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Lecture from the Man Who Dropped Both Atomic Bombs
- veidr 11y ago"I say war by its very nature is immoral. If you are going to prolong a war by using a lesser weapon, that is an immorality. But I do not see any special immoralities where it comes to using the best weapon to get it over with in a hurry." That's a pretty unassailable statement.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y agoVery much so. I found there wasn't a single sentence of that old man that I disagree with.
- cyphax 11y agoI also found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said, but at the same time, I can't imagine coming to the conclusion that the only way out is to drop not one but two atomic bombs on cities. It's easy to say "but if we hadn't done that we would've ended up killing many more on the ground" but that's speculation, even if it's well-founded. There's no alternative timeline that we can point at and say: look, this is what happened if we hadn't dropped the bombs so we had no choice. There was always a choice and I don't think I could ever make the choice they made.
- MrBuddyCasino 11y agoHmm, I guess thats true. The second bomb probably wasn't necessary. One must not forget though that the conventional firebombing of the vulnerable wood and paper housings had already claimed much more lives up to that point, so it wasn't exactly a difference in the scale of human lives lost. Maybe the emperor was scared they'd drop one on him? I know the US military discussed that option.
- sethammons 11y agoIf I recall, America first said, "surrender, or we will unleash an unimaginable weapon upon you." Japan says, "go pound sand." America drops the bomb and says, "if you don't surrender, we will do it again." Japan says, "there is no way you have more than one of those. Pound sand." America drops the next one. Japan surrenders.
- hga 11y agoThere's also the "Would you prefer to surrender to us, or the Soviets who are currently grinding your Army into sand in Manchuria?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria)? It would have taken some time for them to have arranged to invade more than Sakhalin Island on down to the Kurils, but it's very possible they might have grabbed some of the home islands, in which case Japan would have a lot more to be upset about than the four of the Kurils off Hokkaido it still wants back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuril_Islands_dispute
- skrebbel 11y agoSeriously? He basically says that it's better that many innocent civilians die than that even more soldiers (but fewer civilians) die, over a longer span of time. It's a pretty sane opinion to hold: basically, it boils down to "in war times, value(civilian) == value(soldier)". But I wouldn't call it "unassailable", and I'm sure many will disagree with it.
- 67726e 11y agoPart of the job description? How about conscription, how does that play into the equation? The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. The question you need to be concerned over is, "What would we do in this day and age faced with a similar situation?"
- skrebbel 11y agoYeah, you're right, I edited that "part of the job description" stuff out again. Sorry for making you respond to something that was only in my comment for 3 minutes. All that said, I'm not judging any actions, I'm not sure where you got that from. The GP said that the remarks made by the pilot were "unassailable". I just pointed out that that's nonsense because while it's a sane argument, there's also a sane argument against it. It's been many years and there's been no US bashing in this thread up until now, but absolute statements on the morality of what happened, in either direction, just don't seem to make sense anymore.
- scottjad 11y ago> The perennial "Bash the US for dropping the atomic bombs" really just needs to stop. You're judging actions that happened 70 years ago by your standards you hold today. Plenty of people in the day opposed it as well. Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc: http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
- veidr 11y ago
- prof_hobart 11y agoI'm not sure it is unassailable. More quickly doesn't always equal less casualties, for instance. And even where more quickly does equal less casualties for your side, it could mean vastly more for the other side, or less military deaths but more civilian one. Or how about the potential for ongoing damage to both environment and survivors health. This isn't to say that a nuclear attack, or any other weapon that could bring a war to a swift close, is automatically worse - just that's not automatically and unassailably better either.
- veidr 11y agoI think his argument is based on the premise that the atomic bomb meant the war could be ended without protracted ground invasion and thousands of additional conventional bombing runs. You can still dispute that premise -- and while I don't, many people do. But if you accept that premise, then yeah, it's a war. End (win) it as soon as you possibly can. I also think that in a war, unless you think you are on the wrong side or perpetrating immoral aggression towards an underserving enemy, you should optimize for more deaths on the opposing side than on yours. Also, I live in Tokyo (though I am American) -- and the sustained, conventional firebombing of Tokyo produced more devastation and casualties (though perhaps not horror) than Hiroshima or Nagasaki[1]. Of course dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations is a terrible thing to do, but to me the key point of Beser's lecture is that he reminds you that it was done in the context of a completely fucking horrific world war. Which really does radically change the equation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
- merpnderp 11y agoGiven an average of 100,000 [EDIT 100,000 per month since 1937] civilian deaths at the hands of the imperial army just in China alone (there were civilians being slaughtered in Indo-china and the Korean peninsula also), if the bombs ended the war just two months earlier than it would have ended (incredibly unlikely to the point of absurdity), it was a net gain in civilians saved. And it can be well argued that the Japanese civilian deaths should be blamed on the imperial army for not capitulating when it was obvious the war was lost.
