installations that hadn’t already been bombed to smithereens with conventional bombings. (And Kyoto was taken off the list precisely because it had no military targets.)
The notion that we used the A-bomb to scare Stalin is ludicrous. We’d just finished persuading him to declare war on Japan, which we needn’t have done. The bomb program had been set in motion long before any idea of conflict with Stalin had ever come up. And if we were really determined to scare him, we could have picked a fight and dropped the bomb on him while we still had a monopoly.
I can’t understand why anyone thinks that Hiroshima was OK but Nagasaki was too much. If you wish to hit an enemy, you hit him once and see if he surrenders. If he doesn’t, you hit him again, and keep hitting until he does. The fire-bombing of Tokyo shook the Japanese, but they didn’t surrender. So we dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. That also shook them, but they didn’t surrender. So we dropped one on Nagasaki. That time they did. Of course changes in our propaganda and public statements also affected this. But from the first A-bomb on, the US position was: we’ll keep dropping these things on you until you surrender. Dropping one and then stopping would not have conveyed that message. The only problem was keeping the secret that, after Nagasaki, we’d temporarily run out of A-bombs to use.
I’m going to repeat a point I just made over at Body and Soul–it makes no sense to defend the bombing of Hiroshima on the grounds that air raids on Dresden and Tokyo also killed massive numbers of people. The moral issue here should be whether it is ever justified to deliberately kill massive numbers of civilians, not whether it is worse to kill them with atom bombs instead of incendiaries.
To be fair, there are people on both sides who seem to miss this point. I’ve seen some people who attack Truman’s decision to use the atom bomb and then say “We could have won the war by continuing to bomb their cities with conventional weapons, or by starving them with the blockade.” Hell, why not use machetes, which killed over half a million people in Rwanda.
Adding to Donald’s post, I think the “firebombing was just as bad” arguments particularly miss the boat in this thread, since my post didn’t assume that the A-bomb was worse than other kinds of killing.
The moral question brought up by some historians is whether the bombs were dropped after the point when the Japanese were essentially defeated and a surrender could have been negotiated. Many American military of the era stated that the war could have been ended without either dropping the a-bombs or a full invasion of Japan.
I’d say that – if it is true that the war could have been ended without destroying any further cities full of civilians (and I admit that’s one HUGE “if”!) – killing 150,000 (or, arguably, more) civilians needlessly was immoral, regardless of if it were done with incendiary bombs or atomic bombs.
At the very least, it should have been tried.
I brought up the point about the incendiary raids being more deadly than the A-bombs to ask this question:
Why were you asking about Japan’s willingness to surrender before the A-bombs were dropped, and not about its willingness to surrender before the fire-raids? Is this solely a matter of the dates involved? If the US had fire-bombed, instead of A-bombed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and caused the same human damage, would you be asking the same question?
You’ve now answered that with “Yes”, but I tend to doubt it would have gotten as much attention, at least from Alperovitz. For this reason I wished to bring out the latent assumption that the A-bomb is worse, an assumption which, as Donald Johnson testifies, is carried by some people to the point of ridiculousness.
Ampersand says, “Many American military of the era stated that the war could have been ended without either dropping the a-bombs or a full invasion of Japan,” but that is emphatically not what the military advisors to the US were saying at the time. Japan had given every evidence of intending to fight to the last man. The probable necessity of an invasion was assumed by all the planners. The A-bomb was dropped when it was because that was the first available date, but it had – even back at the planning stages – the propaganda purpose of perhaps shocking Japan into surrender. I’m not going to dig out references to the numerous non-Alperovitz scholars who have demonstrated this, but the A-bombs did succeed in jolting the Japanese government out of its previous path. Perhaps something else might have done so as well, but that’s pure hindsight speculation that wasn’t available at the time.
The evil of war lies in war itself, and subject to certain rules (which, as they existed at the time, the A-bomb violated no more than the fire-raids did), when surrender has been demanded you fight the enemy as hard as you can until they give up.
It may be worth noting that Japan had been warned. Not in specific terms about an A-bomb itself, but at Potsdam, after learning the test had been successful, Truman issued a general warning to Japan to the effect that if Japan did not surrender, the Allies had plenty of devastation to wreak on their homeland. Japan couldn’t say it wasn’t warned, and that’s why I don’t find Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral -as acts of war go-.
“Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” -President Harry S. Truman, Diary Entry, July 18, 1945.
