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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 A

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.
    - throwanem 1y ago
      Best not to lose a war. Having started it, doubly so. Signed, a Mississippi son.
    - lenerdenator 1y ago
      Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated. International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas. Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
    - nelox 1y ago
      No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
      - Synaesthesia 1y ago
        They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors. The conduct of the allies in WW2 was atrocious.
        bigDinosaur 1y ago
        What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)? It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
- nelox 1y ago
  Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
  - kketch 1y ago
    How could detonating a nuke over a city not violate humanitarian law … ?
    - defrost 1y ago
      Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you? Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified. Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
    - nelox 1y ago
      The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality. Empty city scenario: The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects. Extremis Self-Defense: The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself. Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology: Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm. But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering. The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
- ForOldHack 1y ago
  When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
  - _trampeltier 1y ago
    With your logic, it would be ok for Isreal to nuke Gaza now ond for Russia to nuke the Ukraine.
    - mrheosuper 1y ago
      If UKR was fascist and on the path to genocide everywhere, it's acceptable to nuke them.
    - nelox 1y ago
      Again, no, not necessarily a war crime.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Both Israel and Russia are aggressors in the wars. It’s really not comparable. Would Ukraine have every right to use atom bomb if it had one? Absolutely.
      - albulab 1y ago
        "Both Israel and Russia are aggressors" Yeah, for anyone with more then one functioning brain cell, Russia attacked Ukraine. Gaza attacked Israel. Both Muslims and Russia are the same axis.
    - albulab 1y ago
      Gaza is an existential threat to Israel more then Japan ever was to the U.S. so, yeah.
  - kketch 1y ago
    You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
- yard2010 1y ago
  This is a fallacy, not that you're not right, but what is the alternative? The alternative is never "just do nothing and everyone lives" Life isn't about choosing the best option but choosing the lesser evil imo
- brabel 1y ago
  Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    > They could have negotiated with the Russians And got second Korea in the long run? No, thanks.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - snickerbockers 1y ago
    America also could've just ditched Europe and let the Nazis rebuild their empire if that's what you want.
    - brabel 1y ago
      The Soviets would almost certainly have taken Berlin either way, given they were fighting 80% of the Nazi Army, while all of the Western Front was concerned only with the "minor" side. Thinking America saved Europe in WWII is one of the many misconceptions perpetuated to this day about the War.
      - snickerbockers 1y ago
        Well if all that counts is who's fighting >= 51% of the Axis, then you have to take into consideration that the USSR didn't even join the Asian theater until the day after Hiroshima happened despite sharing a border with Imperial Japan and having struggled through a brutal war of attrition with the Japanese just a couple decades earlier. This idea you and many other armchair historians have that the USSR can solo 1v1 the axis powers and win isn't any less naive than saying America saved Europe, because it ignores the significant amounts of foreign aid that the US donated to other allied nations. This includes the USSR, who would not have been able to carry out a successful war of attrition against the Germans without a consistent pipeline of supplies and weapons. It certainly would not have been able to win a war on two fronts if the Japanese felt free to invade the soviet far east. I will concede that the Chinese deserve way more credit than they generally get for waging their own war of attrition against the Japanese which prevented them from going to war in the soviet far east, but that was also made possible with significant American logistical support. But more importantly, you seem to have an oddly eurocentric view of history in which the european theater is the only one of any import. Japan's eventual defeat was never a foregone conclusion, and they were just as cruel to their conquered foes as the Germans were. They were also the only Axis that posed a credible threat to the United States, having successfully established a foothold in the Aleutian Islands with an aim towards invading Canada and the United States. Realistically I don't think it ever would have worked (again, they were pre-occupied with China) but they certainly have a better track record of attacking the North American continent than the krauts ever did.
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed. Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
- dsego 1y ago
  It was total war (1), all civilian infrastructure was there to facilitate the war, all bets were off. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime? When the alternative was millions of Japanese dead instead of a few hundred thousand. (Never mind American lives, or all of those living under Japanese rule in Manchuria, etc.)
ekianjo 1y ago
The US had no other bomb ready to be dropped actually. preparing the fissile material took a lot of time.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Is that true? I thought they had a core at Los Alamos.
  - defrost 1y ago
    They had Fat Man and Little Boy, after detonating Trinity, so one down, two ready to go, a few near ready cores, and a production pipeline in place to produce more at one a month or so .. (the exact number is on Alex W's Nuclear Secrecy blog .. my recollection is poor and from five+ years past).
    - philipkglass 1y ago
