OT: Hiroshima: The Right Thing To Do?
 

Did we do the right thing or not?

In something that I read recently, I had not considered the savings of Japanese lives. We grew up hearing how that it had saved up to 2 million Allied lives but had not thought that it also had probably saved up to 5 million Japanese lives. As we have learned from the American Civil War, World War I and the European theatres of WW2, a war of attrition is awful.

The single biggest decision a sitting president has ever made.

I was dismayed to learn from my 16 year old cousin that this topic was barely brushed over in history class. They learned about the bomb being dropped, but not any of the reasons behind it. I don't care if you think it was the right or wrong choice, I cannot believe we aren't teaching this generation about everything involved with it.

Dissapointing.

In our American History class we spent a day on WW2, and then moved on. The bomb got about 5 minutes.

I get Monday off work for "Victory Day" because of it, so yeah.

More honestly, I'm not sure. It's a loaded question and people here can argue better than me(Troy's post might as well be about me ;)). There is the common explanation that we saved more lives dropping it rather than invading. But you also need to consider things not related to Japan, how it cemented our status in the world for decades.

I'm kind of with jeff on this. Sure, we could have continued to firebomb Japan into oblivion, but I don't think it would have had near the effect on the world. I don't know if the Russians, or the rest of the world for that matter, would have feared or respected the US in nearly the same manner. Before, we were a large player in the world, but we weren't nearly the superpower we've been since. Who knows if it would have occurred. And I honestly couldn't say if the world is better off. I think it is, but its happened, and it worked.

The nuclear age was introduced with that weapon - and an entire city was razed to the ground - civilians, and what not. Today we call warfare against civilians "terrorism". If war is meant to be fought by soldiers, than killing immense amounts of civilians is simply not justifiable. I understand the Allied soliders arguement, as well as the Japanese one - but it was a mass murder of the kind that is hard to "accept".

The death estimates from an invasion of Japan are amazing in the way they change. The numbers you cite are much higher than anything I've ever seen.

Most documentation seems to suggest that estimates by the U.S. put American casualties at anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000, with predictably people against the bomb going with the lower number and those in favor with the higher number. Even Truman himself couldn't determine the correct number; there is a letter at the Truman Library he wrote where at one point he said 125,000 people would have died on both sides, then later in the same letter he says half a million lives total were saved.

The political underpinnings of the decision are fascinating. Did we drop the bomb to win the war or to show the Russians we had it and weren't afraid to use it?

I can't answer the question because I don't know the premise of the question. Was it "the right thing to do" morally? Strategically? What is the context? I think an intelligent person can be of two minds on the question.

I think the aftermath of the bombings is almost as intriguing as the decision to bomb. If we had mounted a conventional invasion of Japan, what would have happened?

Notably and I think admirably, the Truman Library's display on the decision has countless documents, videos and information about the bombings but at the end leaves it up to the visitor to make their own decision.

Dola,
I'm genuinely curious how all of you that voted "yes" (and yes, many have posted that it was a hard decision) reconcile the fact that most deaths were civilian - and that you were targetting an entire city ( I recognize Hiroshima was a military target- still applies). If any kind of warfare is acceptable, then how can one complain about targetting civilians today ?

Because we see the wars of today as completely different from WW2. Even Afghanistan is different, and I didn't mind going in there. In Iraq and Afghanistan, its generally the very small minority who wanted to fight, so therefore killing civilians today seems more barbaric. The stakes aren't nearly the same now as they were then, so to compare the to isn't entirely fair.

It didn't start with the dropping of the weapon for the research into the splitting of the atom (and the immense power it generated) had been going on for some years. If it hadn't been used in Japan, it would have been used somewhere, sometime - perhaps earlier under unique circumstances and most assuredly, later. But because it had been twice in 1945, one could argue that it couldn't be used again for a long time - and the Cold War bears testimony to that.

I didn't vote because I don't have an answer. I've studied warfare throughout the history of humankind and see this as an inevitable evolution.

Matt - I don't remember the source but it doesn't surprise me to see this become an urban legend of sorts.