“The cable “asking for peace” was not that but an inquiry asking permission to send a personal representative, a former Japanese premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, who would negotiate presumably to keep the Soviet Union from entering the war against Japan or perhaps to seek the USSR’s good offices in negotiating with the United States. The cable was not news to President Truman, who because of the interception by American intelligence of Japan’s diplomatic radio traffic and its translation (an operation known as Magic), already knew about it.” -Robert H. Ferrell, “Truman and the Bomb: A Documentary History”, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/ferrell_book/ferrell_book_chap5.htm
I’ll stay out of the debate over the diplomatic options, since I’m rusty on even the few details I ever knew.
But one thing that’s always bugged me about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that I’ve never seen a detailed explanation about whether there were any purely military targets available. (Hiroshima had an army base, but I doubt that the killing of all the civilians was “collateral damage”–I suspect that just as in the firebomb raids, their deaths were part of the plan.)
Regarding military targets, I think there were still a few large vessels left in the Japanese Navy. There were two atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 which showed what 20 kiloton bombs could do to naval vessels. The air burst was a disappointment, but the surface burst did a spectacular amount of damage. No doubt there would be “collateral damage” if some Japanese naval base had been hit, but I suspect the civilian death toll would have been much less. And it would have been clear that the US hadn’t been aiming at civilians.
My own feeling, and it’s only a feeling of course, is that the Allies should have stuck to their original stance, which was that bombing of civilian populations was immoral. Leaving the morality aside, the theory of “terror bombing” as it was sometimes called was that civilian morale would collapse and the government would have to surrender. It didn’t work in Germany and it didn’t work (before the A-bombs at least) in Japan. It didn’t work in Korea (where it’s possible that more civilians were killed by bombs than in Germany or Japan). And to the limited extent it was done in Vietnam (Hanoi was mostly spared, but most of southern North Vietnam was turned into a moonscape, along with parts of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), it didn’t work there. It didn’t work in Afghanistan either, when the Soviets bombed much of the country into rubble. (The US had a much easier time, I think, not because our military was so much better, but because the Taliban had very little support. And also because the tremendous destruction caused by Soviet bombing probably turned even more of the surviving population against them.)
It might possibly have worked with Hiroshima and Nagasaki (combined with the entry of the USSR into the war), but maybe the destruction of a military target would have been just as impressive.
But overall, the world would have been a better place if the supposedly civilized countries had stuck to the notion that deliberately targeting civilians was wrong. Or so I think.
Justifiably or not, the US considered the target cities to be military targets. There’s no evidence in any of the decision-makers’ paperwork or memoirs that the bomb was dropped to terrorize the civilian population. Truman made the decision, and says in his memoirs that he was looking for “a war production center of prime military importance.” And those were just about the only ones in Japan that hadn’t already been bombed flat. (Tokyo was omitted from the list for that reason.) Argue with this if you like, but that was Truman’s position, then and later.
Sorry to bring in the fire-raids again, but their justification on these grounds was perhaps shakier.
Dropping the bomb on a ship would not have been practical. A ship could be taken out with a much smaller bomb, but it takes a lot of bombing to take out a city’s worth of military factories. Also, there were only two A-bombs, so they couldn’t afford to be wasted on drops that might be off-target; precision bombing was far from an exact science; and a large, stationary target (one that wouldn’t suddenly move the day before and throw your logistics out of whack) was thus vital.
There were four cities on the A-bomb target list (the other two were Kokura and Niigata), because of the necessity of having backups for weather reasons and any other unforseen problems. This may give a notion of just how logistically complex was the seemingly simple act of sending in a plane with a bomb in it. Nagasaki was bombed only after three runs over Kokura had failed to give a clear target.
I’m not sure at what point you think that the Allies changed a stance “that bombing of civilian populations was immoral.” The RAF’s original plan in bombing Germany – long before the A-bomb -was to take out war materiel production centers, which meant bombing cities, because that’s where the factories were, and getting lots of civilians in the process was a known side-effect. But the British felt that if the Germans wanted to protect their civilians, they could close the factories and move the civilians out. That would have interfered with Germany’s ability to fight the war, of course; but that would have been fine with the British.
And in this case, the demoralization of specifically the civilian population was also part of the plan, as it wasn’t with the A-bomb. (Demoralizing the government was the plan with the A-bomb.)
The RAF pursued this policy against Germany with great vigor, even imagining that they could force Germany’s surrender by themselves, and their chief became known as “Bomber” Harris.
Regarding the Allied change of opinion on the morality of bombing, I thought that was common knowledge. During the 30’s and during the earliest parts of WWII, people in the West expressed shock over the barbarity of Japanese and German bombings of civilian targets. But when the Allies were able to reply in kind, most of that outrage subsided, though there were still a few people who objected. Strategic theorists might have favored bombing civilians (and people like Churchill were all in favor of bombing Iraqis who had the gall to rebel against British rule), but in general the concept was regarded as barbarous before WWII.