      The production rate of 3 bombs per month in August was expected to rise to 5 bombs per month in November, and 7 bombs per month in December. In 1946, it could rise much higher. https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html
      - defrost 1y ago
        Cheers, cheers, cheers, for that, that. obligatory Philip Glass rep-rep-repition
  - alex_young 1y ago
    This was the third core: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
ForOldHack 1y ago
I did not read that book, and I had venimently disagreed with it, until I read Hirohito's book. The military and the nationalists wanted to fight to the very last man, and cause as much death as possible. Estimates of that strategy were 22 million japanese dead 1.1M to 1.5M American deaths. Hirohito fought through 4 cabinets, and finally was able to surrender. He did so simply for the lives of the japanese people. He said so. He saved American lives and he saved a huge amount of japanese lives. ( Keep in mind 'fight to the last man' ) Japan would not have surrendered if we had not dropped the bombs. The second one was essential. I am anti-war and anti nuke, but there was no other solution. My father knew Oppy, and I knew he knew, but because of what the US did to him, my father never spoke of him,but spoke of every other physisasist involved. I caught he saying Ed for Edwin Teller, but he would never admit to knowing Oppy. Those were dangerous times.
nelox 1y ago
Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons. American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict. The U.S. had limited understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons before using them. The Manhattan Project scientists estimated 70,000 to 100,000 deaths for a medium-sized Japanese city (depending on weather, geography, and building density). These were very rough estimates, focused mainly on blast and heat, not long-term radiation, which was unknowable.
- slg 1y ago
  Why is this discussion always a binary choice between a land invasion of Japan or dropping the bombs exactly how we did? For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
  - jandrewrogers 1y ago
    It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan. You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.
    - slg 1y ago
      >They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan. And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.
timuckun 1y ago
AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were using the Russians as the negotiators. The US didn't want that so they bombed instead.
- throw0101c 1y ago
  > AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were also looking to keep all the land they had conquered. If Nazi Germany was willing to surrender would we have been okay with it if they got to keep the Czech Republic, Poland, northern France?
Synaesthesia 1y ago
Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb". Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.
- fch42 1y ago
  fair enough to notice though that while the Soviet Union may have had agreed to enter the war with Japan (at the Potsdam conference ?), it had not done so by the time the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was dropped. It did declare war on Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing. In a way ... Stalin chose the "let's go to war with Japan" date opportunistically. When it was clear there could be much gain without too much pain. Which is not a dissimilar thing to the US "wavering" over the commitment to an invasion of Japan. The nuclear bombs "resolved" that. We'll never know what would have happened otherwise.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them. Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost. That's the problem. Japan not surrendering even when they knew. Per Japanese documents even after one bomb was dropped they still would not surrender. It took the second bomb, and even then the war cabinet was split on 3-3 on whether to surrender. Two bombs dropping only got them to the point of a tie. The Emperor had to be called in to break the tie after two bombings. And the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to enter the war. That was already in their calculations and they still were for fighting.
  - mbs159 1y ago
    But you do realize that in cabinet meetings after the atomic bombings, the bombings themselves were only scarcely discussed? It is unknown how much impact the atomic bomb had on their decision to surrender, but it is certainly only one of many factors.
alex_young 1y ago
Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians? The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?
- yes_really 1y ago
  Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong". Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    The point of the concept of war crimes is that it applies to you regardless of whether you think you’re in the right. Even if the other side is committing them, it still applies. That’s why the definitions take pains to not make them a winning strategy or unilaterally avoiding them a losing one: why we talk about (deliberately) targeting civilians, not (incidentally) killing them; why putting munitions in a Red Cross-marked hospital annuls all protections for it; etc.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Of course it is, much more humane is to mount amphibious assault and kill millions.
- Gibbon1 1y ago
  My thoughts about this after 50 years of thinking about it is that war results in a relentless normalization of deviance. It's a good reason not to start wars.
- Mordisquitos 1y ago
  The firebombing of Tokyo[0] on 10 March 1945 is often considered even more destructive and lethal than either of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or at the very least in the same ballpark. However, popular discourse never treats it as a crime against humanity. What is the qualitative difference between the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one morning using an atomic bomb and the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night using explosive and incendiary devices? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...
udev4096 1y ago
[flagged]
- muppetman 1y ago
  I'm not saying you're right or you're wrong. Only that your opinion isn't fact, so don't act like you're presenting one. Calling someone brainwashed because you disagree with them only serves to make you look a total fool, not them.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Broke: countless of arguments arguing that nukes were justified, citing contemporaries from both sides of the time Woke: you’re all brainwashed, because I said so
