17 ms·

The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan

207 points by rtpg 13y ago

grimtrigger 13y ago
I've never heard a defense of nuclear weapons based on their ability to end wars, only as a weapon to prevent them. I think most policy makers are in agreement that use of a nuclear weapons means they have failed their primary purpose. As for the "uniqueness" of nuclear weapons, there's an interesting parallel to the uniqueness of chemical weapons use in Syria. Even as conventional weapons are ripping the country to pieces, there is a heavy amount of focus on chemical weapons. I think it has to do with the desire to draw lines of acceptability somewhere, but an inability to draw lines on anything but a technological front.
- tvon 13y ago
  > I've never heard a defense of nuclear weapons based on their ability to end wars, only as a weapon to prevent them. TFA aside, it is generally accepted that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender. Besides, the bomb was not invented until well into the war.
cowpow 13y ago
Is there a link that doesn't require the user to login?
- dpedu 13y ago
  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=0,5 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di... Change the 5 at the end of the url to a lower or higher number for different pages. I'm not sure if it's just me but the page navigation seems to come and go.
- killerpopiller 13y ago
  In episode 3 of Oliver Stones marvelous Documentary "the untold history of the US" you will find a great representation of tose events as well: http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-united-states/season/1/episode/3#/index http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-u...
- burstmode 13y ago
  just turn off javascript....
- axomhacker 13y ago
  + Go to the single page URL: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=full http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di... + Open up the JS console + $("#TB_window").remove() + $("#TB_overlay").remove() Done!
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  I'm not getting a login box. It would seem that it's defeated by Adblock (Chrome). Edit: I am getting the login box when I go to the "single page" link. Removing the DOM elements works.
  - axomhacker 13y ago
    I have ABP installed (Chrome + Mac). Still getting the login/signup/paywall. This is what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814168
- Zikes 13y ago
  This link seems to bypass the login overlay: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=0,0 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...
- rocky1138 13y ago
  Use the viewtext.org chrome extension. Works a charm, even concatenating the six pages.
unoti 13y ago
Wow, what an annoying travesty that sign on page is, and whatever all that other stuff was. I understand they have to make a buck and can do whatever they like with their content, but that was powerfully annoying. I imagine content providers have spent a lot of time anguishing over how they can extract money from users, but I wonder if this is the best way. No way am I going to figure out how to get through the multiple layers of dismissals and whatever to figure out how to get to the content.
- rch 13y ago
  Just select 'sign on with Google', or one of the others, then cancel when the permission screen shows up. It is annoying though...
- bauer 13y ago
  I was able to click stop before the page loaded to read it without signing in.
- Finster 13y ago
  Right-click -> Inspect Element -> Delete Node Pretty easy to get the popup and the overlay.
- cheath 13y ago
  or just use safari reader/iReader for chrome.
- filbertkm 13y ago
  or disable javascript
- Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
  I was able to view the entire contents (annoyingly spread across many pages) without pop-ups, a sign in page or any issues at all. I'd politely suggest that on HN, designed for those technically minded in the sphere, you should be able to cure your own browsing problems. Whitelists, AdBlock, Ghostery, NoScript, HTTPS everywhere and so on and so forth should fix any issues you have. You are perfectly able to choose when / where ad revenues are paid, rather than being tied to someone elses business model.
mpyne 13y ago
This is why I've started to dislike revisionist history. The premise that the threat of Stalin alone forced Japanese surrender is at least as ludicrous as saying that the nuclear bombs alone forced Japan to surrender. I closed the page immediately because of the full-page popup ad, but I've encountered the premise elsewhere so it warrants examination. The first thing to realize is that for Japan, whatever else happened an invasion of any sort would be harshly contested. It's not simply a matter of manpower either, there was a lot that was needed to be able to provide a workable invasion: * Control of the air. * Gunfire/artillery support to suppress the defenders prior to the assault wave. * Logistical support, including landing craft (LOTS of landing craft), means of turning a beachhead into a supply terminal. * More importantly for logistical support, a working supply chain to feed materiel to the battleground. In almost all military aspects the U.S. was already in much better shape to host an assault on Japan. Even assuming the U.S.S.R. could pull all their troops from the occupation of Eastern Europe fast enough via the Trans-Siberian railroad they still would have needed to accumulate sufficient landing craft, field Naval support assets, build more airstrips and air bases, etc. etc. etc. As a side note, the whole reason Stalin would have needed to move the masses of troops back to the east was because he knew from his diplomats in Japan that Japan would respect the ceasefire that had been signed after Gen. Zhukov decisively defeated the Kwantung Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, a military result that may have proven invaluable in the later defense of Moscow. The Soviet troops fighting in Manchuria/Manchukuo in 1945 were in a much better military situation by comparison: The Kwantung Army's best troops had been continually bled to fight on the real front lines, Mao and Kai-Shek's guerrilla armies represented a constant drain on the Kwantung Army, and years of garrison duty had the effect of further reducing the martial ability of the KA compared to battle-hardened Soviet troops arriving from the Eastern Front. But at this time the Soviet gains were achieved only overland. In fact the Soviets proved unable due to logistical difficulties to completely overrun Korea, a failure which would itself significantly alter the course of later history. Sometimes proponents of the "Soviet shock" theory mention that it was the threat of attack on the Japanese Home Island from the undefended north which truly drove the spectre of fear amongst the Japanese leadership, but that's missing a very big point: There's a reason the Japanese defenders on the Home Islands were concentrating on the south! The Japanese could certainly have redeployed to the north if they had wished, so it seems that they feared the imminent U.S. invasion more than the potential threat of Soviet invasion. But the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to attack. They in fact had been re-deploying the Kwantung Army to east Manchuria where they expected the attack to fall. The Soviets surprised the Japanese by attacking from every possible direction instead, but the surprise wasn't that the Soviets attacked at all, it was that it came sooner than expected and from the wrong directions. None of this is to say that the atom bombs were the reason that the Japanese surrendered either. But it bears repeating that the Japanese were quite willing to fight an invasion of the Home Islands. Whether the invaders were American or Soviet was relatively immaterial, and given the massive American advantage in both air cover and Naval support the Americans could have invaded into a weak spot if that were the only concern. In the actual event the news of the Nagasaki bombing had come during a Supreme Council being hosted by Emperor Hirohito amongst his closest advisers. The news drove the Council to split evenly on whether to surrender (but maintain the Kokutai) or surrender with further conditions. An American B-29 pilot was tortured into "confessing" that the U.S. had a 100 more atom bombs, which would be used in the next few days, news which was used by Japan's War Minister to push for surrender. Likewise, when Emperor Hirohito broke his Council's tie (in favor of surrender) he explicitly mentioned the destructiveness of the atom bomb. One of the emperor's advisers even mentioned the 'twin shocks' of Soviet invasion and the atom bombs as being gifts in a sense, as it meant the Emperor could say he was forced to surrender and not that Japan "gave up". So it seems clear that the Soviet invasion was core to the decision-making, but not that it was the only concern, and certainly not that the atom bomb was not factored in at all.
makhanko 13y ago
This is why Google and technology in general should stay away from foreign policy where the end always justifies the means, no matter what the rhetoric is.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
