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Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusu

by celoyd 13y ago

Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. (To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.) it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”. The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort. As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head. Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity. There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea.

hga 13y ago
"The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians." Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.
- Scramblejams 13y ago
  Yes, I sometimes wonder what a veteran of the American Revolutionary War thought when he first saw the Gatling gun. What would be unusual is if weapon technology _didn't_ increase exponentially in lethality over time. Given enough time even Little Boy will, to future generations, look to be nearly as puny as a flintlock. Hope we don't do ourselves in.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    If you want to bomb a target smaller than a city then you have to design smaller bombs. If you want to target cities then you keep making city-sized bombs. If you want to target larger areas, you're probably going to be most efficient by targeting the cities in that area; go back to the previous step of city-sized bombs. What's the incentive to increase lethality? If you make huge nukes or equivalently powerful weapons, they overkill your target and have negative side effects back on the homeland.
    - svachalek 13y ago
      Even sub-city-sized weapons like the ones dropped on Japan are too large to actually launch in the modern world; the political repercussions are much too great. The only use for a nuclear arsenal is to promise Mutually Assured Destruction, and it really doesn't take much for that. The dangerous super-weapons of the future are small, simple ones that can kill just the right person, anywhere, anytime. That arms race is happening right now, and progress is rapid.
  - hga 13y ago
emmelaich 13y ago
I stunned that you compare the atomic bombing with the Armenian genocide. The atom bombs saved millions of Japanese lives because the alternative was a protracted brutal ordinary war. Reminder: the firebombing that preceded the atomic bombs killed a lot more.
greedo 13y ago
You have the privilege of tarring the commanders of US forces as war criminals "of the highest gravity" because of the sacrifices US soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines made during WW2. If you haven't already, do some research on how the Japanese fought at Okinawa. At the defensive plans they had in place for defending the Home Islands. The toll of an invasion would have been horrendous for both sides. This is without dispute by serious historians. Your idea that the Japanese were "relatively contained," implying that there was no need to do any further action is almost laughable as a military or political strategy. When you go to war, you should go to war til the other side cries "Uncle." Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs. And to lump the A bombs with what Japan did to China? Read up on the Rape of Nanking. Or find out how many Chinese civilians the Japanese Army killed on the mainland. Or how they treated POWs during the Bataan Death March. War is hell.
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  > Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs. Did you just agree that people, army and paramilitary forces of Afghanistan are right to go to total war "to death" with the USA, USA army and USA civilians. Because even one innocent dead man in Afghanistan can justify action of, for example, poisoning NYC water supplies? Or this "unproporional" punishment of enemy is justified only if it's the USA that is doing it, not when it suffers it?
  - greedo 13y ago
    I think it's entirely justifiable for any afghani to be joining the Taliban and fighting to kick out a foreign invader from their soil. Everyone has a right to defend their country's sovereignty. I personally wouldn't advocate targeting civilians; but if there was no alternative, and my culture, country and way of life was being destroyed, I could see a rational actor choosing to do so. The US would have been far better served by simply conducting a punitive raid in AFG to knock over the original Taliban and let the assorted tribes learn not to stir the hornets nest. Instead we've decimated the country without creating any real change. And we've also grown accustomed to a sanitized style of warfare where drone operators in Creech, Nevada plink small targets without working up a sweat. War should be hell, lest we grow to like it too much.
vidarh 13y ago
> But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. They were extraordinary weapons, but as the article points out: The bombing campaigns were not, other than in doing the damage with much fewer bombs. Japan had seen similar levels of destruction in dozens of cities that summer, and was running out of larger undamaged cities. With that context, they should require extraordinary justification to use, but no more so than the previous months of firebombing, and the focusing on the use of a nuclear bomb vs. "just" the fire bombing is detracting from the issue of how much of that overall bombing should have been acceptable and how much of it was necessary or served much purpose. I don't want to excuse the A-bombs, but the article does make a compelling argument that they were not qualitatively different in the suffering caused.

by celoyd 13y ago

hga 13y ago

"The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians." Extraordinarily efficient, one plane, one bomb, one city, but we'd already methodically bombed pretty much every other city (along with Kyoto for political reasons, the A-bomb targets and their alternates were reserved), with e.g. the firebombing of Tokyo killing a conservative 100,000.

