10 ms·

Hiroshima (1946)

120 points by pseudolus 1y ago

pseudolus 1y ago
https://archive.ph/N672J https://archive.ph/N672J
- mulnz 1y ago
  Thank you. Scrolled for 10 minutes through predictably nightmarish comment wars for this.
jalapenos 1y ago
Interesting to see the difference in writing style back then. Lots of long sentences. Kind of the opposite to the LinkedIn-style writing we see today, spitting out as many sentences and paragraphs as possible. Like you can see the generations' attention spans in their form of writing.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Been watching some old movies lately and its amazing to watch simple scenes stretch on for five minutes or more. Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
  - avhception 1y ago
    At first I'm irritated by this, but once I adapt I actually like the time it gives me as a viewer to appreciate the subtleties of what's the characters and what they're up to.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Agreed, though I feel they went overboard during the seventies. On the other hand, modern movies make me desperate for a breather.
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    > Its almost like there was nothing else to do. Until now I forgot that people saw theaters as social venues, would eat buckets of popcorn, go the toilet etc. From that lens, viewers fully focused and digesting every second of the movie was definitely not the average target.
- asdff 1y ago
  A whole generation reared on cigarettes and black coffee with no tech addiction. Yeah, these were pretty focused times.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Long sentences are fine if your value form over communication. Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
defrost 1y ago
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Unsurprising for the time given the context. While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time. The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
- eschulz 1y ago
  This piece made a big impact on me when I read it like five years ago, and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. He did like 48 hours in the hospital as thousands upon thousands of burned and dying walked from afar to the completely overrun clinic.
  - throw0101d 1y ago
    > […] and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. Was the dropping of the bombs any worse than the fire bombings that had been taking places for months? LeMay didn't seem to think so.
- slibhb 1y ago
  There was no nuclear taboo in 1945. Looking back, people forget that.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    I think we were very lucky with the timing such that atomic bombs could be used in warfare just twice. Imagine if development had been delayed a little while and the war ended without any atomic bombs. The bomb would still be built and improved. The falling out of the USSR with the other Allies would still happen. The Soviets would still get the bomb and there would still be an arms race. But would the Cold War have stayed cold without an object lesson in what nuclear warfare actually looks like? I suspect not. Even with those object lessons, it took a while for the consensus to emerge that nuclear war must be averted no matter what. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general said we’d only “get our hair mussed” in a war with just 10-20 million dead was pretty much the real attitude of the Air Force leadership at the time.
Synaesthesia 1y ago
The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
- OgsyedIE 1y ago
  I totally disagree about the difficulty of describing horror, since the linked article is one of many to have received critical acclaim for providing quality descriptions of WW2 experiences (my recommendation is 1952's The Naked Island). Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
  - jwilber 1y ago
    Well, op may be making the point that even the best description of horror is little compared to experiencing it. Watching a video of the horror itself (e.g. combat footage, a beheading, open-heart surgery) pales in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.
- prmph 1y ago
  Man, the whole war was horrific. The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash. The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc. The Allies did various fire-bombings. The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
- ricksunny 1y ago
  Any global consensus on avoiding repeating this low point in human history needs to acknowledge the prime movers behind birthing the bomb into existence in the first place. Much ink has been spilt debating morality, but on the raw mechanics the historians are in alignment with each other - doesn't matter if you ask Richard Rhodes, Robert S Norris, or Alex Wellerstein: Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction. https://www.jstor.org/stable/233904 https://www.jstor.org/stable/233904 (compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history) If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC). edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
zzzbra 1y ago
I just bought this paperback.
jmclnx 1y ago
Verg good read Linked there is also a related article from 1985 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-aftermath https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-...
cypherpunks01 1y ago
"The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article" TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. The Editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
- defaultcompany 1y ago