The challenge I have with this, and pretty much all 'alternate history' foreign policy discussions, is that they try to argue an indefinite (Japan would have surrendered if we hadn't done this) against a definite (We bombed them and they surrendered immediately). There isn't any way to prove that stuff of course, and you can tweak the indefinite to be whatever you want to overcome the definite. So in some ways it is simply mental gymnastics and great fodder for writers of fiction. The further we get away from the events of those times the easier it is to second guess those decisions and not be challenged by someone with first hand knowledge of the events.
- gruseom 13y ago
  they try to argue an indefinite (Japan would have surrendered if we hadn't done this) against a definite (We bombed them and they surrendered immediately) No, the article is not arguing against a factual claim like that, but against a causal one: that Japan surrendered because of the atomic bombs. The latter may be the mainstream view but it's just as "indefinite" by your standard. And causal claims can be weakened by evidence, which is what most of the article tries to do. Also, one of the article's major claims is that Japan didn't surrender immediately. That argument is more intricate and interesting than I expected.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    > Also, one of the article's major claims (its first, in fact) is that Japan didn't surrender immediately. I find it hard to reconcile this idea with the relatively persuasive reasoning that the second bomb was unjustifiable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Nagasaki_bombing_unnecessary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings... I am not entirely convinced that it was so, but I do think it is reasonable that a few days is not sufficient time to understand the full magnitude and novel nature of such an event. The second bomb was probably necessary, but even in an alternative universe where it was not, I think it would be foolish to expect a surrender that immediately.
    - gruseom 13y ago
Eva_Peron 13y ago
Stalin has always been under-rated in the United States. Truth was, he was a hero who helped to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. But saying that undermines those who want Churchill and FDR to take all the credit.
- JPKab 13y ago
  A hero who was a megalomaniacal mass murderer who killed any and all who had the audacity to speak their mind. Ask any Jewish person what they think of Stalin.
  - CleanedStar 13y ago
    People can take note of this - Stalin fought the Nazis and liberated Auschwitz and other concentration camps, with over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. So who does this person say Jews hate? Stalin. Reflect on this gratitude the next time you hear someone lamenting that the world did not care when the German right began mistreating Jews... In another context, ask any Palestinian what he thinks of the foreigners who invaded his home in the 1940s, and massacred his kin and are continuing to increase the bloody settlement of his land...
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Don't think for a second that the U.S.S.R. (which was more than Russia) fought the Nazis to free the Jews. Before Hitler stabbed Stalin right in the back Stalin's regime had zero qualms about turning Jews over to the tender care of the Nazis. The fact that the Soviets freed concentration camp victims as they came across the camps afterwards is admirable, but that wasn't why the Soviets were fighting, just as the U.S. wasn't fighting just to save the Jews.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. Why should we applaud Stalin for the sacrifices of his men?
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gaoshan 13y ago
The article seems determined to assign a single cause as the reason for the timing of the surrender when I think it is quite more likely that it was an accumulation (and a rapid one at that) of serious developments that precipitated that end. Claiming "Stalin did it" when there had also just been an atomic attack and an entire summer of horrendously devastating attacks, that the Japanese were almost powerless to defend against, on cities not to mention the ever tightening noose of allied encroachment throughout the region and the anticipation of an imminent final invasion, just seems like someone is trying to come up with a catchy article title... not honestly looking at the situation.
- gruseom 13y ago
  Article writers don't come up with the headlines. In this case the headline does the author a bad disservice by making his piece seem simple-minded. It isn't. Its strongest parts come before he even gets to discussing the Soviet invasion. Those are (a) his dissection of the timeline by which surrender unfolded, and (b) his case that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not outliers in the destruction of Japanese cities and thus not game-changers in the minds of Japanese leaders. When he does turn to the Soviet invasion, his argument isn't that the Japanese surrendered because they were overwhelmed by it, but rather because it closed off their remaining strategic options. Agree or disagree, these are serious arguments that deserve to be met with more than platitudes and belief-repetition.
  - moogleii 13y ago
    I'm starting to think not many people actually read the article. Though to be fair, the first 3 or so pages are just build up, and I almost ejected out of skepticism, too.
gwright 13y ago
In the first couple pages there is an argument made that the Japanese supreme council didn't seem to react to news of the first bomb and the associated casualties. I don't think it is easy for us today to understand how slow information was to travel during the time of the war nor is it easy for us to understand how incomprehensible it would be to accept reports about a single bomb creating as much destruction as was reported at the time. While the slow reaction of Japan might be incomprehensible if the same events happened today I think it is dangerously misleading to apply todays standards regarding communication loops and the destructive force of atom bombs to the events of the late 1940s.
- bjhoops1 13y ago
  That's why the author lists a number of examples from roughly the same time period (or earlier e.g. Lincoln/McClellan) as a means of comparison. It's anecdotal, to be sure, but then again this is history, not science.
  - yohui 13y ago
    The two examples given were of a singular leader responding to something that called for immediate action. The Japanese were hardly in a position to strike back against the atomic bomb. In the absence of an obvious response, it's not surprising that it took time for their leaders, a group, to come to a decision to surrender, considering their culture and society. (I do agree that the role of the Soviets is indeed underplayed, but in its desire to make a point the article overreaches.)
woodchuck64 13y ago
Why revisit the issue? Modern society has evolved morally to be utterly revolted by the killing of civilians of another country intentionally and would never support the use of a nuclear weapon in this fashion. Isn't that all the moral judgement we need?
- moogleii 13y ago
  Studying history is always useful. We should have known from WW1 what happens when we don't help rebuild effectively, and from WW2 what happens when you do, simply speaking. Yet we pretty much ignored all that info for Iraq. Also, "intentionally" can always be fudged. We "intentionally" bombed the house with the suspected terrorist in a dense neighborhood, but "unintentionally" killed a lot of civilians in the surrounding area. We don't seem to be revolted enough by that to stop doing it.
  - woodchuck64 13y ago
    The first paragraph contains this: "Obviously, if the bombings weren't necessary to win the war, then bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong". I don't see why articles need to go there. Studying history is useful but making moral judgments mixes societies at different levels of moral development. Unless "unintentionally" can be fudged to morally sanction wiping out a city with a nuclear weapon today, I don't see the point. Maybe I slightly exaggerated the moral repugnance of society today towards civilian death. But the difference between moral attitudes toward civilian death today and civilian death in WW2 is so dramatic, a little bit of exaggeration does very little to weaken the point.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Governments continue to intentionally kill civilians all over the world, including the US government. Drone strikes are one example.
- greedo 13y ago
  If you think that "modern society" is that evolved, you're very fortunate that we haven't had anything near total war in 68 years. Morals quickly fall by the wayside when a country's way of life or existence is threatened. Read up on SIOP and the Soviet equivalent, and you'll see that we trained thousands to use nuclear weapons, spent trillions, and the Soviets did as well. The gloss of civilization is a thin veneer that can easily be degraded.
joyeuse6701 13y ago
The article does make a convincing argument as to the reasons why the bomb was highlighted as the main reason for the surrender of Japan, very interesting. I suppose fear of invasion from S.U wasn't nearly as serious as the loss of diplomatic ties. In which case an eventual two front war would have done them in. Also, as much as the Japanese high command didn't react to the city bombings, I doubt they ignored them as much as the article comes to say. Loss of production power is absolutely a strategic concern. On the other hand, the cultural preference of Army over Navy in Japan in a war that was largely Naval may mean that other ludicrous claims about the way they strategized and conducted war may have merit. Interesting read!
stcredzero 13y ago
