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> HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the "most devilish thin

• jrockway 10y ago
  I still don't understand why Japan gives us a pass for nuking two of their cities.
  • 67726e 10y ago
    Because they started it and would have killed and estimated million of our own (millions of their own!!!) invading the home islands. Why does this happen every damn time it comes up on HN. We didn't just say "hey, fuck those nips". It was the best option for everyone involved.
    • Cyph0n 10y ago
      It's not as clear cut as you make it out to be in my opinion. Please think twice and look at the aftermath and devastation that resulted from using nuclear bombs on a civilian population. Both sides were at fault, but to say that the U.S. was objectively right is an oversimplification.
      • tptacek 10y ago
        The invasion of Okinawa killed something like 140,000 civilians, in addition to the horrific military casualties. That's just Okinawa.
        • Cyph0n 10y ago
          Holy shit, that's insane...
          • tptacek 10y ago
            The civilian death toll just in ETO Belgium is higher than that of Nagasaki. War is fucked up.
      • 67726e 10y ago
        The firebombing of Tokyo itself did much worse. The projected losses were so insanely higher for ALL sides it's just stupid to act as though the bombings were not the best options available. I consume every bit of WWII history I can get my hands on, but your suggestion is nothing but revisionist. Please stop spreading this insane notion.
        • Cyph0n 10y ago
          I don't claim to be well-versed on WWII history, but that's my opinion until I hear a convincing argument as to why using a nuclear bomb was necessary. Just saying it was the "best option" isn't too convincing imo. There were many prominent scientists who advised against using it, so it wasn't a unanimous decision as you make it out to be. > The firebombing of Tokyo itself did much worse. Are you considering the aftereffects of radiation on top of the civilian death toll? I think the U.S. is quite fortunate that they bombed Japan and not another country. Only the Japanese could so quickly recover from the horrors of a large-scale nuclear bombing in such a short period of time. It makes people who blame the U.S. look bad because "oh but they're doing fine now, so it wasn't that big of a deal".
          • tptacek 10y ago
            Yes, the casualty figures for the bombs include radiation. From what I can tell, it is difficult to make an argument against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on the civilian toll. The pacification of Japan without the bomb would seemingly have led to far more civilian deaths.
            • statictype 10y ago
              >The pacification of Japan without the bomb would seemingly have led to far more civilian deaths. Just curious on how you could have arrived at this conclusion?
              • tptacek 10y ago
                Because just the invasion of Okinawa led to more civilian deaths.
      • Spooky23 10y ago
        It's total war. That's what happens. The atomic bomb was horrific in its effect, but it was no different that the industrial scale bombardment implemented throughout the war. Even a cursory study of this subject going back to the manipulations in China in the 1930s makes it pretty clear that the US/Allied cause was righteous.
        • Cyph0n 10y ago
          > Even a cursory study of this subject going back to the manipulations in China in the 1930s makes it pretty clear that the US/Allied cause was righteous. Ah, but who ended up pardoning the scientists behind the atrocities committed against the Chinese for "precious" data? I think "righteous" is too strong a word to use when talking about war. Reminds of the Crusades tbh.
    • pinaceae 10y ago
      How many US civilians were killed by Japanese troops total vs. how many innocent women, kids, elderly, artists were firebombed and nuked by the US in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki? This comic book version of history present in the US is disgusting. The US could have nuked a 100% military installation. The US could have detonated the nukes in Tokyo harbor to scare the shit out of the population. No. The US decided to nuke TWO, not one, TWO cities full of civilian human beings.
      • throwaway_xx9 10y ago
        Actually, Hiroshima had a bomb assembly plant. So you call them civilians, I call them military production.
      • hga 10y ago
        How many people were prematurely dying every month in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere after we took back the Philippines? The latest, best estimate I've seen, in the excellent book Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 (https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947/dp/1591143160/ https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947...) was 400,000, up from the 250,000 I'd picked up somewhere I can't remember. It had many interesting revelations, including the single thing which had a higher priority than the Manhattan Project: the building of a super-Mullberry for Operation Coronet, the invasion of the Kanto Plain on main island of Honshu, where Tokyo and much else was located. And if you study the endgame on the Japanese side, it's really not likely nukes in Tokyo harbor to scare the shit out of the population would have worked, for one thing, they had no say in the running of the country. There also wasn't generally clean separations between military installations and civilian areas, especially since Japan is so crowded. No, one of the clear factors was their leadership realizing we'd advanced to the point where a single plane could destroy a city, instead of requiring near Maximum Efforts with hundreds of them. And of course, the bottom line is that these bombings worked. All else is speculation.