I've always kind of felt that the fact that the Japanese did not surrender immediately after the first bomb was dropped as justification for using it in the first place. The Japanese leadership were willing to continue the war after Hiroshima. Dropping another on Nagasaki 3 days later resulted in the unconditional surrender that America had been fighting for.

I don't think we should forget about the Dresden bombings either, those were just as indiscriminate and had a similar impact on the Germans living in that city.

Would it be right to drop another bomb? I don't think so. We have the ability to strike conventionally with more precision now and the nuclear weapons that we have now are far more powerful, they cause far more damage and prevent use of the land for much longer.

It's very tough to reconsile that fact. Innocent civilians died because of that decision.

But lets look at a few factors here:

1) We know what would have happened had we continued the fight. The numbers might be in dispute, but there is no doubt there would have been many more people who died.

2) Lets not paint the Japanese as some group of people with higher moral values. During WWII, they launched thousands of "Fugos" These were balloons filled with bombs that were designed to drop and blow, killing anything in its path. Now, forget for a moment they were largely failures. Of the 9,000+ launched, only a few did any damage. The design was crystal clear. It was to kill US civilians.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, I think the final US death toll due to the fugo was only 5 or 6. A family in Oregon had found one. Not knowing what it was they tried to move it. It exploded and they all died.

May seem like only a minor point. . . but it does show the thought process of the Japanese and Truman had to pay attention to that.

3) WWII was not a war that you wanted to be a civilian in overall. Only the US civilian population came away unscathed. From Russia to London to France, civilians were randomly bombed during this war. (and we aren't even talking about the attempted extermination of the Jewish race yet)

I'm not trying to say this is right, but you must take into account what was happening around this war.


Like I said, for it or against it, this was one of the biggest ethical and moral issues any sitting leader has ever faced. Why it's not talked about more in schools is stunning to me.

Yes, the cost of invading Japan in human lives would have been terrible (for both sides -- I've seen some figures in the 2-5 million range) and some historians doubt such an invasion's ultimate success.

After dropping the bombs, the Japanese quickly agreed to unconditional surrender. I have no doubt that if the Germans or Japanese had developed the technology before we did (the Germans were close), they would have used it.

Having actually used atomics, the whole world was able to see the devastating "real world" effects of such attacks. During the 20s and 30s, many sci-fi writers wrote flippant stories about future wars involving atomic weapons. I believe the horrific reality of using the bomb, including images of victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is one of the major factors that have resulted in no further use of such weapons in warfare. I think most civilized states realize the cost of such an exchange is too high.

There is actually some debate about this. Some historians believe Japan did in fact try to surrender after the first bomb and that the message was misinterpreted or ignored.

I'm not sure how much I believe it, but it's always made the debate about the second bomb just as interesting as the first.

Didnt Operation Olympic (proposed inv. of Japan) involved up to 10 bombs to be dropped at Hyunshu just before the troops landed a shore.

Not that I know of. We were actually in a bit of trouble. After both bombs were dropped, we were not going to have any additional fissionible material for some time.

There is no telling how many lives have been saved due to the atomic bomb. I once saw a chart floating around that showed how many people were killed worldwide due to wars, etc. The number was increasing pretty close to exponentially until 1945. Then the number dropped to virtually zero.

What happened to bring this about? What new weapon caused this change? The plane? No, that was around during WWI, and still was not a decisive weapon system. The submarine? No. Again, it was not a decisive arm. The single decisive weapon system was the atomic bomb. Since then, the fear of the bomb and retaliation by use of the bomb has prevented any truly global wars from erupting.

That is how I learned to stopp worrying and love the bomb.

It really depends on what kind of assumptions and thoughts you have on what would have been necessary to end the war with Japan in the first place. It is somewhat likely that more innocent japanese would have died if more firebombing would have been necessary. And what if we could only get Japan to a stalemate? Who knows how many would have died if a still militaristic Japan engages in a second war. Perhaps we should have dropped the two bombs, to prove we had more than one, but on areas with less population as a threat. But would such a threat have worked? I'm not sure.