  This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.
karlgkk 1y ago
The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb. Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand. Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either. I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  I agree. With the information they had at the time it made total sense to drop the bomb. After seeing how tough the Japanese military fought during the invasion of the various islands it was reasonable to assume that the invasion of the mainland would be extremely bloody. I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available. If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.
  - pchristensen 1y ago
    My favorite terrifying fact about the WW2 Pacific theater: The US expected that invading the Japanese home islands would be so bloody that they manufactured tons of Purple Heart medals, and they’re still giving them out today because they haven’t run out.
    - ForOldHack 1y ago
      That is the terrifying fact, and I can confirm it. It was mentioned in a large volume on World war II.
throw0101d 1y ago
If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hiroshima https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-days-hiroshima-story-japans-last-chance-avert-armageddon https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender. What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
- petermcneeley 1y ago
  Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime?
  - defrost 1y ago
    Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs? Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ Outside of Japan many other cities received the same treatment, famously but not only Dresden.
    - ekianjo 1y ago
      those are all war crimes but the victors never get prosecuted.
impact_sy 1y ago
Honestly, I think the Japanese deserved it. If you see the war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II, you will know that the atomic bomb was right.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Civilians though?
  - dsego 1y ago
    It's a tough question, it was total war, all the civilians were working to support the military goals. Japanese supposedly had a very militarized society (1). The concept of total war adopted by the expansionist axis powers meant that the allies had to fight back in the same way, namely use strategic bombing (2) to lower their morale and destroy civilian infrastructure and industrial targets which aided the war effort. (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism (2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
- pwim 1y ago
  Saying that the Japanese people deserved it comes off as hateful. Not every Japanese person was complicit. Like I think it was pretty clear Japanese children were innocent casualties.
- nelox 1y ago
  By standards of the day, absolutely. Today, probably not. From the military and strategic standpoint of 1945, using nuclear weapons to rapidly end the war was considered justified, necessary, and effective, especially given the precedent of widespread strategic bombing and the anticipated cost of a full-scale invasion. While moral dissent existed, it was overridden by the dominant goal of ending the war quickly and decisively. A goal that, in the minds of U.S. leaders, justified the use of overwhelming force.
sidcool 1y ago
The European theatre of war has long shadowed the brutality and loss of the Pacific theatre. And even the Eastern front. From what I have read, relatively speaking, the Western European front was easier than the Eastern one and the Pacific theatre.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
This came up recently on my feed (Hiroshima - the unknown images): https://youtu.be/QrqjADwzDm0 https://youtu.be/QrqjADwzDm0 Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon. They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.
timuckun 1y ago
>A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died. People will say the same thing about Gaza one day.
- albulab 1y ago
  Then they will remember that October 7 was recorded by Hamas rapists.
wouterjanl 1y ago
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve? Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
- 542354234235 1y ago
  Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japan epitomized in the rape of Nanking. While these things need to be explored and looked at, we also need to recognize that death camps and genocide were happening every day the Nazis and Japanese empire were still fighting.
  - wouterjanl 1y ago
    I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.
Pooge 1y ago
I want to give my thoughts to answer a few comments in this thread. If the atomic bomb was first developed by the Japanese, they wouldn't have hesitated to use it just like the USA did. Does it make it more right? Absolutely not, but as a Japanese friend put it: "it's war". If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later. And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.
thomasfl 1y ago
Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.
- defrost 1y ago
  The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP. Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough. The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use. With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction. Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.
luckys 1y ago
I find it fascinatig the Little Boy (uranium) technology hadn't been fully tested by the Americans before the bombings.
dzonga 1y ago