Freeman Dyson (a physicist better known for his contribution to quantum electrodynamics) wrote a little about this in his autobiography “Disturbing the Universe”. He worked for the RAF and said that after the successful creation of a firestorm at Hamburg, the British tried to do this every time, but only succeeded again at Dresden. Apparently it wasn’t that easy to start a firestorm with conventional weapons, but the fact that they didn’t succeed very often wasn’t for lack of trying.
It’s been years (or decades, actually) since I read it, but John Toland’s book “The Rising Sun” also has a section on how moral attitudes towards civilian bombing changed during WWII.
I just got my copy of John Dower’s book “War without Mercy” off the shelves and he describes the change in moral attitude on pages 39-40. Quoting Dower, he says, that in 1940, Churchill denounced the bombing of cities as a “new and odious form of attack” (which was rich, coming from him–my comment, not Dower) and Roosevelt pleaded that all parties refrain from bombing civilians and went on to “recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited”.
There’s also a fascinating book by a Swedish author on the history of bombing which discusses these attitudes, but I’ve forgotten his name. (Lindqvist?) It’s a good book, though the organization of the chapters is bizarre.
Just in my own religious reading, I once found a passage in C.S. Lewis written before WWII where he was arguing against pacifism, but said that a Christian airman who wanted to take a moral stand might, for instance, refuse on principle to bomb civilian targets.
On the subject of whether Hiroshima was a military target, I do remember enough of what I read to know that Truman always claimed that to be the case. But this seems like a classic example of doublethink. It’s ludicrous to think that one could drop an atom bomb on a city and think the civilian casualties were a regrettable form of collateral damage. And on the subject of hurting “morale”, in this case I think that’s a euphemism for creating terror.
The destruction of a city hurts morale because it becomes clear that Americans are capable of wiping out entire cities with one plane and the Japanese government can’t stop it.
As for bombing ships, again I’ll point out that dropping a bomb on a harbor with some Japanese military vessels would have had impressive effects. We know this because it was done at Bikini with a Nagasaki-type bomb and the surface burst smashed up ships in spectacular fashion. But my larger point is that I’ve never seen a detailed discussion by anyone on either side of possible alternative military targets. Was every conceivable important stationary military target in Japan located inside a major city, so that it couldn’t be atom-bombed without killing tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians? Seems implausible to me. I think the preceding years of bombing civilians had made many military and civilian leaders (though not all, as shown by Alperovitz) come to think that hitting cities was the natural thing to do, so when the A-bomb came along they simply picked out cities as the targets of highest value. Nothing new to think about–the moral line had been crossed years earlier.
Donald: You had written of the “original stance” of “the Allies,” and as “the Allies” of WW2 did not exist as an entity before the war, I thought you were referring to a change in stance -during- the war, not before it or at the outset of the war, as your latest post makes clear. There was no change of stance -during- the war: that was my point.
As you point out, creating firestorms was a deliberate policy of the RAF (and the US in Tokyo, one might add), once it had been discovered by accident that they could be created.
The German air attacks, both bombs and rockets, on Britain throughout World War Two, deliberately targed civilian targets, and the British knew this. Yet despite a few comments on the lines of the ones from WSC and FDR that you quote, it’s striking how absent from Allied propaganda is depiction of this as an outrageous atrocity.
I’m thinking, for instance, of the anti-German propaganda in WW1 attendant on the German invasion of Belgium, which depicted the Germans virtually as inhuman beasts. Ironic, as the Nazis of WW2 were far closer to inhuman beasts than the Prussian officers of WW1.
Apparently, British feeling was that bayoneting children in Belgium [whether or not the Germans actually did that, it’s what they were accused of] is materially worse than having bombs dropped on you, even if you’re the victim of the bomb and weren’t the victim of the bayonet. And this attitude makes sense, for as you suggested in a previous post, killing half a million people with machetes is at least as bad as killing them with a bomb.
So the Allies were not really hypocritical in thinking bombing civilians was OK only when they did it (despite occasional comments that went that way). And that is why I think it’s important to make clear that the Allied stance didn’t change during the war.
The deliberate collateral death of civilians (for it -was- collateral, not the main intent, with the A-bombs, whatever the case with firebombing) has always been a knotty problem in the morality of war. And it’s only gotten worse since WW2, as guerrilla warfare became more common. Guerrilla tactics are often resorted to by those who know they’d be defeated if they came out into the open, and are trusting in the enemy’s reluctance to target civilians. For that reason, some have argued that it’s the guerrillas, not the enemy who kill the civilians, who are really to blame morally. (If a criminal fugitive takes a hostage, are the police to blame for placing the hostage’s life at risk?)