        • mindviews 10y ago
          >And of course, the bottom line is that these bombings worked. All else is speculation. The imminent USSR invasion from the north played a significant part in the calculus of Japan's surrender. Too often the use of nuclear weapons alone gets credit, but there was a more complex political/diplomatic context surrounding _why_ they worked in the case. Links for anyone interested in reading more on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/dp/0674022416/ https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/... http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/?page=full http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08... http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
    • danielmorozoff 10y ago
      Wasn't the reason to drop the bombs was to check Soviet expansion. Notably in destroyed Europe where the red army had amassed a huge force and the 1.5million manchurian offensive which was about to invade Japan on land , which it did August 9th 1945 right before the Japanese surrender
      • 67726e 10y ago
        Are you suggesting that was the primary motive, or an additional consideration in dropping the bomb?
      • hga 10y ago
        While the Manchurian offensive was big and very successful, the Red Army was massively more effective than they were in 1938-9 when they'd previously stomped the Imperial Japanese Army, they simply didn't have the resources to seriously invade the home islands. At "best" they would have been able to take a port in northern Hokkaido, which would have been terribly obnoxious after the war, but not by itself strategically significant after they'd taken so many of the islands to the north. Details about this, and the massive resources that would have been required by us to take just Sapporo, can be found in the highly recommended Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947 (https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947/dp/1591143160/ https://www.amazon.com/Hell-Pay-Operation-Downfall-1945-1947...) I recommend elsewhere in this subthread. To imagine this was a major factor in the decision, when e.g. Truman's ship to the Potsdam Conference crossed the path of 4 US divisions being shuttled from the ETO to the Pacific is ludicrous. E.g. we're still issuing Purple Hearts from the initial lot MacArthur ordered, which was estimated to be 1/4 of what would be needed for Operation Downfall. This was also not long after the survivors of the Bataan Death March had been rescued, we were very much in a mood of revenge, see Grove's autobiography for a direct citation of this in reference to the bombing of Hiroshima.
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    • krapp 10y ago
      >We didn't just say "hey, fuck those nips". It was the best option for everyone involved. It was the most politically expedient option. The US had the atomic bomb, but couldn't use it on Germany. Not using it on Japan would have been unthinkable, and impossible to justify to US soldiers and their families, in the face of the potential lives lost invading Japan. However, I'm certain the US would have used the atomic bombs regardless of what atrocities Japan committed, or whether Japan started the war, or how Okinawa turned out. In the case of the US invading Japan, they would have used nukes to soften Japan up for the invasion, and still invaded. I can't accept the moral justifications made for using the atomic bombs because I'm not convinced there was any scenario in which the US would have had them and not used them.
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    They don't, in fact as time goes on they're more and more convinced that it was an act of aggression without provocation. I kid you not. There has always been some denial on that end about the role of starting that war, and even more denial about their behavior in China and elsewhere. They probably "give a pass", because to do more on the international stage would draw attention to their many, many, inexcusable war crimes. Dropping plague fleas on China for instance, or the general activities of Unit 731, which would be bound to come up again and again... and they weren't trying to end a war. That said, I think even in the US there's a lot of debate over the fact that Nagasaki probably didn't need to happen, but hindsight is 20/20.
  • crooked-v 10y ago
    Probably something to do with the resources and lives already sacrified to an ultimately futile war effort by the Japanese government of the time, and the huge American effort put into rebuilding the country into a democratic and prosperous place afterwards. Of course, not everybody thinks that way.
  • tptacek 10y ago
    As opposed to what, a pass for killing hundreds of thousands more of their citizens in an invasion? The death toll from Okinawa alone outstrips that of both bombs, doesn't it?
  • sandworm101 10y ago
    The destruction brought by the two nukes actually pales in comparison to the firebombing. Some have argued that, given the energies required to build the bombs, far more death would have occurred had those resources been put towards greater firebombing. In that context it is difficult to give special legal treatment to the nukes.
    • douche 10y ago
      For true horror, continue the conventional bombing, and put an iron blockade around the Home Islands for another year and cut off all shipping. Millions would have starved. US submarines were already very nearly doing to Japan what Germany's U-boats attempted to do to Britain by the late stages of the war.
      • sandworm101 10y ago
        Agreed. It is in victory where honor matters most. In naval circles there is a principal that a ship be sunk, not punished. (Shots not below the waterline meant to kill the crew rather than sink the ship and allow the crew to abandon.) Some say Bismark was punished. Walling off Japan and bombing it conventionally would have been punishment. Once the enemy is down, the victor has a duty to construct an endgame. But imho the bombs are still overplayed as war-enders. I think the prospect of invasion and occupation by Russian forces had at least as much of an impact on the decision.