- RankingMember 11y agoUnassailable? That short-sited philosophy essentially legitimizes the use of any weapon if the goal in using it is to finish a war faster. The goal of each side in a war is to dominate and win as fast as possible, but there are degrees of immorality, and to stoop to deplorable means (gas, nukes, biological) to bring about a quicker end is to lose the high ground and very likely inspire surrounding nations to unite against you. Thankfully, our leaders have realized this, otherwise we'd have kept on using nukes when in conflicts since dropping them on Japan.
- mc32 11y agoSometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc. One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused.
- hga 11y agoIndeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity. Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question.
- RankingMember 11y ago"Sometimes you also have to learn from experience how bad something is in order to actively work against using it again. For example mustard gas, etc. One could argue the detonation of smallish weapons prevented the future detonation of much bigger weapons in the future knowing the horror an even smallish weapon caused." "Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point, having read a lot of pre-actual bomb dropping science fiction, which detailed many much worse ways nuclear weapons could have be introduced to humanity. Or take all the alternate histories of WWII where the Nazis hold out for much longer, especially their somehow not provoking a World War earlier than they were ready for. Give them enough time and their delivering plutonium nukes to our cities in stealthy flying wing bombers or V-2 descendants is not out of the question." What I'm getting from these two comments is that it's good we dropped two bombs on civilians because it taught us that we shouldn't do that and that, also, there was some scary science fiction about worse ways for nuclear weapons to be introduced to humanity so our way wasn't that bad. Is that what you're intending, because I can't really read it any other way. "Indeed, there's nothing I would change about history up to that point" It's hard to argue hypotheticals, but really, you wouldn't change anything about history up to that point? Perhaps not strangling Germany quite as hard as we did after WWI? You wouldn't change that even if it'd completely erase the climate where the Nazis could rise to power?
- euroclydon 11y agoIt makes sense in the context of WWII, where conventional bombing campaigns killed people at a slower rate that atomic. Also, it just took a localized atomic campaign to cause that war to cease everywhere, whereas increased conventional bombing in all theaters would have not ended the war so quickly. There might be a modern analogy to be drawn: "It's more moral to torturously murder a few enemies on internet video, such that the rest of your enemies are sufficiently scared to engage, than it is to try to engage them all in battle."
- veidr 11y agoWow!! Did you do like, debate club in school? Because even though I stand by my statements made in this thread so far, I am pretty sure you win. (Although I do think there is still a point in there somewhere to be made about the underlying reasons the conflict is occurring in the first place. If you started it to implement your vision of a religious caliphate, revive the slave trade, etc... how does that change the morality of it?)
- rz2k 11y agoThe major premise of the statement, that war was a given, is effectively 'unassailable' in this case, but it isn't difficult to imagine such a calculus being abused. I think it was especially a danger when one compares the apparent flight of talent from the public sector when you compare the people working for the federal government in the 30s and early 40s to the personality types and intellectual capacity of people behind the red scare in the 50s. Furthermore there are even worse imaginable scenarios than occasional use of nuclear weapons, namely, complete compliance from everyone else without nuclear weapons. In my opinion, many of the people in government in the 50s and 60s really were motivated by an anger toward people who they thought were their inferiors displaying insufficient deference, and I think tools to demand greater compliance can have a self-reinforcing effect—"these animals don't respond to x level of force, so we use y level, which is much softer than z level" et cetera. And yet with hindsight we see that after ending the war in the Pacific, nuclear weapons were a significant factor in keeping the Cold War "cold" long enough for the relative strengths of the two systems to matter as much as how the balance of military power happened to lay at the end of WWII. So my point isn't that I think the end didn't justify the means in this case, but that it is because of the specifics rather than the value of the rule. As a general rule, it is a horrible one. Just as sometimes fighting a war is better than not, the opposite can also be true, and whether or not its important to insist on supremacy, even when there is little cost, is a discussion that should come long before the analysis of different weapons' impact. The danger is the implied generality of the rule. It is tempting to shift the conversation to quantifiable metrics like lives lost, because it is easier than the very difficult, soft discussions about whether pursuing various policies do anything to create the world we want to live in.
- ant6n 11y agoI still don't really buy this whole trade-off idea used to justify dropping the bombs, massacre from above vs massacre on the ground.
- vadman 11y agoMassacre from above minimized American losses.
- comrh 11y agoWhich was traded for Japanese civilians though, no?
- belenos46 11y agoDefinitely. In general, though -all other things being equal- if I have to decide who dies, I will decide they won't be people fighting on my side.
- davidjeet 11y agoBy most approximations, there were about 200,000 causalities from the bombs and their aftermath. That said, had the bombs not been dropped, estimates ran into the millions for Allied casualties and tens of millions for Japanese (civilian + soldiers) casualties. Ultimately it boils down to an issue of numbers (achieved by expediency).