Defense Analyst James Dunnigan, in his highly influential book How to Make War, argued that late in the war, the blockade and mining of Japanese Shipping had by far the largest effect on the Japanese ability to wage war. Given enough time, the Japanese military machine would just have bled to death. However, it may have been political rough going to continue the war in Japan long past the defeat of Nazi Germany. By other accounts, the Japanese were pretty much ready to surrender without the bomb anyway.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I love UFO stories, and I love history, and I love pseudo-science. Hell, I even like counter-factuals. What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Patton had actually commanded the Normandy invasion? And so forth. But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge. Think for a minute about what this essay is asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?" Well dang, Action X could be just about anything. The fact of the matter is that all of the actions, taken together, were the reason for the war to end. Yes, Stalin played a big role. But it's not an either-or situation; it's an amalgam. The logical structure of trying to support a statement such as "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan" is flawed. It's like saying the landing on Tarawa didn't beat Japan. Well no, and yes. The assertion itself is flawed. While I love all sorts of semi-non-fictional essays, I have a little warning bell that goes off when I'm mostly through an essay and the essayist starts telling me a story about how I've been misled. Smells of a political agenda and manipulation. Japan was threatened on many fronts and made the best choice it could. That much is clear. Atom bombs did not cause as much building and population damage as the fire-bombing did. That's also clear. But atom bombs represented one thing that Stalin and fire-bombing did not: the end of Japanese culture. A few dozen atom bombs would not only have made huge holes in the landscape, it would have erased the culture of Japan. Nobody is finding comfort in simplistic stories. In fact, the more details people know, the happier I am. But dropping the bombs on Japan saved millions of both Japanese and allied lives. It served as a quick end to a long war, and it saved thousands of allied prisoners whom the Japanese were ready to execute. It also allowed the great Japanese culture to continue. Most serious historians don't get into counter-factuals, except maybe as fiction. It just doesn't work.
- mcantelon 13y ago
  >But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge. Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time. "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." -Fleet Admiral William Daniel Leahy (May 6, 1875 – July 20, 1959), the senior-most United States military officer during th Second World War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb The bomb was dropped not to win the war, but to intimidate the USSR.
cromwellian 13y ago
Looking at the massive logistical effort that was the D-Day landings, did the Soviets even have the strategic lift/naval capability to transport their army onto Japan's northern islands? I guess that the Germans had fortified the coast better, and maybe Japan hadn't, never expecting an invasion from the North, but still, you need a Navy, and at that point, did the Soviets even have one?
scarmig 13y ago
I find the article rather convincing: I want to play a related alterna-history game that takes the article as a given. Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did? Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to. What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time? Some results: 1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure. 2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin. 3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India. 3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border. 4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited. 5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo. 6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side. 7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end. 7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful. Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.
kn0thing 13y ago
The author touches on this, but I've always been fascinated with how little awareness there is in the USA about Japanese atrocities (like the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731) compared to the well-known and oft-discussed atrocities of the Nazis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
- hga 13y ago
  Some of us are familiar with it. Contemporary Americans certainly were (obviously not Unit 731, but Nanking, various atrocities revealed by the liberation of the Philippines, etc.), and the fact that the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was by the end of the war killing something like 250,000 of the occupied peoples per month was one of the many inputs into the desire to finish the war quickly by any means necessary.
DividesByZero 13y ago
The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.
stox 13y ago
Can you imagine if we had not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Without the horrific evidence of those bombings, we would have inevitably dropped a warhead in the future. Except 7 years later, we would have dropped an H Bomb instead, with 1,000 times the power. The other side would probably have warheads by then, and would answer back. I think we were very lucky that history proceeded as it did.
crusso 13y ago
Apologists often give the excuse that the Civil War was unnecessary to end slavery because slavery "would have ended soon anyway". Ask yourself if the would-have-ended-soon-anyway defense works well for the Civil War.
Aqueous 13y ago
"Why did it take them 3 days to sit down and discuss it?" His argument seems to come down to this 3 day delay between Hiroshima and the Supreme Council meeting. He is not looking at this through the lens of the Supreme Council, or even any Japanese citizen. Remember: this is the first use of the atomic weapon in front of the entire world in human history. As far as the Japanese were concerned, on August 6, 1945 the sky suddenly lit on fire and destroyed an entire city in seconds. To the mind of 1945, this event was indistinguishable from magic. He cites many examples of military emergencies inciting a quick response but none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb. Indeed, the atomic bomb was completely unprecedented in all of human history. It is therefore not completely mysterious why the Supreme Council would initially not know what to do. They would be a) in a state of complete confusion b) in a state of complete defeat and c) trying to shore up the nation after what must have appeared like a supernatural force leveling an entire city and killing many, many thousands of people.
- hencq 13y ago
  The article does talk about this though and effectively dismisses your "indistinguishable from magic" argument: " Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. General Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of August 7. The idea that Japan's leaders didn't know about nuclear weapons doesn't hold up." As for your " none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb": " if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer." In other words, there is nothing to suggest any of the state of shock that you suggest would prevent them from meeting earlier.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  Come on, the only way you could tell it wasn't a traditional bomb was it being smaller. Magic? Ridiculous.
iterative 13y ago
There are numerous problems with this article, but the one that jumps out at me the most is that it doesn't seem to have occurred to the author that maybe the Soviet Union got off the fence and declared war on Japan because of the atomic bomb. If it looked like victory was going to be achieved without an invasion, why wouldn't Stalin have jumped onto the bandwagon and declared a war he knew he'd never have to fight?
mynameishere 13y ago
Pearl Harbor beat Japan. The bomb was tactically economical, and nothing else. It did the work of 500 B-29s. Guess what? We had those 500 B-29s, and the bomb did nothing more than save petrol. Quit hand-wringing.
brunorsini 13y ago
Surprised to see this on HNs front page when there's an Oscar-winning documentary that makes this pretty clear (Errol Morris's "The Fog of War"). Vonnegut also talks about this on Slaughterhouse-V: "The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes." (Chapter 9) The nuclear attacks served their purpose, sure, but they were definitely not decisive for the outcome of the war.
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  Vonnegut was very probably wrong about the Dresden numbers. One of the people to popularize a disproportionally high death toll from the firebombing of Dresden was David Irving — later discredited and now largely known for his fascist leanings and his denial of the Holocaust — in his first book [1]. The modern estimate, from a report done by the city of Dresden in 2010 [2], is is that around 25.000 people died. He's more right about the Tokyo bombing. Richard Rhodes, in his fantastic "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", cites 100,000 dead and 1 million injured. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#Falsification_of_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War... [2] http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommission_Dresden1945_Abschlussbericht_V1_14a.pdf http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommi...