  - okasaki 1y ago
    So should Russia nuke Dallas and Chicago to end the US proxy war in Ukraine?
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Of course it should, comrade! Them imperialist pigs deserve the nukes for the war that we have started!
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  "You're all brainwashed, and nothing can change my mind!"
cmsefton 1y ago
I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary. The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister. To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it? The Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated. There were peace envoys from the Japanese side towards the end of 1944 onwards exploring a negotiated peace. Peace was already likely without the need of a ground invasion, if it had been explored seriously. What seems likely is that dropping the bombs was an attempt to end the war on American terms, with no Soviet involvement in a negotiated peace. It likely had little to do with avoiding a ground operation; those plans were never approved, and it's unlikely they would have been needed. I don't discount that people may really have believed and intended that this would save American lives. I do think there were other reasons behind dropping the bombs, however, things are rarely binary. Edit: I should also add here that from the Japanese perspective (for example, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa), the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.
- throwanem 1y ago
  I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.
  - cmsefton 1y ago
    Can you explain why you think that's what I'm advocating?
    - flyinglizard 1y ago
southernplaces7 1y ago
Much of what you state is basically true, but bear in mind that other options, that didn't involve nuclear terror, would still have worked, and weren't used for reasons a bit more cynical than exasperation at Japanese truculence, or mere ignorance of radiation's insidious effects (which wasn't as deep as one might think, even in 1945).. Even without concretely knowing just how long the Japanese government would attempt to hold out in the face of conventionally inevitable defeat, political and military planners in the U.S. could have -and knew they could have- simply sealed off the Japanese Home Islands and starved them into submission while continuing to bomb their cities to ashes with ordinary bombs. Well before July of 1945, Japan was essentially defenseless against aerial bombardment and its cities aside from the famous cases of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had already been absolutely devastated by repeat massive bomber raids that the feeble Japanese air defense systems at the time could do next to nothing against. Many, many more people had already died in these firestorm raids than were eventually killed by Little Boy and Fat Man. What's more, the Japanese Navy was by that point basically in scattered, useless tatters while U.S. naval and aerial might was so total, so all-encompassing, that the severely import-dependent Japanese homeland could have been brought completely to its knees in misery, to the point of eventually just succumbing, without having to send so much as a single American soldier onto the the main islands. It would have been a longer and less "glorious" way of leveraging a surrender than one big military invasion by all those shiny war tools and soldiers you now have geared up in such abundance to fight and finish the whole mess, but it indisputably would have worked; even nationalist fanaticism short circuits when literal mass starvation becomes completely inescapable, ravages every corner of society, and the most basic essentials of modern civilization are gone, while every single one of your cities is now ashes and rubble. All of these horrors could have been achieved without invasion. The United States knew all this. However, as mentioned above, its Marine Corps and vast navy were already at maximum deployment, so the political sacrifice of a decisive invasion was the alternative to which the atomic bombs were compared. Secondly, the U.S leadership now had the bomb, after all that cost and effort, and felt a pressing need to showcase its live military use to themselves, to the world, and very crucially, to Stalin. By that point, in July and August, he was no longer quite the friendly "Uncle Joe" that American wartime propaganda had painted him as for the sake of political convenience, while the Nazis were still in the picture. Personally, i'm glad the bombs were used then, in that context, while their destructive power was still s relatively weak. It showed the world the monstrosity of atomic bombing used against an actual society, while the consequences for using it live were much less than they would have been if delayed to just a decade later. If at that future date, someone had decided to finally get an itchy trigger finger for the first time, they'd have been doing it with many more, far more powerful bombs, claiming many more lives..
Symmetry 1y ago
One important thing the US could have done to get the Japanese to surrender without dropping the bomb would have been to promise that Japan would not be turned into a republic after the war but allowed to keep its imperial family as ceremonial heads of state. As, you know, actually happened after they surrendered. Promising to do what we actually did would have been more than enough to save a huge number of lives, and honestly we should have had Hirohito "go into seclusion" in favor of a successor.
- 542354234235 1y ago
  But you don't know that promising that wouldn't have emoldened the Japanese leadership. That they wouldn't have seen that as a weakening of Allied resolve and a willingness to end the war on Japan's terms. Japan was already using Iwo Jima and Okinawa to fight to the last man while exacting high American causalities, in an attempt to make the US reassess the cost of taking mainland Japan.
hulitu 1y ago
> The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through Why didn't they drop the bomb in Tokio then ? This surely would have been more convincing for the emperor.
- marssaxman 1y ago
  The Americans had already bombed Tokyo into ruins five months prior, killing at least 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless. It was the most violent air raid in history, doing more damage than either of the atomic bombings. The Japanese did not surrender. The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon. The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.