So it’s a difficult problem. We can’t solve it here, and I’m not really interested in trying. What I am trying to do is stop the separation of the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the general problem. I don’t believe they should be considered in isolation as uniquely horrific events of the war. As I wrote before, “the evil of war lies in war itself.”
If you’re really interested in second-guessing the military planners’ decisions on where exactly to drop the A-bombs, I suggest you read the documents in which they decided exactly that. The reasons for not dropping the bomb on a ship in the open ocean I’ve already discussed. I believe they considered the idea of dropping it on a harbor instead of the associated city, and as I recall, that was decided against because it wouldn’t destroy very much, was much harder to target (because it was a smaller target), and if successful would still kill a lot of civilians in the city anyway.
Another option specifically considered, and rejected for very good reasons, was the favorite of latter-day quarterbacks, dropping the bomb on an uninhabited island with a prior announcement.
I’m not sure where a good archive of this material is, but you can start with the summaries and references in “A World Destroyed” by Martin J. Sherwin, if you haven’t read it.
Thanks for the suggestions. Sometime I’ll have to look for the Sherwin book.
The guerilla warfare thing brings up another topic, but I don’t think we want to argue it here. My opinion (and it’s only that) is that there’s no reason why one can’t blame both guerillas and the counterinsurgency forces for civilian deaths. It depends on the circumstances. (That was vague enough so that you probably won’t be tempted to disagree.)
Back when I was studying the topic, Sherwin’s book was considered the first word on the subject.
It’s really useful to remember that there were only two A-bombs to hand, with no more expected for a couple of months at least; and that the mechanism was so experimental that nobody could count on any given A-bomb not exploding. (Trinity proved the bomb could explode, not that every A-bomb assembled would actually work.) These facts, easily forgotten in retrospect, played a large part in planning the use of the bomb.
Re the guerrillas: well, in the police & hostage situation, whether the police are to blame for the death of the hostage depends, to my mind, on how reckless they are in attacking, and whether there are other plans. It’s also possible for the police to be too cautious. The excessive caution shown by the SWAT team at Columbine may have prevented them from accidentally killing any innocent people, but it did lead directly to the death of the wounded who couldn’t be evacuated, and probably allowed the killers to do more killing, too.
Similarly, it’s perhaps possible that Japan would have surrendered without the A-bomb or an invasion, but despite hindsight comments, there was no information available at the time which suggested any such thing, and it would have been foolish for Truman to plan otherwise; and it would have been equally foolish for him to wage war in such a way as to avoid killing civilians at all costs.
The a-bomb did cause much concern from the start. Niels Bohr became increasingly worried as the Second World War unfolded that either sides would develop nuclear armament and make extensive use of it on the enemy. He voiced his concerns to Einstein, who himself grew troubled and met with Szilard to write President Roosevelt about the full-blown significance of nuclear energy. These concerns, however, were more likely to favour research in nuclear armament (and indeed, they did) than to put a stop to it, in the eyes of the State. It was the beginning of the first nuclear arms race as both sides suspected the other of being on the verge of making the dreaded discovery. In 1944, Bohr made a proposition to Roosevelt that met instant disapproval: in order to reach an international agreement on the control of such weapons, Bohr suggested that Americans should share the information on their a-bomb with all of their Allied peers, including the Russians. In January 1945, Leo Szilard sent Roosevelt a petition signed by the world’s biggest names in science (except Oppenheimer) asking for control of nuclear armament. In this letter, he predicted the Cold War by mentioning that the most imminent danger was a nuclear arms race with the Russians. (No, I do not think it is ludicrous to think the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were a message to Stalin. It was also good advertisement for nuclear firepower.)
The Manhattan Project members themselves didn’t have much time for considering the moral implications of the a-bomb. There were great many other things to think about if the arms race was to be won (one can see here what kind of vicious circle the war ideology could lead to). Yet after the first plutonium bomb was tried on Trinity Site on July 16th 1945, we do get a rather sombre response from Oppenheimer; he immediately quoted the Baghavad Gita: “I am become Death, Shatterer of worlds”. This phrase (originally attributed to Shiva) may be taken to express awe-full guilt, or at least some sort of fear. This conclusion would not be unreasonable: the test bomb gave off a blast equivalent to 20 000 tons of TNT, which was no less than four times as much as Szilard had predicted. As Oppenheimer himself would say later: “the physicists have sinned”.
