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This is a phenomenal mini-book. John Heresy does a superb job portraying the horror of the Bomb. What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its u

This is a phenomenal mini-book. John Heresy does a superb job portraying the horror of the Bomb. What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its use was inhuman. "As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” " "Others were of the opinion that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians."

yesenadam 8y ago
I don't know how accurate the account is in Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Chapter 12 Hiroshima, but according to that, it seems there was no actual decision made to drop the bomb; no-one felt responsible; there was just a series of misunderstandings between a few individuals and groups. The account there is too long to quote, but here's one bit from it, from Truman's private diary: We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark. Anyway we ‘think’ we have found a way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling – to put it mildly … This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. http://download1.libgen.io/ads.php?md5=97FAA80173CF3534DCEEB44EDEAE2214 http://download1.libgen.io/ads.php?md5=97FAA80173CF3534DCEEB...
- stephen_g 8y ago
  I don't think that's really plausible that it wasn't intentional. Daniel Ellsberg's recent book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" has a pretty good analysis of how we went from the idea of bombing civilians being considered barbaric at the start of the war, to purposely incinerating cities full of them and attempting to create "firestorms" to make the damage even worse (Munich, Dresden, Tokyo, etc.) in just a few short years. I think the worst thing people could take away is that the nuclear bombs were outliers - the conventional fireboming of Tokyo a little earlier killed more people than Nagasaki and Horishima combined. It was shocking that one bomb could do what we'd previously employed hundreds or thousands to do, but it was just the culmination of several years of intentionally bombing civilians.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    Not plausible? Based on..what? Well yeah, it's pretty unbelievable, like a lot of stuff in that book. Did u look at the link I gave? (epub download of book) The writer is a renowned moral philosopher. (Maybe you are too, hehe, it's hard on HN not knowing who you're talking to) Yeah, Humanity does the same thing (history of the moral slide) for the whole 20th C, and each time a new low, "But the other guys did worse last time".. ps I didn't understand the "I think the worst thing" sentence at all sorry.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- acqq 8y ago
  Your quote from Truman's diary exactly proves that the US president was lied to, if he believed that: "The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement" Since the planers always knew their goals: the whole city populated with humans (which obviously can't be called a military target more than any city can be) was selected simply to "test" the bomb's destructive power. It's widely documented: a few cities in Japan were therefore intentionally, according to the months long military planing, spared from being bombed with conventional bombs by the US(!) The list of the targets was planned and revised. On the shortest list of the targets was also Kyoto, which was removed from that list only on the intervention of Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war under both Roosevelt and under Truman. Kyoto was just lucky that Stimson was before the war a "tourist" in Kyoto, in 1920's. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in August 6 and 9. But even in July that year "Japan was so beaten that the U.S. continuing further bombing and bombardment was tantamount to flogging a dead horse." https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/12/04/commentary/japan-commentary/stimsons-love-kyoto-saved-bomb/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/12/04/commentary/j...
  - masonic 8y ago
    But even in July that year "Japan was so beaten On Luzon alone, there were still 115,000 active Japanese forces in July 1945.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Not to mention that there was still a Japanese army running around beheading anything that moved in China (a slight exaggeration I know). They might have been beaten strategically but they sure weren't going to surrender anytime soon. The Japanese were willing to follow their cause to death (and they did so on Iwo Jima and Okinawa with no indication that they would not to the same on the home islands).
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    Well, here's Humanity's take on that: The restraining effects of moral identity can be weakened by evading any clear recognition of what you are doing. In his private diary Truman wrote a passage on the bomb. Given the decision he was making, there is something disappointing about the quality of his thought: [diary quote] The passage gives evidence of the need to escape from any clear, plain statement of what he was about to do. There is the denial of the full human impact of the bomb by seeing the victims as ‘Japs’ and savages. There is the half-suggestion that the bomb may not work anyway: we only ‘think’ we have found a way to split the atom. We are exonerated because we are giving them a warning, even though we know they will ignore it. Above all, there is the evasion of the fact that an atomic bomb dropped on a city cannot possibly be directed at purely military targets. In Hiroshima civilians outnumbered soldiers by more than six to one. President Truman certainly had some idea of the civilian casualties later. After Nagasaki he stopped the atomic bombing, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible, and that he did not like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’. Perhaps at some level he knew about this before Hiroshima. If not, his concern for the children was too small to prompt him to find out. It was not only the President who had to face or evade a moral decision. The scientists who developed the bomb were also faced with a question of conscience. While some confronted it, others took refuge in evasion.
zeroname 8y ago
> What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its use was inhuman. It's all about context. At that point in history, the Japanese forces had already murdered millions of non-Japanese. Furthermore, firebombing campaigns on Japan caused way more civilian casualties than the atomic bombs. The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground invasion. Fortunately, the war stopped at "only" two atomic bombs, there were more to come...
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  > Fortunately, the war stopped at "only" two atomic bombs, there were more to come... Not for a while, I think. We only had two bombs at the time. IIRC it would have taken months (weeks?) to build another. The implication that we could just keep dropping a bomb every three days until surrender was a bluff, albeit a very strong bluff.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > Not for a while, I think. We only had two bombs at the time. IIRC it would have taken months (weeks?) to build another. It wasn't that far off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Plans_for_more_atomic_attacks_on_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
- rtpg 8y ago
  > The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground invasion This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence for it. By this point in the war, the constant firebombing had destroyed any sort of infrastructure allowing for such a strong defense. Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near those casualty numbers
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence for it. There is scant evidence for this (honest question)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_Ketsug%C5%8D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_K... > Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near those casualty numbers That's pretty irrelevant, because hindsight is 20/20. Given the conduct of Japanese in the war, it wouldn't have seemed implausible at the time. The soviets sacrificed millions of their people to repel the Nazis.
mikeash 8y ago
It wasn’t even the most deadly bombing of the war. The target cities had to be specifically set aside from the conventional bombing raids so that there would be something left to destroy. It came at the end of a decade of intense fighting that saw tens of millions of civilians killed. It’s a remarkable event because it was a single plane with a single bomb rather than hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs, and that had a massive effect on world events afterwards, but the scale of human suffering of this bombing was, sadly, wholly unremarkable by that point.
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Survivors begged nurses to be killed, the pain was so great.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    I’m sure that had happened many times before too. You can still get horribly burned in a conventional attack. I’m not trying to downplay the horror of the nuclear bombings. I’m just upplaying (is that a word?) the rest of the war.
    - Jackim 8y ago
      Amplify might be the word you're looking for!
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    If you review the history, most of the cities of Japan had been bombed heavily using incendiary weapons by that point, creating devastating fires and leaving large swathes of them in ruin. Do you imagine that there were no injured there who were in equal pain?
nabla9 8y ago
You ask good question. Conventional warfare against near peer enemy is absolutely horrifying for civilians. Estimated direct or indirect civilian casualties almost always exceed military casualties by large margin. How much difference does 'did not directly target' has when you know the end result. It does not help that modern military propaganda often describes the job of infantry "saving lives" without any sense of irony.
rsync 8y ago
Related: https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/picture-of-the-day-the-bombing-of-dresden/ https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/picture-of-the-day-the-bom...