greedo 13y ago
This smacks of coming up with a conclusion first, then massaging "what ifs" and unsubstantiated viewpoints to support the conclusion. Historians should operate in the reverse.
tokenadult 13y ago
This is one of those cases where submitting the article with the original article title would be very helpful. Both on the page, as visible to readers, and in the HTML source code title element, the title of the article is "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did." The timeline that the article sets up claims that the (belated) declaration of war by the Soviet Union against Japan, which came only after Allied victory in Europe, is what forced Japan to consider surrender to the Allies. Responding to this, I would point out that it was a known historical facts for a long time that Stalin had spies (plural) in the Manhattan Project, and generally had a good idea of how far the United States was progressing toward developing an atomic bomb. So one could just as well say that it is the advanced development of the bomb by the United States that prompted Stalin to declare war against a new enemy, right after a brutal and prolonged war against the European Axis powers. Over the years, I have read many proposed ways to defeat Japan without dropping the atomic bomb in a variety of American sources. Submarine captains thought that submarine warfare alone could defeat Japan. (Near the end of the war, American submarines were operating freely very near the coast of Japan, and even in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and the other main islands of Japan.) American aviators were glad to have the bomb to continue to justify their existence, of course, but many have expressed the opinion that conventional strategic bombing alone could have defeated Japan. Japan set up a rather harsh set of expectations by how fiercely it fought against the Allied landing on Okinawa. That made Allied war planners revise upward their estimate of the difficulty and cost in lives (both civilian and military) likely from a forced invasion on the main islands of Japan. That had to be part of the consideration as Allied war planners decided whether or not to drop the bomb. It's still a historical fact that no surrender was offered until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
oneiric 13y ago
I would like to see more comments on Ward Wilson's larger point, that atomic bombs should not exist. This is merely one piece to that larger argument, which I find convincing, that atomic bombs are not useful in a modern world as a militaristic or diplomatic tool. Maybe some of the commenters that are demonstrably far more expert historians than I would explain whether they think this recollection supports that idea, or that atomic bombs are merely less influential than a large scale invasion from Stalin, a scary dude.
kmasters 13y ago
It seems the implication of the article is to say that we have potentially drawn the wrong conclusion on "which straw" broke the camels back. And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals. It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone". But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers. Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects. Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".
dxt78 13y ago
what on earth does this have to do with technology or computer science?
ckozlowski 13y ago
I thought it was a very well written piece. I've seen lots of debate on this subject. The author brought a lot of evidence and work to the table for this. While its implications can be debated (what lessons can we draw from this?) a very strong case is made for the invasion being the cause for the end. Thanks for sharing. =)
dspillett 13y ago
> It could not have been Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred in the late morning of August 9, after the Supreme Council had already begun meeting to discuss surrender, and word of the bombing only reached Japan's leaders in the early afternoon -- after the meeting of the Supreme Council had been adjourned in deadlock and the full cabinet had been called to take up the discussion. Based on timing alone, Nagasaki can't have been what motivated them. I've not read the whole thing (just starting work, have it marked for later) so I may be jumping the gun with this comment, but that paragraph jumped out. A lot of arguments I see for why dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary seem fairly rooted in hindsight - this doesn't make the arguments wrong, but it does mean we can't judge the decisions made on these metrics because at the time people did not have that hindsight to help them. Did they know that the effect of soviet actions would be so detrimental to Japan long-term? Did they absolutely know that Japan, or one of its allies, didn't have something up its sleeve had the potential to turn that situation around? Or that a sudden change of fortunes wouldn't disable a large chunk of the relevant forces against Japan such that they could pull themselves "back into the game"? No one thing beat Japan. War isn't about doing the one thing that will probably stop an enemy: it is about trying to make sure they stop and stay stopped long enough for you to solidify your position and deal with your other problems (particularly, in a large war, battles on other fronts). This often means hitting an enemy while they are down just in case. Rule 4: The double-tap. Of course as taps go dropping a nuke over a civilian target is at best morally dubious, this is undeniable IMO, but I find a lot of the arguments against to be ill considered from the point of view of what people making the decisions at the time definitely knew, definitely knew that they knew, and the long list of things that they could not confirm so strongly.
moo 13y ago
The speed at which the Soviets defeated the Japanese in Manchuria is what motivated the USans to drop the atomic bomb, to end the war quickly and keep the Soviets out of a post war Japan.
scotty79 13y ago
I wasn't aware that US carpet bombed 66 major cities full of civilians. That's kinda hard to spin as life saving solution. A-bomb was most wonderful political invention. Much better than technical one.
nesu 13y ago
The article's 5th paragraph says it all. From today's perspective, Japan's defeat in the war is obvious. But Japan's leaders still needed an eye-opener then. One bomb obliterated an entire city, and they were still deliberating about the possibility of surrender? About the bomb, it's not a question of necessity, but of economics. That was a time of war. American forces beat the enemy every step of the way in the Pacific. The Allies may have enough power to bring Japan down to its knees during the war in the long run, but how tempting is a weapon that wreaks destruction unseen yet on the planet, but gives zero casualties, instead of sending your fellow soldiers to their deaths on a foreign land? Who wouldn't get sick of a long war and not seek to end it as soon as possible? Of course, someone may argue that since it's a question of economics, then it is unnecessary, and therefore, the bombings were wrong. But surely, if there is something you wouldn't want to give to your enemy, one of those is time. The author mentioned a Japanese nuclear research program, and that really deserved a red flag. It took 6 more days after the Soviet invasion and Nagasaki bombing, before Emperor Hirohito publicly announced their unconditional surrender. If the emperor made the public announcement before the Nagasaki bombing, then the second bombing may be wrong. If there is something I would admire of the Japanese people, it would be their sense of patriotism. Stalin did not beat Japan. What kept the country from surrendering and hold that long was Japanese Pride. Little Boy and Fat Man are very weak compared to today's nuclear weaponry. Historians and article writers should be discreet when discussing sensitive issues like this, as they can fuel hatred. Focus should be on preventing nuclear war, or there would be no more history left to discuss.
ankjevel 13y ago
(This is not about the content of the article, this is about the site.) Why oh why do they have a sign-up/sign-in? The content is clearly there in the background! So obtrusive! This is how I was able to read the article: (function(){var o,w,h,b,n,s,h,i,j;o=document.getElementById("TB_overlay");w=document.getElementById("TB_window");if(!!o){o.parentNode.removeChild(o);}if(!!w){w.parentNode.removeChild(w);}h=document.getElementById("art-mast");b=document.getElementById("art-body").getElementsByClassName("translateBody")[0];n=document.createElement("div");n.style["max-width"]="625px";n.style.padding="150px 0 0 150px";n.innerHTML=h.innerHTML+b.innerHTML;document.body.innerHTML="";document.body.appendChild(n);s=document.getElementById("share-box");s.parentNode.removeChild(s);h=document.head.getElementsByTagName("script");i=h.length;while(i--){j=h[i];if(!j)return;j.parentNode.removeChild(j);}})();
jgalt212 13y ago
Stalin hustled to make war against Japan because he knew the US had the bomb and he did not want WWII to end without any strategic gains in the Pacific. So either way, the bomb caused Japan to surrender or Stalin caused Japan to surrender. Both precursors were directly or indirectly caused by the bomb. In summation, the bomb caused Japan to surrender. I want my 20 minutes back for reading this garbage.