Would the atom bomb have been used on Germany ? Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed. the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.
- clarionbell 1y ago
  Yes and Japan was not giving up. Bombs should have been developed and must have been dropped.
- cdavid 1y ago
  It is very likely: the atomic bomb was initially built to defeat Nazi Germany, and the Manhattan program was started before Pearl Harbour. When you read The Atomic Bomb book, many scientists who worked on the bomb justified their effort by defeating the Nazis, and many had to escape from Europe. Once it became clear Nazi were about to be defeated, there were discussions from the scientists about sharing the knowledge w/ all countries. But at that point, the scientists had long lost control over the project.
notorandit 1y ago
I will likely be downvoted. Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians. It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union. As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender. None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely. IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.
- nabeards 1y ago
  This is specifically called out as a reason in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I was there just a few weeks ago. It's also available here: https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=CornerView&corner_id=19&lang=eng https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=Cor... "The United States believed that ending the war with an atomic bombing would help prevent the Soviet Union from extending its sphere of influence."
Havoc 1y ago
It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.
bell-cot 1y ago
For those unfamiliar with the Soviet Union's Aug'45 entry into the war against Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria Japan had ample reason to fear the Red Army. Which, in overrunning Manchuria and surrounding areas, had just proven Japan's assessments of Stalin's resources and capabilities to be disastrously wrong. So, from the Japanese PoV - if they didn't surrender, how many weeks would it take for the Red Army to conquer the Japanese home islands? They were under no delusions about the brutality of a Soviet occupation.
forinti 1y ago
I get that people have this fascination for what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but was it really worse than the incendiary bombing of other cities? These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.
- aredox 1y ago
  I recommend again and again Alex Wellerstein's blog on all those topics: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Example: the firebombing of Toyama on Aug 1, 1945. 99.5% of the city was destroyed, a record perhaps unequaled in the history of warfare (vs. about 1/3rd of Nagasaki). And the conventional bombing of Japan was just getting started. It would have escalated massively had Japan not surrendered.
sgnelson 1y ago
There's a lot of argument about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, and that debate will go on forever. And while the following is not as important as the decision to drop the bomb, I think the decisions to publish "Hiroshima" and how it was published (especially in 1946) is very much worth understanding. This was not a story the US Government did not want to get out. The US military/government tried to hide many of the facts about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki for various reasons (military secrecy was one, but I think hiding the true impacts of the horrors of the bomb from the American (and world) public was the big one.) You can read about the coverup of the nuclear weapons impact on Hiroshima in the book "Fallout" by Lesley Blune: https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallout-9781925713930 https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallou... And here's a short article that I quickly googled that discusses the story behind the story using "Fallout" as a reference: https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hiroshima/ https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hirosh...
stefantalpalaru 1y ago
[dead]
luckys 1y ago
I believe we humans have reached a point where, materially at least, everyone could live in reasonable comfort and there would be no space for wars. Yet we seem to often behave as if we're still hunting for sustenance and living in caves, having to carve out our survival. I don't have any inclination toward socialism or communism, nor do I have an answer for how this system we live in can be changed for the better, but if we don't at least consider that there must be alternatives, we'll keep living in a world where something as absurd as war continues to be considered normal.
Isamu 1y ago
Part of the problem understanding this is how much the leadership of Japan was strongly split into factions with opposite goals and views. There was no unified decision to start the war. Instead the army unilaterally precipitated the war. There was a lack of unified views about ending the war. To say that the war was already lost was true and recognized by many, but there was a strong faction that would not support surrender. It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, whether not dropping the bomb would result in fewer deaths or more.
msarrel 1y ago
I especially like the idea that the USA would never have dropped the bomb in Europe but couldn't wait to try it out on the "yellow devils". Fun stuff to read speeches given in Congress about the "war-like Japanese". I'm in no way criticizing the use of the bomb, I'm just suggesting we understand some of the many reasons why it was used.