yesenadam 8y ago

I don't know how accurate the account is in Jonathan Glover's Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Chapter 12 Hiroshima, but according to that, it seems there was no actual decision made to drop the bomb; no-one felt responsible; there was just a series of misunderstandings between a few individuals and groups. The account there is too long to quote, but here's one bit from it, from Truman's private diary: We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark. Anyway we ‘think’ we have found a way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexican desert was startling – to put it mildly … This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He & I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. http://download1.libgen.io/ads.php?md5=97FAA80173CF3534DCEEB44EDEAE2214 http://download1.libgen.io/ads.php?md5=97FAA80173CF3534DCEEB...

stephen_g 8y ago
I don't think that's really plausible that it wasn't intentional. Daniel Ellsberg's recent book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" has a pretty good analysis of how we went from the idea of bombing civilians being considered barbaric at the start of the war, to purposely incinerating cities full of them and attempting to create "firestorms" to make the damage even worse (Munich, Dresden, Tokyo, etc.) in just a few short years. I think the worst thing people could take away is that the nuclear bombs were outliers - the conventional fireboming of Tokyo a little earlier killed more people than Nagasaki and Horishima combined. It was shocking that one bomb could do what we'd previously employed hundreds or thousands to do, but it was just the culmination of several years of intentionally bombing civilians.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Not plausible? Based on..what? Well yeah, it's pretty unbelievable, like a lot of stuff in that book. Did u look at the link I gave? (epub download of book) The writer is a renowned moral philosopher. (Maybe you are too, hehe, it's hard on HN not knowing who you're talking to) Yeah, Humanity does the same thing (history of the moral slide) for the whole 20th C, and each time a new low, "But the other guys did worse last time".. ps I didn't understand the "I think the worst thing" sentence at all sorry.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
acqq 8y ago
Your quote from Truman's diary exactly proves that the US president was lied to, if he believed that: "The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement" Since the planers always knew their goals: the whole city populated with humans (which obviously can't be called a military target more than any city can be) was selected simply to "test" the bomb's destructive power. It's widely documented: a few cities in Japan were therefore intentionally, according to the months long military planing, spared from being bombed with conventional bombs by the US(!) The list of the targets was planned and revised. On the shortest list of the targets was also Kyoto, which was removed from that list only on the intervention of Henry Stimson, the US secretary of war under both Roosevelt and under Truman. Kyoto was just lucky that Stimson was before the war a "tourist" in Kyoto, in 1920's. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in August 6 and 9. But even in July that year "Japan was so beaten that the U.S. continuing further bombing and bombardment was tantamount to flogging a dead horse." https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/12/04/commentary/japan-commentary/stimsons-love-kyoto-saved-bomb/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/12/04/commentary/j...
- masonic 8y ago
  But even in July that year "Japan was so beaten On Luzon alone, there were still 115,000 active Japanese forces in July 1945.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Not to mention that there was still a Japanese army running around beheading anything that moved in China (a slight exaggeration I know). They might have been beaten strategically but they sure weren't going to surrender anytime soon. The Japanese were willing to follow their cause to death (and they did so on Iwo Jima and Okinawa with no indication that they would not to the same on the home islands).
- yesenadam 8y ago