207 points by rtpg 13y ago

I've never heard a defense of nuclear weapons based on their ability to end wars, only as a weapon to prevent them. I think most policy makers are in agreement that use of a nuclear weapons means they have failed their primary purpose. As for the "uniqueness" of nuclear weapons, there's an interesting parallel to the uniqueness of chemical weapons use in Syria. Even as conventional weapons are ripping the country to pieces, there is a heavy amount of focus on chemical weapons. I think it has to do with the desire to draw lines of acceptability somewhere, but an inability to draw lines on anything but a technological front.

tvon 13y ago
> I've never heard a defense of nuclear weapons based on their ability to end wars, only as a weapon to prevent them. TFA aside, it is generally accepted that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused Japan to surrender. Besides, the bomb was not invented until well into the war.

cowpow 13y ago

Is there a link that doesn't require the user to login?

dpedu 13y ago
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=0,5 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di... Change the 5 at the end of the url to a lower or higher number for different pages. I'm not sure if it's just me but the page navigation seems to come and go.
killerpopiller 13y ago
In episode 3 of Oliver Stones marvelous Documentary "the untold history of the US" you will find a great representation of tose events as well: http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-united-states/season/1/episode/3#/index http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-u...
burstmode 13y ago
just turn off javascript....
axomhacker 13y ago
+ Go to the single page URL: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=full http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di... + Open up the JS console + $("#TB_window").remove() + $("#TB_overlay").remove() Done!
lobster_johnson 13y ago
I'm not getting a login box. It would seem that it's defeated by Adblock (Chrome). Edit: I am getting the login box when I go to the "single page" link. Removing the DOM elements works.
- axomhacker 13y ago
  I have ABP installed (Chrome + Mac). Still getting the login/signup/paywall. This is what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5814168
Zikes 13y ago
This link seems to bypass the login overlay: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_didnt_beat_japan_nuclear_world_war_ii?page=0,0 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...
rocky1138 13y ago
Use the viewtext.org chrome extension. Works a charm, even concatenating the six pages.

unoti 13y ago

Wow, what an annoying travesty that sign on page is, and whatever all that other stuff was. I understand they have to make a buck and can do whatever they like with their content, but that was powerfully annoying. I imagine content providers have spent a lot of time anguishing over how they can extract money from users, but I wonder if this is the best way. No way am I going to figure out how to get through the multiple layers of dismissals and whatever to figure out how to get to the content.

rch 13y ago
Just select 'sign on with Google', or one of the others, then cancel when the permission screen shows up. It is annoying though...
bauer 13y ago
I was able to click stop before the page loaded to read it without signing in.
Finster 13y ago
Right-click -> Inspect Element -> Delete Node Pretty easy to get the popup and the overlay.
cheath 13y ago
or just use safari reader/iReader for chrome.
filbertkm 13y ago
or disable javascript
Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
I was able to view the entire contents (annoyingly spread across many pages) without pop-ups, a sign in page or any issues at all. I'd politely suggest that on HN, designed for those technically minded in the sphere, you should be able to cure your own browsing problems. Whitelists, AdBlock, Ghostery, NoScript, HTTPS everywhere and so on and so forth should fix any issues you have. You are perfectly able to choose when / where ad revenues are paid, rather than being tied to someone elses business model.

mpyne 13y ago

This is why I've started to dislike revisionist history. The premise that the threat of Stalin alone forced Japanese surrender is at least as ludicrous as saying that the nuclear bombs alone forced Japan to surrender. I closed the page immediately because of the full-page popup ad, but I've encountered the premise elsewhere so it warrants examination. The first thing to realize is that for Japan, whatever else happened an invasion of any sort would be harshly contested. It's not simply a matter of manpower either, there was a lot that was needed to be able to provide a workable invasion: * Control of the air. * Gunfire/artillery support to suppress the defenders prior to the assault wave. * Logistical support, including landing craft (LOTS of landing craft), means of turning a beachhead into a supply terminal. * More importantly for logistical support, a working supply chain to feed materiel to the battleground. In almost all military aspects the U.S. was already in much better shape to host an assault on Japan. Even assuming the U.S.S.R. could pull all their troops from the occupation of Eastern Europe fast enough via the Trans-Siberian railroad they still would have needed to accumulate sufficient landing craft, field Naval support assets, build more airstrips and air bases, etc. etc. etc. As a side note, the whole reason Stalin would have needed to move the masses of troops back to the east was because he knew from his diplomats in Japan that Japan would respect the ceasefire that had been signed after Gen. Zhukov decisively defeated the Kwantung Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, a military result that may have proven invaluable in the later defense of Moscow. The Soviet troops fighting in Manchuria/Manchukuo in 1945 were in a much better military situation by comparison: The Kwantung Army's best troops had been continually bled to fight on the real front lines, Mao and Kai-Shek's guerrilla armies represented a constant drain on the Kwantung Army, and years of garrison duty had the effect of further reducing the martial ability of the KA compared to battle-hardened Soviet troops arriving from the Eastern Front. But at this time the Soviet gains were achieved only overland. In fact the Soviets proved unable due to logistical difficulties to completely overrun Korea, a failure which would itself significantly alter the course of later history. Sometimes proponents of the "Soviet shock" theory mention that it was the threat of attack on the Japanese Home Island from the undefended north which truly drove the spectre of fear amongst the Japanese leadership, but that's missing a very big point: There's a reason the Japanese defenders on the Home Islands were concentrating on the south! The Japanese could certainly have redeployed to the north if they had wished, so it seems that they feared the imminent U.S. invasion more than the potential threat of Soviet invasion. But the Japanese knew the Soviets were going to attack. They in fact had been re-deploying the Kwantung Army to east Manchuria where they expected the attack to fall. The Soviets surprised the Japanese by attacking from every possible direction instead, but the surprise wasn't that the Soviets attacked at all, it was that it came sooner than expected and from the wrong directions. None of this is to say that the atom bombs were the reason that the Japanese surrendered either. But it bears repeating that the Japanese were quite willing to fight an invasion of the Home Islands. Whether the invaders were American or Soviet was relatively immaterial, and given the massive American advantage in both air cover and Naval support the Americans could have invaded into a weak spot if that were the only concern. In the actual event the news of the Nagasaki bombing had come during a Supreme Council being hosted by Emperor Hirohito amongst his closest advisers. The news drove the Council to split evenly on whether to surrender (but maintain the Kokutai) or surrender with further conditions. An American B-29 pilot was tortured into "confessing" that the U.S. had a 100 more atom bombs, which would be used in the next few days, news which was used by Japan's War Minister to push for surrender. Likewise, when Emperor Hirohito broke his Council's tie (in favor of surrender) he explicitly mentioned the destructiveness of the atom bomb. One of the emperor's advisers even mentioned the 'twin shocks' of Soviet invasion and the atom bombs as being gifts in a sense, as it meant the Emperor could say he was forced to surrender and not that Japan "gave up". So it seems clear that the Soviet invasion was core to the decision-making, but not that it was the only concern, and certainly not that the atom bomb was not factored in at all.

makhanko 13y ago

This is why Google and technology in general should stay away from foreign policy where the end always justifies the means, no matter what the rhetoric is.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

The challenge I have with this, and pretty much all 'alternate history' foreign policy discussions, is that they try to argue an indefinite (Japan would have surrendered if we hadn't done this) against a definite (We bombed them and they surrendered immediately). There isn't any way to prove that stuff of course, and you can tweak the indefinite to be whatever you want to overcome the definite. So in some ways it is simply mental gymnastics and great fodder for writers of fiction. The further we get away from the events of those times the easier it is to second guess those decisions and not be challenged by someone with first hand knowledge of the events.

gruseom 13y ago
they try to argue an indefinite (Japan would have surrendered if we hadn't done this) against a definite (We bombed them and they surrendered immediately) No, the article is not arguing against a factual claim like that, but against a causal one: that Japan surrendered because of the atomic bombs. The latter may be the mainstream view but it's just as "indefinite" by your standard. And causal claims can be weakened by evidence, which is what most of the article tries to do. Also, one of the article's major claims is that Japan didn't surrender immediately. That argument is more intricate and interesting than I expected.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > Also, one of the article's major claims (its first, in fact) is that Japan didn't surrender immediately. I find it hard to reconcile this idea with the relatively persuasive reasoning that the second bomb was unjustifiable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki#Nagasaki_bombing_unnecessary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings... I am not entirely convinced that it was so, but I do think it is reasonable that a few days is not sufficient time to understand the full magnitude and novel nature of such an event. The second bomb was probably necessary, but even in an alternative universe where it was not, I think it would be foolish to expect a surrender that immediately.
  - gruseom 13y ago

Eva_Peron 13y ago

Stalin has always been under-rated in the United States. Truth was, he was a hero who helped to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan. But saying that undermines those who want Churchill and FDR to take all the credit.