  • dclowd9901 10y ago
    They don't all. There's a more contemporary movement (I believe) that is rejecting the idea that their country "had it coming" or are apologetic about Japan's role during the war.
  • CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    We did more damage to Tokyo than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki using the firebombing technique we developed over Germany. Japan killed more people in Nanking than either bomb. Both sides fought massive battles on land and sea. My father was in the Second Marines. The War Dept. issued everyone wills to fill out and put uppermost in their footlockers. Their commanders told them bluntly they wouldn't be coming back from this one. This after Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, Okinawa. Of course, we all know now that invasion never happened. But if it had, Japanese losses were projected at the time to be maybe a million. Even Japan knows things could have been better, but almost certainly would have been worse.
  • rhino369 10y ago
    They would have done the same thing to us. We just beat them to it. Despite all the other moralizing, I'm 100% sure of that fact. Hard to get angry that someone isn't playing fair when you would have done the same.
  • yongjik 10y ago
    They got to keep their emperor. For all I know, higher powers in Japan at that time would have preferred that to an alternate universe with no nukes and the emperor getting executed. Of course, those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki might feel differently, but when do we ever ask for people's feelings?
  • krapp 10y ago
    I don't understand why the US doesn't give Japan a pass for Pearl Harbor. At least that was an unambiguous military target. I found a Quora thread[0] with several answers from apparent Japanese natives that appears to address this. Some Japanese don't give the US a pass, and Japan's pacificm and anti-nuclear stance can be seen in light of that (see the answer by "Hide Izumi",) as Japan's express policy of not wanting to repeat the evil done to them by the Americans. Others accept the common rationale that the bombs would have saved more lives in the end than an invasion, and that the Japanese government at the time had betrayed its own people, committed atrocities and had to be stopped. Others, still, don't really care because it was 70 years ago. It probably helps a great deal that the US invested money and effort into rebuilding Japan after the war. We didn't want them to turn out like Germany after WW1 and wind up fighting them again in a few years. [0]https://www.quora.com/How-could-Japan-forgive-the-atom-bombs?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-could-Japan-forgive-the-atom-bombs...
  • RandomOpinion 10y ago
    Does it really matter whether one dies from a nuclear bomb, an incendiary bomb, a conventional explosive bomb? The latter two have killed far, far more than nuclear weapons ever have.
    • Synaesthesia 10y ago
      I don't know, survivors of the nuclear blast were in such pain that they begged the nurses to kill them. Also the nuking of the cities was really unnecessary- it could have been demonstrated without the loss of life.
      • RandomOpinion 10y ago
        I imagine there were many burn victims from the incendiary bombs on Tokyo and other cities that were in such pain that they begged their nurses to kill them too. What's your point?
• Cyph0n 10y ago
  Take a look at Unit 731 vs. the Nazi human experimentation program during WWII. In exchange for the data gathered through 731's history, the U.S. turned a blind eye. The Nazis however were tried by U.S. military courts for conducting such experiments. Hypocrisy at its finest. Unit 731: "Instead of being tried for war crimes, the researchers involved in Unit 731 were secretly given immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the data they gathered through human experimentation." Nazis: "After the war, these crimes were tried at what became known as the Doctors' Trial, and revulsion at the abuses perpetrated led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics."
  • M_Grey 10y ago
    We did that with plenty of Nazis too... hence NASA. 'I Aim For The Stars'..."(But Sometimes I Hit London)"
    • Cyph0n 10y ago
      True, but one was secret (Unit 731) and the other wasn't if I recall correctly.
      • M_Grey 10y ago
        That too. The Japanese did a much better job of destroying evidence of such crimes, while the Germans mostly meticulously documented them, and they were too busy running like hell from the Soviets to destroy them all, once they saw what was in store for them.
        • wtbob 10y ago
          And also the Germans surrendered 8 May, while the Japanese surrendered 14 August. Over the course of that quarter it had become more and more apparent that WWII wasn't going to end soon (it didn't, in fact, end until 15 March 1991), and that the Soviets were going to be the next enemy, and that we'd need to preserve Germany and Japan in some form (rather than adhering to the earlier Morgenthau Plan, which would have rurified all of Germany, in the process killing millions and making it much easier for the Soviets to roll through Europe). If there were any fairness, we'd have hanged the Japanese emperor, and quite a few more of his subjects responsible for crimes against humanity. But the political-military situation didn't allow it.