Hiroshima (1946)

120 points by pseudolus 1y ago

pseudolus 1y ago

https://archive.ph/N672J https://archive.ph/N672J

mulnz 1y ago
Thank you. Scrolled for 10 minutes through predictably nightmarish comment wars for this.

jalapenos 1y ago

Interesting to see the difference in writing style back then. Lots of long sentences. Kind of the opposite to the LinkedIn-style writing we see today, spitting out as many sentences and paragraphs as possible. Like you can see the generations' attention spans in their form of writing.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
Been watching some old movies lately and its amazing to watch simple scenes stretch on for five minutes or more. Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
- avhception 1y ago
  At first I'm irritated by this, but once I adapt I actually like the time it gives me as a viewer to appreciate the subtleties of what's the characters and what they're up to.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Agreed, though I feel they went overboard during the seventies. On the other hand, modern movies make me desperate for a breather.
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  > Its almost like there was nothing else to do. Until now I forgot that people saw theaters as social venues, would eat buckets of popcorn, go the toilet etc. From that lens, viewers fully focused and digesting every second of the movie was definitely not the average target.
asdff 1y ago
A whole generation reared on cigarettes and black coffee with no tech addiction. Yeah, these were pretty focused times.
makeitdouble 1y ago
Long sentences are fine if your value form over communication. Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.

defrost 1y ago

A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Unsurprising for the time given the context. While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time. The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.

eschulz 1y ago
This piece made a big impact on me when I read it like five years ago, and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. He did like 48 hours in the hospital as thousands upon thousands of burned and dying walked from afar to the completely overrun clinic.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > […] and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. Was the dropping of the bombs any worse than the fire bombings that had been taking places for months? LeMay didn't seem to think so.
slibhb 1y ago
There was no nuclear taboo in 1945. Looking back, people forget that.
- wat10000 1y ago
  I think we were very lucky with the timing such that atomic bombs could be used in warfare just twice. Imagine if development had been delayed a little while and the war ended without any atomic bombs. The bomb would still be built and improved. The falling out of the USSR with the other Allies would still happen. The Soviets would still get the bomb and there would still be an arms race. But would the Cold War have stayed cold without an object lesson in what nuclear warfare actually looks like? I suspect not. Even with those object lessons, it took a while for the consensus to emerge that nuclear war must be averted no matter what. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general said we’d only “get our hair mussed” in a war with just 10-20 million dead was pretty much the real attitude of the Air Force leadership at the time.

Synaesthesia 1y ago

The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.

OgsyedIE 1y ago
I totally disagree about the difficulty of describing horror, since the linked article is one of many to have received critical acclaim for providing quality descriptions of WW2 experiences (my recommendation is 1952's The Naked Island). Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
- jwilber 1y ago
  Well, op may be making the point that even the best description of horror is little compared to experiencing it. Watching a video of the horror itself (e.g. combat footage, a beheading, open-heart surgery) pales in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.
prmph 1y ago
Man, the whole war was horrific. The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash. The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc. The Allies did various fire-bombings. The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
ricksunny 1y ago
Any global consensus on avoiding repeating this low point in human history needs to acknowledge the prime movers behind birthing the bomb into existence in the first place. Much ink has been spilt debating morality, but on the raw mechanics the historians are in alignment with each other - doesn't matter if you ask Richard Rhodes, Robert S Norris, or Alex Wellerstein: Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction. https://www.jstor.org/stable/233904 https://www.jstor.org/stable/233904 (compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history) If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC). edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'

zzzbra 1y ago

I just bought this paperback.

jmclnx 1y ago

Verg good read Linked there is also a related article from 1985 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-aftermath https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-...

cypherpunks01 1y ago

"The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article" TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. The Editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)

defaultcompany 1y ago
This article was 160 pages long when printed in the New Yorker. Modern nuclear warheads are around 30x more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. For comparison sake the equivalent resulting story would be 4800 pages long.

karlgkk 1y ago

The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb. Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand. Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either. I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
I agree. With the information they had at the time it made total sense to drop the bomb. After seeing how tough the Japanese military fought during the invasion of the various islands it was reasonable to assume that the invasion of the mainland would be extremely bloody. I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available. If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.
- pchristensen 1y ago
  My favorite terrifying fact about the WW2 Pacific theater: The US expected that invading the Japanese home islands would be so bloody that they manufactured tons of Purple Heart medals, and they’re still giving them out today because they haven’t run out.
  - ForOldHack 1y ago
    That is the terrifying fact, and I can confirm it. It was mentioned in a large volume on World war II.