Did we save more Japanese civilians by choosing the course of action that we did is the question. If its yes, which I would lean towards right now, then it was the right thing to do. I could care less if we saved American soldier lives by killing innocent civilians, I'd rather be a good human being before a good American.

This is kind of a blowout.

My feeling is that we would not be here today, if we had not dropped the bomb, it would have been used en mass later and life would have ended as we know it.

A recent telephone Gallup poll suggests that only 57% of Americans approve while 38% disapprove of the use of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima to end the war. I find that interesting considering we are a very diverse crowd here and have resigned ourselves (at a rate of over 90%) that we did the right thing.

There is nothing resigned about it, I'd have dropped more if we had them. I don't believe in leaving an enemy alive to fight another day. But then again, I'm an asshole.

There are still plenty of Japanese civilians around today that were alive during WW2, grab a rifle and get over there to kill some "enemies!"

(Hopefully your post wasn't THAT serious. Civilians as enemies is what rationalized 9/11 for terrorists.)

I think in a Gallup poll you might be getting people from younger generations and the numbers are going to come out skewed. I think that people that grew up during those years have much more valid worldviews of that time.

I think that our country citizen's have become way too insulated to the world and are somewhat oblivious. I think it's the easy way out to say we should not have dropped the bomb. It's ridiculous IMO, trying to use hindsight to determine if the correct decision was made. The world was a different place then, and to apply either current worldviews, or to try to guess the climate back then are impossibilities.

I saw somewhat of the same disconnect in South Korea when I was stationed there. The older generations that lived through the Korean War appreciated Americans being based in South Korea to help deter further aggression. The younger generation seemed to hate us, and viewed us as more of a foreign invader. Just my 2 cents.

For the record I am glad that most here on the board agree that we did the right thing.

Morality can improve, or perhaps I should say change, overtime. Do you think in the (comparitively) closed off world we lived in in the 40's people gave a shit about civilians of a nation with militaristic leaders? Today most would thumb their nose at making a hole where baghdad is, it just wouldn't be morally right to kill civillians like that.

I think the debate of IF the bombs should have been dropped is one that we must keep having, even if it was the right decision. The death of civilians is not something that should be taken lightly or a decision that should be forgotten. But we probably saved a good deal more civilian lives by dropping the bombs than not doing so, thats the important thing.

But if we look at the loss of any civilians as just necessities of winning our side of a war without consideration of alternatives, it makes us no better than the terrorists we are fighting today.

Do you guys think we'll see a nuclear war?

Unfortunately I think we will. While Western Culture has dominated the world, and the idea of each life having value, we were spared the horrific cost of a nuclear war. Unfortunately, as more cultures gain power that look at lives as just another pawn in their struggle for power, I think we will have a nuclear war.

I agree that we do need to look at alternatives to the loss of civilian life whenever possible. If anything, though, I would say that Morality in this country has severly eroded, not improved since WW2.

I don't think it's an increase in moral values that has kept us from making a hole in Baghdad. It's globalization, intertwined economies, CNN, the United Nations, the internet, etc. etc.

Nations are much more dependent on each other than they were 50-75 years ago. Societies were also much more homogenous than they are today. In WW2 there was no USA Today, or universal mediums that we have now. Countries were, IMO to a certain extent more like what we see in North Korea today (or don't see lol). People got news through their government (or at the very least filtered). There were sovereign nations with nationalistic ideologies.

"Best information available at the time" is something I come back to. We were trying to draw up a treaty, were involved in a power struggle with Russia over control of Germany, we were racing with the Axis Powers (and Russia) to develop the Atomic bomb before they did, and continue the war against Japan. I just think if we feel we should debate whether or not we should have dropped the bombs, we need to understand the context of everything that was going on at that time.

Interesting question I thought of (but don't particularly have an answer). Why is it so much worse to kill civilians rather than conscripted soldiers? I mean those soldiers may not even want to kill Americans, they were just drafted by their countries to do so. I'm not advocating going after civilians first, but it's just a question I've puzzled over, especially in the context of WW2 when every country has conscripted militaries fighting. They weren't the ones necessarily who pushed for war or planned it.