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.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Best not to lose a war. Having started it, doubly so. Signed, a Mississippi son.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated. International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas. Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
  - nelox 1y ago
    No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
    - Synaesthesia 1y ago
      They are horrendous war crimes. The only reason they aren't called as such is we were the victors. The conduct of the allies in WW2 was atrocious.
      - bigDinosaur 1y ago
        What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)? It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
nelox 1y ago
Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
- kketch 1y ago
  How could detonating a nuke over a city not violate humanitarian law … ?
  - defrost 1y ago
    Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you? Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified. Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
  - nelox 1y ago
    The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality. Empty city scenario: The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects. Extremis Self-Defense: The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself. Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology: Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm. But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering. The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
ForOldHack 1y ago
When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
- _trampeltier 1y ago
  With your logic, it would be ok for Isreal to nuke Gaza now ond for Russia to nuke the Ukraine.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    If UKR was fascist and on the path to genocide everywhere, it's acceptable to nuke them.
  - nelox 1y ago
    Again, no, not necessarily a war crime.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Both Israel and Russia are aggressors in the wars. It’s really not comparable. Would Ukraine have every right to use atom bomb if it had one? Absolutely.
    - albulab 1y ago
      "Both Israel and Russia are aggressors" Yeah, for anyone with more then one functioning brain cell, Russia attacked Ukraine. Gaza attacked Israel. Both Muslims and Russia are the same axis.
  - albulab 1y ago
    Gaza is an existential threat to Israel more then Japan ever was to the U.S. so, yeah.
- kketch 1y ago
  You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
yard2010 1y ago
This is a fallacy, not that you're not right, but what is the alternative? The alternative is never "just do nothing and everyone lives" Life isn't about choosing the best option but choosing the lesser evil imo
brabel 1y ago
Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > They could have negotiated with the Russians And got second Korea in the long run? No, thanks.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  America also could've just ditched Europe and let the Nazis rebuild their empire if that's what you want.
  - brabel 1y ago
    The Soviets would almost certainly have taken Berlin either way, given they were fighting 80% of the Nazi Army, while all of the Western Front was concerned only with the "minor" side. Thinking America saved Europe in WWII is one of the many misconceptions perpetuated to this day about the War.
    - snickerbockers 1y ago
      Well if all that counts is who's fighting >= 51% of the Axis, then you have to take into consideration that the USSR didn't even join the Asian theater until the day after Hiroshima happened despite sharing a border with Imperial Japan and having struggled through a brutal war of attrition with the Japanese just a couple decades earlier. This idea you and many other armchair historians have that the USSR can solo 1v1 the axis powers and win isn't any less naive than saying America saved Europe, because it ignores the significant amounts of foreign aid that the US donated to other allied nations. This includes the USSR, who would not have been able to carry out a successful war of attrition against the Germans without a consistent pipeline of supplies and weapons. It certainly would not have been able to win a war on two fronts if the Japanese felt free to invade the soviet far east. I will concede that the Chinese deserve way more credit than they generally get for waging their own war of attrition against the Japanese which prevented them from going to war in the soviet far east, but that was also made possible with significant American logistical support. But more importantly, you seem to have an oddly eurocentric view of history in which the european theater is the only one of any import. Japan's eventual defeat was never a foregone conclusion, and they were just as cruel to their conquered foes as the Germans were. They were also the only Axis that posed a credible threat to the United States, having successfully established a foothold in the Aleutian Islands with an aim towards invading Canada and the United States. Realistically I don't think it ever would have worked (again, they were pre-occupied with China) but they certainly have a better track record of attacking the North American continent than the krauts ever did.
snickerbockers 1y ago
It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time. Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed. Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
dsego 1y ago
It was total war (1), all civilian infrastructure was there to facilitate the war, all bets were off. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
throw0101d 1y ago
> Under which conditions is nuking a city not a horrific warcrime? When the alternative was millions of Japanese dead instead of a few hundred thousand. (Never mind American lives, or all of those living under Japanese rule in Manchuria, etc.)

