6 ms·

The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan Stalin Did (2013)

26 points by jurgisr 6y ago

throwaway4good 6y ago
The nuclear bombing of Japan was planned years in advance. The US had to show the world or rather the Soviets the power of the weapon they had. They chose Japan because its people were not white.
- tester34 6y ago
  hi, where can we read about it?
  - ggm 6y ago
    Richard Rhodes "the making of the atomic bomb"
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    You can go to the museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - they tell the story in painful detail.
    - ngcc_hk 6y ago
      How about all those death in other Asian countries or those potential death of Japanese and Americans. Any museum ...
- krapp 6y ago
  No. The atomic bombs were intended to be used against Germany as well, but the Nazis surrendered before a working bomb could be deployed. The US chose Japan because they were at war with Japan and Okinawa proved just how costly an invasion would be. Not that the US wasn't, and isn't, still virulently racist against Asians in many ways, but we didn't undertake the entire Manhattan Project because of racism or just to show up Stalin, that's absurd.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    The last bit is a bit of a straw man isn't it? You can study the initiation of the Manhattan project if you will. But once the bomb was built, it had to be used. And America at that point was already planning for the world after it had defeated the Axis powers and that is where the dark racist geopolitcs comes in.
    - krapp 6y ago
      > The last bit is a bit of a straw man isn't it? It's a repudiation of the premise that "They (the US) chose Japan because its people were not white." Had the war in the Pacific ended first, the US would have dropped the bombs on Germany. Simplistic reductionist arguments like that only risk turning what could be interesting discussions into race-baiting flamewars. As far as dropping the bombs as a display of power to Stalin goes, it's a conspiracy theory without hard evidence. I'm sure the US was aware of the wider geopolitical context of what they were doing, but if all they wanted was to show Stalin they had a working bomb, they could have dropped one on Alaska or anywhere. The US' primary concern at the time was ending the war.
      - throwaway4good 6y ago
        My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944.
        resoluteteeth 6y ago
        > My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944. There's probably an actual argument to be made for it being motivated by racism but what you have posted here is not doing much for the case.
        thehappypm 6y ago
        Just admit you're wrong here. The USA did not nuke Japan out of racism. It nuked Japan because they were the only enemy left.
- Juliate 6y ago
  Related read: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-s... (from other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867366) As always, it's quite more a complex factor of several events than a simple story line.
- jdmoreira 6y ago
  I don’t know how much you know about the atrocities the Japanese inflicted on everyone during WWII but things were much more civilized on the western front and you were dealing with the Nazis and Hitler there. The Japanese were absolute insane and completely fanatics committing unspeakable atrocities. Soldiers that fought the Japanese were absolutely destroyed for life and the Chinese were just one of the asian people suffering all kinds atrocities at their hands. Japan was already defeated when those bombs were dropped but they were seriously planning to fight to the last man/woman/child. There were plans by the state of mass suicide if they failed. Now you may think dropping 2 nukes on them is an atrocity of the worst kind by the white man but consider you don’t know as much as the people making the decision.
  - jdmoreira 6y ago
    I can recommend listening to Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East episodes
    - prepend 6y ago
      I second that. It’s pretty fascinating. The story of the Japanese campaign on Singapore and the Malay peninsula is pretty wild for the atrocities by the Japanese.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    There is a lot of Hollywood thinking in the American understanding of the second world war. That America somehow won the war because they were good and had god on their side. However everyone goes into war thinking they have god on their side. Reality is that wars are won by having resources and being nasty.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      > That America somehow won the war because they were good That's demonstrably true: 1) the Allies worked together and won, and the Axis didn't and lost. Britain and the US shared advanced technology transparently, while the enemy was limited. 2) the US was isolationist until attacked by Japan. 3) Japan refused to follow the Geneva Convention, even making a law that captured airmen were to be executed (and half were, while 1% died in German captivity.) The leftist narrative that the US is evil is simply false.