Is it because the soldiers can defend themselves? From bombs they likely cannot... especially if their higher ups haven't given them any cover.

It's a sticky question in my mind. Why is it more moral to kill the guy wearing the uniform when the chances are he may just want to go home.

The water does get a bit murkier when soldiers are conscripted. You're not likely to be killing children when killing conscripted soldiers at least. From the US soldiers vs Japanese civilians standpoint there were at least a significant number of volunteers in the US army. And its not like those drafted were forced at gunpoint to go. Not a very practical arguement I know, but a civilian can't avoid a war if it comes to him/her, whereas the soldier, in the US's case, is bringing the war to civilians.

I've read that the Japanese would have surrendered conditionally earlier in the year but that the Allies had already agreed on the only terms they would accept at Potsdam. It would seem kind of odd that the US leadership would ignore an offer of unconditional surrender but I'm sure that someone has made a case for it.

Did we do the right thing? I think so. As others have said the world was different then. While you may not like it you have to look at it from the point of view of 60 years ago and not today. Now there's nothing wrong with looking back and trying to learn from the experience but when deciding right or wrong IMHO you have to use the context of the times.

IIRCC Warsaw, London, and other European cities were bombed long before Berlin. I also think it's safe to say that Japan bombed many civilians as they moved into China and other Asian countties. It was just a different time and the world has changed since then. If today's standards were the same as 1945 I don't think there would be a building standing in Baghdad.
I'm not saying that's the way it should be in todays world but in the world of 1945 I think it would be that way.

On a personal note this subject has probably had a direct effect on my life and maybe some others that are here also. My father would have been one of the soldiers in the invasion of the Japanese Islands and could very well be one of those American lives that was saved. .

He then became part of the occupation forces. He often talked of how well they were treated by the Japanese. Imagine that occupying a country and being able to remember it as a good time. Not as a time where you felt you had to be on constant watch for fear of being attacked. There were no guerrilla tactics or resistance to the occupying forces. The Japanese were told the war was over and that was it. It was a different world with different rules.

Looking back IMHO it more than likely saved many move lives than it took.
I think we should all thank God ( or whoever your are comfortable thanking )
that the US was the first to make the bomb. Imagine if anyone else besides
the US or Britian had done it. What would have happened if Germany, Japan, or even the Soviets under Stalin had done it first? Anyone want to hazzard a guess on how they would have been used?

As shocking as the bomb was, it was no worse then the conventional tactics we were using. We had already killed over 100,000 people in one raid on Tokyo with fire bombs. Any moral questions were already answered when we decided to bomb civilians in the cities.

Are you serious? How can you complain about some individual group of people who have no actual affiliation with a country attacking civialians? Are you really serious about that question? Come one, get real.

Let's just assume for a second that you actually believe what you said.

On one hand you have a declared war between countries. A war which has already seen cities being bombed (meaning civilian casualties). Bombings which would have continued to happen as the war would drag on. Which means that the death tolls would not just have been soldiers but also civilians if the war had continued.

On the other hand you have a radical group of people who decide that the best way to get their so called message across is to kill civilians. That equates to murder and nothing to do with war.

Seems rather obvious.

Not in the true sense if the word war. I would like to think that most leaders understand that there will be no winner in a nuclear war. The only risk is that of a rogue group getting access to these kinds of weapons. Some radical terrorist group, those animals have no respect for life.

I voted no, but only for one reason. There was no "right" thing to do. Sadly, our options were all wrong, but we had to pick one.

I'm not a military historian, but I do remember reading in the book "What If..." that the Russians actually planned an invasion of Japan in September of 1945 (and therefore actually hoped that the war continued). Dropping the bombs and the eventual surrender changed all that. However, it was interesting to read how different the world may have been had Russia invaded and had Japan as part of it's Iron Curtain.

Yes, without a doubt and anyone who thinks otherwise is a complete and utter moron.