ekianjo 1y ago

The US had no other bomb ready to be dropped actually. preparing the fissile material took a lot of time.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Is that true? I thought they had a core at Los Alamos.
- defrost 1y ago
  They had Fat Man and Little Boy, after detonating Trinity, so one down, two ready to go, a few near ready cores, and a production pipeline in place to produce more at one a month or so .. (the exact number is on Alex W's Nuclear Secrecy blog .. my recollection is poor and from five+ years past).
  - philipkglass 1y ago
    The production rate of 3 bombs per month in August was expected to rise to 5 bombs per month in November, and 7 bombs per month in December. In 1946, it could rise much higher. https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html https://www.dannen.com/decision/bomb-rate.html
    - defrost 1y ago
      Cheers, cheers, cheers, for that, that. obligatory Philip Glass rep-rep-repition
- alex_young 1y ago
  This was the third core: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

ForOldHack 1y ago

I did not read that book, and I had venimently disagreed with it, until I read Hirohito's book. The military and the nationalists wanted to fight to the very last man, and cause as much death as possible. Estimates of that strategy were 22 million japanese dead 1.1M to 1.5M American deaths. Hirohito fought through 4 cabinets, and finally was able to surrender. He did so simply for the lives of the japanese people. He said so. He saved American lives and he saved a huge amount of japanese lives. ( Keep in mind 'fight to the last man' ) Japan would not have surrendered if we had not dropped the bombs. The second one was essential. I am anti-war and anti nuke, but there was no other solution. My father knew Oppy, and I knew he knew, but because of what the US did to him, my father never spoke of him,but spoke of every other physisasist involved. I caught he saying Ed for Edwin Teller, but he would never admit to knowing Oppy. Those were dangerous times.

nelox 1y ago

Yes, actually try and put yourself in the shoes of American leadership responsible for making the decision to continue with an invasion of Japan without using nuclear weapons. American casualty estimates exceeded 500,000, and Japanese fatalities were expected to be in the millions—with some projections placing them between 5 million and 10 million depending on the length and scope of the conflict. The U.S. had limited understanding of the full effects of nuclear weapons before using them. The Manhattan Project scientists estimated 70,000 to 100,000 deaths for a medium-sized Japanese city (depending on weather, geography, and building density). These were very rough estimates, focused mainly on blast and heat, not long-term radiation, which was unknowable.

slg 1y ago
Why is this discussion always a binary choice between a land invasion of Japan or dropping the bombs exactly how we did? For example, there is rarely any discussion of whether another target with fewer civilian casualties could have accomplished the same result.
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  It wasn’t like they were sitting on a pile of nukes. They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan. You are suggesting that they should have selected a target that was virtually guaranteed to have less impact and leverage with a very scarce resource. They couldn’t afford to take that risk with American lives.
  - slg 1y ago
    >They had to make the maximum concrete, visceral impact with the couple they had such that there would be minimal second-guessing on the part of Japan. And yet they didn't decide to bomb Tokyo or Kyoto. There was clearly a calculus done in selecting the targets to find the right balance of all the various factors involved. I don't see the problem in questioning whether they came to the right decision. Too often the target selection decision is assumed to be right and the only decision that is questioned is the yes or no of actually going through with the bombing.

timuckun 1y ago

AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were using the Russians as the negotiators. The US didn't want that so they bombed instead.

throw0101c 1y ago
> AFIK they were looking for ways to surrender while saving face. They were also looking to keep all the land they had conquered. If Nazi Germany was willing to surrender would we have been okay with it if they got to keep the Czech Republic, Poland, northern France?