- 11y ago
- forinti 11y agoThe US dropped incendiary bombs in dozens of japanese cities, so an atomic bomb didn't really add much to the brutality of the situation. Furthermore, if the objective of these bombs was to simply convince the japanese to shorten the war, couldn't they have been dropped off the coast of Tokyo?
- rubidium 11y agoHe addressed this: "Later, another person questions using the atomic bomb at all. Why not drop it as a show of force in a rural area far away from people? Why didn’t America prove it had a superweapon then ask Japan to surrender?" “What would be lost?” Beser says. “The integrity of your threat is gone … the ability to carry out your threat is paramount. You do not win a war by just threatening to do things and then go ‘poof.’
- artmageddon 11y agoThe US actually did consider this, but were worried that it would embolden the Japanese if the demonstration ended up being a failure(i.e. the bomb didn't properly detonate, yield was less than anticipated, etc. http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-15-3-b-choices-truman-hirohito-and-the-atomic-bomb.html http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-15-3-b-...
- adnam 11y agoThey needed to demonstrate not only the awesome and terrible power of the bomb, but also that it could be accurately targeted (hence, two bombs).
- mclee 11y agoProbably related: The testimony of Charles Sweeney, who flew both atomic missions: https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony-of-major-general-charles-w-sweeney-may-11-1995/ https://eahnc.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/senate-testimony-of-m... Both seem to claim they are the only one who flew both missions though, I can't tell if they are correct. [Edit: Changed the link to a wordpress site for easier reading.]
- swehner 11y agoI don't think the article makes it too obvious, but he died in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser A person who thinks they know lots, but actually don't. Especially with age they think they are owed respect, but no
- ioanpopovici 11y agoAll new evidence points to the fact that the Japanese were thinking of surrendering and that the Americans new it, before the bombs were dropped. Also it shows that the bombs had little to no effect on their reasoning. They whished to surrender on their own terms which they did, more or less, despite the "unconditional surrender" bs.
- dabeeeenster 11y agoFurther reading on this (really interesting piece) http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
- talmand 11y agoI find it interesting but doesn't convince me. Their timeline, 20/20 hindsight, ability to predict a future without the bombings, and definitive "we know, know!, they were unnecessary" doesn't make me think highly of their argument. My favorite example is that the first bombing only required one initial report from the governor for the council to understand what happened. The second bombing had a similar verbal report but they had to wait another day to get the full report to understand what happened. Never mind the fact they don't seem to grasp the significance that one bomb dropped from one plane equaled up to 10,000 bombs, or more, from around 500 planes. Is there no consideration in that leisurely dropping one bomb delivered more kilotons than a full scale air raid is a major show of force? With the obvious promise of more to come? For my part, I would say that the bombing were not the full reason for the surrender. But they did play a major part. They faced either nuclear destruction from the US or being totally wiped out by the Soviets invading. If the Chinese didn't get their licks in too.
- bpodgursky 11y agoWhat are you talking about? Japan completely gave up on declaring their own terms. Taking away the godhood of the emperor was a colossal blow. If Japan surrendered on their own terms, there would absolutely have been no occupation. Japan for a decade after the war was a completely occupied, controlled, planned state (by the US). They got NONE of their own terms. What about "unconditional surrender" is BS?
- dade_ 11y agoAccepting that a nuclear weapon was the best way to end the war, was it really necessary to use 2? It's the second one that doesn't sit well with me. Even by the logic in this account, the first bomb made the threat of subsequent attacks real. At least it is still being discussed and debated.
- sanoli 11y agoThey dropped the first and Japan did not surrender. Only after the second. So, accepting it was the best way to end the war, it was necessary to use 2. From what I've read, many high officials still didn't want to accept the surrender, even after the second bomb.
- ourmandave 11y agoJapan didn't surrender until the Soviets declared war and wiped out their million man army in Manchuria which was after the bombs were dropped.
- hga 11y agoIt started in between, and the Soviets had only made great progress, the IJA wasn't quite at the "wiped out" level. However this thesis runs into at least two problems: The Soviets were no great threat to the home islands, at least without the naval oriented Allies providing ships, boats and air cover. Nor do I recall them showing any great interest in that decisive part of the end game, vs. playing the same game they'd started with Eastern Europe. Which, let us not forget, included mass murder of locals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre The Emperor mentioned the atomic bombing in his famous radio broadcast, not the Soviet invasion. (Very few other contemporaneous, reliable records survived the mass destruction of documents before the occupation.) Few doubt that it was a cause of the invasion, but there's absolutely no support for it being a greater cause than the atomic bombings, with the promise of more to come.