throw0101d 1y ago

If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hiroshima https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir... * https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-days-hiroshima-story-japans-last-chance-avert-armageddon https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-... It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender. What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

petermcneeley 1y ago
Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime?
- defrost 1y ago
  Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs? Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/ Outside of Japan many other cities received the same treatment, famously but not only Dresden.
  - ekianjo 1y ago
    those are all war crimes but the victors never get prosecuted.

impact_sy 1y ago

Honestly, I think the Japanese deserved it. If you see the war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II, you will know that the atomic bomb was right.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Civilians though?
- dsego 1y ago
  It's a tough question, it was total war, all the civilians were working to support the military goals. Japanese supposedly had a very militarized society (1). The concept of total war adopted by the expansionist axis powers meant that the allies had to fight back in the same way, namely use strategic bombing (2) to lower their morale and destroy civilian infrastructure and industrial targets which aided the war effort. (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_militarism (2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
pwim 1y ago
Saying that the Japanese people deserved it comes off as hateful. Not every Japanese person was complicit. Like I think it was pretty clear Japanese children were innocent casualties.
nelox 1y ago
By standards of the day, absolutely. Today, probably not. From the military and strategic standpoint of 1945, using nuclear weapons to rapidly end the war was considered justified, necessary, and effective, especially given the precedent of widespread strategic bombing and the anticipated cost of a full-scale invasion. While moral dissent existed, it was overridden by the dominant goal of ending the war quickly and decisively. A goal that, in the minds of U.S. leaders, justified the use of overwhelming force.

sidcool 1y ago

The European theatre of war has long shadowed the brutality and loss of the Pacific theatre. And even the Eastern front. From what I have read, relatively speaking, the Western European front was easier than the Eastern one and the Pacific theatre.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

This came up recently on my feed (Hiroshima - the unknown images): https://youtu.be/QrqjADwzDm0 https://youtu.be/QrqjADwzDm0 Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon. They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.

timuckun 1y ago

>A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb. Survivors wonder why they lived when so many others died. People will say the same thing about Gaza one day.

albulab 1y ago
Then they will remember that October 7 was recorded by Hamas rapists.

wouterjanl 1y ago

Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve? Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?

542354234235 1y ago
Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japan epitomized in the rape of Nanking. While these things need to be explored and looked at, we also need to recognize that death camps and genocide were happening every day the Nazis and Japanese empire were still fighting.
- wouterjanl 1y ago
  I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.

Pooge 1y ago

I want to give my thoughts to answer a few comments in this thread. If the atomic bomb was first developed by the Japanese, they wouldn't have hesitated to use it just like the USA did. Does it make it more right? Absolutely not, but as a Japanese friend put it: "it's war". If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later. And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.

thomasfl 1y ago

Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.

defrost 1y ago
The decision to bomb Hiroshima was made long before the existence of atomic weapons was widely known. They were classified at the highest level and not even Truman knew they existed until he became POTUS after being VP. Hiroshima was another target, way down the list, of Japanese targets to destroy, beginning with Tokyo, after Allied command determined that simply bombing purely industrial and military targets wasn't enough. The decision to use an atomic weapon wasn't much debated, at the time, given they were built to counter a supposed German atomic capability that didn't exist and given that Germany had surrendered by the time the atomic weapons were ready for use. With a massive amount of money invested, German targets being off the board, and Japan nearing it's end it was considered a dwindling window to field test the post Trinity prototypes in anger. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was chosen as near virgin targets from the existing list of cities scheduled for destruction. Seventy two Japanese cities were destroyed before they were.

luckys 1y ago

I find it fascinatig the Little Boy (uranium) technology hadn't been fully tested by the Americans before the bombings.

dzonga 1y ago

Would the atom bomb have been used on Germany ? Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed. the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.