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  What??? Germany had already surrendered, Japan was the only major Axis power left. They used the bomb immediately after it was built. There was a single test, Trinity, then the next bomb went to Japan. How could they choose Japan years in advance when they used the bomb the second it came off the assembly line??? The US nuked Japan because a land invasion was projected to kill millions on both sides. Because Japan is mountainous and its people were prepared to fight till the bitter end, which was proven by the number of kamikaze attacks. The US wanted the war to end quickly without losing a lot of their troops. The Japanese Emperor had to be convinced the war was unwinnable. The Atom bomb was the easiest way to do that. The US also avoided bombing Kyoto to preserve Japanese cultural heritage. If they wanted to to do maximum damage, they could have done worse. It should be remembered that it was Japan that attacked the United States, which was at the time a neutral power. They, like Germany, brought the war and destruction upon themselves. Somehow you twist a war that was started by Japan into "The US is racist". As an American, I find that incredibly offensive.
LatteLazy 6y ago
People really underestimate how well the ussr did in ww2. Both in terms of the fighting and the result. Even with the Axis working to try and give the west as much aid as possible, Stalin controlled everything from the Rhine to the sea of Japan. The west's only real advantage was the US strategic airforce and nuclear weapons. The Soviets trumped those with their own bombs and sputnik within a decade.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Public opinion who actually won the war has shifted in the decades following WW2: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year... The war in Europe was already decided in 1943 at Stalingrad, over a year before the Western Front was even opened, and I guess the populace of Nazi-occupied Europe was very well aware of that. A (not so minor) correction: The Red Army stopped roughly at the Elbe/Mulde rivers, not at the Rhine. Large parts of what would later become the Soviet Occupation Zone (and later East Germany) were actually liberated by the US Army (the US and UK do deserve a lot of credit for preventing the Soviet Union from occupying all of Europe after the war had ended of course).
- cafard 6y ago
  Rhine, or Elbe?
timoth3y 6y ago
I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more conversations on the subject than I can remember. The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?" You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not. There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.
jrexilius 6y ago
The recent revisionist trend towards "the communists won the war" is a rather silly and bald faced effort to glamorize that broken system. This is nonsense.
throwawayffffas 6y ago
Stalin jumped on the chance to "liberate" Manchuria and North Korea, after the Americans fought and won the war in the Pacific. When the soviets entered the war against Japan everything was already decided, there had been two nuclear bombings, Okinawa was under American occupation and it was clear there would be an imminent surrender. To make things 100% clear it was not Stalin nor the Bomb it was almost 4 years of fighting in the pacific.
berto4 6y ago
The author is reaching here. I don't buy their narrative of how the timeline doesn't support the idea that the bombings did it. There are easy arguments against that position. Additionally, how can the author be certain of what they knew at what time? Don't you think they also had a capable spy network?? At the very least the threat of bombardment would definitely be weighing heavily on their minds.
gbronner 6y ago
Historians' opinions about this have changed over time -- the generation of people who experienced it felt that a land invasion of Japan would be ruinous, and would kill a million US men. To that effect, the US tried firebombing cities, paraded battleships along the coast, sent subs to the Inland Sea, and telegraphed that they would destroy a city completely. Then they did. Meanwhile, the USSR invaded and militarily routed the Japanese. For the Japanese, the situation was militarily hopeless and had been for a while, but the events of August made this very clear to a wider audience. Perhaps there was no single event that triggered the surrender, but opinion, even of ministers, can cascade rapidly. Once one person publicly lost faith, it became easier for others to join him, but that might not have been initiated by a specific event or on a specific timeline.
missedthecue 6y ago
This feels like very motivated reasoning. Yes, the Soviets took Manchuria, but they had no capacity to invade Japan in 1945. They had a very small navy to begin with, and essentially no pacific fleet at all. This is important because you need a huge fleet to launch a full scale invasion of an island country. For instance, the invasion of Okinawa Island alone, which is extremely small in comparison to Japan, involved 1,300 U.S. ships and dozens more from the Royal Navy.