- leojg 11y agoIts likely that they used 2 because they only had 2. If they had a dozen or the thousand they have today they would had used them all. The real effects of such weapons were unknown and the public opinion didnt really care about killing all those inocent civilians(it is not that different from the mass bombings done in the war, with "conventional weapons")
- Asbostos 11y agoWhat most people in the west neglect about Japan was what it was doing to China and south-east Asia during the war. Their killing of civilians was greater than what the atomic bombs did. That's where the good came from - saving the rest of Asia, not saving America. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were industrial cities making the weapons that the Japanese were using to kill the Chinese civilians. The residents were civilians but not entirely innocent. They were part of the war machine.
- mkaziz 11y agoYou could say the same of anyone working in any industry on any side during the War. The civilian farmers in the US weren't actively killing people, but their food was sustaining soldiers who sure were.
- codeshaman 11y agoSurely the pilots were briefed about the destructive power of the weapon they were going to drop on civilians. He knew. He had a choice. He could have chosen not to fly that mission. Even with the risk of being court marshalled. Even if somebody else would have done it anyway. He could have stepped aside and chosen despise or even punishment over glory. But he didn't. He went ahead and pulled the trigger on women and children. He chose the glory. Saying later that "those were the times" does not exonerate you from the sins committed. -- This is a good example of choices that we might face in our lives. We all have a choice not to participate in the insanity (or "immorality") of war. In fact, if we all did, wars wouldn't exist at all. Refusing to go to the battlefield and kill other young people is not immoral. It is the most moral and humane thing you can do. If you ever need to make that choice, remember this. I highly recommend reading Tolstoy's "The kingdom of God is within you", were he does a very deep analysis of war, state, violence and Christianity not as religion, but as a non-violent philosophy of life.
- gambiting 11y agoI'm not sure what the point of your post is. The whole discussion happening around the atomic bombs dropped on Japan is - have they actually prevented more deaths, because Japan would not have surrendered otherwise? More people have died in firebombing of Tokyo, yet Japan was not willing to surrender. Of course, you could shield yourself behind morals and just say "well, they could have chosen not to go to war and not to kill other people!", but it's no different than a 5 year old child saying "people just shouldn't kill each other", without real understanding why people do it. To err makes us human.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThis is the utilitarian argument. The other one is, never agree to killing for any reason. But I'm certain that any pilot of that time had long given up the finer points of philosophy. Their cohort was diminished daily; they'd seen far too much death. A utilitarian view (kill these families to save many more) would have made complete sense to them. While modern, civilized (and maybe coddled) people have a hard time appreciating that view.
- 11y ago
- stonewhite 11y agoNot all statements have to be timeless. I think the arguments are valid for his paradigm. Some of us may have problems even entertaining such ideas, but then again we grew up to a docile, friendly japan. Just to make it more contemporary, swap Japan with Iran. (Disclosure: I'm not in anyway against Iran or something)
- scottjad 11y agoPlenty of US leaders at the time opposed it (some privately). Here are quotes from Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William D. Leahy (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman), Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, etc: http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
- whitenoice 11y agoSo by this man's logic it would be OK to nuke Iraq?
- verinus 11y agohow so?
- rz2k 11y agoThe cost in Iraqi lives and destruction has probably been a few times greater than that from the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it would have been quicker. Whether it would have lead to functioning government that wasn't expansionist and that served Iraqis without prejudice is another question entirely. We never really discussed the aims to be achieved by the use of conventional arms either though. One could also weigh the thousands of US soldiers lives lost and >$1T cost against the cost of a few nuclear warheads. I don't think it's too difficult to see how the arguments to justify two specific uses of atomic bombs are entirely dependent on their context, and making them sound like general rules probably does people a disservice.
- Retra 11y agoIt wouldn't have been quicker, though. Anyone can see that: if you nuke Iraq, you'd face a massive, worldwide, prolonged counter-movement. The fact that this didn't happen during WW2 means that it was one of the only times you could actually get away with using nuclear weapons, and the people making that decision knew that they could get away with it. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have used them. They relied on ignorance that simply doesn't exist today.
- hga 11y agoThey relied on ignorance that simply doesn't exist today. I think that goes a little to far. More like they "relied" on the context of a World War that had butchered 75 million people, 1/3 of that in the Pacific. And as I've noted elsewhere, was butchering 250,000 people per month in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and was looking to kill maybe a million Allied soldiers, with no upper limit for the Japanese population, as had just been demonstrated in Okinawa.
- sitkack 11y agotl;dr Man who kills children still not remorseful. Says made correct decision in light of new information.
- fatjokes 11y agoI'm curious, for those who oppose the nuking of Japan---would you also oppose the hypothetical nuking of Germany before Normandy?
- fatjokes 11y agoI'm curious, for those who oppose the nuking of Japan---would you also oppose the hypothetical nuking of Germany before Normandy?