Scramblejams 13y ago
Yes, I sometimes wonder what a veteran of the American Revolutionary War thought when he first saw the Gatling gun. What would be unusual is if weapon technology _didn't_ increase exponentially in lethality over time. Given enough time even Little Boy will, to future generations, look to be nearly as puny as a flintlock. Hope we don't do ourselves in.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  If you want to bomb a target smaller than a city then you have to design smaller bombs. If you want to target cities then you keep making city-sized bombs. If you want to target larger areas, you're probably going to be most efficient by targeting the cities in that area; go back to the previous step of city-sized bombs. What's the incentive to increase lethality? If you make huge nukes or equivalently powerful weapons, they overkill your target and have negative side effects back on the homeland.
  - svachalek 13y ago
    Even sub-city-sized weapons like the ones dropped on Japan are too large to actually launch in the modern world; the political repercussions are much too great. The only use for a nuclear arsenal is to promise Mutually Assured Destruction, and it really doesn't take much for that. The dangerous super-weapons of the future are small, simple ones that can kill just the right person, anywhere, anytime. That arms race is happening right now, and progress is rapid.
- hga 13y ago

emmelaich 13y ago

I stunned that you compare the atomic bombing with the Armenian genocide. The atom bombs saved millions of Japanese lives because the alternative was a protracted brutal ordinary war. Reminder: the firebombing that preceded the atomic bombs killed a lot more.

greedo 13y ago

You have the privilege of tarring the commanders of US forces as war criminals "of the highest gravity" because of the sacrifices US soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines made during WW2. If you haven't already, do some research on how the Japanese fought at Okinawa. At the defensive plans they had in place for defending the Home Islands. The toll of an invasion would have been horrendous for both sides. This is without dispute by serious historians. Your idea that the Japanese were "relatively contained," implying that there was no need to do any further action is almost laughable as a military or political strategy. When you go to war, you should go to war til the other side cries "Uncle." Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs. And to lump the A bombs with what Japan did to China? Read up on the Rape of Nanking. Or find out how many Chinese civilians the Japanese Army killed on the mainland. Or how they treated POWs during the Bataan Death March. War is hell.

levosmetalo 13y ago
> Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs. Did you just agree that people, army and paramilitary forces of Afghanistan are right to go to total war "to death" with the USA, USA army and USA civilians. Because even one innocent dead man in Afghanistan can justify action of, for example, poisoning NYC water supplies? Or this "unproporional" punishment of enemy is justified only if it's the USA that is doing it, not when it suffers it?
- greedo 13y ago
  I think it's entirely justifiable for any afghani to be joining the Taliban and fighting to kick out a foreign invader from their soil. Everyone has a right to defend their country's sovereignty. I personally wouldn't advocate targeting civilians; but if there was no alternative, and my culture, country and way of life was being destroyed, I could see a rational actor choosing to do so. The US would have been far better served by simply conducting a punitive raid in AFG to knock over the original Taliban and let the assorted tribes learn not to stir the hornets nest. Instead we've decimated the country without creating any real change. And we've also grown accustomed to a sanitized style of warfare where drone operators in Creech, Nevada plink small targets without working up a sweat. War should be hell, lest we grow to like it too much.

vidarh 13y ago

> But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. They were extraordinary weapons, but as the article points out: The bombing campaigns were not, other than in doing the damage with much fewer bombs. Japan had seen similar levels of destruction in dozens of cities that summer, and was running out of larger undamaged cities. With that context, they should require extraordinary justification to use, but no more so than the previous months of firebombing, and the focusing on the use of a nuclear bomb vs. "just" the fire bombing is detracting from the issue of how much of that overall bombing should have been acceptable and how much of it was necessary or served much purpose. I don't want to excuse the A-bombs, but the article does make a compelling argument that they were not qualitatively different in the suffering caused.