26 points by jurgisr 6y ago

The nuclear bombing of Japan was planned years in advance. The US had to show the world or rather the Soviets the power of the weapon they had. They chose Japan because its people were not white.

tester34 6y ago
hi, where can we read about it?
- ggm 6y ago
  Richard Rhodes "the making of the atomic bomb"
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  You can go to the museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - they tell the story in painful detail.
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    How about all those death in other Asian countries or those potential death of Japanese and Americans. Any museum ...
krapp 6y ago
No. The atomic bombs were intended to be used against Germany as well, but the Nazis surrendered before a working bomb could be deployed. The US chose Japan because they were at war with Japan and Okinawa proved just how costly an invasion would be. Not that the US wasn't, and isn't, still virulently racist against Asians in many ways, but we didn't undertake the entire Manhattan Project because of racism or just to show up Stalin, that's absurd.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  The last bit is a bit of a straw man isn't it? You can study the initiation of the Manhattan project if you will. But once the bomb was built, it had to be used. And America at that point was already planning for the world after it had defeated the Axis powers and that is where the dark racist geopolitcs comes in.
  - krapp 6y ago
    > The last bit is a bit of a straw man isn't it? It's a repudiation of the premise that "They (the US) chose Japan because its people were not white." Had the war in the Pacific ended first, the US would have dropped the bombs on Germany. Simplistic reductionist arguments like that only risk turning what could be interesting discussions into race-baiting flamewars. As far as dropping the bombs as a display of power to Stalin goes, it's a conspiracy theory without hard evidence. I'm sure the US was aware of the wider geopolitical context of what they were doing, but if all they wanted was to show Stalin they had a working bomb, they could have dropped one on Alaska or anywhere. The US' primary concern at the time was ending the war.
    - throwaway4good 6y ago
      My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944.
      - resoluteteeth 6y ago
        > My source for this is documentation on display in the Hiroshima museum. Make of it what you will. PS: I don't judge the US for being racist - everyone was racist by today's standard anno 1944. There's probably an actual argument to be made for it being motivated by racism but what you have posted here is not doing much for the case.
      - thehappypm 6y ago
        Just admit you're wrong here. The USA did not nuke Japan out of racism. It nuked Japan because they were the only enemy left.
Juliate 6y ago
Related read: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-s... (from other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26867366) As always, it's quite more a complex factor of several events than a simple story line.
jdmoreira 6y ago
I don’t know how much you know about the atrocities the Japanese inflicted on everyone during WWII but things were much more civilized on the western front and you were dealing with the Nazis and Hitler there. The Japanese were absolute insane and completely fanatics committing unspeakable atrocities. Soldiers that fought the Japanese were absolutely destroyed for life and the Chinese were just one of the asian people suffering all kinds atrocities at their hands. Japan was already defeated when those bombs were dropped but they were seriously planning to fight to the last man/woman/child. There were plans by the state of mass suicide if they failed. Now you may think dropping 2 nukes on them is an atrocity of the worst kind by the white man but consider you don’t know as much as the people making the decision.
- jdmoreira 6y ago
  I can recommend listening to Dan Carlin's Supernova in the East episodes
  - prepend 6y ago
    I second that. It’s pretty fascinating. The story of the Japanese campaign on Singapore and the Malay peninsula is pretty wild for the atrocities by the Japanese.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  There is a lot of Hollywood thinking in the American understanding of the second world war. That America somehow won the war because they were good and had god on their side. However everyone goes into war thinking they have god on their side. Reality is that wars are won by having resources and being nasty.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > That America somehow won the war because they were good That's demonstrably true: 1) the Allies worked together and won, and the Axis didn't and lost. Britain and the US shared advanced technology transparently, while the enemy was limited. 2) the US was isolationist until attacked by Japan. 3) Japan refused to follow the Geneva Convention, even making a law that captured airmen were to be executed (and half were, while 1% died in German captivity.) The leftist narrative that the US is evil is simply false.
throwaway189262 6y ago
What??? Germany had already surrendered, Japan was the only major Axis power left. They used the bomb immediately after it was built. There was a single test, Trinity, then the next bomb went to Japan. How could they choose Japan years in advance when they used the bomb the second it came off the assembly line??? The US nuked Japan because a land invasion was projected to kill millions on both sides. Because Japan is mountainous and its people were prepared to fight till the bitter end, which was proven by the number of kamikaze attacks. The US wanted the war to end quickly without losing a lot of their troops. The Japanese Emperor had to be convinced the war was unwinnable. The Atom bomb was the easiest way to do that. The US also avoided bombing Kyoto to preserve Japanese cultural heritage. If they wanted to to do maximum damage, they could have done worse. It should be remembered that it was Japan that attacked the United States, which was at the time a neutral power. They, like Germany, brought the war and destruction upon themselves. Somehow you twist a war that was started by Japan into "The US is racist". As an American, I find that incredibly offensive.