Synaesthesia 1y ago

Gar Alperovitz wrote the definitive book on the subject "The Decision to use the Atomic Bomb". Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them.

fch42 1y ago
fair enough to notice though that while the Soviet Union may have had agreed to enter the war with Japan (at the Potsdam conference ?), it had not done so by the time the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was dropped. It did declare war on Japan the day before the Nagasaki bombing. In a way ... Stalin chose the "let's go to war with Japan" date opportunistically. When it was clear there could be much gain without too much pain. Which is not a dissimilar thing to the US "wavering" over the commitment to an invasion of Japan. The nuclear bombs "resolved" that. We'll never know what would have happened otherwise.
throw0101d 1y ago
> Many US military experts and top generals believed it was unnecessary. Japan was defeated, particularly with the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, it was over for them. Yes, Japan was defeated a year before the bombs were dropped. The problem was Japan decided not to surrender even though themselves they knew they lost. That's the problem. Japan not surrendering even when they knew. Per Japanese documents even after one bomb was dropped they still would not surrender. It took the second bomb, and even then the war cabinet was split on 3-3 on whether to surrender. Two bombs dropping only got them to the point of a tie. The Emperor had to be called in to break the tie after two bombings. And the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to enter the war. That was already in their calculations and they still were for fighting.
- mbs159 1y ago
  But you do realize that in cabinet meetings after the atomic bombings, the bombings themselves were only scarcely discussed? It is unknown how much impact the atomic bomb had on their decision to surrender, but it is certainly only one of many factors.

alex_young 1y ago

Isn’t it clearly a horrific crime against humanity to knowingly, instantaneously, and with premeditation, murder hundreds of thousands of civilians? The normal response to this line of reasoning is that they were / could have been doing the same to us. Two wrongs does not make a right does it?

yes_really 1y ago
Japan was the one who started the war. Japan was the aggressor. Defending yourself by winning a war against an aggressor is not a "wrong". Many more people were saved by dropping the bombs than people died in it. And, while it is a tragedy that those people died, that fault lies with Japan, not the US.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  The point of the concept of war crimes is that it applies to you regardless of whether you think you’re in the right. Even if the other side is committing them, it still applies. That’s why the definitions take pains to not make them a winning strategy or unilaterally avoiding them a losing one: why we talk about (deliberately) targeting civilians, not (incidentally) killing them; why putting munitions in a Red Cross-marked hospital annuls all protections for it; etc.
wiseowise 1y ago
Of course it is, much more humane is to mount amphibious assault and kill millions.
Gibbon1 1y ago
My thoughts about this after 50 years of thinking about it is that war results in a relentless normalization of deviance. It's a good reason not to start wars.
Mordisquitos 1y ago
The firebombing of Tokyo[0] on 10 March 1945 is often considered even more destructive and lethal than either of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or at the very least in the same ballpark. However, popular discourse never treats it as a crime against humanity. What is the qualitative difference between the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one morning using an atomic bomb and the killing 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night using explosive and incendiary devices? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...

udev4096 1y ago

[flagged]

muppetman 1y ago
I'm not saying you're right or you're wrong. Only that your opinion isn't fact, so don't act like you're presenting one. Calling someone brainwashed because you disagree with them only serves to make you look a total fool, not them.
wiseowise 1y ago
Broke: countless of arguments arguing that nukes were justified, citing contemporaries from both sides of the time Woke: you’re all brainwashed, because I said so
- okasaki 1y ago
  So should Russia nuke Dallas and Chicago to end the US proxy war in Ukraine?
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Of course it should, comrade! Them imperialist pigs deserve the nukes for the war that we have started!
robertlagrant 1y ago
"You're all brainwashed, and nothing can change my mind!"

cmsefton 1y ago

I am one of those that think that the dropping of the bombs was unnecessary. The decision is complicated and multifaceted. It's also difficult to know what could have happened if they hadn't done it. If my brother had been born a woman, he'd have been my sister. To your point of some people refusing to surrender on the Japanese side, on the US side Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Admiral William Leahy opposed the dropping of the bombs, and viewed it as completely unnecessary. Does this then demonstrate it was not needed, because there were elements who did not support it? The Japanese had no navy to speak of at the time, America had complete air superiority, and had no qualms of firebombing Japanese cities and killing its civilians. They were essentially already defeated. There were peace envoys from the Japanese side towards the end of 1944 onwards exploring a negotiated peace. Peace was already likely without the need of a ground invasion, if it had been explored seriously. What seems likely is that dropping the bombs was an attempt to end the war on American terms, with no Soviet involvement in a negotiated peace. It likely had little to do with avoiding a ground operation; those plans were never approved, and it's unlikely they would have been needed. I don't discount that people may really have believed and intended that this would save American lives. I do think there were other reasons behind dropping the bombs, however, things are rarely binary. Edit: I should also add here that from the Japanese perspective (for example, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa), the invasion of the Soviets is considered to be the deciding factor in ending the war, and not the dropping of the bombs, so even the assertion that the bombs were responsible is questionable.