JPKab 13y ago
A hero who was a megalomaniacal mass murderer who killed any and all who had the audacity to speak their mind. Ask any Jewish person what they think of Stalin.
- CleanedStar 13y ago
  People can take note of this - Stalin fought the Nazis and liberated Auschwitz and other concentration camps, with over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. So who does this person say Jews hate? Stalin. Reflect on this gratitude the next time you hear someone lamenting that the world did not care when the German right began mistreating Jews... In another context, ask any Palestinian what he thinks of the foreigners who invaded his home in the 1940s, and massacred his kin and are continuing to increase the bloody settlement of his land...
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Don't think for a second that the U.S.S.R. (which was more than Russia) fought the Nazis to free the Jews. Before Hitler stabbed Stalin right in the back Stalin's regime had zero qualms about turning Jews over to the tender care of the Nazis. The fact that the Soviets freed concentration camp victims as they came across the camps afterwards is admirable, but that wasn't why the Soviets were fighting, just as the U.S. wasn't fighting just to save the Jews.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. Why should we applaud Stalin for the sacrifices of his men?
13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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gaoshan 13y ago

The article seems determined to assign a single cause as the reason for the timing of the surrender when I think it is quite more likely that it was an accumulation (and a rapid one at that) of serious developments that precipitated that end. Claiming "Stalin did it" when there had also just been an atomic attack and an entire summer of horrendously devastating attacks, that the Japanese were almost powerless to defend against, on cities not to mention the ever tightening noose of allied encroachment throughout the region and the anticipation of an imminent final invasion, just seems like someone is trying to come up with a catchy article title... not honestly looking at the situation.

gruseom 13y ago
Article writers don't come up with the headlines. In this case the headline does the author a bad disservice by making his piece seem simple-minded. It isn't. Its strongest parts come before he even gets to discussing the Soviet invasion. Those are (a) his dissection of the timeline by which surrender unfolded, and (b) his case that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not outliers in the destruction of Japanese cities and thus not game-changers in the minds of Japanese leaders. When he does turn to the Soviet invasion, his argument isn't that the Japanese surrendered because they were overwhelmed by it, but rather because it closed off their remaining strategic options. Agree or disagree, these are serious arguments that deserve to be met with more than platitudes and belief-repetition.
- moogleii 13y ago
  I'm starting to think not many people actually read the article. Though to be fair, the first 3 or so pages are just build up, and I almost ejected out of skepticism, too.

gwright 13y ago

In the first couple pages there is an argument made that the Japanese supreme council didn't seem to react to news of the first bomb and the associated casualties. I don't think it is easy for us today to understand how slow information was to travel during the time of the war nor is it easy for us to understand how incomprehensible it would be to accept reports about a single bomb creating as much destruction as was reported at the time. While the slow reaction of Japan might be incomprehensible if the same events happened today I think it is dangerously misleading to apply todays standards regarding communication loops and the destructive force of atom bombs to the events of the late 1940s.

bjhoops1 13y ago
That's why the author lists a number of examples from roughly the same time period (or earlier e.g. Lincoln/McClellan) as a means of comparison. It's anecdotal, to be sure, but then again this is history, not science.
- yohui 13y ago
  The two examples given were of a singular leader responding to something that called for immediate action. The Japanese were hardly in a position to strike back against the atomic bomb. In the absence of an obvious response, it's not surprising that it took time for their leaders, a group, to come to a decision to surrender, considering their culture and society. (I do agree that the role of the Soviets is indeed underplayed, but in its desire to make a point the article overreaches.)

woodchuck64 13y ago

Why revisit the issue? Modern society has evolved morally to be utterly revolted by the killing of civilians of another country intentionally and would never support the use of a nuclear weapon in this fashion. Isn't that all the moral judgement we need?

moogleii 13y ago
Studying history is always useful. We should have known from WW1 what happens when we don't help rebuild effectively, and from WW2 what happens when you do, simply speaking. Yet we pretty much ignored all that info for Iraq. Also, "intentionally" can always be fudged. We "intentionally" bombed the house with the suspected terrorist in a dense neighborhood, but "unintentionally" killed a lot of civilians in the surrounding area. We don't seem to be revolted enough by that to stop doing it.
- woodchuck64 13y ago
  The first paragraph contains this: "Obviously, if the bombings weren't necessary to win the war, then bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was wrong". I don't see why articles need to go there. Studying history is useful but making moral judgments mixes societies at different levels of moral development. Unless "unintentionally" can be fudged to morally sanction wiping out a city with a nuclear weapon today, I don't see the point. Maybe I slightly exaggerated the moral repugnance of society today towards civilian death. But the difference between moral attitudes toward civilian death today and civilian death in WW2 is so dramatic, a little bit of exaggeration does very little to weaken the point.
foobarqux 13y ago
Governments continue to intentionally kill civilians all over the world, including the US government. Drone strikes are one example.
greedo 13y ago
If you think that "modern society" is that evolved, you're very fortunate that we haven't had anything near total war in 68 years. Morals quickly fall by the wayside when a country's way of life or existence is threatened. Read up on SIOP and the Soviet equivalent, and you'll see that we trained thousands to use nuclear weapons, spent trillions, and the Soviets did as well. The gloss of civilization is a thin veneer that can easily be degraded.

joyeuse6701 13y ago

The article does make a convincing argument as to the reasons why the bomb was highlighted as the main reason for the surrender of Japan, very interesting. I suppose fear of invasion from S.U wasn't nearly as serious as the loss of diplomatic ties. In which case an eventual two front war would have done them in. Also, as much as the Japanese high command didn't react to the city bombings, I doubt they ignored them as much as the article comes to say. Loss of production power is absolutely a strategic concern. On the other hand, the cultural preference of Army over Navy in Japan in a war that was largely Naval may mean that other ludicrous claims about the way they strategized and conducted war may have merit. Interesting read!