Computers would have cost a lot more... and I think we wouldn't have had those hot anime babes.

dola

I picked this up off another board... methinks he doesn't like america... Its truly Prawful writing.
hxxp://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2005-daily/06-08-2005/oped/o6.htm

The world's worst terrorist act

Praful Bidwai

As the clock struck 8:15 a.m. in Japan this very day exactly 60 years ago, the world witnessed a wholly new kind and scale of brutality, leading to mass death. The entire city of Hiroshima was flattened by a single bomb, made with just 60 kg of uranium, and dropped from a B-29 United States Air Force warplane.

Within seconds, temperatures in the city centre soared to 4,0000C, more than 2,5000 higher than the melting point of iron. Savage firestorms raged through Hiroshima as buildings were reduced to rubble. Giant shock-waves releasing blast energy ripped through the city, wreaking more destruction.

Within seconds, 80,000 people were killed. Within hours, over 100,000 died, most of them crushed under the impact of blast-waves and falling buildings, or severely burnt by firestorms. Not just people, the body and soul of Hiroshima had died.

Then came waves of radiation, invisible and intangible, but nevertheless lethal. These took their toll slowly, painfully and cruelly. Those who didn't die within days from radiation sickness produced by exposure to high doses of gamma-rays or poisonous radio-nuclides, perished over years from cancers and leukaemias. The suffering was excruciating and prolonged. Often, the living envied the dead. Hiroshima's death toll climbed to 140,000.

This was a new kind of weapon, besides which even deadly chemical armaments like mustard gas pale into insignificance. You could defend yourself against conventional-explosive bombs by hiding in an air-raid shelter or sandbagging your home. To protect yourself from a chemical attack, you could wear a gas mask and a special plastic suit. But against the nuclear bombs, there could be no defence --military, civil or medical.

Nuclear weapons are unique for yet another reason. They are, typically, not meant to be used against soldiers, but are earmarked for use against unarmed non-combatant civilians. But it is illegitimate and illegal to attack non-combatant civilians. Attacking them is commonly called terrorism. Hence, Hiroshima remains the world's worst terrorist act.

Hiroshima's bombing was followed three days later by an atomic attack on Nagasaki, this time with a bomb using a different material, plutonium. The effects were equally devastating. More than 70,000 people perished in agonising ways.

US President Harry S. Truman was jubilant. Six days later, Japan surrendered. The US cynically exploited this coincidence. It claimed that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an early end. This was a lie. Japan was preparing to surrender anyway and was only waiting to negotiate the details of the terms. That entire country has been reduced to a wasteland. Most of its soldiers had stopped fighting. Schoolgirls were being drafted to perform emergency services in Japanese cities.

American leaders knew this. Historians Peter Kuznick and Mark Selden have just disclosed in the British New Scientist magazine that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed Japan was "looking for peace". General Dwight Eisenhower said in a 1963 Newsweek interview that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing". Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, also said 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".

The real function of the two bombs was not military, but political. It was to establish the US's superiority and pre-eminence within the Alliance that defeated the Axis powers, and thus to shift the terms of the ensuing new power struggle in Washington's favour.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings inaugurated another rivalry: the Cold War, which was to last for four decades. They also triggered fierce competition among the other victors of the World War to acquire nuclear weapons. The insane arms race this launched but hasn't ended yet.

From a few dozen bombs in the early 1950s, the world's nuclear arsenals swelled to several hundred warheads in a decade, and then several thousand by the 1970s. At the Cold War's peak, the world had amassed 70,000 nukes, with explosive power equivalent to one million Hiroshimas, enough to destroy Planet Earth 50 times over. One-and-a-half decades after the Cold War ended, the world still has 36,000 nuclear weapons. Nothing could be a greater disgrace!

Nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and have never ceased to horrify people and hurt the public conscience. The damage they cause is hard to limit in space --thanks to the wind-transporting radioactivity over thousands of miles --or in time. Radioactive poisons persist and remain dangerous for years, some for tens of thousands of years. For instance, the half-life of plutonium-239, which India uses in its bombs, is 24,400 years. And the half-life of uranium-235, which Pakistan uses in its bombs, is 710 million years!