LatteLazy 6y ago

People really underestimate how well the ussr did in ww2. Both in terms of the fighting and the result. Even with the Axis working to try and give the west as much aid as possible, Stalin controlled everything from the Rhine to the sea of Japan. The west's only real advantage was the US strategic airforce and nuclear weapons. The Soviets trumped those with their own bombs and sputnik within a decade.

flohofwoe 6y ago
Public opinion who actually won the war has shifted in the decades following WW2: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year-campaign-to-convince-people-the-usa-and-not https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year... The war in Europe was already decided in 1943 at Stalingrad, over a year before the Western Front was even opened, and I guess the populace of Nazi-occupied Europe was very well aware of that. A (not so minor) correction: The Red Army stopped roughly at the Elbe/Mulde rivers, not at the Rhine. Large parts of what would later become the Soviet Occupation Zone (and later East Germany) were actually liberated by the US Army (the US and UK do deserve a lot of credit for preventing the Soviet Union from occupying all of Europe after the war had ended of course).
cafard 6y ago
Rhine, or Elbe?

timoth3y 6y ago

I've lived in Japan for over 30-years, read quite a bit about the events and internal debates that lead up to the decision to surrender, and been a part of more conversations on the subject than I can remember. The facts in the article are not wrong (the rarely are), but the problem is the reductionist approach to answering the question of "what really ended the war?" You can make a strong, evidence-backed case that the atomic bombs did, and you can make an equally strong case that they did not. There is no one thing that ended the war. It's certainly interesting to consider how things might have played out under various counterfactuals, but as much as we would all find a simple, tidy answer far more satisfying, the reasons the war ended are just as complex and nuanced as the reasons the war started.

jrexilius 6y ago

The recent revisionist trend towards "the communists won the war" is a rather silly and bald faced effort to glamorize that broken system. This is nonsense.

throwawayffffas 6y ago

Stalin jumped on the chance to "liberate" Manchuria and North Korea, after the Americans fought and won the war in the Pacific. When the soviets entered the war against Japan everything was already decided, there had been two nuclear bombings, Okinawa was under American occupation and it was clear there would be an imminent surrender. To make things 100% clear it was not Stalin nor the Bomb it was almost 4 years of fighting in the pacific.

berto4 6y ago

The author is reaching here. I don't buy their narrative of how the timeline doesn't support the idea that the bombings did it. There are easy arguments against that position. Additionally, how can the author be certain of what they knew at what time? Don't you think they also had a capable spy network?? At the very least the threat of bombardment would definitely be weighing heavily on their minds.

gbronner 6y ago

Historians' opinions about this have changed over time -- the generation of people who experienced it felt that a land invasion of Japan would be ruinous, and would kill a million US men. To that effect, the US tried firebombing cities, paraded battleships along the coast, sent subs to the Inland Sea, and telegraphed that they would destroy a city completely. Then they did. Meanwhile, the USSR invaded and militarily routed the Japanese. For the Japanese, the situation was militarily hopeless and had been for a while, but the events of August made this very clear to a wider audience. Perhaps there was no single event that triggered the surrender, but opinion, even of ministers, can cascade rapidly. Once one person publicly lost faith, it became easier for others to join him, but that might not have been initiated by a specific event or on a specific timeline.

missedthecue 6y ago

This feels like very motivated reasoning. Yes, the Soviets took Manchuria, but they had no capacity to invade Japan in 1945. They had a very small navy to begin with, and essentially no pacific fleet at all. This is important because you need a huge fleet to launch a full scale invasion of an island country. For instance, the invasion of Okinawa Island alone, which is extremely small in comparison to Japan, involved 1,300 U.S. ships and dozens more from the Royal Navy.