  Well, here's Humanity's take on that: The restraining effects of moral identity can be weakened by evading any clear recognition of what you are doing. In his private diary Truman wrote a passage on the bomb. Given the decision he was making, there is something disappointing about the quality of his thought: [diary quote] The passage gives evidence of the need to escape from any clear, plain statement of what he was about to do. There is the denial of the full human impact of the bomb by seeing the victims as ‘Japs’ and savages. There is the half-suggestion that the bomb may not work anyway: we only ‘think’ we have found a way to split the atom. We are exonerated because we are giving them a warning, even though we know they will ignore it. Above all, there is the evasion of the fact that an atomic bomb dropped on a city cannot possibly be directed at purely military targets. In Hiroshima civilians outnumbered soldiers by more than six to one. President Truman certainly had some idea of the civilian casualties later. After Nagasaki he stopped the atomic bombing, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible, and that he did not like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’. Perhaps at some level he knew about this before Hiroshima. If not, his concern for the children was too small to prompt him to find out. It was not only the President who had to face or evade a moral decision. The scientists who developed the bomb were also faced with a question of conscience. While some confronted it, others took refuge in evasion.

zeroname 8y ago

> What surprised me most how many citizens didn't feel that its use was inhuman. It's all about context. At that point in history, the Japanese forces had already murdered millions of non-Japanese. Furthermore, firebombing campaigns on Japan caused way more civilian casualties than the atomic bombs. The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground invasion. Fortunately, the war stopped at "only" two atomic bombs, there were more to come...

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> Fortunately, the war stopped at "only" two atomic bombs, there were more to come... Not for a while, I think. We only had two bombs at the time. IIRC it would have taken months (weeks?) to build another. The implication that we could just keep dropping a bomb every three days until surrender was a bluff, albeit a very strong bluff.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > Not for a while, I think. We only had two bombs at the time. IIRC it would have taken months (weeks?) to build another. It wasn't that far off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Plans_for_more_atomic_attacks_on_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
rtpg 8y ago
> The Japanese leadership was ready to sacrifice millions in a possible ground invasion This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence for it. By this point in the war, the constant firebombing had destroyed any sort of infrastructure allowing for such a strong defense. Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near those casualty numbers
- zeroname 8y ago
  > This point in particular comes up a lot , but there is scant actual evidence for it. There is scant evidence for this (honest question)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_Ketsug%C5%8D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Operation_K... > Contemporary US military estimates of a ground invasion get nowhere near those casualty numbers That's pretty irrelevant, because hindsight is 20/20. Given the conduct of Japanese in the war, it wouldn't have seemed implausible at the time. The soviets sacrificed millions of their people to repel the Nazis.

mikeash 8y ago

It wasn’t even the most deadly bombing of the war. The target cities had to be specifically set aside from the conventional bombing raids so that there would be something left to destroy. It came at the end of a decade of intense fighting that saw tens of millions of civilians killed. It’s a remarkable event because it was a single plane with a single bomb rather than hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs, and that had a massive effect on world events afterwards, but the scale of human suffering of this bombing was, sadly, wholly unremarkable by that point.

Synaesthesia 8y ago
Survivors begged nurses to be killed, the pain was so great.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I’m sure that had happened many times before too. You can still get horribly burned in a conventional attack. I’m not trying to downplay the horror of the nuclear bombings. I’m just upplaying (is that a word?) the rest of the war.
  - Jackim 8y ago
    Amplify might be the word you're looking for!
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  If you review the history, most of the cities of Japan had been bombed heavily using incendiary weapons by that point, creating devastating fires and leaving large swathes of them in ruin. Do you imagine that there were no injured there who were in equal pain?

nabla9 8y ago

You ask good question. Conventional warfare against near peer enemy is absolutely horrifying for civilians. Estimated direct or indirect civilian casualties almost always exceed military casualties by large margin. How much difference does 'did not directly target' has when you know the end result. It does not help that modern military propaganda often describes the job of infantry "saving lives" without any sense of irony.

rsync 8y ago

Related: https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/picture-of-the-day-the-bombing-of-dresden/ https://twistedsifter.com/2012/07/picture-of-the-day-the-bom...