Nuclear weapons violate every rule of warfare and every convention governing the conduct of armed conflict, they target non-combatant civilians. They kill indiscriminately and massively. They cause death in cruel, inhumane and degrading ways. And the destruction gets transmitted to future generations through genetic defects. That's why nuclear weapons have been held to be incompatible with international law by the International Court of Justice.

The world public overwhelmingly wants nuclear weapons to be abolished. The pro-abolition sentiment is strong and endorsed by 70 to 90 percent of the population even in the nuclear weapons-states (NWSs), according to opinion polls. More than 180 nations have forsworn nuclear weapons by signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But a handful of states remain addicted to their "nuclear fix". Led by the US, five NWSs refuse to honour their obligation under the NPT to disarm their nuclear weapons. And three of them, India, Pakistan and Israel, haven't even signed the treaty.

India and Pakistan occupy a special position within the group of NWSs. They are its most recent members. They are regional rivals too, with a half-century-long hot-cold war, which has made South Asia the world's "most dangerous place". There is an imperative need for India and Pakistan, rooted in self-preservation, to negotiate nuclear restraint and abolition of nuclear weapons. But the chances of this seem rather dim.

Even dimmer is the possibility of the five major NWSs embracing nuclear disarmament. Their reluctance to do so largely springs from their faith in nuclear deterrence. This is a dangerously flawed doctrine. It makes hopelessly unrealistic assumptions about unfailingly rational and perfect behaviour on the part of governments and military leaders and rules out strategic miscalculation as well as accidents. The real world is far messier, and full of follies, misperceptions and mishaps. Yet, the deterrence juggernaut rolls on.

Today, the system of restraint in the global nuclear order is on the verge of being weakened. The US-India nuclear deal (discussed here last week) is a bad precedent. But even worse are US plans to develop nukes both downwards (deep-earth penetrators or bunker-busters) and upwards ("Star Wars"-style space-based Ballistic Missile Defence). If the US conducts nuclear tests in pursuit of this, that will impel others to follow suit, and encourage some non-nuclear states to go overtly nuclear, raising the spectre of another Hiroshima.

Sixty years on, that would be a disgrace without parallel. Humankind surely deserves better.

Nuclear war?

I'm almost certain of it.

As I've said in other threads, eventually terrorists will cross the line. I'm not as concerned about us as Israel, but that all changes if they start doing to us what they've done to Israel. (meaning a series of attacks that continue over a long amount of time)

If we don't do it, eventually some crazy bastard will. May not happen for 50 years. May not happen for 200 years. But I do believe it will happen.

Ben Affleck nows... Sum of All Fears. Really not the assraping most people claim it is.

A couple of people have picked up on the wording in that regard. My intentions were more along the lines of this.

August 1945
General: Mr President, the Atom Bomb is armed and ready. We can end this war in one mission or we can continue with the invasion plans. May I give the pilots of the Enola Gay clearance for takeoff?

President Truman: ...

Interesting...I always though if a terrorist group like Al-Quada (spelling?) would be smart enough to not use a nuclear weapon. I'll explain what I mean, why I think they wouldn't use one. Their intentions are get us out of the Middle East region. I would fear that by them using a nuclear weapon, they would have to expect us to use them in defense, and basically send them to the Middle East.

I don't think North Korea will use them. I feel they would have used them by now, and I believe that they are a "talker", but not a walker to get more aid, ect. If China-US go to war ever, I would be alittle scare. Pakistan and Iran and whoever they hate could be potential threats.

Diffrent rules of war at the time...

I'm sure the Japs where carefull not to kill any civilians at pearl harbor...

The issue of counter-force (strictly going after military targets) versus counter-value (targeting civilian targets, since they contribute to the power of a state) targeting is a long running debate and is full of ambiguity.

I would recommend reading Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars". It's a classic in military philospohy that lays out some of these ethical dillemnas (as well as the ethics of war in general).

The question should be whether the Al Qaeda want us out of the Middle East or do they want a massive war of Jihad. They will never fully segregate the Muslim and Western communities without it.

Good points Dutch.

and Bataan,,,,,Corregidor,,,,Nangking....and the list goes on.