stcredzero 13y ago

Defense Analyst James Dunnigan, in his highly influential book How to Make War, argued that late in the war, the blockade and mining of Japanese Shipping had by far the largest effect on the Japanese ability to wage war. Given enough time, the Japanese military machine would just have bled to death. However, it may have been political rough going to continue the war in Japan long past the defeat of Nazi Germany. By other accounts, the Japanese were pretty much ready to surrender without the bomb anyway.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I love UFO stories, and I love history, and I love pseudo-science. Hell, I even like counter-factuals. What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Patton had actually commanded the Normandy invasion? And so forth. But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge. Think for a minute about what this essay is asking "What if action X did not end the war in the Pacific?" Well dang, Action X could be just about anything. The fact of the matter is that all of the actions, taken together, were the reason for the war to end. Yes, Stalin played a big role. But it's not an either-or situation; it's an amalgam. The logical structure of trying to support a statement such as "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan" is flawed. It's like saying the landing on Tarawa didn't beat Japan. Well no, and yes. The assertion itself is flawed. While I love all sorts of semi-non-fictional essays, I have a little warning bell that goes off when I'm mostly through an essay and the essayist starts telling me a story about how I've been misled. Smells of a political agenda and manipulation. Japan was threatened on many fronts and made the best choice it could. That much is clear. Atom bombs did not cause as much building and population damage as the fire-bombing did. That's also clear. But atom bombs represented one thing that Stalin and fire-bombing did not: the end of Japanese culture. A few dozen atom bombs would not only have made huge holes in the landscape, it would have erased the culture of Japan. Nobody is finding comfort in simplistic stories. In fact, the more details people know, the happier I am. But dropping the bombs on Japan saved millions of both Japanese and allied lives. It served as a quick end to a long war, and it saved thousands of allied prisoners whom the Japanese were ready to execute. It also allowed the great Japanese culture to continue. Most serious historians don't get into counter-factuals, except maybe as fiction. It just doesn't work.

mcantelon 13y ago
>But these things are the province of speculation, not knowledge. Here's the opinion of the leader of the US military at the time. "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." -Fleet Admiral William Daniel Leahy (May 6, 1875 – July 20, 1959), the senior-most United States military officer during th Second World War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy#Atomic_bomb The bomb was dropped not to win the war, but to intimidate the USSR.

cromwellian 13y ago

Looking at the massive logistical effort that was the D-Day landings, did the Soviets even have the strategic lift/naval capability to transport their army onto Japan's northern islands? I guess that the Germans had fortified the coast better, and maybe Japan hadn't, never expecting an invasion from the North, but still, you need a Navy, and at that point, did the Soviets even have one?

scarmig 13y ago

I find the article rather convincing: I want to play a related alterna-history game that takes the article as a given. Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did? Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to. What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time? Some results: 1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure. 2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin. 3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India. 3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border. 4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited. 5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo. 6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side. 7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end. 7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful. Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.

kn0thing 13y ago

The author touches on this, but I've always been fascinated with how little awareness there is in the USA about Japanese atrocities (like the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731) compared to the well-known and oft-discussed atrocities of the Nazis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

hga 13y ago
Some of us are familiar with it. Contemporary Americans certainly were (obviously not Unit 731, but Nanking, various atrocities revealed by the liberation of the Philippines, etc.), and the fact that the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was by the end of the war killing something like 250,000 of the occupied peoples per month was one of the many inputs into the desire to finish the war quickly by any means necessary.

DividesByZero 13y ago

The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.

stox 13y ago

Can you imagine if we had not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Without the horrific evidence of those bombings, we would have inevitably dropped a warhead in the future. Except 7 years later, we would have dropped an H Bomb instead, with 1,000 times the power. The other side would probably have warheads by then, and would answer back. I think we were very lucky that history proceeded as it did.

crusso 13y ago

Apologists often give the excuse that the Civil War was unnecessary to end slavery because slavery "would have ended soon anyway". Ask yourself if the would-have-ended-soon-anyway defense works well for the Civil War.

Aqueous 13y ago

"Why did it take them 3 days to sit down and discuss it?" His argument seems to come down to this 3 day delay between Hiroshima and the Supreme Council meeting. He is not looking at this through the lens of the Supreme Council, or even any Japanese citizen. Remember: this is the first use of the atomic weapon in front of the entire world in human history. As far as the Japanese were concerned, on August 6, 1945 the sky suddenly lit on fire and destroyed an entire city in seconds. To the mind of 1945, this event was indistinguishable from magic. He cites many examples of military emergencies inciting a quick response but none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb. Indeed, the atomic bomb was completely unprecedented in all of human history. It is therefore not completely mysterious why the Supreme Council would initially not know what to do. They would be a) in a state of complete confusion b) in a state of complete defeat and c) trying to shore up the nation after what must have appeared like a supernatural force leveling an entire city and killing many, many thousands of people.

hencq 13y ago
The article does talk about this though and effectively dismisses your "indistinguishable from magic" argument: " Japan had a nuclear weapons program. Several of the military men mention the fact that it was a nuclear weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in their diaries. General Anami Korechika, minster of war, even went to consult with the head of the Japanese nuclear weapons program on the night of August 7. The idea that Japan's leaders didn't know about nuclear weapons doesn't hold up." As for your " none on the level of total, wholesale destruction like the atomic bomb": " if you graph the number of people killed in all 68 cities bombed in the summer of 1945, you find that Hiroshima was second in terms of civilian deaths. If you chart the number of square miles destroyed, you find that Hiroshima was fourth. If you chart the percentage of the city destroyed, Hiroshima was 17th. Hiroshima was clearly within the parameters of the conventional attacks carried out that summer." In other words, there is nothing to suggest any of the state of shock that you suggest would prevent them from meeting earlier.
Dylan16807 13y ago
Come on, the only way you could tell it wasn't a traditional bomb was it being smaller. Magic? Ridiculous.

iterative 13y ago

There are numerous problems with this article, but the one that jumps out at me the most is that it doesn't seem to have occurred to the author that maybe the Soviet Union got off the fence and declared war on Japan because of the atomic bomb. If it looked like victory was going to be achieved without an invasion, why wouldn't Stalin have jumped onto the bandwagon and declared a war he knew he'd never have to fight?

mynameishere 13y ago

Pearl Harbor beat Japan. The bomb was tactically economical, and nothing else. It did the work of 500 B-29s. Guess what? We had those 500 B-29s, and the bomb did nothing more than save petrol. Quit hand-wringing.

brunorsini 13y ago

Surprised to see this on HNs front page when there's an Oscar-winning documentary that makes this pretty clear (Errol Morris's "The Fog of War"). Vonnegut also talks about this on Slaughterhouse-V: "The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes." (Chapter 9) The nuclear attacks served their purpose, sure, but they were definitely not decisive for the outcome of the war.

lobster_johnson 13y ago
Vonnegut was very probably wrong about the Dresden numbers. One of the people to popularize a disproportionally high death toll from the firebombing of Dresden was David Irving — later discredited and now largely known for his fascist leanings and his denial of the Holocaust — in his first book [1]. The modern estimate, from a report done by the city of Dresden in 2010 [2], is is that around 25.000 people died. He's more right about the Tokyo bombing. Richard Rhodes, in his fantastic "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", cites 100,000 dead and 1 million injured. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II#Falsification_of_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War... [2] http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommission_Dresden1945_Abschlussbericht_V1_14a.pdf http://www.dresden.de/media/pdf/infoblaetter/Historikerkommi...

greedo 13y ago

This smacks of coming up with a conclusion first, then massaging "what ifs" and unsubstantiated viewpoints to support the conclusion. Historians should operate in the reverse.