throwanem 1y ago
I forget who exactly, but someone correctly said after Versailles that it was no armistice but a twenty-year ceasefire. What you advocate would have been another.
- cmsefton 1y ago
  Can you explain why you think that's what I'm advocating?
  - flyinglizard 1y ago

southernplaces7 1y ago

Much of what you state is basically true, but bear in mind that other options, that didn't involve nuclear terror, would still have worked, and weren't used for reasons a bit more cynical than exasperation at Japanese truculence, or mere ignorance of radiation's insidious effects (which wasn't as deep as one might think, even in 1945).. Even without concretely knowing just how long the Japanese government would attempt to hold out in the face of conventionally inevitable defeat, political and military planners in the U.S. could have -and knew they could have- simply sealed off the Japanese Home Islands and starved them into submission while continuing to bomb their cities to ashes with ordinary bombs. Well before July of 1945, Japan was essentially defenseless against aerial bombardment and its cities aside from the famous cases of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had already been absolutely devastated by repeat massive bomber raids that the feeble Japanese air defense systems at the time could do next to nothing against. Many, many more people had already died in these firestorm raids than were eventually killed by Little Boy and Fat Man. What's more, the Japanese Navy was by that point basically in scattered, useless tatters while U.S. naval and aerial might was so total, so all-encompassing, that the severely import-dependent Japanese homeland could have been brought completely to its knees in misery, to the point of eventually just succumbing, without having to send so much as a single American soldier onto the the main islands. It would have been a longer and less "glorious" way of leveraging a surrender than one big military invasion by all those shiny war tools and soldiers you now have geared up in such abundance to fight and finish the whole mess, but it indisputably would have worked; even nationalist fanaticism short circuits when literal mass starvation becomes completely inescapable, ravages every corner of society, and the most basic essentials of modern civilization are gone, while every single one of your cities is now ashes and rubble. All of these horrors could have been achieved without invasion. The United States knew all this. However, as mentioned above, its Marine Corps and vast navy were already at maximum deployment, so the political sacrifice of a decisive invasion was the alternative to which the atomic bombs were compared. Secondly, the U.S leadership now had the bomb, after all that cost and effort, and felt a pressing need to showcase its live military use to themselves, to the world, and very crucially, to Stalin. By that point, in July and August, he was no longer quite the friendly "Uncle Joe" that American wartime propaganda had painted him as for the sake of political convenience, while the Nazis were still in the picture. Personally, i'm glad the bombs were used then, in that context, while their destructive power was still s relatively weak. It showed the world the monstrosity of atomic bombing used against an actual society, while the consequences for using it live were much less than they would have been if delayed to just a decade later. If at that future date, someone had decided to finally get an itchy trigger finger for the first time, they'd have been doing it with many more, far more powerful bombs, claiming many more lives..

Symmetry 1y ago

One important thing the US could have done to get the Japanese to surrender without dropping the bomb would have been to promise that Japan would not be turned into a republic after the war but allowed to keep its imperial family as ceremonial heads of state. As, you know, actually happened after they surrendered. Promising to do what we actually did would have been more than enough to save a huge number of lives, and honestly we should have had Hirohito "go into seclusion" in favor of a successor.

542354234235 1y ago
But you don't know that promising that wouldn't have emoldened the Japanese leadership. That they wouldn't have seen that as a weakening of Allied resolve and a willingness to end the war on Japan's terms. Japan was already using Iwo Jima and Okinawa to fight to the last man while exacting high American causalities, in an attempt to make the US reassess the cost of taking mainland Japan.

hulitu 1y ago

> The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through Why didn't they drop the bomb in Tokio then ? This surely would have been more convincing for the emperor.

marssaxman 1y ago
The Americans had already bombed Tokyo into ruins five months prior, killing at least 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless. It was the most violent air raid in history, doing more damage than either of the atomic bombings. The Japanese did not surrender. The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon. The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.