clarionbell 1y ago
Yes and Japan was not giving up. Bombs should have been developed and must have been dropped.
cdavid 1y ago
It is very likely: the atomic bomb was initially built to defeat Nazi Germany, and the Manhattan program was started before Pearl Harbour. When you read The Atomic Bomb book, many scientists who worked on the bomb justified their effort by defeating the Nazis, and many had to escape from Europe. Once it became clear Nazi were about to be defeated, there were discussions from the scientists about sharing the knowledge w/ all countries. But at that point, the scientists had long lost control over the project.

notorandit 1y ago

I will likely be downvoted. Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians. It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union. As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender. None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely. IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.

nabeards 1y ago
This is specifically called out as a reason in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I was there just a few weeks ago. It's also available here: https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=CornerView&corner_id=19&lang=eng https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=Cor... "The United States believed that ending the war with an atomic bombing would help prevent the Soviet Union from extending its sphere of influence."

Havoc 1y ago

It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.

bell-cot 1y ago

For those unfamiliar with the Soviet Union's Aug'45 entry into the war against Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria Japan had ample reason to fear the Red Army. Which, in overrunning Manchuria and surrounding areas, had just proven Japan's assessments of Stalin's resources and capabilities to be disastrously wrong. So, from the Japanese PoV - if they didn't surrender, how many weeks would it take for the Red Army to conquer the Japanese home islands? They were under no delusions about the brutality of a Soviet occupation.

forinti 1y ago

I get that people have this fascination for what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but was it really worse than the incendiary bombing of other cities? These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.

aredox 1y ago
I recommend again and again Alex Wellerstein's blog on all those topics: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
pfdietz 1y ago
Example: the firebombing of Toyama on Aug 1, 1945. 99.5% of the city was destroyed, a record perhaps unequaled in the history of warfare (vs. about 1/3rd of Nagasaki). And the conventional bombing of Japan was just getting started. It would have escalated massively had Japan not surrendered.

sgnelson 1y ago

There's a lot of argument about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, and that debate will go on forever. And while the following is not as important as the decision to drop the bomb, I think the decisions to publish "Hiroshima" and how it was published (especially in 1946) is very much worth understanding. This was not a story the US Government did not want to get out. The US military/government tried to hide many of the facts about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki for various reasons (military secrecy was one, but I think hiding the true impacts of the horrors of the bomb from the American (and world) public was the big one.) You can read about the coverup of the nuclear weapons impact on Hiroshima in the book "Fallout" by Lesley Blune: https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallout-9781925713930 https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallou... And here's a short article that I quickly googled that discusses the story behind the story using "Fallout" as a reference: https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hiroshima/ https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hirosh...

stefantalpalaru 1y ago

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luckys 1y ago

I believe we humans have reached a point where, materially at least, everyone could live in reasonable comfort and there would be no space for wars. Yet we seem to often behave as if we're still hunting for sustenance and living in caves, having to carve out our survival. I don't have any inclination toward socialism or communism, nor do I have an answer for how this system we live in can be changed for the better, but if we don't at least consider that there must be alternatives, we'll keep living in a world where something as absurd as war continues to be considered normal.

Isamu 1y ago

Part of the problem understanding this is how much the leadership of Japan was strongly split into factions with opposite goals and views. There was no unified decision to start the war. Instead the army unilaterally precipitated the war. There was a lack of unified views about ending the war. To say that the war was already lost was true and recognized by many, but there was a strong faction that would not support surrender. It’s hard to prove a counterfactual, whether not dropping the bomb would result in fewer deaths or more.

msarrel 1y ago

I especially like the idea that the USA would never have dropped the bomb in Europe but couldn't wait to try it out on the "yellow devils". Fun stuff to read speeches given in Congress about the "war-like Japanese". I'm in no way criticizing the use of the bomb, I'm just suggesting we understand some of the many reasons why it was used.