tokenadult 13y ago

This is one of those cases where submitting the article with the original article title would be very helpful. Both on the page, as visible to readers, and in the HTML source code title element, the title of the article is "The Bomb Didn't Beat Japan... Stalin Did." The timeline that the article sets up claims that the (belated) declaration of war by the Soviet Union against Japan, which came only after Allied victory in Europe, is what forced Japan to consider surrender to the Allies. Responding to this, I would point out that it was a known historical facts for a long time that Stalin had spies (plural) in the Manhattan Project, and generally had a good idea of how far the United States was progressing toward developing an atomic bomb. So one could just as well say that it is the advanced development of the bomb by the United States that prompted Stalin to declare war against a new enemy, right after a brutal and prolonged war against the European Axis powers. Over the years, I have read many proposed ways to defeat Japan without dropping the atomic bomb in a variety of American sources. Submarine captains thought that submarine warfare alone could defeat Japan. (Near the end of the war, American submarines were operating freely very near the coast of Japan, and even in the Inland Sea between Shikoku and the other main islands of Japan.) American aviators were glad to have the bomb to continue to justify their existence, of course, but many have expressed the opinion that conventional strategic bombing alone could have defeated Japan. Japan set up a rather harsh set of expectations by how fiercely it fought against the Allied landing on Okinawa. That made Allied war planners revise upward their estimate of the difficulty and cost in lives (both civilian and military) likely from a forced invasion on the main islands of Japan. That had to be part of the consideration as Allied war planners decided whether or not to drop the bomb. It's still a historical fact that no surrender was offered until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.

oneiric 13y ago

I would like to see more comments on Ward Wilson's larger point, that atomic bombs should not exist. This is merely one piece to that larger argument, which I find convincing, that atomic bombs are not useful in a modern world as a militaristic or diplomatic tool. Maybe some of the commenters that are demonstrably far more expert historians than I would explain whether they think this recollection supports that idea, or that atomic bombs are merely less influential than a large scale invasion from Stalin, a scary dude.

kmasters 13y ago

It seems the implication of the article is to say that we have potentially drawn the wrong conclusion on "which straw" broke the camels back. And that if we drew the wrong conclusion that somehow this might impact or could have impacted the rationale for developing nuclear arsenals. It's also popular in the US war college that officers attend, the statement that "Wars cannot be won by air power alone". But beyond these details, whether the history is exactly right on what caused the Japanese to surrender, there is no doubt that the conclusion of WWII precipitated an arms race and a space race as Nazi scientists and technology were divided among the superpowers. Nothing would have stopped the advancement of war making technology, no convenient conclusions about the strategic causes or effects. Technology will advance whether we want it to or not. And whether or not its in out best interests as we perceive them in our posited "future".

dxt78 13y ago

what on earth does this have to do with technology or computer science?

ckozlowski 13y ago

I thought it was a very well written piece. I've seen lots of debate on this subject. The author brought a lot of evidence and work to the table for this. While its implications can be debated (what lessons can we draw from this?) a very strong case is made for the invasion being the cause for the end. Thanks for sharing. =)

dspillett 13y ago

> It could not have been Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki occurred in the late morning of August 9, after the Supreme Council had already begun meeting to discuss surrender, and word of the bombing only reached Japan's leaders in the early afternoon -- after the meeting of the Supreme Council had been adjourned in deadlock and the full cabinet had been called to take up the discussion. Based on timing alone, Nagasaki can't have been what motivated them. I've not read the whole thing (just starting work, have it marked for later) so I may be jumping the gun with this comment, but that paragraph jumped out. A lot of arguments I see for why dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary seem fairly rooted in hindsight - this doesn't make the arguments wrong, but it does mean we can't judge the decisions made on these metrics because at the time people did not have that hindsight to help them. Did they know that the effect of soviet actions would be so detrimental to Japan long-term? Did they absolutely know that Japan, or one of its allies, didn't have something up its sleeve had the potential to turn that situation around? Or that a sudden change of fortunes wouldn't disable a large chunk of the relevant forces against Japan such that they could pull themselves "back into the game"? No one thing beat Japan. War isn't about doing the one thing that will probably stop an enemy: it is about trying to make sure they stop and stay stopped long enough for you to solidify your position and deal with your other problems (particularly, in a large war, battles on other fronts). This often means hitting an enemy while they are down just in case. Rule 4: The double-tap. Of course as taps go dropping a nuke over a civilian target is at best morally dubious, this is undeniable IMO, but I find a lot of the arguments against to be ill considered from the point of view of what people making the decisions at the time definitely knew, definitely knew that they knew, and the long list of things that they could not confirm so strongly.

moo 13y ago

The speed at which the Soviets defeated the Japanese in Manchuria is what motivated the USans to drop the atomic bomb, to end the war quickly and keep the Soviets out of a post war Japan.

scotty79 13y ago

I wasn't aware that US carpet bombed 66 major cities full of civilians. That's kinda hard to spin as life saving solution. A-bomb was most wonderful political invention. Much better than technical one.

nesu 13y ago

The article's 5th paragraph says it all. From today's perspective, Japan's defeat in the war is obvious. But Japan's leaders still needed an eye-opener then. One bomb obliterated an entire city, and they were still deliberating about the possibility of surrender? About the bomb, it's not a question of necessity, but of economics. That was a time of war. American forces beat the enemy every step of the way in the Pacific. The Allies may have enough power to bring Japan down to its knees during the war in the long run, but how tempting is a weapon that wreaks destruction unseen yet on the planet, but gives zero casualties, instead of sending your fellow soldiers to their deaths on a foreign land? Who wouldn't get sick of a long war and not seek to end it as soon as possible? Of course, someone may argue that since it's a question of economics, then it is unnecessary, and therefore, the bombings were wrong. But surely, if there is something you wouldn't want to give to your enemy, one of those is time. The author mentioned a Japanese nuclear research program, and that really deserved a red flag. It took 6 more days after the Soviet invasion and Nagasaki bombing, before Emperor Hirohito publicly announced their unconditional surrender. If the emperor made the public announcement before the Nagasaki bombing, then the second bombing may be wrong. If there is something I would admire of the Japanese people, it would be their sense of patriotism. Stalin did not beat Japan. What kept the country from surrendering and hold that long was Japanese Pride. Little Boy and Fat Man are very weak compared to today's nuclear weaponry. Historians and article writers should be discreet when discussing sensitive issues like this, as they can fuel hatred. Focus should be on preventing nuclear war, or there would be no more history left to discuss.

ankjevel 13y ago

(This is not about the content of the article, this is about the site.) Why oh why do they have a sign-up/sign-in? The content is clearly there in the background! So obtrusive! This is how I was able to read the article: (function(){var o,w,h,b,n,s,h,i,j;o=document.getElementById("TB_overlay");w=document.getElementById("TB_window");if(!!o){o.parentNode.removeChild(o);}if(!!w){w.parentNode.removeChild(w);}h=document.getElementById("art-mast");b=document.getElementById("art-body").getElementsByClassName("translateBody")[0];n=document.createElement("div");n.style["max-width"]="625px";n.style.padding="150px 0 0 150px";n.innerHTML=h.innerHTML+b.innerHTML;document.body.innerHTML="";document.body.appendChild(n);s=document.getElementById("share-box");s.parentNode.removeChild(s);h=document.head.getElementsByTagName("script");i=h.length;while(i--){j=h[i];if(!j)return;j.parentNode.removeChild(j);}})();

jgalt212 13y ago

Stalin hustled to make war against Japan because he knew the US had the bomb and he did not want WWII to end without any strategic gains in the Pacific. So either way, the bomb caused Japan to surrender or Stalin caused Japan to surrender. Both precursors were directly or indirectly caused by the bomb. In summation, the bomb caused Japan to surrender. I want my 20 minutes back for reading this garbage.