It has been frequently argued that before the Hiroshima bombing, the War was well on the way to its end, and the Axis threat considerably less significant than before. The Germans surrendered in April 1945, and it had been discovered before that they were not even close to making the bomb. The Japanese people were very much ready to fight to the death for his Holiness Hirohito, but it seems that the attack on Hiroshima had not been the most efficient one of the war, strategically speaking. Five months earlier, an attack on Tokyo had killed 83 000 people with phosphorous bombs. Not only did this kind of arsenal represent much less risks ( if the B-29 carrying Fat Man, Nagasaki’s plutonium bomb, would have crashed upon departing from the Allied camp Tinian, it could have exploded and made a considerable number of Allied victims) but it was also much, much more cost efficient. Phosphorus bombs did not destroy all the buildings, which could then be repaired and occupied as the Allied forces marched into Japan. Plutonium cost millions to produce, and was very dangerous to manipulate. A single particle of it could cause entire dormitories of workers to die in the slow agonizing pain of radiation sickness (and indeed, this happened).
Moreover, Truman’s demands to the Japanese government were, to say the least, a bit hard to swallow. “Complete and unconditional surrender” is always somewhat of a hard condition for peace, and it would also seem like a rather silly propositions for the devout Japanese. If further attempts at putting an end to the war through diplomacy would have been orchestrated by the international community after the defeat of the Germans, who is to say what bloodshed could have been avoided? But of course, President Truman was concerned not only with ending the war, but also achieving victory; Japanese casualties did not count as much as Allied supremacy, especially not if that supremacy could be insured by the Americans.
I thoroughly recommend Peter Wyden’s Day One : Before Hiroshima and After.
Unlike Donald Johnson’s thoughtful posts, the above is so wrongheaded from the start that it affords no opportunity to correct its errors except to write a whole essay on the subject, which has already been done. Start with my posts above, which already responded to much of this before it was written, go on to Sherwin, and then read what the actual people involved said about their reasoning.
The idea is that the Japanese were about to surrender and if we’d only finessed them a bit we could have done without dropping the bombs. This is easily refuted, and Bruce Lee’s “Marching Orders” is readily available to do it.
The book is an analysis of the code intercepts and their impact on American war policy. Even before Potsdam, these intercepts reveal, the Japanese had reason to believe that there was wiggle room on the issue of the Emperor. They chose to fight on. Even after Nagasaki the Japanese war council could not decide to end the war; that required Hirohito’s unprecedented intervention. This also deals with the idea that a demonstration would have been preferrable. There was a demonstration–Hiroshima–and it didn’t work. Lee’s book shows that right away the Japanese leaders knew what an atomic bomb was, knew what it could do, and still wanted to carry on.
Gar Alperovitz wrote an entire book purporting to explore American motivations for dropping the bombs. If you check the index you’ll see that “Okinawa” is mentioned I think twice, both just as place names, and I don’t think “kamikaze” is in there at all. The most charitable explanation is that as a diplomatic specialist Alperovitz has trouble dealing with military issues. He doesn’t spend much time dealing with Japanese sources. Richard Frank, in “Downfall,” does. Frank’s book is much better.
By the way, every so often someone refers to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s claim that even without the bombs Japan would have surrendered by December 1. The USSBS’s purpose was to make the case for an independent air force. This assertion is in the summary. Robert P. Newman looked into the entire record and reported what he found in “Truman and the Hiroshima Cult.”
And what he found was that virtually all the Japanese leaders told the survey that they’d had every intention of fighting on and expected that bloody resistance to an invasion would lead to a peace on favorable terms. One–I think–of a dozen or so leaders came out with this December 1 claim and that’s what the survey chose to report.
If you have access to the NY Times archives, read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/05KRIS.html
Column by Nicholas Kristof recounting evidence from Japanese sources that the A-bomb was what gave the peace party in the Japanese government the ability to win the argument in favor of surrender.
I don’t think that i was the right thing to do when the droped the bomb on hiroshima that day it was not right to kill all those people.
amber
I don’t think that i was the right thing to do when the droped the bomb on hiroshima that day it was not right to kill all those people.
And the peanut gallery has spoken. Was October 6 a weekend day, Amber, or were you just cutting classes?
Are you going to make any intelligent observations, or are you just trolling?
Oh, wait. Your posts in other threads pretty much answered my question.
Can the nasty thing just be banned? Please? I’ve never asked before & I probably won’t ask again, but it’s annoying to have to read that stuff when checking the most recent comments.
I emailed Reginleif and asked him (her?) to either get civil or stay off my site; s/he emailed me back and said they’d stay off my site from now on. So hopefully that’s the last we’ll hear from that contributor.
arg, all my work got erased. well, ill re-do it later. ciao…
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